Beginnings of Jazz Week 3 2013

•  From New Orleans to Chicago •  Precursors •  The context •  The mixing of styles •  The personalities •  The impact

Readings

•  Burkholder, Grout and Palisca, pp. 844-864 also bits in chapter 30.

•  Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz, pp. 3-54 •  Ed. Mervyn Cooke and David Horn, The

Cambridge Companion to Jazz, CUP, 2002, pp. 9-32

•  Gunter Schuller, Early Jazz, 1968, pp. 63-133

Congo Square Dance

Prehistory

•  Congo square dances of black slaves in early 19th century New Orleans. The ring shout. Rhythmic content of African music.

•  Video 1 •  Ragtime and Scott Joplin. Starts in the 1890s as a

piano style full of syncopation. Died with Joplin in 1917. Revived in the 1960s and 70s.

•  Extract 1 - The Cascade – by Scott Joplin

The Blues

•  Country Blues and classic blues. Country blues dominated by big names of Delta blues singers. Classic by female singers – Ma Rainey

•  Video 2 – 1890s and blues •  Extract 2 Robert Johnson

Ma Rainey

•  Titanic Man Blues

The Blues

New Orleans Context

•  Industrial Port of the 19th century. It had been Spanish and then French, then American with the Louisiana purchase of 1803.

•  Imported slaves to work on the plantations of the south.

•  Steam boats of Mississippi opened up New Orleans as a major port for shipments made from the central states of the USA. Population increased 4 fold between 1825-75

Mortality •  Blacks lived on average 36 years – whites only 46. •  Pestilence – city below sea level, no sanitation or

sewage until 1892. Mosquitoes ever present. •  Fascination with death and funeral processions. •  Huge red light district. To cater for drifting

population. •  Storyville the birthplace of Jazz. •  Passion for marching bands throughout 19th

century. Sunday concerts, dances and funeral processions.

•  Video 3 Feeling the Blues

Feeling the blues

Blending

•  Opera house in New Orleans from 1792 – a new one opened in 1859 and was the best in the New World.

•  Creole musicians traversed cultural divides. Steeped in the classics and could read at sight.

•  Bordellos brought all races together.

Buddy Bolden

•  Father of Jazz – but no recordings or music survives – just a name.

•  Dates 1877- 1931 •  Took up the cornet in 1890s – played in

mixed band of strings and wind. Career in decline by 1906. Declared insane. Applied syncopations of ragtime and tonality of blues to a new range of compositions.

•  Video 4 Blues on Brass

Blues on Brass

New Generation

•  Uptown cornettists – Bunk Johnson, Joe ‘King’ Oliver, Mutt Carey and Louis Armstrong – took over from Bolden.

•  Creoles also took up the new style – Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory and white musicians - Papa Jack Laine, Emmet Hardy, Nick LaRocca.

•  By early 1920s the first recordings were made.

Bands develop

•  Band improvisation •  Video 5

Bands

Original Dixieland Jazz Band

•  All white band that made the first recordings – joined in Chicago in 1916 and opened in New York in 1917. The band travelled widely and played a wide selection of music – but not really the ‘real thing’, but did much to expose the new music to the world.

Nick La Rocca – Tiger Rag

Jelly Roll Morton

•  ‘World’s Greatest Hot Tune Writer’. •  Flamboyant character of New Orleans. •  Real name Ferdinand LaMenthe b.1890.

Highbrow Creole family. Became a piano ‘Professor’ of the bordellos. Made hundreds of piano rolls. Lead a band called the The Red Hot Peppers. His music full of surprises and changes of direction. Known for its structural complexity.

•  Extract 3 - Perfect Rag

The Move to Chicago

•  By early 1920s the centre of Jazz had moved to Chicago – but the Chicago scene was dominated by players and bands from New Orleans.

•  Millions of blacks moved north in search of work and a better life.

•  Joe ‘King’ Oliver and his King Oliver Creole Band perhaps the best known today for their recordings. Background of marching bands of New Orleans. Took on a second cornettist for recordings of 1923/4 - Louis Armstrong.

•  Extract 4 Froggie Moore - King Oliver

Louis Armstrong

•  1900 illegitimate son of New Orleans prostitute. Arrested in 1913 for shooting off a gun - put in a Home of boys - with military band traditions - given a cornet and taught to play. Drove a coal wagon and played on this side - included in many bands.

Band balance

•  Group rather than individual solos - interweaving of front line parts - cornet, clarinet, trombone..

•  Trombone takes lower register bass melody; clarinet plays complex figurations in high or middle register; Cornet plays less complex figures but in the middle register and pushes the band forward.

•  Each instrument tried to emulate the human voice - like talking and singing.

•  Rhythm section - piano, banjo, drums - possibly also bass or tuba.

Move towards Big Bands and Soloists/Leaders

•  Armstrong was clearly a more virtuosic player than Oliver - who saw Jazz as collective and inter-dependent. Armstrong was constrained within the band.

•  Individualism of Armstrong calls attention to itself.

•  Death knell of New Orleans style - and arrival of big band format. In place by 1925 and in full flow by 1930.

Impact

•  1920s the ‘Jazz Age’. •  Phonograph, gramophone and radio all in place by

1920s. Tin Pan Alley still important and lots of music was transcribed and sold as sheet music.

•  Dance craze of the era. One step, Two step, Blackbottom, Stomp, Charleston, etc. Records allowed people to dance at home.

•  Musicians throughout the world aware of Jazz - world wide impact.

•  Gerswin’s Rapsody in Blue 1924. Big impact in Paris and on French composers. Extract 5 I

Records

•  By 1909 12 million dollars of records and cylinders sold in USA, by 1921 thus had increase 4 fold.

•  Jazz arrives as a recorded product in the early 1920 and is our main source of knowledge of the genre from then on.

Radio

•  Early records - 78 had to be 3 and half minutes. •  No electric microphones before 1925 so sound

quality was poor and the recording process crude. •  Radio preferred to a have a live band - often a

house ensemble to produce music on tap. •  Quality of sound on radio was better than on

record in general - early shellac records deteriorated quickly and were easily broken.

Bix Beiderbecke •  White boy growing up in Davenport Iowa, in the

mid West. From a German musical family - but with no connection with Jazz in his musical heritage.

•  His understanding and enthusiasm came from hearing records. - ODJB and the cornet playing of LaRocca in particular.

•  Played by ear - never learnt to read music well. •  Sent to school near Chicago but played truant to

hear and play with bands. •  First band the Wolverines got their first records in

1923. In second sessions of 1924 he was still only 21. He moved to New York in 1924.

Big Band Era

•  Chicago to New York. •  Period of Jazz legends. •  Increasing importance of singers with use of

microphones. •  Collapse of record sales and dominance of radio. •  Crash of 1929 - the depression and prohibition.