Five
The Early Years of Jazz
Jazz has been described
as the first American art form. It is characterized by self-expression;
the performer is both composer and troubadour. Jazz belonged to its
performers, and would develop as their abilities and needs demanded.
The word was also spelled
‘jass’. Some think it came from the French jaser (to converse,
perhaps indiscreetly); attempts to trace the word back to Africa have
been inconclusive. It was used in print as early as 1909 in reference
to dancing, and in 1913 about US Army musicians who were ‘trained on
ragtime and "jazz"’ (Oxford English Dictionary). Clarence
Williams claimed to be first to use the word on sheet music around 1915,
when he described ‘Brown Skin, Who You For?’ as ‘Jazz Song’: ‘I don’t
exactly remember where the words came from, but I heard a lady say it
to me when we were playin’ some music. "Oh, jazz me, baby,"
she said.’ It certainly had sexual connotations: American slang for
the male seminal emission is ‘jism’ or ‘jizz’. Song titles such as ‘Jazz
Me Blues’, ‘Jazzin’ Babies Blues’ were common. The word has been used
of any jazz-influenced popular music, from the time of Paul Whiteman,
‘King of Jazz’, to the ‘jazz rock’ or ‘jazz funk’ of recent times, and
today has so many connotations that many young musicians will not use
it.
The purest origins of jazz
are lost in ancient history, but more scholarship is now being done
than ever before. We are too much the prisoners of our received knowledge;
we are taught that Columbus discovered America, and we get the impression
that he discovered that the world is round. But some people believe
that the Irish visited North America even before the Vikings, and many
educated people knew that the world was round before 1492. There was
trade between Africans and South-east Asia as early as 1000 AD, which
is thought to be how xylophone-like instruments got to Africa. We are
taught that polyphonic music was invented in Europe, but the musical
development that took place then was inspired by musics from other places.
The moresca, an African fertility dance performed with small bells on
the costumes, spread to Europe, where its rhythm is found in Monteverdi’s
Orfeo; Shakespeare referred to ‘a Morris for May Day’ in As
You Like It, and the morris dance was revived in England around
1900, probably because the English thought they invented it. Similarly,
jazz was not a discovery, but a rediscovery of musical values which
in some parts of the world had never been lost.
Samuel A. Floyd, Jr, editor
of Chicago’s Black Music Research Journal, has defined black music as
‘that which reflects and expresses essentials of the Afro-American experience
in the United States’. To a great extent the mainstream music business
had co-opted minstrelsy and ragtime, making fads of these musics with
no respect for their black input. But in the case of jazz, helped by
recordings and broadcasting, the beauty, honesty and joy in the music
belonged to its creators. Airchecks (off-the-air recordings) from the
1930s and 1940s are always of interest since we can hear jazz musicians
trying and sometimes failing to get their message across; even the classic
Benny Goodman band of the late 1930s, a precise and well-drilled outfit,
sounded somehow more exciting on the bandstand than it did in the studio,
because it was communicating to a human audience rather than recording
a commercial product. And the jam sessions and cutting contests, which
have now disappeared, were never as successful as money-spinning enterprises
as they were in their original late-night informal atmosphere, where
the competition and invention were untrammelled. It is thanks to this
aspect of direct communication between musicians and their listeners
that jazz conquered the world, and remained at the root of twentieth-century
popular music.
Jazz has evolved, as any
art form must, encountering resistance at every step of the way. But
it is not true that it was not taken seriously in the USA; perceptive
writing on the subject began there in the 1920s. Conspiracy theories
about the suppression of jazz were once spread by the American far left,
which tried to co-opt jazz (as it did folk music) as a music of the
oppressed for political reasons, following a decision by the Communist
Internationale in 1928 to define jazz as a proletarian music. It was
already too late for that nonsense, and in any case the so-called socialist
countries then disapproved of jazz for decades on the grounds that it
was an example of western decadence. Great black jazz men and women
did not receive the recognition or the money they deserved because of
racism, but by the time the music reached Chicago white businessmen
were recording the musicians and singers and hiring them to perform
for enthusiastic white audiences. The Melrose brothers, Walter and Lester,
ran a music store in Chicago and were involved in jazz and blues in
that city at an early stage; they became powerful music publishers as
a result, and copyrighted many of the early compositions. The Lincoln
Gardens, where King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band played in the early 1920s,
was visited by the best white dance band musicians, who knew where the
good music was, while white kids (Chicago jazzmen of the next generation)
sat on the curb outside because they were too young to get in. When
we were growing up, we Americans were taught that Europeans appreciated
our music more than we did, while we took it for granted; Europeans
were first to compile discographies, but we could take it for granted
because it was so popular in America.
It is true that the white
entrepreneurs often tried to water down the music, yet it survived and
remained honest, becoming popular and influential around the world.
There have been countless fine white jazz musicians, but the great innovators
(advancing the music’s stylistic frontier) were almost all black, a
situation that may now be becoming an historical one: jazz, or ‘improvised
music’, or just ‘the music’, now has so many streams that it has become
a repertory music and a viable international genre. But it is also true
that most Americans hear little or no jazz today, because broadcasting
and major record labels in the USA have been turned over entirely to
tone-deaf lawyers and accountants, who are interested only in easy money.
Jazz quickly spread all
over America, but New Orleans was the most important incubator because
of its location. Ragtime and the call-and-response pattern of work songs
were vital ingredients. African-Americans had retained an astonishing
amount of their African heritage for generations, mainly because slaves
had not been allowed to take part in American culture. But Louisiana
slave-owners, who were French-speaking Catholics rather than Anglo-Saxon
Protestants, did not try to forbid slaves to play music and dance as
strictly as owners in other areas did. New Orleans was a seaport, so
that influences came in from the Caribbean, and it had an easier racial
atmosphere than the rest of the South, at least until the First World
War. And while every town in the USA had a brass band, New Orleans had
them in every neighbourhood.
It has long since become
a cliché that jazz bands played hymns for funerals on the way
to the graveyard, and on the way back celebrated the life of the departed,
with tunes such as ‘Oh, Didn’t He Ramble’ and ‘When the Saints Go Marching
In’. Just as important was the New Orleans ‘second line’. The mourners
were joined by anybody who happened to be nearby; they followed the
band down the road, marching and dancing along and enjoying the music.
The second line is still important in New Orleans clubs today, as the
dancers and ringside fans have been important in the whole history of
the music: the communication extends beyond mere entertainment.
The blues (like the other
American rural music, now called country music) began as a folk music,
but jazz was never folk music. From the beginning there was a formal
content. New Orleans clarinettist Paul ‘Polo’ Barnes said to British
journalist Max Jones in 1973, ‘You see, in ragtime music they had books
and . . . you just had to read that music, and when you read it you
were reading another man’s idea . . . We played ragtime, but we couldn’t
read. And we played a different ragtime from those reading musicians
who actually played it. We put our own version in there.’ But Barnes
also said that Buddy Bolden, one of the first jazzmen, played ‘the way
he feel the music go. So traditional jazz is really that: you play your
feelings.’ There was also a difference between the better-off Creoles
and the ‘uptown’ blacks who had recently been slaves. Clarinettist Albert
Nicholas was a Creole, from a musical family, and there were musical
instruments at home; he knew Louis Armstrong when they were children,
but Louis came from a much harder background. The Creole and uptown
players ‘all played together in the brass bands . . . Those were mixed
bands, Creole and uptown. In a brass band they were solid.’ But the
Creoles also had their own dance bands, ‘and your uptown . . . sounded
a little different, more gut-bucket’. The musical influence was two-way:
the self-taught musician wanted to learn to play ‘straight’, while musicians
in marching and concert bands were proud of their ability to read and
to play either straight or ‘ragtime’, using crying tones, slurred notes
and so forth. The early jazz standard ‘Fidgety Feet’ was a syncopated
march.
Alderman Joseph Story set
aside a neighbourhood for brothels and gambling in 1897, known as the
District, or Storyville; but at the beginning of the First World War
Storyville was closed by order of the US Navy. While pianists found
their work in bars and brothels, and bands played mostly at picnics,
funerals and in the street, musicians also worked in dance halls and
on riverboats. The closure of Storyville accelerated travel to the West
Coast and especially up the Mississippi to Chicago, and thence to New
York City. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the ‘up the river
from New Orleans’ version of jazz history, as long as it is understood
that jazz was being played all over the country. New Orleans was where
many of the best musicians came from, and they followed the work.
The most famous riverboat
bandleader was Fate Marable, born in Kentucky. He played piano and calliope,
and first worked on a boat at the age of seventeen with a white violinist
(Emil Flindt, who wrote ‘The Waltz You Saved for Me’). Marable, who
was not a jazzman, formed his own band in 1917 and worked for the Streckfus
line out of St Louis until 1940. He made only one recording, in 1924,
which is not highly rated. But no leader ever hired more talent: the
list of sidemen who played with Marable begins with Henry ‘Red’ Allen,
Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Blanton and Earl Bostic and continues through
the alphabet. Young people who heard the music up and down the river
were impressed; pianist Jess Stacy remembered hearing a Marable band
with Armstrong, Baby Dodds and Johnny Dodds.
Pianist and vocalist Tony
Jackson, who wrote ‘Pretty Baby’, and cornettist and bandleader Charles
‘Buddy’ Bolden probably formed links between ragtime and jazz; neither
ever recorded. Bolden was renowned for his tone and his strength - it
was said he could be heard clear across Lake Pontchartrain - but he
was committed to a hospital in 1907 and never emerged. Cornettist Freddie
Keppard took his Original Creole Orchestra to California in 1914 and
caused a sensation, playing a new ragtime music called ‘jass’, a ‘white-tie,
all musical act, with neither blackface minstrel clowning, nor even
verbal comedy’, according to Rudi Blesh. Keppard’s band appeared in
Chicago in 1915, as did Tom Brown’s Band from Dixieland, called a jazz
band at a time when any new, lively dance music was already known as
jazz. There is a story that the local musicians’ union, which resented
the competition of out-of-town outfits like Brown’s, spread the word
that it was nothing but a ‘jazz’ band, and that this backfired and helped
Brown’s business. Keppard was allegedly offered a chance to record for
Victor late in 1916, but turned it down, afraid that other people would
steal his material; he recorded only once as a leader, in Chicago in
1926. The excellent trumpeter Doc Cheatham said Keppard sounded like
‘a military trumpeter playing jazz’.
Early jazz history was
confused by the fact that the first jazz recordings were made by the
Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a white band from New Orleans that won
great acclaim at Reisenweber’s Restaurant in New York. Cornettist Nick
LaRocca, clarinettist Larry Shields, trombonist Eddie Edwards, drummer
Tony Sbarbaro and pianist Henry Ragas recorded Keppard’s ‘Livery Stable
Blues’ early in 1917 for Victor; they also recorded for Columbia and
made obsolescent vertical-cut records for Aeolian Vocalion the same
year, but most of their recordings were for Victor. They later caused
the same sensation in London, with a slightly different personnel. The
recordings were regarded as novelties, and did much to establish the
public’s view of jazz as a noisy party music. LaRocca copyrighted ‘Tiger
Rag’ (their biggest hit), ‘Fidgety Feet’ and other New Orleans classics,
and in an interview with Leonard Feather in 1936 claimed that white
musicians had invented jazz and taught it to the blacks. By then the
whole world knew better than that.
Spikes’ Seven Pods of Pepper,
with Edward ‘Kid’ Ory on trombone and cornet player Thomas ‘Papa Mutt’
Carey, recorded in Los Angeles in 1922, but the New Orleans style was
best captured by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in 1923. More than two
dozen sides were made in Chicago and Richmond, Indiana, on the Gennett,
Paramount. Okeh and Columbia labels by a New Orleans line-up.
The front line of the band
included Oliver on lead cornet, Louis Armstrong on second cornet, Johnny
Dodds on clarinet and Honore Dutrey on trombone; Lillian Hardin played
piano, Bill Johnson, Arthur ‘Bud’ Scott or Johnny St Cyr banjo and Warren
‘Baby’ Dodds drums. Stump Evans on C-melody saxophone or Charlie Jackson
on bass saxophone were added on some tracks. The cornets carried the
melody, the clarinet added a filigree commentary on it and the trombone
played a bass line or ‘tailgate’ style (so called because in New Orleans
the trombonist sat on the tailgate of the wagon so as not to knock anyone’s
hat off with his slide). In fact, this was collective improvisation,
with everybody listening to everybody else: an improvised counterpoint.
The acoustic recording process restricted Baby Dodds to using woodblocks
instead of his drum kit, but the records still sound surprisingly good,
and they preserved the style in the nick of time. The band swings madly
or lopes easily, sometimes seeming to do both at once.
‘Dipper Mouth Blues’ and
‘High Society Rag’ sold well enough to have been national hits, had
charts existed at the time. Oliver would allow only a bucket of sugared
water on the bandstand for refreshment, hence ‘Dipper Mouth Blues’ (which
became ‘Sugar Foot Stomp’ a few years later). In ‘High Society Rag’
the harmony between Johnny Dodds’s clarinet and the leader’s cornet
is exquisitely beautiful, harmony in jazz always being coloured by the
personal sound of each musician; and Dodds gives us the famous solo
on the tune that was originated by Alphonse Picou. In performance and
on record Oliver and Armstrong astonished everyone by playing breaks
together in harmony that were apparently improvised; years later Armstrong
revealed that Oliver would show him the fingering secretly just before
each break.
The concatenation of historical
events often poses mysteries. Why did recorded sound come along just
in time to capture a great American musician like Oliver, one of the
fathers of popular music? Or perhaps there is an illusion here, created
by recorded sound itself. We will never know what Frank Johnson’s music
sounded like (mentioned in chapter two), because he lived before the
phonograph; but, according to contemporary newspaper accounts, his bugle,
in a piece called ‘Philadelphia Fireman’s Quadrille’ of around 1840,
could be heard to cry ‘Fire! Fire!’ Joe ‘King’ Oliver succeeded Bolden
as the leading cornettist in New Orleans, and the vocal-like colour
that emerged from his horn was one of the things that made it so deeply
moving. His playing was marked by subtlety, unlike that of the ‘ragtimers’
or of contemporary white musicians, and its dignified melancholy reminds
us of the importance of the blues in jazz. Oliver was the principal
influence on Louis Armstrong, and the way he growled through his cornet
was immediately influential: trumpeter Bill Coleman heard a musician
called Nassau doing it in Cincinnati in 1923, Bubber Miley did it in
the Duke Ellington band a few years later, and it became an element
in that band’s sound, and hence in all of jazz.
Oliver played in Chicago
and on the West Coast, and then returned to Chicago, where he led the
band at the Lincoln Gardens that made the classic recordings. He recorded
two duets with Jelly Roll Morton in 1924, which were very successful;
from 1926 to 1928 he recorded around forty sides (including alternative
takes) with the Dixie Syncopators, a band whose personnel often changed.
The lineup included Ory on trombone, Buster Bailey, Omer Simeon and
Albert Nicholas on reeds, Luis Russell on piano and Lawson Buford on
tuba. By now the original style was already mutating: more of the music
was arranged and there was more solo space and less counterpoint. In
my opinion Dixie Syncopator recordings such as ‘Farewell Blues’, ‘Every
Tub’, ‘Willie the Weeper’ and ‘Someday Sweetheart’ are among the most
heartbreakingly beautiful ever made, in any genre, by anybody.
In 1927 Oliver moved to
New York, and his career began to decline. His music was already being
regarded as old-fashioned; he made superb recordings for Victor from
1929 to 1931, but could not play on them all because his teeth were
going bad. His nephew Dave Nelson played trumpet on some of them, and
many other good sidemen were included. Oliver later ran a fruit stall
and worked in a pool room, while collectors were already paying good
prices for second-band copies of his records; if he had lived a little
longer he would have been lionized by the revivalists who re-created
the New Orleans style just before the Second World War.
The Red Onion Jazz Babies,
a pick-up group put together for recordings only, recorded in 1924.
It included reedmen Bailey and Sidney Bechet, and vocals by Alberta
Hunter; the recordings are probably the best examples we have of how
the bands probably played in the bars and dance halls of New Orleans.
In 1923 Clarence Williams’s Blue Five made similar classics with his
wife Eva Taylor singing, Armstrong, Bechet, Charlie Irvis on trombone
and Williams instead of Lil Hardin on piano.
Clarence Williams was part
Creole Negro and part Choctaw Indian; he grew up in a hotel in Louisiana
and ran away from home to join a minstrel show. Inspired by Tony Jackson,
he ran a cabaret in New Orleans in 1913, began writing songs and formed
a publishing company. He went to Chicago and then New York, where he
was the first New Orleans musician to influence others there, and the
first publisher to help black musicians. He organized and participated
in countless recording sessions, helping the careers of scores of black
jazzmen and blues singers. He wrote words and/or music for ‘Baby Won’t
You Please Come Home’, ‘Royal Garden Blues’ and other jazz classics.
As Ben Harney claimed to
have invented ragtime for commercial reasons, so Jelly Roll Morton claimed
to have invented jazz in 1902 (he gave various dates), but with somewhat
more justification: a comparison of his recording of Joplin’s ‘Original
Rags’ (made in 1939) with Joplin’s sheet music provides a good illustration
of the difference between the genres. Anybody can practise for years
and learn to play Scott Joplin well, but nobody else sounded like Jelly
Roll. He must have been one of the first to play the new style.
He was born Ferdinand Joseph
Lemott in New Orleans in 1890, but he always gave a birthdate of 1885
to add weight to his claim to have invented jazz. His Creole family
(of Haitian descent) had never been slaves; his godmother disowned him
when she discovered he was playing piano in brothels. One of the most
flamboyant characters in the history of jazz (not to say big-mouthed
- the urbane Duke Ellington despised him), he got by as an entertainer,
a pimp, a gambler and a pool shark. He recorded piano solos and with
small bands during the acoustic era; his several sides with the white
New Orleans Rhythm Kings in Chicago in 1923 were probably the first
interracial recording session. The piano solos include the first recording
of ‘King Porter Stomp’, still a hit twenty years later in the Swing
Era. Tracks such as ‘New Orleans Joys’ (also known as ‘New Orleans Blues’),
‘Tia Juana’ and ‘Mamanita’ are the first to show what he called his
‘Spanish tinge’: a habañera rhythm, which is ingrained in New
Orleans music, and played over a rock-steady beat results in a tension
still to be heard in New Orleans rhythm and blues decades later.
From 1926 to 1930 Morton
made nearly ninety sides (including alternative takes) with a studio
group of varying personnel, called Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot
Peppers. He was not only a fine pianist but an incomparable composer
and arranger in his neo-New Orleans style; as well as occasional corny
humour, virtually all of these recordings present much finely judged
and beautiful music. ‘Black Bottom Stomp’, ‘Original Jelly Roll Blues’
and ‘Grandpa’s Spells’ are all from 1927 and all with Ory; ‘Wolverine
Blues’ was made the next year with Johnny Dodds. One high point was
a 1928 session that produced ‘Boogaboo’, ‘Georgia Swing’ and others,
including a trio ‘Shreveport Stomp’, with Simeon’s beautiful, liquid
clarinet and Tommy Benford on drums, and a quartet ‘Mournful Serenade’,
with Simeon, Benford and Geechie Fields on trombone. During the Peppers
period Morton, like Oliver, moved to New York and began to decline.
He recorded again in 1939: a dozen fine piano solos including his version
of Joplin’s ‘Original Rags’. Among his best-known recordings are those
made for Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress; his playing, singing
and talking are a priceless source of information about early jazz.
Sidney Bechet was a New
Orleans clarinettist of unsurpassed lyricism, and had a famous wide
vibrato. His recording career was peripatetic - he had a volatile temperament
and never stayed long in one place - but he was nevertheless influential.
He played with Freddie Keppard as a child and later with Clarence Williams,
plugging songs. He went to New York, where in 1919 he joined the Southern
Syncopated Orchestra, led by Will Marion Cook, and travelled with it
to Europe. Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet heard this band and wrote:
‘I wish to declaim the name of this artist of genius, because for my
part, I will never forget it: it is Sidney Bechet . . . who is so happy
that you like what he does, but does not know how to speak of his art,
save to say that he is following his "own way" . . . perhaps
the great road that the whole world will be swept along tomorrow.’ Bechet
bought a straight soprano saxophone in London and thenceforth concentrated
on that difficult instrument, the only jazzman to do so until Steve
Lacy and John Coltrane, decades later; he continued to play clarinet,
especially on recordings.
Bechet performed with Williams
in 1923, Armstrong in 1924 and briefly with Duke Ellington in 1925 in
New York; he gave lessons to young Johnny Hodges, and played with Oliver
in 1926. He led the New Orleans Feetwarmers with trumpeter Tommy Ladnier
and recorded for Victor in 1932, but times were so bad that he and Ladnier
ran a tailor’s shop. He recorded with various small groups for Victor
until 1941 and for Blue Note in 1939; the Port of Harlem Jazzmen session
included ‘Summertime’ and ‘Blues for Tommy’. He moved to France in 1949,
where he became a national hero. His most famous tunes were ‘Les Oignons’,
recorded in France in 1949 with bandleader and clarinettist Claude Luter,
and ‘Petite Fleur’, which was an international pop hit for a British
trad band in 1959.
The musician who set the
music world on its ear as the first and greatest soloist in recorded
jazz, later becoming one of the best-known and best-loved entertainers
in the world, was Louis Armstrong (known as Dippermouth, then Satchelmouth,
then Satchmo, but always Pops). He came from utter poverty in New Orleans.
Early in 1913 Armstrong was sent to the Home for Colored Waifs after
firing a pistol in the air on the previous Fourth of July; there he
learned to play the cornet. He played in Marable’s riverboat band, and
back in New Orleans replaced Oliver in Kid Ory’s band. Oliver sent for
him and in mid-1922 he went to Chicago to play second cornet in Oliver’s
band.
Louis gave different versions
of his arrival in Chicago: there was no one to meet him, and he took
a cab to the Lincoln Gardens, where Oliver was playing; or Oliver had
tipped off a porter, who took Louis to the right place. It seems to
be agreed that he was a ‘hick’ when he got off the train, and looked
it. Having been a hungry child, he loved to eat; he was overweight and
all his clothes were too small. Furthermore, he was in awe of Oliver,
and lacked self-confidence; but he was always a first-rate musician.
Oliver’s band did not need two cornets. The music it played was beautiful,
but stylized, and Louis stayed in the background because that is what
the music demanded. When he can be heard on the recordings of the Creole
Jazz Band, it is clear that he is already doing something that the others
are not: he is swinging more freely. The earliest jazz musicians were
still ragtimers, inventing a style that came out of the brass band tradition,
while the three most important and influential of the New Orleans natives,
Morton, Bechet and Armstrong, were deeply familiar with the blues, and
with the music of the brothels and dance halls. They took jazz to its
first peak of creative freedom.
Lil Hardin, the band’s
pianist, became Armstrong’s second wife. She was a formally trained
musician from Memphis, Tennessee, and urged Louis to think of himself
as a soloist. He left Oliver in 1924, and was hired to play third trumpet
by Fletcher Henderson, who remembered him from a 1922 tour to New Orleans
with Ethel Waters. Henderson’s orchestra was then becoming a hot dance
band in New York, and Louis set it alight. He was still a hick, wearing
high-button shoes, and he reported later that the drummer Kaiser Marshall
said to him at a rehearsal, ‘Man, you come up here with them policeman
shoes on?’ On one occasion when he played something too loud, he had
his own opportunity to make the band laugh: upon being reminded that
the marking in the music was ‘pp’, he is supposed to have said, ‘Oh,
I thought that meant "pound plenty"!’ But nobody laughed at
his solos, which were revelatory: music in New York was transformed.
Henderson’s men drank too much, and sometimes played sloppily, Louis
later said. After a year he left.
He returned to Chicago
and worked with Lil in her band, but in November 1925 he began making
his famous Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings with studio groups, using
the new electrical recording process. It is hard for us now to imagine
how these records must have astonished musicians hearing them for the
first time.
The Hot Five included Ory,
Johnny Dodds, Johnny St Cyr on banjo and Lil on piano. They made thirty-three
sides in about two years. Maturing as an artist and leaving behind the
collective improvisation of the New Orleans style, Louis began doing
it all himself: with complete mastery he demonstrated all the self-expression
possible in jazz at the time. His tone was clear, accurate and beautiful;
he was the first to improvise freely in the lower registers of the instrument;
his technical skill allowed him to place notes as he wished, bending
a note or placing emphasis within it, and playing around the beat. Swing
was part of the essence of jazz from the beginning, but Louis fully
understood the importance of playing free from the ground beat. He could
swing the entire group himself. As an improvising melodist, he went
further than anyone in recomposing a song. He did not invent the stop-time
chorus (in which the band just marks the time each one or two bars,
leaving the soloist to do as he wishes), but he was the first to take
complete advantage of that freedom. His solos were perfectly constructed,
yet obviously improvised in their ebullience. He sang the same way:
he seemed to have invented scat singing (wordless, improvised, swinging
nonsense syllables) since he did that too with such abandon. Among the
Hot Five’s best recordings were ‘Cornet Chop Suey’ (whose roots lay
in the virtuoso solos that were always a part of brass band music),
‘Heebie Jeebies’ (for the scat singing) and ‘Hotter Than That’ (for
a fine series of solo choruses).
During the Hot Five series
he changed permanently from cornet to the brighter trumpet. For the
Hot Seven recordings Pete Briggs (tuba) and Baby Dodds (drums) were
added and John Thomas replaced Ory on trombone. ‘Wild Man Blues’, ‘Gully
Low Blues’ and ‘Potato Head Blues’ are mostly solos, the last famous
for its stop-time chorus. The members of the Hot Seven were drawn from
Carroll Dickerson’s Savoyagers, who recorded ‘Savoyagers’ Stomp’; ‘Chicago
Breakdown’ was made by Louis Armstrong and his Stompers, a group that
worked in a Chicago cafe: these ten- or eleven-piece bands included
Earl Hines on piano.
The Savoy Ballroom Five
made eighteen sides in 1928, with no New Orleans players, except Louis
and Zutty Singleton on drums, but with Hines, one of the few musicians
Armstrong ever worked with who was his equal. Recording director Tommy
Rockwell had learned how to use electrical recording, holding Singleton’s
snare drum above the microphone as he played brushes on the opening
bars of ‘Muggles’. ‘West End Blues’ is famous for its perfect architecture
and contains the basic elements which would identify some of the best
popular music for decades: a well-known introduction, in the nature
of an announcement (actually based on phrases Louis had invented while
accompanying blues singers), followed by the statement of the theme
by the leader and a series of solos, backed harmonically by other members
of the band, among them Louis’s heartfelt scat singing, seemingly improvised.
A classic duet with Hines, ‘Weather Bird’, shows two very great musicians
near their peak.
From 1928 Armstrong fronted
larger bands, directed by others, at first the excellent Luis Russell.
In his prime at the end of the silent film era he was a top cabaret
and theatre entertainer, singing as much as playing and seen as a star
by audiences who often cared little about jazz itself. Armstrong frequently
played more than a hundred consecutive high notes at the end of hackneyed
show-stoppers such as ‘Shine’ or ‘Tiger Rag’; but he always made beautiful
recordings. An early example of Lionel Hampton’s vibraphone may be heard
on ‘Memories of You’ (1930); in 1931 the hits included a classic version
of ‘Stardust’, as well as ‘All of Me’, and ‘The Peanut Vendor’. ‘Body
and Soul’ (1932) shows Armstrong’s beautiful muted trumpet to advantage,
while ‘Rockin’ Chair’ was a vocal duet with the song’s composer, Hoagy
Carmichael. All these were made for Okeh and then Columbia, and are
thus the property of Sony today; among his recordings for Victor in
late 1932 and 1933 are medleys on an early attempt at a long-playing
record. In 1935 he signed with Jack Kapp’s new Decca label, with which
he stayed for twenty years. On Decca he recorded with the Mills Brothers,
Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald; towards the end of that period he was
often accompanied by Gordon Jenkins and his studio orchestra.
Armstrong always suffered
from insecurity due to racism and the extreme poverty of his youth.
He was managed at first by Rockwell, and then by Johnny Collins, a small-time
gangster. Sometimes booked 365 nights a year, and never having acquired
a proper embouchure, he developed a chronic lip problem. In 1933 he
went to Europe, where he was idolized and had a rest. Not content with
stealing from Armstrong, Collins abandoned him in London without his
passport. Louis had not forgotten Oliver’s advice, to find himself a
white man who would put his hand on his shoulder and say, ‘This is my
nigger.’ He put his affairs in the hands of Joe Glaser, a playboy who
then became a successful booking agent. Glaser was a ruthless businessman,
but he understood the value of the property he controlled, and even
travelled with the band in the early years. Armstrong began appearing
in better films, for example Pennies From Heaven (1936); he made
more than fifty altogether, and finally had financial security.
Armstrong’s big bands were
sometimes not very good, for their only purpose was to back him, and
there is some evidence that he did not want to compete with musicians
who might be his equal. Jazz fans were disappointed by his emphasis
on entertainment, but Louis was grateful to his public and always gave
full measure. In a famous remark he said that his favourite band was
Guy Lombardo’s, his point being that Lombardo’s ‘sweet’ band was reliable
and musically impeccable. Armstrong’s pop records are charming. As a
soloist he continued to innovate long after 1930, too good a musician
to stop creating; a 1938 broadcast aircheck with Fats Waller, Bud Freeman,
Al Casey, Jack Teagarden and Wilmore ‘Slick’ Jones (Waller’s drummer
at the time) is priceless for Louis’s singing of the introduction to
‘Jeepers Creepers’ alone.
At the end of the Swing
Era in the late 1940s Armstrong gave up the big band and thereafter
toured with a small group. We will come back to Louis later, but it
is worth noting here that many Americans, on reading his obituaries
in 1971, were surprised to discover that he had been one of the most
influential musicians of the twentieth century.
Swing can be said to begin
with Armstrong. None had such complete mastery as he of the manipulation
of time in performance, according to the performer’s skill, personality
and mood, and the nature of the song or tune. Many other factors might
enter the equation, such as how long it had been since the last square
meal, or the last fight with the spouse. By the time the Swing or Big
Band Era began in 1935 the word ‘swing’ was in common use; earlier musicians
had spoken of ‘getting off’ or ‘taking a Boston’, and a swinging ensemble
was ‘in the groove’. Sometimes it happened, sometimes not: the band
had to be in the mood. There are stories about Armstrong or Waller being
asked what swing was, and replying, ‘If you don’t know what it is, don’t
mess with it’, or ‘If you gotta ask, you’ll never know.’ A medium tempo
that is easy to dance to is best for swinging, pace the popular
conception of loud, fast ‘killer dillers’.
Blacks were said to have
‘natural rhythm’, but the truth is more interesting than easy racial
stereotyping. To begin with, as we have seen, African-Americans had
maintained the aspect of music as a means of social intercourse as well
as of self-expression from Africa, aspects that had been played down
in European music. Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin were great improvisers,
unlike today’s concert pianists. Classical music can swing, if everybody
is in the groove, but nothing has put more people off classical music
than second-rate performances, and a great performance is a matter of
genius interpreting the written notes, while the separation of composition
from performance has meant that classical music has been losing a source
of inspiration for two centuries.
Secondly, blacks in America
had less to lose from self-expression, while hundreds of years of European
Protestantism on top of three thousand years of Aristotelian consciousness
had left whites somewhat restrained. Slaves in America were often not
allowed to learn to read; dependent upon the spoken word for communication,
they were forced to live in the present, which is where you have to
be to manipulate time, while many whites felt guilty about the past
or anxious about the future, and lived anywhere but in the present.
Finally, as we have seen, rhythm is at the centre of African music (rather
than melody or harmony, as in other musics). The performer who is swinging
is commenting on the beat, which is somewhere else; swing is thus a
polyrhythmic phenomenon. One way to describe jazz is to say that in
the performer’s improvisations the rhythmic element works additional
magic on the melodic and the harmonic.
Soon enough, arrangers
and composers would learn to write music that would swing, if the right
people were playing it and everybody was in the mood. A good comparison
is provided by Fletcher Henderson’s two recordings of the Fats Waller
tune ‘Stealin’ Apples’. The first, delightful version was made in March
1936, at a session when ‘Blue Lou’, ‘Christopher Columbus’ and ‘Grand
Terrace Swing’ were also recorded. The second, eighteen months later,
was made by a band with almost completely different personnel, and in
a series of sessions that included mostly pop ballads (among them a
version of Joyce Kilmer’s sentimental poem ‘Trees’). The second version
is workmanlike, but the band’s heart is not in it, and Henderson’s piano
introduction is unusually stiff even for him. A more modern example
is found in two recordings of Thelonious Monk’s ‘Hackensack’, made in
London in 1971. In the second Monk re-enters in the wrong place after
Art Blakey’s drum solo, intentionally or not, and stays there. The result
is recognizably Monk’s tune, but sounds like something that could have
been invented by a cocktail pianist.
White musicians learned
quickly. Jews and Italians were especially prominent among white jazz
musicians of the 1920s, while in Britain a considerable number of jazz
musicians have been Scottish. (Benny Carter, whose European band of
the 1930s included Scots, said it was because ‘wherever they are, there’s
happiness’.) Before long many white musicians were influencing blacks,
and combining technical skill, good tone and harmonic adventurousness.
Many years later cornettist Rex Stewart spoke in an interview about
the first time he heard Bix Beiderbecke.
Bix, for Pete’s sake.
You know, I worshipped Louis at that time, tried to walk like him,
talk like him, even dress like him. He was God to me, and to all the
other cats too. Then, all of a sudden, comes this white boy from out
west, playin’ stuff all his own. Didn’t sound like Louis or anybody
else. But just so pretty. And all that tone he got. Knocked
us all out.
Doc Cheatham put it this
way: ‘All trumpet players had been playing alike when Bix came along
and opened the gate.’ Leon Bix Beiderbecke became a distorted legend
after his death from alcoholism; a book and a film were loosely based
on the life of the ‘young man with a horn’. Born in Davenport, Iowa,
he began learning piano at the age of three. His brother brought home
records such as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s ‘Tiger Rag’; Bix
slowed down the turntable so that he could pick out the cornet part
on the piano, and soon took up the cornet. He performed in Chicago and
on Lake Michigan excursion boats as a teenager, and joined a band called
the Wolverines in 1923. He made his first recordings the following year
and became the earliest white jazz musician to have a considerable influence
on everybody else.
He continued studying piano,
and was the first important jazzman to be inspired by contemporary classical
music. But in later life he hated to perform as a pianist in public.
In the modern harmonies of impressionist composers he heard the same
freedom as in jazz, but he would have needed more formal training and
more personal discipline than he possessed to develop it. Yet what he
did was miraculous. It was with Bix’s solos, and the more fully realized
composition of Duke Ellington, that jazz began to absorb other influences
and put them to work in the late 1920s.
Bix’s technique was unorthodox
and he never learned to read music well, but his intonation was perfect.
He had a faultless ear, a gorgeous tone and so perfect an attack that
contemporaries said each note sounded like a chime struck by a mallet.
He knew little about the blues, but he was a lyrical, linear soloist.
Unlike Armstrong, he avoided bravura; he experimented harmonically from
the start, but, like Armstrong, was a natural melodist. He was among
the first to play solo for thirty-two bars using logically compatible
phrases, recomposing as he went along rather than improvising close
to the melody, and building on phrases he had just invented in a previous
bar. James Lincoln Collier described ‘a humility in his playing, a humbleness
toward his art. Always he is saying, I do not wish to intrude, but let
me show you this marvel. And marvels they were.’
The Wolverines were not
a great band and their recordings were acoustic; Bix’s sound has been
likened to piercing a curtain of fudge. Yet in good modern transfers
the records are not all that bad. On Hoagy Carmichael’s recommendation
the band played at Indiana University, and it became a sensation on
campuses. Bix was hired by bandleader Jean Goldkette, and spent the
peak of his career with Paul Whiteman; these were the best white bands
of the period. Whiteman was one of the biggest recording stars of the
century and his band was admired by everybody in show business, yet
even there Bix’s marvels stood out.
The story that Bix was
frustrated by his position in that band is not true. He was at the top
of his trade and knew it, and Whiteman kept a chair open for him until
the end. Bix’s problem was his alcoholism (he had his first breakdown
with delirium tremens in 1929), together with his German Protestant
background. He sent copies of his records to his family, but they did
not even open the parcels. (The same thing happened decades later to
Ornette Coleman.) Bix earned the respect and admiration of his peers,
and increasingly of the public, but he never had confidence in himself
or in the value of his work.
Beiderbecke’s best recordings
were made with small groups from 1927, led by reedman Frankie Trumbauer,
which often included Eddie Lang, Jimmy Dorsey and Adrian Rollini on
bass saxophone. The most famous are ‘I’m Comin’ Virginia’ and ‘Singin’
the Blues’; the latter especially was memorized and played by white
and black bands. Bix’s impressionistic compositions include ‘In the
Dark’, ‘Candlelight’, ‘Flashes’ and ‘In a Mist’, the last of which he
recorded as a piano solo.
His admiration of Armstrong
was mutual. Louis allegedly lent Bix his horn so that he could sit in,
a thing he rarely, if ever, did for anyone else. Bix influenced Red
Nichols and Bobby Hackett, who influenced Roy Eldridge and Miles Davis
respectively; Eldridge was in turn the greatest influence on Dizzy Gillespie.
There are links between Bix’s advanced harmonic thinking and that of
Charlie Parker, but the beauty of his tone and his phrasing can stand
alone. Carmichael’s songs ‘Stardust’ and ‘Skylark’ may have been based
on Bix’s solos; Carmichael carried Bix’s mouthpiece in his pocket for
the rest of his life.
Other young white players,
particularly in Chicago, imitated their black heroes: Oliver, Armstrong
and clarinettists Baby Dodds and Jimmie Noone. The late show at the
Lincoln Gardens would be attended by the musicians whose own gigs had
finished; the teenagers sat on the pavement outside. Bud Freeman wrote
many years later that the bouncer at the door would say, ‘Well, it looks
like the little white boys is out here to get their music lessons.’
The white boys soon invented a free-wheeling small-group Chicago style,
with solos between orchestral, ragtime-like ensemble passages; there
was usually an ‘explosion’ of sound at a climax just before the repetition
of the melody, and a ‘clambake’ ride-out at the end. With a band of
soloists, collective improvisation as it had been practised in New Orleans
receded into the past.
The Chicagoans include
the Austin High Gang, so called because some attended Austin High School:
Frank Teschemacher on reeds, guitarist Dick McPartland, trumpeter Jimmy
McPartland and Bud Freeman on tenor saxophone. Other Chicagoans were
singer and kazoo player Red McKenzie, pianist Joe Sullivan, banjoist
and guitarist Eddie Condon, Gene Krupa and Benny Goodman. The style
may be heard on recordings as early as 1927 by McKenzie and Condon’s
Chicagoans. Also usually counted as Chicagoans are clarinettist Pee
Wee Russell, trumpeters Wingy Manone and Muggsy Spanier and a third
Melrose brother, Frank, a pianist who recorded with Manone and Freeman,
among others.
The Friar’s Society Orchestra
became the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and began recording in 1922. This
white group included cornet player Paul Mares, clarinettist Leon Roppolo
(whose name is often wrongly spelled Rappolo), reedman Eddie Miller
(later with Bob Crosby’s band), trombonist George Brunis and drummer
Ben Pollack (later an important bandleader).
Pee Wee Russell and Bud
Freeman were as innovative on their instruments as Beiderbecke on his,
playing pretty, thoughtful and original solos while eschewing bravura.
Freeman was the first tenor saxophonist to take a fundamentally different
direction from Coleman Hawkins, while Russell was an original to the
end of his life. Their ‘sweet’ jazz may have stemmed from the use of
the microphone in that they did not have to play loud to be heard in
their small groups; their ability to construct solos was always underrated.
Freeman’s recording sessions with his Summa Cum Laude Orchestra (an
octet, with Russell, Max Kaminsky and Eddie Condon) in 1939 probably
represent the high point of the Chicago style, especially Freeman’s
tour de force in ‘The Eel’. Muggsy Spanier’s Ragtime Band (also an octet,
one of whose members was George Brunis, not a great trombonist but a
fine accompanist in this style) made sixteen sides the same year, playing
with integrity the tunes they had all loved in their youth, including
‘Livery Stable Blues’ and Spanier’s ‘Relaxin’ at the Touro’, a souvenir
of his stay in a New Orleans hospital. But that was the end of the era.
In later years many of these musicians were submerged by their dixieland
identities, making a living playing for middle-aged businessmen in cocktail
lounges. Even when record companies in the LP era occasionally wanted
them, it was only to rerecord the dixieland chestnuts.
In the mid-1920s on the
East Coast cornettist Red Nichols and trombonist Miff Mole came from
Paul Whiteman’s band to play in each other’s small groups, under such
names as the Charleston Stompers, Red and Miff’s Stompers, Miff Mole
and his Molers, Red Nichols and his Five Pennies and so on. Their playing
was less rowdy than the Chicagoans, and has been described as a New
York style. Nichols was inspired by Beiderbecke, but was thought by
some to play and compose in an innovative open-chord way of his own.
Mole was one of the first to liberate the trombone from the New Orleans
tailgate style. Nichols and Mole split up in 1928 and Nichols’s influence
was short-lived; in later years he was popular with tourists visiting
Las Vegas.
Eddie Lang was born Salvatore
Massaro, the son of a banjo- and guitar-maker in south Philadelphia.
He invented jazz guitar playing, playing rhythm and solos in an advanced
style: he played four-to-the-bar rhythm, often with a newly created
chord on each stroke. His solo work sparkled with innovation, and he
acquired a deep and genuine feeling for the blues. On some of his duets
with black guitarist Lonnie Johnson he was billed as Blind Willie Dunn.
He was Bing Crosby’s favourite accompanist, and his unexpected early
death (from an embolism while having his tonsils out) was as great a
loss as that of Bix.
Jack Teagarden came from
Texas. He began learning trombone as a child, and developed a method
of playing all the notes without the long positions, using his lips
rather than the slide. He had perfect pitch and read music well from
an early age. He could play as fast as a valve-trombone player, and
made the difficult sound easy; he combined his technical proficiency
with a deep southern understanding of the blues, so that his rapid execution
did not contradict the impression he gave of being completely relaxed.
He sang the same way, in a warm baritone drawl. When he reached New
York in 1927, he was fully-fledged and caused a sensation. He ended
Mole’s brief dominance of eastern trombone playing and quickly became
close friends with Coleman Hawkins and trombonist Jimmy Harrison, both
of whom were in Henderson’s band. It is interesting to speculate how
different Teagarden’s career would have been if he had not been white:
would he have joined Henderson? He played on more than a hundred recordings
in 1929, but none at all in 1932. In 1933 he signed a five-year contract
with Paul Whiteman, and his talent was largely hidden, except in his
freelance work. He led a big band in 1938-9 but went broke, and the
rest of his recording career was peripatetic. He never played or sang
a note that was not instantly recognizable.
Meanwhile, on the East
Coast, Eubie Blake, Luckey Roberts, Willie ‘the Lion’ Smith, James P.
Johnson and others had been playing stride piano, a two-fisted style
built on ragtime that emphasized a strong beat with tenths in the bass.
Territory bands played all over the country, and larger dance bands
were learning to swing. The Swing Era itself was not far off.
