Jazz began in the early 20th century, evolving into a major musical art form and in this feature we examine it’s origins until the present day.
Beginning with trying to define the word, we will explore the importance of US cities like New Orleans, Chicago and New York in the development of jazz; key musical movements from the 1930′s until the 1950s such as Swing, Be-Bop, Cool Jazz and Modal Jazz, developments from the 1960s until the present such as Free Jazz, and contemporary jazz.
We will also examine some of the major artists who have helped shaped jazz over the years, the key albums, some useful terms and also list some recommended books for people to explore further.
WHAT IS JAZZ?
is:
…a type of music of black American origin characterized by improvisation, syncopation, and a regular rhythm…
…an American musical art form which originated in the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music tradition. The style’s West African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation, and the swung note.
But where did the actual word come from? The origin is elusive.
Although it is now used to refer to a form of music the earliest known references to jazz are in the sports pages of various West Coast newspapers covering baseball in 1912.
The Los Angeles Times of April 2nd, 1912, referred to Portland Beavers pitcher Ben Henderson:
“…I got a new curve this year,” softly murmured Henderson yesterday, “and I’m goin’ to pitch one or two of them tomorrow. I call it the Jazz ball because it wobbles and you simply can’t do anything with it…”
Whilst this had nothing to do with music, it shows that the word was in use by 1912.
As with many words that evolved from slang, there is no definitive origin but the now-obsolete slang term ‘jasm’, meaning ‘spirit, energy or vigour’, is dated to 1860 in the
Historical Dictionary of American Slang and could be considered a leading candidate for the source of ‘jazz’.
Although jazz as we know it is widely considered to have evolved in New Orleans, the word began to be applied to music in Chicago around 1915.
Blues Is Jazz and Jazz Is Blues . . . The Worm had turned — turned to fox trotting. And the “blues” had done it. The “jazz” had put pep into the legs that had scrambled too long for the 5:15. . . At the next place a young woman was keeping “Der Wacht Am Rhein” and “Tipperary Mary” apart when the interrogator entered. “What are the blues?” he asked gently. “Jazz!”
Examples in Chicago continued over the next year, with the term beginning to extend to other cities by the end of 1916. By 1917 the term had caught on, although sometimes it was called ‘jass’.
One of the ironies of jazz is that although its history is fairly well documented, trying to define it is much harder. Jazz music evolved in the ghettos of New Orleans at the end of the 19th century and gradually spread to Chicago and New York in the 1920s as African Americans moved north in search of a better life.
The 1930s saw the emergence of swing bands led by Duke Ellington and soloists like Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young.
But over the next 70 years as different forms emerged with Be-Bop in the 1940s, Cool jazzin the 1950s, Modal jazz in 1960s and Fusion in 1970s it became ever harder to pin down what a working definition of jazz itself. Part of the reason is that jazz remains an organic art form which continues to grow.
Although it may be hard to easily define, many people have given their take on what jazz means to them. Here are a selection of quotes from famous jazz figures:
- “By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with” – Duke Ellington
- “…jazz has all the elements, from the spare and penetrating to the complex and enveloping. It is the hardest music to play that I know of, and it is the highest rendition of individual emotion in the history of Western music.” – Wynton Marsalis
- “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.” - Louis Armstrong (when asked to define the rhythmic concept of “swing”)
- “When they study our civilization two thousand years from now, there will only be three things that Americans will be known for: the Constitution, baseball and jazz music. They’re the three most beautiful things Americans have ever created.” – Gerald Early
- “Do not fear mistakes. There are none.” – Miles Davis
- “Master your instrument, Master the music, and then forget all that **** and just play.” – Charlie Parker
But how did jazz begin?
ORIGINS
By early 19th century the
Atlantic slave trade had brought almost half a million Africans to the United States. The slaves had mostly come from
West Africa and brought with them tribal musical traditions.
Unlike European musical traditions, African music focused on rhythm rather than harmony. When the African five note (
pentatonic) scale met the European seven note (
diatonic) scale, different hybrids evolved. The most important of these hybrids were Blues and Ragtime.
Blues was the song form that became central to Jazz and it formed in the 19th century from a mix of African and Christian music. Around 1835 there were plantation brass bands and touring minstrel troupes were singing and playing early versions of the blues by the 1840s.
The actual phrase “the blues” is a reference to the Blue Devils, meaning low spirits, melancholy, and sadness. An early reference to “the blues” can be found in George Colman’s one act farce Blue Devils from 1798.
Though the use of the phrase in African American music may be older, it can be traced back to 1912, when Hart Wand’s “Dallas Blues” became the first copyrighted Blues composition.
Although we could now define “the blues” musically as certain chord structures and lyric ideas that originated in West Africa, audiences in America identified it as the music of the rural south, especially the Mississippi Delta.
The notion of blues as a separate genre arose during the black migration from the countryside to urban areas in the l920’s and the simultaneous development of the recording industry.
Ragtime was a syncopated European style of piano music that evolved from the march but was often played with an African-style rhythm. As the forerunner of Jazz it became fully developed in the 1890s but it is difficult to pinpoint when Jazz actually emerged, or who actually started it.
The abolition of slavery led to new opportunities for education of freed African-Americans, but strict segregation meant there were limited employment opportunities. Black musicians provided “low-class” entertainment at dances, minstrel shows, and in vaudeville, and many marching bands formed.
Black pianists played in bars, clubs and brothels, and ragtime developed. The emergence of mature ragtime is usually dated to 1897, the year in which several important early rags were published. In 1899, “Maple Leaf Rag” by Scott Joplin was published, which became a hit and demonstrated more depth and sophistication than earlier ragtime.
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Some artists, like
Jelly Roll Morton, were present and performed both ragtime and jazz styles during the period the two genres overlapped. Although Blues and Ragtime were crucial to development of Jazz, the way in which they intersected is hard to pin down. A similar sense of ambiguity surrounds where Jazz was actually born, but there is one city which dominates the early years: New Orleans.
NEW ORLEANS
New Orleans was originally a French settlement and a melting pot for all kinds of people in the 19th century. It didn’t officially become part of the United States of America until 1803 with
The Louisiana Purchase.
This was when the U.S under President
Thomas Jefferson paid $15,000,000 for the Louisiana territory, which back then encompassed 23% of North America.
The effect of this was that it retained its cosmopolitan European character longer than other American cities. At the turn of the 20th century it had proportionally more opera companies, symphonies and music halls than any other American city.
The traditional music and songs of European countries such as France, Spain, England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany and Italy could be heard in the music halls and brass bands – which were common in French villages since Napoleon – were popular.
New Orleans had a legacy of racial diversity and throughout the 19th century the city had a French-speaking upper class named the
Creoles.
Historically, the name ‘Creole’ was used in early generations to refer to colonists of French descent who had been born in Louisiana and were thus native to the territory, compared to new immigrants. It then referred exclusively people of European descent but it also was used for black slaves who were born in Louisiana rather than those born and transported as slaves from West Africa.
These were people who were a mixture of mainly French, Spanish, African American, and Native-American heritage. They were often educated, academically and musically, in the classical European manner and there was little discrimination against them in the 19th century.
At the beginning of the 1800s, the population of New Orleans was roughly half black and half white. Half of the blacks were ‘workers’, the other half were slaves and the captive Africans continued to be brought into the city throughout the 19th century.
During this French and Spanish colonial era, slaves were commonly allowed Sundays off from their work and they gathered in a square where they would set up a market, sing, dance, and play music.
This eventually became known as ‘Congo Square’ and as African music had been suppressed in the Protestant colonies and states, the weekly gatherings here became famous and were an important step in influencing what would later become jazz.
After the Louisiana Purchase, American settlers moved to the city and working class blacks were moved out of the better neighbourhoods and jobs. By 1890 racial discrimination was directed towards the Creoles and sophisticated creole musicians moved into the same areas and began to play alongside black musicians who liked to improvise.
One of the unintended effects of the Civil War was that there was a sudden supply of cheap military marching band instruments. This meant that the music of late 19th century New Orleans was dominated by brass bands and they played at all kinds of events including: parades, dances and funerals.
Storyville in New Orleans
In 1897 the city created a legal red-light district namedStoryville.
The streets of this district were often filled with walking musical processions (Mardi Gras, dances and funerals) and the music was mainly handled by two groups: working class blacks and Creoles of colour.
It is this fusion of the earthy, bluesy music of Blacks and the technical skill of Creoles that many scholars see as the origin of what we now know as Jazz.
The instruments used in marching bands and dance bands became the basic instruments of jazz: brass and reeds tuned in the European 12-tone scale and drums. Small bands of primarily self-taught African American musicians, many of whom came from the funeral-procession tradition of New Orleans, played a seminal role in the development and dissemination of early jazz.
They travelled throughout black communities in the Deep South and from around 1914 Afro-Creole and African American musicians playing in vaudeville shows took jazz to western and northern US cities.
Many early jazz musicians credited
Charles ‘Buddy’ Bolden and his band with being the originators of what came to be known as ‘jazz’, though the term wasn’t in common use at the time. He is credited with creating a looser, more improvised version of ragtime and adding blues to it, although sadly no known recordings of Bolden have survived.
Poster for Jelly Roll Blues in 1915
Afro-Creole pianist
Ferdinand ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton began his career in Storyville. From 1904, he toured with vaudeville shows around southern cities, also playing in Chicago and New York.
His “Jelly Roll Blues,” which he composed around 1905, was published in 1915 as the first jazz arrangement in print, introducing more musicians to the New Orleans style.
That year numerous other bands made recordings featuring “jazz” in the title or band name, mostly ragtime or novelty records rather than jazz.
In September 1917 W.C. Handy’s Orchestra of Memphis recorded a cover version of “Livery Stable Blues”. In February 1918 James Reese Europe’s “Hellfighters” infantry band took ragtime to Europe during World War I, then on return recorded Dixieland standards including “The Darktown Strutter’s Ball”.
However, it remains a strange irony that some of the classics of ‘New Orleans’ jazz recorded in the 1920s by Joe Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong were actually made in another U.S. city – Chicago.
CHICAGO
In 1900, most of America’s black population lives in the South but over the next few decades many migrated north for a better life as America’s industrial economy grew.
Jazz at the Savoy in Chicago during the 1920s
Chicago in the 1920s became the centre of this migration north and soon became a place where cabaret and dance joints thrived.
One factor that helped trigger this boom was
Prohibition which was voted in not long after migrants from the south arrived.
These new laws that banned alcohol led to an enormous boom in bootleg liquor and illegal drinking clubs called ‘
speakeasies’. It was in these places that jazz thrived as people looking for a drink wanted music to accompany it.
When the Storyville was closed down in 1917, many of the jazz players moved north to Chicago. In 1918 Joe ‘King’ Oliver left New Orleans and moved to Chicago where he formed his famous Creole Band, which became famous at Lincoln Gardens on the South Side of the city.
In 1922, King sent for a gifted young trumpeter he had taught in New Orleans named
Louis Armstrong.
When Oliver brought Armstrong into his band he doing an unconventional thing by adding a second cornet player.
Whilst Oliver never strayed far from the melody and beat Armstrong adopted a more improvisational style which helped revolutionise jazz music. Previously it had been an ensemble form of music but Armstrong helped pave the way for later musicians with his revolutionary playing style.
With his distinctive voice, Armstrong was also an influential singer, showing great skill in bending the lyrics and melody of a song for expressive purposes. By the 1920s the New Orleans jazz community had found a new home in Chicago and the population of the city’s South Side grew to 100,000.
Even white audiences were drawn to the new music with special concerts by the King Oliver band being held at Lincoln Gardens. The distinctive Chicago style of jazz which originated in the south was sometimes called “
Dixieland” or “Hot Jazz”.
Louis Armstrong’s recordings with his Chicago-based Hot Seven band (which included members of his New Orleans Hot Five) came out during this period. There was an emphasis on solos, faster tempos, string bass and guitar, which replaced the traditional tuba and banjo.
Important musicians in the Chicago style include Muggsy Spanier, Jimmy McPartland, Bix Beiderbecke, Eddie Condon, Bud Freeman, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Frank Teschemacher and Frank Trumbauer.
Another important development around this time was the firstcommercial radio broadcasts in 1920, which in a couple of years had seen over 500 stations sprout up.
Meanwhile, another American city was becoming important in the development of jazz.
NEW YORK
Whilst New York did not have the same jazz traditions as New Orleans and Chicago, in the 1920s it was becoming the centre of the recording industry.
Don Ricos New York jazz band in the 1920s
One artist who came to prominence at this time in the Big Apple was a bandleader named
Paul Whiteman, who had great success with ‘symphonic jazz’ arrangements.
Calling himself the ‘King of Jazz’, he sold three million copies of his first record in 1922. In 1924 he staged a concert in New York’s Aeolian Hall and that saw the premiere of ‘
Rhapsody in Blue’ by George Gershwin.
Around the same time Whiteman was crowning himself the king of jazz, another bandleader named
Fletcher Henderson was making waves.
Incorporating more improvisational jazz within his big band style he found a way of using saxophones and brass sections in new and innovative ways. In 1924 he brought Louis Armstrong over from Chicago to join his band in New York, which added another dimension to his sound.
In the 1920s Black poetry, art, literature and music came flourished and the district of Harlem be came an epicentre for this cultural change.
It wasn’t just in the night spots that Harlem buzzed – there were even rent parties and ‘parlour socials’ which saw tenants hire musicians to play in their own homes, charging a small fee to cover the rent. These open houses provided an outlet for such musicians as Fats Waller and James P Johnson.
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Duke Ellington had already made a name for himself with his Kentucky Club Orchestra and in 1927 his group of musicians became the house band at Harlem’s Cotton Club.
He held court at this legendary club during its most celebrated period from 1927 to 1931.
Ellington and his orchestra survived the hard times by taking to the road in a series of tours and a weekly radio broadcast helped maintain his popularity.
The so called ‘Jazz Age’ was about to end but the Swing Age was just around the corner.
