1. Beginnings of Jazz Week 3 2013
• From New Orleans to Chicago
• Precursors
• The context
• The mixing of styles
• The personalities
• The impact
2. 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
4. 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
5. 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
8. 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
9. 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
11. 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.
12. 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
14. 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.
17. 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.
19. 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
20. 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
21. 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.
22. 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.
23. 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.
24. 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 5I
25. 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.
26. 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.
27. 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.
28. 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.
