CONNECT/Eddie Holt: Strange how even the mention of jazz, never mind listening to it or playing it, leads to the mind meandering from the ga-ga days of early radio to sinister acts of violence
Warning about the moral decay that would inevitably result if Irish wirelesses broadcast jazz, one 1920s radio critic proffered a recommendation. Though acknowledging that jazz, having crossed the Atlantic, was sweeping through Europe, its popularity, he insisted, "was not a very sound argument as to why we should not discard - if necessary by decrees - the music of the nigger in favour of products of our own artistic creation and the creation of cultured peoples".
There's culture - yaboyya!
Recalling such a contribution to the "jazz debate" of the early years of Irish radio provides not only a jazzy but also a penetrating peek into widespread Irish cultural assumptions and aspirations of the period. There's the unmistakable riff of presumed white cultural superiority in our critic's language and sentiment. There is also - though the shocking "n-word", like a foghorn amid flutes, monopolises our response - the note of nation-building.
The "jazz debate" was just one of many rancorous rows at the start of 2RN (the forerunner of Radio Éireann). Indeed, it wasn't even the prime one.
Political control of the new medium, how it should be financed and the establishment of its news service were more central concerns of the politicos and culturati. Nonetheless, the row over jazz rings down the decades. Indeed, though the context has changed hugely and the significance has been diluted, the debate about musical fitness for Irish ears echoes all the way down to the ongoing spat over RTÉ television's Popstars.
In the 1920s and 1930s, jazz was not merely a subject for unmusical debate about music. It was cast, more importantly, as a matter of public morality. The Catholic Church, attributing the new craze to black people and Jews, saw in it a pagan peril. The Gaelic League - or, at any rate, its more rabid and fundamentalist members - maintained that jazz was a grave danger to indigenous Irish traditions of music and song. In fact, the chief organiser of the campaign against jazz was Séan Óg Ó Ceallaigh, secretary of the league.
Listening to jazz on the wireless was decadent enough. But late-night dancing to the infernal music could only lead to unspeakable depravity. Indeed, the notorious orgies of ancient Rome would seem like nothing more than teenage hand-holding compared with the utter debauchery which jazz could unleash from Rosscarbery to Rathmullen.
The Talibanic zeal of the period seems ludicrous now (though it was probably no more intense than the current Talibanic zeal for "entrepreneurship"), but such was the unfree Free State of the time.
Jazz, of course, was easily attacked. It was foreign, made principally by cultural, indeed racial, "inferiors" and, horror of horrors, reputedly a libido stimulant. As the emerging Irish State looked inwards and demanded of its citizens that they be frontline troops - religious, political and cultural - outside influences which could be disseminated through books, cinema and radio were ruthlessly suppressed.
It was a time of Catholic Ireland über alles and, though we can decry its excesses, it was, for most people, a time of voluntary sacrifice as well as one of involuntary ignorance.
RICHARD Pine's fine new book, 2RN and the Origins of Irish Radio (the first in a series, 'Broadcasting and Irish Society', commemorating 75 years of Irish broadcasting) deals with the "jazz debate", and a great many more prosaic debates besides. It is, however, a remembered echo from the distant public turmoil over jazz that provokes a link to Philip Pullman's winning of the Whitbread Prize for The Amber Spyglass, the first children's book to make this breakthrough.
In the early 1960s, by which time Irish television, not radio, was the new and hot medium attracting political and cultural debate, a primary school Irish-language textbook continued to keep the "jazz debate" alive. It was one of those second or third class exercise books in which children were given an incomplete sentence and had to fill in the missing words.
Completed, the sentence had to read: "Is fearr liom ceol gaelach ná jazz."
There could be no dissent. We were told what we preferred, and that was that.
One poor, unbroken child objected, arguing that he didn't like ceol gaelach. He never objected again. Yet he was reading, albeit by compulsion rather than choice, a child's book. "Our old school-books are, in themselves, a social history of our country," wrote Thomas Walsh in the introduction to his 1998 compendium, Favourite Lessons We Learned at School.
Fair enough, even if the lesson to be learned from the echo of the "jazz debate" was that there was to be no debate about it.
Then again, the real significance of old schoolbooks is perhaps not so much social as psychological history. "It is easy to see that there was an emphasis on right and wrong, on honesty and honest labour and a shunning of materialism and wealth . . . There was a certainty about everything, including right and wrong," continued Walsh's introduction. There certainly was. "We knew what was forbidden [sex, jazz and our own opinions!] and what was commanded and we knew what bad thoughts were."
Given what we guiltily suspected and now incontrovertibly know about the institutions in which may of us were schooled, we damn well should have known what "bad" thoughts were.
But there were other children's books too - ones to read by choice and not just because of compulsion. The success of Rowling's Harry Potter books, renewed interest in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Pullman's winning of the Whitbread and the nomination of Irish author Eoin Colfer for that prize, bode well for a genre on course to supplant memoir, which flourished in the 1990s as the genre of this decade.
ALAN Bennett, in his essay, 'The Treachery of Books', hilariously and poignantly invokes the childhood sense of deprivation that the real world cannot ever be a match for the exciting worlds in books. "Had it been only stories that didn't measure up to the world, it wouldn't have been so bad. But it wasn't only fiction that was fiction. Fact too was fiction, as textbooks seemed to bear no more relation to the real world than did the storybooks."
Bennett goes on to observe that if the "fact books" (he cites his Boy's Book of the Universe) were to be believed, "every seashore was littered with starfish and delicately whorled shells, seahorses in every rockpool and crabs the like of which I had seen only in MacFisheries's window. Certainly I never came across them at Morecambe . . ."
It's a familiar complaint, and as true as the fact that, for many people, once they've hit their teenage years, or shortly afterwards, reading is seldom, if ever, quite as exciting again.
Of course, there are more alternatives than ever for children these days.Yet, in spite of dire warnings that radio, then television and, more recently, computer games would annihilate children's books, the genre is thriving at the moment. Certainly, there is marketing behind the boom - the hype for Rowling's books and film has been practically obscene - and publishers are intensely mining a re- opened seam. But, at any rate, 21st-century children are being encouraged not to spend all their time on Sony PlayStations. The market knows that there are other ways to make money from kids - hence Popstars and heavily promoted children's books.
Anyway, strange how even mention of jazz, never mind listening to or playing it, leads to the mind meandering. Maybe it was an unconscious fear of such unstructured associations that underpinned the "jazz debate" of the early years of Irish radio. Whatever its psychological basis, the debate sounds ludicrous now. However, the racism of our critic, quoted at the start of this column, remains alive and well. Just ask the Chinese community in Dublin. As for a debate about contemporary Irish radio: why are so many of the voices and accentson radio (and TV) ads as offensive as the now taboo "n-word"? We should discard - if necessary by decrees - these vile-sounding spiels.
2RN and the Origins of Irish Radio by Richard Pine, the first in a series, Broadcasting and Irish Society, is published by Four Courts Press.