History of Classic Jazz (from its beginnings to Be-Bop) E-Book

Marco Ravasini

• Herausgeber: Youcanprint
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The history of classic Jazz presented interactively, with photographs, musical excerpts and video recordings from the era available through World Wide Web access, along with links to a glossary of all specialized technical terms.

Leseprobe

Copyright

Original title: History of Classic Jazz

First edition: November 2020

Second Edition: July 2022

English translation: Wendell Murray

© 2013 Marco Ravasini,

Via Carlo Boucheron 14,

10122 Torino, Italia

ISBN 978-88-908800-9-4

Preface

“I don't need words. It's all in the phrasing”

- Louis Armstrong

“Music should always be an adventure”

- Coleman Hawkins

“Well, if you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night!”

- ‘Count’ Basie

This is the English version of a book written in 2013, which had its origins in my more than ten years of teaching the history of Jazz at the Conservatory, both for the benefit of students of Jazz and of others who might come from a more traditional, classical orientation. In this case, as in the Italian original, the book is not intended as an exhaustive accounting of Jazz, because that would go against the idea of the book itself, designed for ease of use. Further, it is impossible to recount the lives of all individuals, whether rightly or wrongly, who might be considered important figures in jazz history. That is due to the fact that each of us, including the author, has the right to his or her own quirks and preferences.

Within the text itself, subdivided into 3 chapters and 22 sections, along with 3 appendices, a reader may click on a link to access a complete definition/explanation of any technical term. Other links, indicated as LISTEN or LISTEN-VIEW, take the reader to the respective pages on the World Wide Web, where the reader may listen to and/or watch those relevant musical pieces. To access these resources, it should go without saying, in opposition to the items in the glossary, that an Internet connection is needed either through a WIFI connection or through a SIM card in a mobile phone or tablet computer.

Lastly, I want to express my thanks to two special individuals: to my long-term friend, near brother in fact, Wendell Murray, without whom this translation would otherwise be unthinkable and to my father Giorgio, a life-long jazz aficionado, who passed on to me, starting as a young child, his passion for African-American music, even if, later on, as I grew, I pursued an interest in other musical genres. This book, in large part, is his product as well as mine.

M.R.

Magliano Alfieri, Piedmont Italy, September 2020

CHAPTER 1

Beginnings of Jazz

Section 1

Calls, Cries, WorkSongs, Ballads, Spirituals, Blues, Minstrelsy, Ragtime, New Orleans

Introduction

It is not possible to establish a precise chronology of all the expressions of vocal Folk Musicin the Black population of the United States of America, from the simplest to the most complex, considering that the simplest (Calls and Cries) must naturally precede the more complex (Ballads and Blues), passing, perhaps necessarily, through the religious repertory (Gospels and Spirituals). Indeed, it is necessary to speak of ‘simultaneity’ or ‘same-timed-ness’ within Black culture. Finding and documenting the origins of these is no easy task.

During the time of slavery (also afterwards), many forms of song were heard in workplaces in the USA South, in cotton, sugar and wheat plantations and in ports along rivers and on the Atlantic coast.

Calls, Cries and Work Songs

Calls served to communicate any kind of message, to call people from the fields (see following figure), to call people to work, to catch the attention of a girl at a distance or simply to make one's presence known.

If a subjective dimension prevailed, in an expressive form and with vocalization of private emotions, then more appropriately these were Cries. Their structure was quite free in general and was often personalized by the singer, anticipating thereby the practice of improvisation that would become, with time, a key characteristic of the Blues and Jazz. Furthermore, if more elaborated and tied more to work, these became so-called Work Songs, of farm workers, of railroad workers, of dock workers, of wood-cutters, of fishermen and of prisoners.

These Work Songs, quite close to the original African tradition, with their typically antiphonal structure, made a strong impression on the whites who heard them, as testimony of the English singer-actress Fanny Kemble documents (Journal of a residence in a Georgia plantation, 1838-1839):“Our boatmen […] accompany the stroke of their oars with the sound of their voices. […] I’ve been quite at a loss to discover any […] foundation for many (songs) that I have heard lately, and which have appeared to me extraordinarily wild and unaccountable. The way in which the chorus strikes in with the burthen [in unison or in octave, often in falsetto, AN] between each phrase of the melody chanted by a single voice is very curious and effective”. Above all else Kemble admired “the admirable time and true accent” of the songs, all tightly connected with the rhythm of work that was performed at the same time, at times sad, at times instead happy and joyful, with the most varied of contents

Ballads

These were complex songs, sometimes very long, articulated in stanzas and at times derived from Work Songs which had lost their original meaning. Often they narrated actual events in epic form, as perhaps in the case of the famous Ballad of Ol' Riley, known under various titles, in which the story is told of an old prisoner who escapes from prison to attend his wife's funeral and is chased by the dog belonging to the prison guards, Rattle, also old, that however cannot catch him… Other times the theme is of conjugal infidelity, of the inadequacy and the fecklessness of husbands of the black race (see the mark of illegitimate children, a near constant in the modern era), a theme widespread also in the Blues, with reaction from the wives, at times resigned, but very often leading, after much tolerance, to violent and homicidal vengeance (see the Ballad of Frankie and Johnny also known by the title Frankie and Albert). Other times the theme had to do with the eternal dream of escaping the bitterness of life, as is the case of [LISTEN]:Midnight Special, perhaps of white origin, that is part of the repertory of the famous singer-guitarist-prisoner Lead Belly (1885-1949) who was discovered, and re-evaluated by the ethnomusicologists John and Alan Lomax. In this, the ‘Midnight Special’, or midnight express, that is the night train that passes huffing and puffing, heading who knows where, becomes the symbol of freedom and a beacon of salvation (imaginary) as much for the laborer who endures daily, hard labor as, in equal measure, for the prisoner who endures loss of his freedom…

Conversion to Christianity: Spirituals

Conversion to Christianity of black slaves, performed by Baptist and Methodist missionaries, appeared for the first time at the beginning of the 18th century, almost two centuries after the first arrivals from Africa. The slaveholders forbade conversion for a long time because they thought that religious parity would have denied to slaveholding society a large part of its supposed justification… Eventually, however, the slaveholders became aware that Christianity could serve as a powerful means of control and containment of the impetus towards and the desire for rebellion (one suffers in silence in this world with the certainty of proximate redemption in the next…) and no longer opposed conversion. For a long time, nonetheless, the converted slaves maintained memory of their former animist rites, giving life to a synthesized cult, halfway between the past and the present. And in their Spirituals, which almost always contained an optimistic and assertive theme, they highlighted their hopes for peace and future redemption without, however, renouncing the idea of reaching those goals while still on this earth, to the point that the performance of some of this music, during a sacred ritual, was absolutely prohibited. Following the Civil War and the consequent emancipation of the slaves, these songs underwent a process of acculturation and a cleansing, when presented to the general public, often that of white skin. Thus the songs often underwent significant transformations, converting themselves to a given vocalization and to new and more complex harmonizations much better appreciated by that audience, even if very far from the original spirit of the compositions. This was, evidently, the type of Spiritual known by European classical composers at the end of the 19th century, as for example by Antonin Dvořak: [LISTEN]:Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.

Blues

A companion genre to Ballads and Work Songs, the Blues, a genre initially vocal, but afterwards becoming instrumental, had its origin in the 19th century in the familiar scenarios of farm and domestic work, but conserving from its beginnings all African-rooted characteristics that, here and there, are sporadically found in the other genres (improvisation and antiphonal aspect, principally). It was made up of three lines of text (three musical phrases of four measures each, in total twelve beats), AA'B, with the first two lines (phrases) that emphasize a concept or a situation and the last that represents the response to them (with regard to the text) and simultaneously the harmonic conclusion (with regard to the music). The meter was in quadruple time (4/4), the harmony repetitive (A all in tonic, A' 2 measures in subdominant and 2 in tonic, B 2 measures in dominant and 2 in tonic) with chords always provided with sevenths (even tonic…), while the scale underlying the melody had thirds and sixths somewhat flat, almost as a harmonic minor used horizontally… After the three lines, the text proceeded with another three lines and another again, maintaining the same melodic-harmonic scheme of the start. The themes addressed rested mostly on the horrid state of existential solitude of blacks who, once removed from slavery, were becoming aware of a new type of legalized exploitation, both in factories and on the farms of an earlier time. The Blues thus became the symbol of the consistently very trying life of the black population, evolving into a cultural emblem for blacks after the Civil War up to the present time, while enriching itself progressively with more complex musical contents.

MinstrelShows

This genre of music is a type of musical theater, primarily improvised upon relatively simple plots, in which, in the period preceding the Civil War, companies of white actors-singers, appropriately made up, their faces blackened with polish, performed vignettes of the (presumed) life of black slaves on Southern plantations, with accompaniment of songs, dancing and recitations, a mixture of derision and fondness for the personalities represented… These MinstrelShows reached a maximum level of popularity towards mid-century in the 1800s when the set masks of Jim Crow (the bow-legged black sidekick, see following figure), Jim Brown (the know-it-all musician) or Sambo (the dumb domestic who did everything imaginable to please his white overlords) became almost proverbial.

Within the minstrel performances songs were born that were destined for great success, such as [LISTEN]: 1)Turkey In The Strawand 2) Old Dan Tucker. Later, the emancipation of the slaves after the Civil War (1861-1865) had the effect of permitting true black singer-actors to act for the first time in such scenes, creating the paradox of fake dark-skinned characters, originally thought up by whites, but now performed, finally and without makeup, by authentic actors of color… Thus, in the last years of the 19th and the first of the 20th centuries, Minstrel Shows ended up accommodating an ever-larger number of expressions, above all musical, from the nascent black culture, finally freed from slavery. Among these, probably the most important was Ragtime.

Ragtime

This genre of partly elevated instrumental music, born at the sunset of the 19th century (the initial date is officially set as 1896) was the first product of black culture – or at least from the less poor and more emancipated fringes of it – capable of attracting the attention of whites, who took possession of the genre, for the most part almost immediately and without the slightest hesitation. Ragtime consisted of compositions for piano or arrangements for dance orchestras, with a classical-sounding chain of stanzas, vaguely inspired by the rondo (AABBACCDD in most cases). The music, in two parts, foresaw a ‘march tempo’ rigorously played by the left hand or by orchestral basses, while the right hand or the melody instruments produced instead a line rich in syncopation and in displacement of beat. It has been said that in this music, as it aspired for respectability among whites, the left hand represented the regularity and the tradition of European music, while the right one embodied the ancestral memory of Africa with its frantic polyrhythms. But in reality even the syncopationsof Ragtime had a soothing aspect, the same as in classical music on the other side of the ocean. This had to do with rhythmic displacements perfectly framed within a traditional meter, something that Jazz would also embody, but enriching it enormously with an oscillation of phrasing in the unity of tempo that would be much more complex and original (swing). Not to mention improvisation, completely missing in Ragtime (rigorously written, equal to a Mazurka by Chopin or a Rhapsody by Liszt) and, to the contrary, which represents in effect the back spine and supporting column of subsequent African-American music. Ragtime’s most important composer, Scott Joplin (see following figure), a contemporary of Mahler, R. Strauss and Debussy and the author of works destined for musical theater (Treemonisha), produced hundreds of successful pieces, among which [LISTEN]: 1) Maple Leaf Ragand2) The Entertainer, but he ended up dying nonetheless in poverty in New York City, in 1917, exactly at the time of the appearance of the first phonographic jazz recordings…

New Orleans

To the standard hypothesis of a sole source for the origin of Jazz, supposedly entirely localized in New Orleans, exist more recent hypotheses which, based on the testimony of musicians active in the Northeast of the USA since the start of the 20th century, point to multi-source origins. That is, origins which are traceable simultaneously to various cities of the country, beyond New Orleans, to Chicago, New York City and Baltimore (in the first two, in effect, Jazz is assumed to have taken hold in the 1920s following the arrival of musicians from New Orleans). In reality, it appears, however, that New Orleans may be granted uncontested primacy in the use of improvisation inside of the new syncopated music, whether for ensembles or for single instruments, that started to be played by then a bit everywhere… The black clarinet player Buster Bailey has said: “We were playing in Memphis [Tennessee] at the same time they were playing in New Orleans. The difference was that the New Orleans bands did more improvising. Ours were more of the note variety. We played from the sheets […]. In 1917, we began to improvise after hearing recordings of Livery Stable Blues and stuff like that” (from an interview done for the magazine The Jazz Review, January 1959, reproduced in Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff (editors), Hear me talkin' to ya, Dover Publications 1966). These recordings done in New York City, the first on record, were effectuated by the Original Dixieland Jass (sic) Band, a small orchestra of whites hailing from New Orleans. They raised such a ruckus that one might imagine that, in effect, around those parts nothing of the type had ever been heard before… It is probable, therefore, that Jazz would have developed even without the contribution from New Orleans, the times were evidently that ripe, but it is certain that the contribution from the major city in Louisiana was absolutely determinant. On top of that, lacking this contribution, i.e. from Blacks, North American music, in the most likely case, would have been different from that which has evolved.

New Orleans (La Nouvelle Orleans) was founded by the French in 1718, whereafter it became Spanish (1762), then French again with Napoleon (1800), and finally part of the growing United States of America (1803), to the chagrin of the inhabitants, creoles (free mulattos) and blacks (slaves), the latter accounting for about half of the population, that had only 10,000 souls. During the first part of the 1800s, the city grew enormously (40,000 inhabitants at mid-century, that would then become 300,000 at the start of the 20th century) thanks to rapid commercial development and to the arrival of new white slaveholders with thousands of black slaves already employed in the Caribbean, mostly in Haiti. Along with the Caribbean slaves the mysterious practice of voodoo came to New Orleans. Voodoo was typically practiced in the countries of slave origin. With the slave owners, in addition to the arrival of voodoo, came a taste for luxury and ostentation. This taste became widespread and was then quickly adopted by the creole component of the population. From elsewhere in the United States arrived merchants and colonists of English origin and of Protestant religion, in contrast to the existing nucleus of the inhabitants of the city, who were Catholic, and other immigrants arrived from Europe, among whom a large number of Italians (who constituted the most numerous, non-USA ethnic group resident in the city). Thus, in the 19th century this delta city at the mouth of the Mississippi river became the melting pot of many disparate cultures: European, mostly French, English, Spanish and Italian, on the one hand; African, in its many, diverse manifestations, on the other. One must keep in mind that the culture (and the music) of blacks, during slavery, was maintained, here, more persistent and free, from the moment that Catholic slave owners treated the slaves even worse than Protestant slaveholders, but left them, at the same time, a greater freedom to cultivate their traditions… In the open tracts of the city and in the famous Congo Square (see following figure), on festive occasions, blacks exhibited themselves in groups during festivities that were based on dancing (the Bamboula, the Counjaille, the Calinda, the last strictly tied to voodoo rites) and on strongly percussive music.

In this context, then, the Civil War, rather than leading to the acclaimed liberation of slaves of color, signified for New Orleans mainly a subordination to the victorious northern states, a consequent protestantization of city life and to a new racism centered on the power of money, with whites on one side and blacks, recently ‘freed’ from slavery, plus creoles by now assimilated with the blacks, on the other. Blacks and creoles came to inhabit the Uptown part of the city, to the west of Canal Street, and this caused a re-mixing of musical traditions that were originally dissimilar: that of the creoles which was classical and European, and included composers such as Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869), and that, strongly African, of blacks, which was preserved here, as already noted, better than elsewhere. The first result of this mixture was the fanfares at black funerals, famous ceremonies in which bands accompanied, with slow-paced, sad and well-mannered music, the hearse to the burial place. They then launched themselves, on the way back to town, into syncopated rhythms of Ragtime… And, behind them, the seemingly limitless multitude that made up the so-called ‘second line’ (in fact a second line of participants), that included the animated participation of thousands of people, with other musical forms and even entirely different music, always mixing European marches with syncopated rhythms.

The last years of the 19th century, as a result, saw the proliferation of brass bands (bands made up entirely of brass instruments), whether small or large, that accommodated in addition - of course - clarinets, in the mold of non-Anglo-Saxon European bands. The most famous of these bands, which performed permanent and crowded concerts in the open in the city's Lincoln Park, was that of ‘Buddy’ Bolden, the first and nearly mythological figure to be found in the annals of Jazz. The formation of his band had many imitators: one or two valve cornets, a slide trombone and a clarinet, along with the instruments which provided rhythmic support, banjo (or guitar), three-stringed double bass and drums… Bolden, according to many, is credited with introducing instrumental improvisation for the first time into his music, based on Blues chord progressions and, more generally, on materials drawn from black musical folklore. But his haphazard life (women and alcohol…) brought on madness - perhaps cerebral-spinal syphilis - by 1907 and none of his music was ever recorded for posterity. He died forgotten by everyone, at the beginning of the 1930s, in a mental hospital in Louisiana. ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton contends that he was considered the strongest cornet-player ever, being able to make himself heard miles away, while the creole clarinet-player Sidney Bechet described him essentially as a showman, perhaps having more a gift for savoir-faire than for true and proper music. Louis Armstrong recounted that Bolden was a somewhat raw instrumentalist, but it is not clear how he might have arrived at that judgment given that Bolden stopped playing when Armstrong was six years old…

Another very famous band was that of the white drummer ‘Jack Papa’ Laine (1873-1966) who inaugurated the formation of the musicians of the Original Dixieland Jass Band (see above), that in the 1920s conquered New York City and London. All the musicians in the bands were black or creole, but whites also, as has been seen, and played in locales such as Storyville (see following figure), the red-light district that in 1910 hosted at least 200 bordellos, for all sizes of wallet.

Furthermore, still in Storyville, pianists were employed as entertainers. They played in the waiting rooms of the bordellos. One of these was ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton, already mentioned, who is reputed to have made the first disc recordings 10 years later.

In the meantime, aside from Bolden, the title to best orchestra was contested by Freddie Keppard (1889-1933) and Joe Oliver, both cornet-players, who often challenged each other to duels, going on occasion to musically provoke the adversary near locales where the other happened to be playing. In the end, Oliver gained the upper hand, receiving the moniker ‘King’ (King Oliver). On November 12, 1917, however, this entire epic came to an end as brutal as it was unexpected, with the forced evacuation of Storyville on orders of the US Marine Command, concerned especially about fighting, evermore frequent, that broke out in the district and that saw marines involved… The bordellos were closed, the prostitutes transferred elsewhere and jazz musicians left without support. Almost all, therefore, following in the tracks of those who had already gone away, left the city finding employment in small orchestras on river boats and migrating in bulk to the north, in search of new ventures. Black, white and creole music of New Orleans had been defeated, in large part, by a triumphant group of moralistic busy bodies who assigned the term ‘jazz’ to this music. At the time, ‘jazz’ was a slang word that can be translated as ‘obscene’ or ‘trivial’, thus a disparaging designation that, nonetheless, would remain as the name for the music into posterity.

Technical note

Jazz, according to an opinion widely expressed at any early period of its existence, was supposed to have been born from the fact that black musicians submerged their African sensibilities (rhythm, essentially, and timbre, with a particular way of starting to play notes and with a different concept of sonority) to the harmonic schemas and the contrapuntal structures typical of the white academic musical tradition. The idea, even while recognizing the synthesizing inherent to Jazz, concerned itself with assigning primary importance to a classical European influence. Such could only gain widespread credence during a period in which recognition of the importance of tribal African music was barely nascent. However, when the first serious ethno-musicological studies were made of musical production on the black continent (Arthur Morris Jones, Studies in African Music, 1956), it became suddenly clear that almost all the components of the language of Jazz derived in essence from African practice and if anything, rather than a forced cohabitation of diverse elements, Jazz arose from the adaptation, deliberate and skilled, of the fundamental characteristics of the music of the former African slaves to the musical rules then in force among their former owners of white race. For example, from the typical African polyrythm that proceeded by adding to the various voices configurations of notes, whose characteristics and length always varied, up to a point of generating complex sensations of displacement of pulse (additive polyrhythm with polymetric outcomes to our common perception of rhythm) came the need to accentuate all beats of typical European measures. While never distancing itself from the typical, regular pulsations of our music, the African polyrhythm necessitated execution of improvised and varying configurations, internal to a 4/4 meter, so as to never rigorously observe the precise dislocation of beats, but rather to oscillate (that is, to ‘swing’) continuously between sensations of anticipation/delay and the momentary reaffirmations of metric emphasis… In the same way, the presence, in Africa, of the practice of vocal performance in thirds, in some regions, or fourths, fifths and eights, in others (Jones), was such that black people in the USA could immediately feel at ease with classical harmony, with its triadic base, conferring to it however, at the same time, thanks to so-called ‘blue notes’, a hint of their own modal scales with the leading tone, the third and the sixth a bit lower than in the European major scalessupposed to be employed, as a norm, for melodies that stood above the same harmonizations…