Jazz working class to highbrow music
Jazz originated as a working
class musical phenomenon, in a country, United States of America, which was fast
developing capitalist society. It was a form which could be played by just a
couple of people as a
jazz duo, or
expand into a community activity as a large
jazz band. At the time jazz was developing in the USA,
working class music in this country certainly, with rather poor, as the
preindustrial folk music of England was dying and being replaced by the
Victorian musical, which never made the grade musically. Interestingly enough
this isn't the case with the shows of American musical culture, where Broadway
shows produced music that is still going today. A lot of the
string quartet repertoire that is played at wedding
receptions derives from the Broadway shows. Working-class music in this country
develop the brass band, but on the whole they were playing arrangements of
classical pieces, and although the bands themselves might have had working class
derivation, the music was not. On the folk scene, the original
Scottish folk
music was being taken over by the theatres and musicals of the day, so was not
really developing as folk music itself. Quite differently in jazz, the music was
developing apace during this period. American popular folk music
developed apace during the 19th century, and reigned supreme over this country
until perhaps the time of the Beatles and onwards. The tables turn to some
extent, and folk music in the UK is now strong. People hire bands to perform
Scottish and
Irish ceilidhs, the book English and
American barn dances and even the Welsh Twmpath have gained tremendous
popularity in the last 15 years or so for everything from weddings to birthday
parties and wedding anniversaries. Whilst the public
ceilidh is in large
part faded away, along with the public dance halls that played big-band jazz and
ballroom dance music, personal music for personal occasions his strong and
healthy. String quartets hired to play for wedding ceremonies, perhaps even more
commonly now that civil weddings and civil partnerships are now more common than
church weddings, probably because the church organist had a commercial grip on
the music business in churches, along with the quiet, and for a long time string
quartets were not very welcome church weddings. The situation in the last 15
years has changed considerably, and now most churches are extremely welcoming to
outside musicians. Going back now to the
development of jazz in the USA, once the core of the music had been developed in
the southern states as a black American folk music, it began to evolve rapidly.
The vocal blues performance, at the very heart of jazz probably was in existence
in simplistic forms even before the American Civil War, although it is probably
not in the now standardised 12 bar form, and certainly without the Western
European harmonies that now a part of the idiom. The blues probably came from
agricultural workers, and we used as work songs to make the work on the day go
past more easily, and also they have developed from secularised gospel songs.
The key thing with the blues is that it marks not just a musical, but a social
evolution as a song form that commented on everyday life. The blues evolved from simply
the ring shout the formula here today, it evolved into the concert spiritual
which is probably a long way from the original jazz style. Spirituals and gospel
songs have retained their popularity and provides reservoir for musical ideas
for jazz. It's surprising that in this country at least, spirituals are not
normally part of the wedding music scene, whereas the jazz that derived from it
is. So too is the pop music that is derived from the spirituals, through the
jazz bands to commercial pop music that has been jazz influenced. In turn, white composers like
Stephen Foster introduced some characteristic Southern coloured American touches
into white song, and in the North a flourishing industry of imitation coloured
American entertainers developed, black-faced and banjo-strumming. Elements of
coloured American music penetrated into American popular music. In fact it was
the most important channel through which coloured influences first passed into
pop music. But it also served as a training ground for coloured musicians in
European-style popular music, and later an an employer of early jazz and ragtime
players. In and around St Louis, where West-Midwest and South meet, the first
identifiable style of jazz emerged: ragtime. This was almost exclusively a style
of solo pianists, trained in European music, often with high musical ambitions:
Scott Joplin, its most noted composer-player, composed a still-born ragtime
opera in 1915, and James P. Johnson, the glory of Harlem's ragtime pianists,
created equally unsuccessful symphonies, choral works and concertos. Perhaps a
little later the second independent jazz style appears: the classic blues, sung
by professional women entertainers on the music-hall stage. Although it's often said that
jazz was born in New Orleans, at the same time cities in the south USA like
Charleston, Atlanta and Mobile centres of the development of a style of
Afro-American band music. So, why did jazz appear in the late 1800s and early
1900s question? What was happening in Europe at that time? Well, France produced
them Montmartre cabaret style, the 'Dans La Rue'. In the middle classes the
operetta, a musical comedy in effect, became popular. In the USA entertainments
that was being developed from working class musicians was New Orleans jazz, with
its public musical parade. Whereas what happened in Europe had its day of
popularity and then died out, the folk music of the black American somehow
connected with people of all nationalities in a timeless sort of way, so that it
went on to develop into many forms and is still with us strongly today as a
community and social entertainment is witnessed by the number of bands booked to
perform at birthday parties and the hired to perform at wedding receptions. What is equally to the point,
the striking increase in the demand for entertainment among the white poor in
the rapidly growing cities accelerated the development of music among coloured
entertainers. Two things helped to precipitate jazz as we know it there: the
breakdown of the old traditional slave culture and the fall of the free 'Creoles
of colour'. The end of formalised African
entertainment left the way free for a much less inhibited mixture of European
and African idioms in the street parades and other brass band music which
flourished like poppies in a cornfield after the Civil War. The fall of the Creoles
brought European musical know-how into the new popular idiom, but above all, it
secured the musical supremacy of the low-caste, black, 'uptown' coloured
Americans, the blues coloured Americans. There are plenty of Creoles in New
Orleans jazz, but (except perhaps for the clarinets) they had to learn to play
dirty and improvise like the uptown boys. I had to jazz it or rag it or any
other damn thing.... We would use most any 4/4, played very slow. The early development of jazz
falls, broadly, into phases: ca. 1900-17 when jazz became the musical idiom of
African American popular music all over America while some of its gimmicks (e.g.
syncopation and ragtime) became a permanent component of Tin Pan Alley; 1917-29
when 'strict' jazz expanded very little, but evolved quite rapidly, but when a
highly diluted infusion of jazz became the dominant idiom of Western urban dance
music and pop songs; 1929-41 when 'strict' jazz began its conquest of European
minority audiences and avant-garde players, and a much less diluted form of jazz
('swing') permanently entered pop music. The real international triumph of jazz,
the penetration of yet 'purer' jazz idioms into pop music - New Orleans jazz,
avant-garde modern jazz, and the country and gospel blues -have come since 1941.
The traditional picture of the
diffusion of jazz is as simple as it is mythical: it stayed in New Orleans until
the American Navy closed down the red light quarter in 1917, after which the
musicians, some already with experience on the river-boats, migrated up the
Mississippi to Chicago, and thence all over America, notably to New York. This
picture not only lacks much relation to the facts, but also makes it totally
impossible to understand how jazz developed as it actually did. For it implies
that other musicians learned their jazz relatively late, and that they learned
it in terms of New Orleans music. Though New Orleans musicians were highly
appreciated and very influential, New Orleans jazz as a style had virtually no
lineal descendants except among Plenty of jazz was played in
coloured bands by the early 1920s, but it was not in New Orleans style jazz,
except when played by groups actually hailing from that city. Plenty of coloured
bands were started in that period, but they contained surprisingly few players
from the Delta, or even the Mississippi river-line, and very few indeed from
Chicago. In fact, jazz emerged after the First World War as a highly varied
music, played by musicians all over the country, the New Orleans style being
only one among many, though still the most fully formed. Touring was part of the
economy of entertainers anyway, and New Orleans, a major reservoir of musicians
even before the rise of jazz, must have been frequently tapped. W. C. Handy
recalls how his road company (Mahara's Minstrels) took over two New Orleans
clarinetists between 1900 and 1903, when African American players took over that
instrument, hitherto the preserve of whites: obviously bandmasters would think
of New Orleans, The Delta musicians themselves soon discovered the possibilities
of engagements further afield. No doubt they stimulated
musicians wherever they went; nothing advances jazz more than a mixing of
players. No doubt they influenced ambitious boys, who in turn taught others
within the radius of their music. But, as we have seen, all coloured America was
ready to burst out into one form or other of the jazz idiom anyway. The ragtime
pianists, the blues singers In the East, for instance, a
local piano style, based on ragtime and Appalachian gospel shouts, was almost
contemporary with the New Orleans players. Walter Gould ('One Leg Shadow') born
in Philadelphia in 1875, piano player and obscure salesman of lottery tickets,
or Eubie Blake (bom 1883) claim to recall men who 'ragged quadrilles and
schottiscb.es even before their birth: Old Man Sam Moore, 'No Legs' Casey, Bud
Minor, 'Old Man Metronome' French. There, it is true, he discovered New Orleans
jazz with Keppard's New Orleans orchestra which played a two-week vaudeville
season in 1915, and had some difficulty as a trained 'reading' musician in
adapting himself to collective improvisation. But how far from New Orleans jazz
were contemporary local bands like the Black-and-Tan Band which he joined, a
cake-walking, ragtime brass band, originally from Texas, which reshuffled itself
into a 'jazz band' as soon as the word had a saleable value in 1918? At most New
Orleans accelerated whatever tendencies towards jazz existed locally. By 1920, therefore, jazz was
already a national idiom with different dialects. That is why the subsequent
movements of jazz musicians reflect not only the traditional touring routes of
vaudeville artists and minstrel shows, but, with some precision, the routes of
migration of ordinary coloured Americans. For this mass migration, rather than
the temporary purity drive in New Orleans, pushed even the New Orleans musicians
northwards. Jazz music spread with the
migrants. Just as ordinary coloured Americans from Florida, Alabama, Georgia,
etc., were likely to move along Eastern routes towards Washington, Baltimore,
Philadelphia and New York, so did the musicians from these areas: Duke
Ellington's orchestra (1926) contained no New Orleans man and only one player
from St Louis, but it did contain men from Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey,
Virginia, South Carolina, Washington DC, and Indiana. Naturally, it was a
Washington-New York band. The African American quarters of St Louis were likely
to attract migrants (and musicians) from the middle Mississippi valley, those of
Kansas City from the Oklahoma-Texas hinterland. There is, in fact, no great
mystery about the geographical diffusion of jazz musicians. For some of the major African
American ghettoes proved far more receptive to jazz than others, or rather,
produced more musicians and independent musical activity than others. Obviously
New York and Chicago led the field in the North, though Chicago, oddly enough,
produced surprisingly few African American orchestral jazz players of standing
for a city so legendary for its jazz. It also seems that the more industrial the
city to which coloured Americans migrated the less fertile apparently its jazz.
It is perhaps less surprising that cities on the fringe of the South should have
been good nurseries for jazz, though a little puzzling why some of the older
centres of the Deep South, Atlanta, Charleston - have not been particularly
productive; or for that matter why, in the North, Philadelphia which ran Harlem
close in numbers until 1920, has made infinitely feebler contributions to jazz.
Coloured orchestral jazz did
not long remain confined to the 'race series', but such series have continued
(re-baptised 'rhythm and blues' in deference to African American
susceptibilities) to this day. Authentic undiluted jazz made no great impact on
the general white public, though the northern tour and the records of the
(white) Original Dixieland Jass Band in 1917 caused a temporary sensation, and
conveniently serve to mark the beginning of the 'jazz age'. This new idiom was
undoubtedly influenced by jazz, but it is safe to say that ninety-seven per cent
of what the average white North American and European heard under that label
between 1917 and 1935 had as little to do with jazz as the costume of
drum-majorettes has with battledress. The triumph of this hybrid
jazz is so important a phenomenon that we must look at it more closely. The
typical nineteenth-century pop music number, on which the fortunes of Tin Pan
rested. Ragtime and jazz rhythms,
which can be used to adapt practically any tune for dancing, were naturally
invaluable. (British dance halls came later: the Hammersmith Palais in 1919,
characteristically with the Original Dixieland Band as resident orchestra.) The
dance halls of the Shimmy, originally a Barbary Coast dance, was particularly
popular in Europe in the 1920s. The success of hybrid jazz in pop music would
have been unthinkable, just as the advance of Latin-American rhythms rested
firmly on the adoption of the tango, also on the eve of the First World War. The
dancing vogue automatically brought an infiltration of Afro-American idioms into
pop music: even the Castles had a coloured band, and a craze for drumming and
drum solos, such as has periodically seized the more moronic part of the public,
was already running its course in 1914-16. From 1912 or so the 'blues' entered
popular music. W. C. Handy published some of his finest pieces between then and
1916 (Memphis Blues, St Louis Blues, Yellow Dog Blues, Beale Street Blues'), and
1916 saw a battle between pop music publishers over the priority of their
respective blues. From about the same time the term 'jazz' (or jass, jaz) came
to be used as a generic label for the new dance music, since few knew that it
had hitherto been an African slang word for sexual intercourse. There was not
only the Original Dixieland Jass Band, which was a jazz band, but a host of
competing 'inventors of the jazz dance', and of Tin Pan Alley numbers of the
genus 'everybody's doing the X now': Cleopatra had a Jazz Band, Everybody's
Crazy 'bout that Doggone Blues, Mr Jazz Himself, by Irving Berlin, who was
quicker off the mark with jazz than with ragtime; all from 1917. Former minstrel
and quasi-military bands like Wilbur Sweatman's, Isham Jones's and Paul
Whiteman's drove their bandwagons in the new style, and those who could not,
added a saxophone to their string trios and called themselves
jazz bands. This mixture was not without
its repercussions on authentic jazz. It was from the pop bands that the
saxophone came. New Orleans players hardly knew or used it. Saxes entered jazz
because they were popular with the audiences: King Oliver was prevailed to try a
couple in the early 1920s because another band was attracting the customers with
these instruments. Again, the pop song of the immediate post-war period provided
a high proportion of the standards for the jazz repertoire of the 'twenties,
especially among white bands, and stimulated the publication of a good many
straight jazz and blues numbers. 'Why is the jass music and, therefore, the jass
band?
On the other hand, the
cultural avant-garde hailed it with equal enthusiasm and almost equal ignorance
as the music of the machine age, the music of the future, the revitalising force
of the primitive jungle and so on; normally on the strength of hearing bands
like Mr Jack Hylton's, which the author remembers as the accepted last word in
jazz in Central European secondary schools, 1928-33. Within hybrid jazz itself
there were also strivings and ambitions rarely found among the modest craftsmen
of Tin Pan Alley. (Incidentally, Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which had its
first performance then, is a very reputable piece of jazz-influenced light
music.) Jazz has had a hankering for recognition as something more than dance
music ever since it emerged from the Deep South, and with reason. At the tailend of the
'twenties, however, we observe the tiny beginnings of an expansion of the
thoroughbred jazz among small obscure and untypical communities in Europe, and
to a much lesser extent, in America. It is fortunate that by the
time the Depression swept over America a few hundreds - they could hardly yet be
counted in thousands - of European jazz fans were ready. For the Depression
virtually killed authentic jazz in the States. Except among coloured Americans,
it had been played on sufferance anyway. In the lush period there had been gigs
for everybody in the 60,000 bands which America then held, and clubs or dances
willing to hire any one of the 200,000 musicians -12,000 of them in New York -
however 'loud and crude' their music; at least sometimes. White musicians took
refuge in pop bands or in the staff orchestras of radio stations; coloured ones,
who had not this choice, went back to labouring, broken by occasional attempts
to form temporary bands. Recording sessions were few and cheap. Europe could not
provide a major market, but it could mitigate the disaster, e.g. by making it
worthwhile for American record companies to produce authentic jazz records for
which the American market in the black years from 1930 to 1934 was zero. (The
most notable examples are the records made by the great jazz Maecenas, John
Hammond, Jr., for the English Gramophone Company from 1933.) European
combinations trying to play 'authentic', or 'hot' [jazz also began in the late
1920s: Fred Elizalde's group in ; 1927 is the British pioneer. These were mostly
small groups [playing in odd nightclubs, or pick-up bands for recordings into
which the already existing fifth column of jazz fans some-j times managed to
talk the gramophone executives. The first Norwegian jazz club dates back to
1928, a now highly prosperous music publisher found it worth while to organise
'hot record recitals' in London in 1930, and by 1935 Denmark, which claimed to
be 'the world's hottest country' had jazz lectures in its schools and three jazz
concerts a year organised by the leading serious newspaper. The most ambitious
musical enterprise of these sects, and also the most original enterprise of
European jazz up to the present, was the famous Quintet of the Hot Club of
France (1934-9) whose star was the remarkable gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt
(1910-53). A number of mixed European-American recording sessions were also
organised mainly in Holland and France, which became [increasingly the European
headquarters of jazz, thanks to the loudly and well-blown intellectual trumpets
of its jazz writers and collectors. If the Depression had almost
exiled authentic jazz from America, that country was triumphantly conquered in
the middle 1930s. In 1935-40 pop music once again capitulated to jazz (now
called 'swing'), as it had done in 1914-20. More-lover, the jazz it capitulated
to was a great deal more like the [real thing than it had been in the days when
anxious band leaders put some saxes behind their stands, some syncopation [in
their arrangements, and played the Blue Danube as the Blue Danube Blues. In fact
pop music adopted, almost in toto, the instrumental techniques and arrangements
elaborated by coloured players, and especially the coloured big bands, in the
1920s. This was all the easier, since these innovations in authentic jazz had
themselves been the result of pop music influence, not to say the natural desire
of coloured entertainers to jump on the white pop musicians' gravy train. At all
events, the difference in genre between Benny Goodman's band, which became the
queen of the musical battlefield, and the ordinary sweet band - itself
infiltrated by hybrid jazz - was a great deal smaller in 1935 than such
differences had been in 1917, when patrons at Reisenwebers in New York had
actually to be instructed that the Original Dixieland Jass Band's sound was
intended for dancing. Why 'swing' conquered in the
middle 1930s is therefore not quite so difficult a question as why jazz
conquered pop music in 1914-20. Glen Gray Knoblaugh's Casa Loma Orchestra
(anticipating the later Glenn Miller Band), which catered largely for college
audiences in the early 'thirties, is said to have been the first white band with
a deliberate jazz policy, and the pioneer of 'swing'. Benny Goodman's Band
(formed in 1934), sold to the business by an ex-college-boy executive, had
little success until it hit the teenage and college public in California in the
middle of 1935. The 'swing' public was a dancing public, but with a difference,
for the athletic, acrobatic dances it evolved. The period from 1930 to 1941
saw intellectuals 'going to the people', collecting, recording and singing their
music with passionate satisfaction. American folk-songs, old and new, became
part of the atmosphere of the American left; no party in Greenwich Village or
the Hollywood scriptwriters' belt became complete without someone who could sing
John Henry to a guitar. Most of the material thus collected was 'pre-jazz'; but
among the forgotten music thus resuscitated was early jazz also. The Lomaxes of
the Library of Congress produced the most impressive single document of New
Orleans jazz in 1938, when they opened their recording shops to a dapper elderly
'Creole Benvenuto Cellini' with gold rings and a diamond set in gold in his
front incisor, who wished to defend his claim to be the only inventor of jazz:
Ferdinand 'Jelly-Roll' Morton. A parallel movement was gaining force among the
specialised jazz lovers, and collectors whose ranks, of course, overlapped a
good deal with those of the musical or political New Dealers, friends of the
Spanish Republic, Communists and others, in Britain as in the USA. Here it took
the form chiefly of a protest against the increasingly 'commercial' tendencies
of jazz in the swing era. From about 1938 collectors and critics began
systematically to organise the recording of forgotten jazz and blues artists,
but especially of attempts by the original players to recapture the
quintessential jazz, which was that of New Orleans. In the international world
of jazz lovers every one of these records and publications, imported at first in
single copies from America, created a sensation. In America itself the
archaeologists went farther, and, by the middle of the war-1943 is the crucial
year-had reached the point of actually restoring retired old New Orleans players
to activity, buying them dentures and trumpets in the process, and launching
them on a receptive public of young whites. Even before the first grey-haired
player tested his new denture on his new horn, young white players - for reasons
to be discussed later the young African American ones were quite immune to
revivalism - had begun the painstaking reconstruction of the original New
Orleans style. records were issued in Europe (not to mention the impossibility
of issuing American jazz in Nazi-occupied territories) postponed the emergence
of the young revivalists outside America. The characteristic small cellar jazz
band, with its trumpeter trying to play like Louis Armstrong and its clarinet
like Johnny Dodds, became part of the West and Central European scene. Why the Soviet authorities
took against the worldwide take-up of jazz, about which they knew virtually
nothing, is obscure. Especially as today jazz is much stronger in the East
European countries and it is in much of Europe and the USA. Bing Crosby's
brother Bob had launched a semi-commercial Dixieland band in 1937, and in 1939
an old Chicagoan, Muggsy Spanier, launched the short-lived and wholly enchanting
career of his Ragtime band, while in New York an even more typical Chicagoan,
Eddie Condon, made a hit with the old-fashioned unplanned jazz of his youth. But
these were men from the old generations, not youngsters. The astonishingly rapid
urbanisation of African American Africa since 1940 produced the need for an
urban popular music, which-for obvious reasons-the orthodox pop industry was
slow to satisfy. In South Africa, on the other hand, specially in Johannesburg,
the urbanised coloured population took to American jazz, mainly derived, by the
sound of it, from the big bands of the swing era. Probably South Africa is today
the most flourishing centre of creative jazz outside America. By the middle 1950s,
therefore, jazz had become a world idiom. The Andalusian flamenco, in the
lifetime of jazz, has shown considerable powers of propagation within the
Hispanic areas, though outside them it has had no popular influence.
Latin-American music, on the other hand, has disputed Western popular music with
jazz, its attack spearheaded by the tangos, rhumbas and sambas, while it has,
since the 1940s, actually encroached upon jazz itself with the fashion for mixed
Cuban-jazz music. Flourishing traditions of light and popular music elsewhere
have also imposed some limitations on jazz, though they have not prevented it
establishing bridgeheads: the Italian canzone, the French chanson and
accordion-type music, and various other older idioms have resisted it. Of
course, except among particular age-groups or social groups, jazz, however
diluted, has nowhere ever had a musical monopoly. Again, except in the most
urbanised Anglo-Saxon areas, jazz has been far slower to penetrate the
countryside than the town, the small town than the big city. But there can be no
doubt that it is today a world idiom, not only in the hybrid form of jazz-tinged
dance-music, but in a much more thoroughbred version. Probably not very much,
except perhaps for the original spread of hybrid jazz. The main international
agency for the dissemination of the American way of life, Hollywood, has paid
very little attention to jazz, since this was and remains a minority taste in
America. The American pop music industry has been much less capable of
international penetration outside the Anglo-Saxon radius than jazz alone: until
almost the present, Tin Pan Alley has not substantially disturbed the national
pattern of the French, German, Italian, Spanish, etc., song-hits. In fact, jazz,
especially authentic jazz in its various forms, has made its way under its own
considerable power. Since 1947 the expansion of jazz has therefore almost
certainly owed something to official sponsorship. However, jazz had travelled a
long way without it, and would undoubtedly have continued to do so in any
country in which jazz records were freely available. The most recent phase of the
expansion of jazz, is perhaps too early to assess: it is the entry of the almost
undiluted rhythm and blues into pop music, as in the rock-and-roll or the
British skiffle crazes. In many ways it is probably the most formidable of the
many advances jazz has so far made, for there can be no doubt that rhythm and
blues have not only swamped ordinary pop music in America and Britain during and
shortly after the wartime years. In America the phenomenon was
a creation of the pop industry, analogous to the jazz injections of 1914-20 and
1935-40. In Britain, however, it had much more interesting origins, in a wholly
spontaneous and uncommercial popular movement of amateur-music-making with
guitars and improvised rhythm instruments, with a repertoire of American folk
songs. These 'skiffle groups' were the direct children of the New Orleans
revival, and indeed consisted originally in the main of singers and guitarists
from larger revival bands, who entertained the audience with blues and Leadbelly-type
songs while the rest of the boys had a drink. How long the rhythm and blues
vogue,
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