What does that say about Louis Armstrong, who likewise had huge audiences by the turn of the decade? (Or Duke Ellington not much later?)
One thing that troubles me about this debate (putting all the vitriol aside, or rather just ignoring it) is how saying something is "pop" as opposed to "jazz" is tacitly allowed to be a kind of insult, or at least a demotion. (Please correct me if this is a misapprehension.)
One thing that the Lowe book I excerpted above challenges is the purism that produces that sort of logic, the idea that "jazz" exists as some separate strand of American popular music, arising from popular forms but almost immediately establishing a kind of solitary teleology. One of the questions Lowe repeatedly asks, concerning this or that record from the 1910s, is "Do we has jazz?" The answer is usually some version of a different question, "Well, what is jazz?" Jolson's early records can claim to be as anticipatory of jazz as many others by black and white recording artists, including people working in genres like ragtime and military bands.
That said, surely Jolson didn't swing in the way that Louis Armstrong or Bing Crosby later swung, and by 1927 it was probably clear to anyone with an appreciation for jazz as it was then understood (including Jolson himself) that Jolson was not singing jazz, not exactly. (He might have been "jazz" to my Russian-Jewish grandmother, the same way Shania Twain might be "country" to a truck driver in Stuttgart. But who cares? These aren't judgements of quality.)
But there is a real syncopation there that puts him "ahead" of many of his recorded contemporaries, at least in the 1910s. Listen to Jolson's record of "You Made Me Love You" (1913):
http://www.sendspace.com/file/3zgi8p. I think anyone listening to this record would recognize a singular stylist. But as for "swing," listen to the way he sings around the beat around 1:30 ("you know I do, 'deed I do, yes I do" etc.)
One of the great things about Jolson is the way he slips--sometimes almost imperceptibly, sometimes very bombastically-- from pop bathos to something slyer and more "jazzy." He straddles two conceptions of rhythm and uses them to oppose or compare two different ways of relating to a lyric. His blackface, troubling as it may seem now to some, was another "abili" that provided him with a wide range of attitudes to strike in the course of a song.
Strangely enough,
The Jolson Story captures some of this. It features Larry Parks lip-synching to a boatload of tunes recorded by Jolie himself. I would recommend this film. Jolson's biography is naturally bent a bit to conform to Hollywood conventions, but the conventions also bend to his (not terribly dramatic, in fact) biography, and the result is a strange kind of stasis that puts the songs front and center. The result (for me at least) was hypnotic, and left me in awe of Jolson's talents. And I don't believe anyone utters the word "Jazz" in the course of the film--until Jolie goes Hollywood, anyway.
And someone ought to mention one of Jolson's greatest acolytes, Judy Garland.
