Jazz has a short history
If you consider a
string
quartet playing for wedding ceremony or wedding reception, or
barn dance band playing for a birthday party or wedding anniversary, the music that is played
mostly has an origin goes back several hundred years. For example a popular
piece for the entrance the bride is an extract from Handel's water music. Handel
died in 1760 and was composing his music sometime before that. Hyden, who died
in 1809 and Mozart who died in 1791, and again the composing music many years
before this, particularly in the case of Mozart who was composing pieces as a
child prodigy still being played today by string quartets, are popular for the
first part of the drinks reception prior to moving on to the jazz and music from
the West End shows repertoire. Similarly, the music that is
played at a birthday party for a barn dance or
ceilidh, the band that have been
hired to perform will be playing music that originated in the most part during
the before the time of the string quartet repertoire referred to above.
Certainly with Scottish ceilidh music, there was significant influence from
Victorian musicians who performed at places like the London Palladium and other
music Hall venues, and there are many modern composers of folk tunes, but the
court that still goes back a long way. Similarly
with Irish ceilidh bands, much
of the music originates prior to the 1700s. With English barn dances, a
significant element of this development was the play for dance, which dates from
1651 when a music publisher named John Playford published the English Dance
Master book. Certainly the dances and tunes have developed a lot from then, but
having myself performed for Playford dance groups at music festivals, I can
easily see the connection between the dances and music of the Playford era and
the stuff that we will play now at a wedding ceilidh or birthday barn dance.
Just as Playford band and dance Master would have been hired for public dancing
back in the 1600s, a ceilidh band will be booked or hired now for a wedding. Perhaps one could say that
societies got a bit more equal now, because when thinking of who hires
musicians, in the days the string quartets were playing Mozart, the Paymasters
where the aristocracy, whereas now, although aristocracy are certainly
interested – Prince Charles used to play the cello, and almost certainly played
string quartets – the person who books the string quartet and pays the higher
charges, will be the bride or groom, or quite likely one of the parents of the
happy couple. Not so with the
jazz quartet,
for Jazz as a much shorter
history. Its origins certainly go back to the days of the slave trade which was
abolished in the UK in 1807, but was not abolished in America until 1865. It was
around this time that jazz began to emerge as a musical form, and was possibly
because of the extra freedom black Americans were beginning to gain, slight it
was, as although slavery may have been abolished things only changed slowly, and
jazz, though even in some parts of America racial prejudice is rife even today,
jazz was a protest movement that did increase the pace of change. The iconic St
Louis Blues was published in 1914, and by 1950 or 1960, around 40 years later,
jazz was totally established as an international musical language. The
development of jazz into this international language obviously move outside
America, but it's history is firmly American. The explosion of jazz into an art
form in one direction, into the blues that has been the core of much pop music,
and lounge jazz that is so popular for weddings, and the modern jazz that
appeals so was the intellectual, can be traced back such a short time to what is
often called Ancient Jazz, but is really very young in comparison with the music
of the string quartet and the ceilidh band. 'Ancient' jazz (e.g. in the
'New Orleans', 'Dixieland', 'Chicago' and 'New York' styles) is a music of small
improvising bands with rudimentary arrangements, of blues singers and pianists.
'Middle period' jazz is essentially a music of larger commercial bands and the
virtuosi they bred; a much more 'composed' and 'arranged' as well as a more
technically demanding music. The 'modern' period has fled back into
improvisation, and the small group, whether in the form of a deliberate return
to 'ancient' jazz (the 'revival' movements) or a deliberate leap forward into a
revolutionary avant-garde music ('bop'), some of which has increasingly turned
into a hybrid between jazz and classical music ('cool'). In the course of this
it has dropped a good deal of improvisation for ambitious, sophisticated, if not
always successful genres of jazz composition. Socially, ancient jazz was a music
for Southerners or first-generation African American migrants to the North,
which was also adopted or listened to by minorities or whites. 'Middle period'
jazz was a music for coloured Americans acclimatised to big city life, and for a
mass American white public of youngsters. Modern jazz was and is avant-garde
music for musicians and a coterie public of white intellectuals and bohemians,
though its public has grown, as its original revolutionary sounds became
familiar and accepted, much as has happened to the Matisses and Picassos of our
century in painting. Revivalist jazz is not a music for coloured audiences at
all, but for white youths and intellectuals. In Europe, but not in America, it
has increasingly become a standard type of dance-music for adolescents. Beneath these fashions,
however, one kind of music has continued comparatively unchanged, the
quintessential sound of the urban and rural coloured Americans: the blues. This
is why the middle period jazz of rocking and swinging bands like Chick Webb's
and Lionel Hampton's, or of 'jumping' saxophone players like Earl Bostic, has
perhaps come nearest to permanent popularity in the coloured quarters than any
other. Perhaps this is also why rock-and-roll, which is remotely based on the
'jump' blues, made greater inroads on the African American public than previous
fashions in commercial music. The blues, urban and immigrant, has remained the
constant background to jazz evolution.
There are two important steps
in the evolution of jazz this. The first marks its change from an old-fashioned
folk-music to a hybrid between folk and commercial music, and the growing
isolation of the jazz musician from his old public. On the whole the evolution
of jazz up to 1941 can be chiefly accounted for in such terms. The second marks
a much more deliberate musical break: the revolution which produced 'bop' and
'cool' jazz, but also - neither modernists nor traditionalists will thank me for
this observation - the deliberate return to archaism of the 'revivalists'. Jazz
evolution up to the end of the middle period was the product of un-selfconscious
popular musicians, playing as such musicians have always played, for an
un-selfconscious public which wanted to be entertained. (The self-conscious
small jazz public appreciated but did not determine jazz evolution.) Jazz
evolution since 1941 or thereabouts (or, to be more accurate, since 1938-42) has
also been the product of self-conscious musicians playing for a self-conscious
public; i.e. it has had far greater affinities with modern minority culture.
Modern jazz has not been played only for fun, for money, or for technical
expertise: it has also been played as a manifesto, whether of revolt against
capitalism or commercial culture, or of African American equality, or of
something else. In terms of music, the break between the two periods is very
sharp indeed. Jazz evolution until the end of the 'thirties proceeded in
something like a single general direction: each successive 'style' tended to
derive from its immediate predecessors, adding to and modifying them. The
'revivalists' (a movement of the public rather than the musicians) deliberately
rejected the existing jazz for a kind of music which had been virtually dead for
at least a decade. The 'boppers' (a movement of the musicians rather than the
public) deliberately rejected the existing jazz for a music which, by existing
standards, would sound dissonant, anarchic, and technically so difficult to play
as to be almost beyond the reach of more than a small avant-garde. They also
rejected most of the social conventions of the older jazz musicians. The first crucial change was
in the public for jazz. There is all the difference in the world between music
played for a home or an away audience. For an outside audience it is just a
blues, whose title and text - and hence whose music - mean as little as the
records named after phrases of esoteric Harlem slang mean to Blackburn
adolescents. As jazz became the general idiom of music for the African American
city immigrants, it inevitably lost some of its roots. At a higher level it produced
the mass public for the classic blues singers in the big urban vaudeville
theatres, and the demand for New Orleans jazz in cities like Chicago.
Commercially it produced the large crop of blues and other jazz pieces named
after specific places in the South: St Louis, Beale Street, Perdido Street,
Memphis, Dallas, Nashville Woman's Blues, Milenberg Joys, and so on. However,
the demand for 'the old music' was strictly limited, if only by the vast
contempt of urbanised and Northern coloured Americans for rural and Southern
ones. The rapid decline and fall of the great classic blues singers after 1927
illustrates the tenuousness of their loyalty to the old music. It is no accident
that the African American public has remained totally immune to the revival of
traditional jazz and blues. The second crucial change,
which almost followed from the first, was the retreat of traditional music
before commercial pop music; or more precisely, the increasing encroachment of
pop music on jazz. The musician wanted to earn money. The established
entertainment industry of the modern city provided the money and the standards.
Why should the musicians object? Jazz became heavily and progressively
infiltrated with 'pop' elements. But it did not become pop music. It remained,
in important respects, the dominant partner in the marriage with commercialism,
because the jazz musician, while welcoming commercialisation also, and
inevitably, rejected it as boring and automatic, an activity unfit for the
creative artist: 'Mickey Mouse music', as the hot players called it in the
'thirties. Much of the evolution of jazz was therefore determined by this mixed
attraction and repulsion of the pops. Both transformed the jazz
orchestra. As we have seen, jazz history from the early 1920s on is mostly that
of progress towards the large 'swing' band; but the big band with its
characteristic instrumentation and 'arrangements' is merely the result of the
attempt to make jazz more like successful commercial entertainment. Jazz,
however, transformed the big band which, in pop music, is merely a collection of
musical zombies who do not greatly mind how they play. The big band of jazz
musicians, who only play well when there is a creative spark about, required
considerable musical innovation before it would work well. Some of the most
important musical developments in jazz can be traced back to this need to adapt
the big band to it. Again, commercialisation
transformed the jazz band repertoire, which - for obvious reasons - rested
increasingly on the current pop song, the 'ballad'. The history of jazz since
1917 might well be written as that of its attempts to come to terms with the
song-hit. The ballad formed no serious part of the repertoire of New Orleans or
the old blues; any pop songs used were assimilated to the traditional marches,
stomps, blues, etc., in the manner habitual among folk-artists. Bessie Smith's
well-known version of Alexander's Ragtime Band is a good example. At the other
extreme, the repertoire of 'modern' jazz is almost exclusively based on the
'ballad', the fundamental experiments of the 'hoppers' being simply transformed
song-hits like How High the Moon, or All the Things You Are. Even when playing
'the blues', a modern trumpeter like Miles Davis thinks automatically in terms
of the way in which a 'ballad' is played, rather than in terms of a traditional
blues piece. But jazz transformed the 'ballad' out of all recognition. When
playing or singing it 'straight', it either deliberately mocked it, as in Fats
Waller's satirical piano-songs, or it took it at its word, turning it into a
touching, or profound and perfectly sincere expression of emotion, as in the
songs and trumpet solos of Louis Armstrong and the songs of the great women jazz
singers like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. When using it as the basis for
jazz improvisation, it progressively elaborated it, until in modern jazz the
actual theme of the song-hit, as originally written, may not even appear at all.
Each jazz 'style' chose from among the mass of current hits a certain number of
'standards', pieces which practice had shown to be particularly suited for jazz
elaboration, and these became the nucleus of its permanent repertoire. listed in Spaeth's History of American Popular Music, only four have become anything like
jazz 'standards': can't Give you Anything but Love, Diga-diga-doo (both written
for the coloured show 'Blackbirds of 1928'), Sweet Sue and Nagasaki. Inevitably, however,
commercialised music repelled and bored the jazz player, and the large band
imposed awkward impersonal discipline on him. The history of Duke Ellington's
band, surely the least low-brow of successful jazz orchestras, is one of
progressive disillusion and discontent among the players, almost from the moment
in which the small, freely blowing group of musicians turned into the organised
and 'arranged' band: 'no longer', as its historian says, 'was playing the
exultant personal expression it had once been'. If this was the case in fairly
uncompromising jazz bands, it was naturally even more so in those which
deliberately went out to please the crowds at all costs, not to mention the
'sweet' and 'corny' bands in which many white jazz musicians had to earn their
living. The third crucial development
in jazz is the consequence of this revulsion. The jazzmen learned to live in two
musical worlds: the one in which they earned their living, and the one after
hours in which they played to please themselves - the world of the 'jam
session'. Except for those who, like many early white jazz players before 1935,
worked in purely commercial bands, the two worlds were not as sharply distinct
as one might think. Moreover, all jazz players still dreamed, and continue to
dream, of small 'combos' in which they can both play as they please and please
the public; or at any rate earn their living and play for a public which does
not get in the way too much. The history of jazz is littered with such small
groups, on temporary engagements in some club, but always turning into 'jam
sessions' as other musicians drop by to 'sit in'; or got together for the
recording studio. But the sharp distinction between playing for musicians and
playing for the public was established; and so, increasingly, was the
distinction between playing 'commercial' and playing for one's own pleasure. Jazz, originally an urban
folk-music, therefore simultaneously developed towards commercial pop music, and
towards a special kind of music for musicians, i.e. the embryo of art music. The
1920s and 1930s in jazz evolution were dominated by the drift towards
commercialism (though, as we have seen, this produced not pop music, but an
independent music based increasingly on pop materials). The 1940s and 1950s have
been equally dominated by the reaction towards musicians' music -the avant-garde
semi-art music of the 'hoppers' and 'cool' players, much of it designed to be
incomprehensible to the non-expert. But, in spite of considerable efforts, it
has not so far produced art music in the orthodox sense either, but an
independent music increasingly infiltrated by elements of classical music.
Suspended somewhere between its folk-music origins and the pop and art music
towards which it is simultaneously urged, jazz remains hard to classify. This difficulty but also most
of the merits of jazz, arise from the fact mat, at , it has never stopped being
folk-music. It has merely retired from the wider community of the traditional
folk-public and folk-artist into the narrower, but real and vivid community of
the professional craftsman-musician. Within this community the music has gone on
living the same sort of life as in folk-music; fluctuating and shifting,
personal, traditional, propagated by word of mouth and apprenticeship, created
as it is played, reflecting all facets of the players' lives. The titles of jazz
records from the middle 'twenties on often reflect esoteric jokes and allusions,
sometimes expressed in the Harlem slang of the 'hipster', which is deliberately
designed to baffle the outsider. The community of jazz players
existed in every city in which jazz is played, like the old communities of
craftsmen; and as the old travelling journeymen would automatically visit the
'house of call' in each town, to meet colleagues and pick up news and jobs, so
the new or touring musician in every town from Los Angeles to London and Paris
knows where to drop in, how to find those who can tell him who's in town, what
music is on, and where a man can sit in with a band. For iazz is collective
music, practised and discussed only in common. The peculiar atmosphere of these
half-anchored half freely floating communities of players, who know the pattern
of each others' lives, which is not that of the 'squares' or outsiders, whether
musical or non-musical, made jazz. It has to be experienced, if only from the
side lines. We'd listen to a lot of Hawk's records. All the guys from the bands
downtown. Most of those there were musicians. There were very, very few
outsiders except some real jazz fans. Naturally the music played in this
community of craftsmen was not folk-music in any traditional sense. But it grew
out of the old folk music, because that was the mould in which the musicians,
their techniques and their entire idiom had been formed, and above all because
the artists remained at all tunes creator / players and never became mere
executants. That is why the latter half of
the 'thirties was so crucial a point in jazz evolution. Until 1935 jazz itself
had scarcely been commercial. The broad white public demanded the hybrid
jazz-coloured pop music, the 'true' jazz fans were not yet numerous enough to
make a market, the coloured Americans were too poor to make a worth-while one.
'Ancient' jazz had dropped out of sight. 'Middle-period' jazz lived a submerged
life anyway, flourishing best in the modest African American ghettoes like
Harlem and Kansas City where nobody minded what was played so long as it
'jumped', and in the joints and night-spots where nobody minded what was played
either so long as the musicians went on playing. Now coloured big-band jazz
turned out to be box office, though more for its lesser white practitioners
(Goodman, Shaw, Dorsey, Glen Miller) than for its genuine stars, the Ellington,
Basie, Lunceford and Chick Webb bands. The specialised jazz lovers themselves
became a commercial public, demanding the impossible, to hear the spontaneous,
unplanned jazz of the jam session played to order on the concert platform.
Commercialisation bit deeper and deeper into the 'private' sector of the jazz
world. As soon as the commercial value of 'true' jazz was recognised, the pop
men fell over themselves to adopt any innovation almost as soon as it was made.
For whereas in the hey-day of 'swing' they were mainly the uninstructed 'square'
audiences, the running has been increasingly made by the growing mass of 'true'
jazz lovers, whose very weight tends to strangle the music they wish to embrace. It is easy to understand why
the jazz of the early 1940s tended to take the form of manifestos against
commercialism, or against the public, or against the excessively esoteric
activities of the musicians: against one aspect or another of the unhealthy
situation into which the music had, inevitably, drifted. However, there is more
to the jazz revolution than this. From the point of view of the public - the
specialised white jazz public - the 'revival' was the first large-scale revolt
within the framework of popular music, against art as mass production.
Technicians, writers and animators banded together to form one of the most
characteristic revivalist bands, overflowing with collective improvisation and
the musical simple life, the 'Firehouse Five Plus Two'. A leading member of the
band was also a leading light in the 'Horseless Carriage Club' - the American
equivalent of the vintage car craze - and the band was actually named in honour
of the 1914 fire engine the band bought and with which it played about.) It was
self-made music, or at least music made in the image of the amateur. The modern revolution -
'bebop' - which took shape in New York in 1940-42, was a musician's revolt, not
a movement of the public. Indeed, it was a revolt directed against the public as
well as against the submergence of the player in standardised floods of
commercial noise. The bebop revolution was
political as much as musical. The savage hostility to 'Uncle Tom' musicians,
which for the first time split the community of jazz players into bitterly
feuding sections, the passionate insistence on inventing a music so difficult
that 'they'-the whites who always cash in on African American achievement - will
'not be able to steal it', even the personal peculiarities of the new players,
cannot be explained in musical terms alone. They stood for a certain attitude of
the African American artist and intellectual. Moreover, they were isolated even
within the coloured world. It is small wonder that their social behaviour was
anarchic and bohemian, their music a multiple gesture of defiance. Strangely though, thanks
mainly to the whites, for the coloured middle class failed to recognise them,
the achievements of the jazz revolutionaries were speedily recognised. White
commercial men, ever on the watch for the cash value of novelty, turned 'bop'
into a slogan. Young white intellectuals and bohemians, recognising a malaise
and unspecified rebelliousness akin to their own, made modern jazz into the
music of the 'beat generation', the American equivalent of the Continental
existentialists. The American Government itself, aware of the propagandist value
of jazz as a cultural export, has sent Dizzy Gillespie abroad as a cultural
ambassador just like - indeed earlier than-Louis Armstrong. From 1949-50 on
modern jazz has been no more an art of outlaws than cubism in the 1930s. It has
certainly helped to make the 'cool period since 1949 one in which jazz has made
more persistent and massive efforts than ever before to fuse with orthodox art
music, though the artistic results of this hybridisation have been generally
mediocre, in terms of the achievements of art-music. It has also, paradoxically,
helped to turn modern jazz, whose founders were without exception coloured
players of plebeian origin, into a music favoured particularly by a host of
young white college-boy types of players, notably in California (hence the name
'West Coast School'). An automatic question at this
point is, what happens next evolution of jazz? The evolution of jazz has
constantly snatched the victory of fine achievement out of the disasters of
commercialisation, and today perhaps out of academic etiolation. Jazz critics
have expressed their fear and disquiet at these dangers by the invariable
statement that 'jazz is in a state of crisis'. Developing as it does through a
series of contradictions, actions and reactions, jazz must be in constant
crisis. It is quite possible that one of these crises will see jazz evolution
either finally merging with commercial evolution or with the evolution of
American art-music. It is more than probable that whatever jazz is played in
future will be unpalatable to many critics on musical or social grounds.
However, at present there is no reason to believe that the history of jazz is
finished. But as long as men and women still sing the blues in Chicago bar
rooms, so long as sax players and trumpeters still like to get together over
some whisky and chicken sandwiches to jam for then: own pleasure, so long as
craftsmen and artists in music resist the pressures to turn them into mere
executants of someone else's product, some jazz will be played. Jazz as an idiom
and a way of playing is too well established to disappear from the scene for a
long time and the world is large. So let's move on to consider
the blues. The blues is not a style or phase of jazz, but a permanent substratum
of all styles; not the whole of jazz, but its heart. No jazz player or band
which cannot play it can reach the peaks of jazz achievement, and the moment
when the blues ceases to be part of jazz will be the moment when jazz, as we
know it, ceases to exist. There also it may mean two things: the general idiom
of African American folk-song and a specific type of secular song. In the most
rigorous sense of the word the blues is a strict musical and poetic form. Well,
a man had my woman, the blues sure had poor me. The blues in its original form
is essentially an 'accompanied' song; more precisely an antiphonal song, in the
long African tradition of such 'calls and responses'.
Blues and orchestral jazz
developed from accompanied blues that becomes a duet between voice and
instrument which echo and respond to it. When singer and player are in sympathy,
and good blues performers, the result can be of heartrending beauty for the
lover of such things: as in Bessie Smith's duets with Louis Armstrong (St Louis
Blues, Reckless Blues), with Joe Smith, perhaps her most sensitive accompanist
(Weeping Willow Blues), or James P. Johnson (Backwater Blues). Solo instrumental
blues are derived from vocal ones and preserve, so far as possible, the
antiphonal characteristics (e.g. the famous Five O'clock Blues or How Long, by
Jimmy Yancey). Being often played on the most unvocal instrument, the piano,
this may not be obvious, but it remains true that virtually all primitive piano
solos 'are the blues, so far as melody, harmony and length of theme are
concerned'. The conflict between the two
produces the characteristic effects of the blues. This scale is remarkably deep
rooted in African American sound. This song, which exists in innumerable
versions, is not, as it happens, a native blues but an Elizabethan and later
Appalachian mountain song turned into a blues by coloured singers, and into a
most marvellous and haunting one. There is no particular reason why the
twelve-bar blues should be slow or sad. However, since the blues is also a mood,
most characteristic secular blues are in fact slow or dragging in tempo and 'low
down' in feeling. The blues is essentially 'expressionist'. One has merely to
listen to the wonderful flexibility of the blues line as sung or played by a
fine artist to appreciate the way in which every slight variation in intonation,
rhythm or melody serves to express emotion with the utmost accuracy and power,
like the movements of a great dancer. In the blues ordinary women, the sort who
are generally inarticulate unless written about, painted or filmed, have found
their voice: if Carmen had spoken herself, she would not have said what Merimde
and Bizet said, but what Bessie Smith sang in Young Woman's Blues. It seems that
the best women blues singers utterly outclass the men, good though these often
are. At a more complex level, the blues has proved to be a uniquely suitable
foundation for solo or collective improvisation in jazz; that is to say for jazz
composition. Country blues are still
emerging from folk-song: anonymous voices, distinguished only by having a
special timbre or skill or trick, singing anybody's blues, not yet those of a
recognisably unique individual. Recorded chiefly by men, the country blues has
continued to be sung, though modified by the migration into the city, by the
mixing styles, and lately by the demands of the jazz public. Being the song of
professional music-hall stars the 'classic blues' is individualised art in the
full sense. It also had far more complex accompaniment from the mature jazz
players and bands who served these prima donnas in the 1920s. There is no need to say much
about Bessie Smith, the most impressive artist produced in any branch of jazz,
for her numerous records form a sort of self-portrait. From the early 1930s the
girls who might earlier have become blues singers, made their way as band
vocalists, singing essentially a repertoire of 'ballads' or normal pop songs, in
a style and with a technique which kept pace with the evolution of orchestral
jazz. Ella Fitzgerald (born 1918) is the finest of the singers of this kind
produced by the 1930s, and perhaps (with the older music-hall artist Ethel
Waters (born 1900), the most gifted jazz singer on record; Sarah Vaughan (born
1924) is the finest singer produced in the atmosphere of the 'modern jazz
school. The classic blues itself either dropped from sight, or developed in the
1930s into what may not unfairly be calle 'cabaret' blues, which differs from
the classic music-hall son as, let us say, Grade Fields's early songs differ
from Yvett Guilbert's. The post-classic blues tradition fell back into the hands
oi the modest 'city blues' singer, who had probably emerged fron the country
blues shortly after the formation of the classics: let us say in the 1920s.
Mostly men, but after 1928 also some women - Bessie Jackson (a pseudonym) and
the Yas Yas Girl perhaps deserve mention - they developed the blues mainly as a
song of urban low-life. Musically perhaps the main development was the
speeding-up of the blues, which increasingly adopted the insistent 'jump' beat,
which has since made its fortune in pop music. The best performers in this genre
were and are men, often very inadequately known on British records, such as
Sonny Boy Williamson, who sung to his mouth-organ, and the Kansas City 'blues
shouters' who were the first group of male blues singers to be integrated into
orchestral jazz: Joe Turner and James P. Rushing, the vocalist of Count Basic's
band. Here again the evolution has been away from the traditional country blues
- partly by the absorption of pop song influences, partly by a crossing with the
rhythmic excitement of urban African American church music. The main development in
African American religious blues has been, as in the classic blues, an
increasing individualisation of the song; i.e. the emergence of the church
soloist out of the complex mixture of collective song and solo improvisation in
the traditional African American church, where perhaps the preacher, slipping
insensibly from rhythmic prose into chanting, was the only real solo voice. Rags or rag-flavoured numbers
also became part of the staple repertoire of New Orleans jazz, or more exactly,
of the white Dixieland music derived from it, and can still be heard in any
'traditionalist' jazz band: e.g. Maple Leaf Rag, Eccentric, That's a Plenty, or
Muskat Ramble, Original Dixieland One Step and Ostrich Walk. The earliest style
of 'ancient' jazz was that of New Orleans, whose origins in military band-music
are still evident. It was a solo instrument for ragtime or blues. The saxophone
never had a place in New Orleans music. The instrumental technique combines the
African vocalising of the uptown coloured Americans with the orthodox French
style of the Creole, especially obvious in the woodwind: thus Johnny Dodds plays
technically mediocre, but wonderfully blue and vocalised clarinet, while Bigard
or Simeon play the liquid 'Creole clarinet'. Though New Orleans knew the blues,
it seems never to have integrated it as fully into its jazz as the Kansas City
players or Duke Ellington did later; perhaps because of the strength of the
Creoles and their dominant, and quite 'unblue' musical tradition. The blues in
New Orleans was regarded mainly as whore-house music. Not until after 1914 or so
was a link between blues and instrumental jazz firmly forged. As for the country
blues, its absorption into the New Orleans tradition is the product or the
invention of the intellectual jazz fans. More.......
