1 beginnings of jazz 2013
TRANSCRIPT
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.