All over America there have been marching bands and other brass aggregations nearly forever. By the 1880s, some cities had African American ones. In the 1890s and early 1900s, the bands that played popular songs, light classics and various dances were affected by the vogue of ragtime. “Syncopating” bands took a big marching step away from strict European time and toward jazz. In the 1910s Tim Brymn, Will Tyers, Will Vodery and Ford Dabney led shouting, boisterous bands in rooftop nightclubs and theaters around New York. In Chicago, Dave Peyton’s Symphonic Syncopators held forth alongside the orchestras of Wilbur Sweatman and Erskine Tate. Instrumental experimentation was rampant: clarinets replacing violins, saxophones doing things they hadn’t done, Sweatman playing three clarinets at once.
And then there was the Crescent City. Jazz didn’t come only from New Orleans; it evolved, like the blues, over a period of time in lots of places. But New Orleans was a special place for putting it all together. As a port city it played host to travelers and settlers who brought their own cultures from all over the world.[1] In the early 19th century, thousands of people, including many free people of color, immigrated to New Orleans from all over the Caribbean. Captives brought from those islands were carrying an African culture preserved in exile, sometimes for generations. New Orleans was under French control for a hundred years, during which the rest of the U.S.-to-be was under Anglo-Saxon rule. This made a difference, if only because the French did not ban the African drum as the English did in their colonies. West African music lived on in New Orleans, as it did in Haiti, Santo Domingo, Brazil, and Cuba. These “Catholic colonies” allowed for more of a syncretism of African religions with Christianity than did the “Protestant colonies” of the British—thus the greater percussion permission.
[1] Seaside location was also a factor in the musical ferment of New York,
as it would later be in San Francisco and Liverpool with rock and roll.
Under the French, and even later, the captive Africans were permitted to gather in Place Congo (Congo Square, now contained within Louis Armstrong Park) every Sunday, drums and all, and dances were held there in highly organized fashion up to at least 1835,[i] and again for another twenty years after the Civil War. At these dances there were many White spectators.
The Dance in Place Congo was a link in the chain of West African culture’s persistence. Later, Black bands would take up European brass band instruments in the service of ritual (see the film Jazz Parades, Videography), leading to the famous funeral marching bands.[2] Another key link was Mardi Gras, a carnival ostensibly Catholic and French but also an opportunity for Blacks to parade, to blow their horns, to dance. In this setting they also commemorated their traditional alliance with Native Americans—who had sheltered AWOL Africans—by adopting “Indian” costumes and other cultural artifacts. Not only had they sheltered them, they had made babies together. That’s why a high percentage of African Americans have a Native American background mixed in.
2] Dennis McNally argues that the wider diffusion of captive Africans
in the United States than in Brazil and the Caribbean
put them in greater contact with Euro-based cultures,
and led to more syncretic forms. (McNally, 27)
The “Mardi Gras Indians” made it on the scene just prior to the development of jazz. Around the turn of the century, the marching band tradition in New Orleans (drawn especially from Italian, French and German immigrants) incorporated ragtime and the blues to produce what eventually became known as jazz. European brass instruments were falling into Black hands in large numbers, left behind in pawn shops by soldiers from Civil War and Spanish-American War army bands. There was a strong parading tradition in France; there was also a tradition of musical parades in West Africa, closely tied to particular functions, that shifted easily to the new instrumentation.[ii] And the counterpoint featured in many marching band tunes interacted nicely with the polyrhythmic and improvisatory penchants of African Americans. The New Orleans bands marched and played for weddings, funerals, and all manner of gatherings.
The brass bands intersected with the style of the spasm bands, which used homemade stringed instruments and drums, harmonicas and kazoos. These were later known as skiffle or jug bands, and interacted with White string bands at various points and places. Jug bands have been traced to Louisville, Kentucky, an upland South river town and fertile ground for cross-cultural exchange and diversity of styles.
Then there were the pianists who earned their livings in a district designated for vice and therefore popular music: Storyville. According to E. Simms Campbell,
Here, when liquor, used to fight off exhaustion, had befogged the brain, many of the discordant and eerie chords were born. I have talked with many a swing musician who has admitted that he has improvised these weird minor chords in these houses…[iii]
French Creole musicians downtown had been playing in marching and dance bands; but in 1894, creoles were expelled from polite White society under new segregation laws, as the distinguished Mr. Jim Crow took over from slavery’s social structures. These free Blacks of mixed ancestry had enjoyed a significant amount of independence and even power since the French Code Noir (Black Code) of 1724,[3] which endowed certain Blacks with certain rights. But they began to lose their status with the advent of the Civil War, and lost it decisively with the destruction of Reconstruction. They were put back in the same class with other Blacks, and lost their previous occupations. They were forced Uptown—a more gritty and less privileged area— and shortly found themselves playing with street-wise swingers; jazz would stew in this Petri dish for 19 important years before being closed down (see Up River).
[3] For visible evidence of their achievements,
take a look at the iron lace decoration on so many New Orleans
homes, a product of free Black craftsmanship. (Buerkle and Barker 1973, 8)
Many of the displaced creoles and their descendants were trained in classical music; some of these were among the first jazz players, like Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton and Sidney Bechet, whose style on the clarinet and soprano sax was described by Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet in 1919 as “perhaps the highway the whole world will swing along tomorrow.”[iv] They heard and incorporated Spanish and Afro-Spanish music, French quadrilles, polkas, schottisches, two-steps, and marches, quartet singing, and British influences, as well as blues and hollers. They taught these things to the Uptown cats, who in turn taught them to get back to the street and loosen up the beat. Jazz was busy being born.
As I hinted earlier, I was a big jazz fan from about the age of five, only I didn’t know it was jazz. I certainly didn’t know it was Black. My jazz source was, funnily enough, TV cartoons.[4] But to this day, some folks like to say that jazz isn’t really of African American origin. In the early days there were indeed not only Black bands, but White bands and even mixed bands. The first band to go to New York and make it big was a White ensemble called the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (previously, “jass,” but kids kept blotting out the “j” on their posters). They made the first jazz records, in 1917, and sold millions.[5] Al Jolson—he of blackface fame—claimed he got them the New York gig that resulted in their recording career. Ironically or otherwise, one of the first two songs they recorded was “Darktown Strutters Ball”—in the event, it was not released.
4] In the 30s, TV cartoons sometimes featured music by a live band.
At the end of the cartoon, they would sometimes show a live shot
of the band playing. I remember seeing Cab Calloway. (Who forgets that?)
[5] Freddie Keppard was offered a recording deal first, but turned it down,
either because he didn’t want people stealing his riffs,
or didn’t want to audition without pay,
or he asked for too much money…scholars differ.
On the question of inspiration and origins, ODJB leader Nick LaRocca was adamant:
Our music is strictly white man’s music. We patterned our earlier efforts after military marches, which we heard in park concerts in our youth. Many writers have attributed this rhythm that we introduced as something coming from the African jungles, and crediting the Negro race with it. My contention is that the Negro has learned to play this rhythm and music from the whites. The Negro did not play any kind of music equal to white men at any time.[v]
Contrast this with the comments in 1921 of Paul Mares, leader of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, a Chicago band comprising eight White musicians, three actually from New Orleans,
We had only two tempos: slow drag and the 2/4 one-step. We did our best to copy the colored music we’d heard at home. We did the best we could, but naturally, we couldn’t play real colored style.[vi]
But as White Chicago jazzman Mezz Mezzrow would write later,
The colored guys really get out in front and set the pace when they’re given half a chance. Why, look at how every white performer that ever aped the Negro became a headliner. Look at Sophie Tucker, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor and the rest—where’d they be without their blackface routines and corny coonshouting and mammy numbers? And in our own field, too, it’s the musicians that tried to grasp a little of the Negro jazz idiom who’ve gotten to be famous.[vii]
New Orleans musician Preston Jackson talked about the White players who used to come to the 101 Club to hear King Oliver’s band: “The LaRocca boys of the Dixieland Jazz Band used to hang around and got a lot of ideas from his gang.”[viii] The boys went slumming at the jazz corn husking and scooped up enough of the kernels to get to New York and Europe. As well they might: the White musicians were put in a tight spot by the popularity of the Black bands, with their new techniques and “new tonal combinations, never-before-heard dissonances, novel melodic figures, and disjointed counter-points.”[ix] But, in a repeat of the Barbershop coverup, H.O. Brunn wrote The Story of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band without mentioning a single black musician. This time the bleach didn’t wash. But as Stephen Longstreet wrote in 1956, “It isn’t hard to prove that white men really invented jazz and made it important. It isn’t true. But it’s easy to prove.”[x] A segregated society extended its malice to its entertainers, noted Leonard Feather:
The Negro musician was Jim Crowed from the day he first became aware of music. In the South, and often even in the North, he could not live near the white musician, could not gain entrance to many of the best music schools, was not admitted either as performer or as spectator to most of the clubs and theaters where music was played, and was barred from jobs in radio stations, in successful hotel bands and even on recording sessions except under segregated conditions…Men like Red Nichols and Joe Venuti, who made hundreds of records, never hired a single Negro.[xi]
In general we can say about jazz what is true of many other forms of American music: it was created by Blacks from a mix of the materials available, and each subsequent innovation, from classic to swing to bop and beyond, was reproduced in turn by Whites. Not to say that there aren’t great White jazz players, who are sometimes an inspiration or model for subsequent Black musicians. But credit is seldom given where credit is due. Neither is cash, which is sometimes a matter of some interest to the musician.
In any case, the key generators of jazz were the Black and Creole musicians. Uptown cornetist Buddy Bolden, who had seen the dancing in Place Congo as a youth, was reported to have “improvised a hot blues” with his band at a dance in 1894.[xii] He developed his style from 1895 to 1905, helping to transform the staid marching band tradition into dance music, via ragtime and his own “shouting” style. Also via having been a barber. Unfortunately, like Henry Sloan, he was never recorded.
Pianist Jelly Roll Morton was also a key early jazz composer and arranger. Then came King Oliver, who had the most popular band of his time, which eventually included Louis Armstrong. Armstrong’s improvisations floated freely over the rhythm, cut loose from the tyranny of the beat, and became a model for all who followed. Armstrong, Morton, and Bechet were all steeped in the blues, an essential element sometimes lost on the White players.
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HENRY FORD
Bill Malone described the automobile tycoon politely as “an Anglo-Saxon nationalist.”[xiii] Ford, in an attack that should be in every high school history text, called Tin Pan Alley a Jewish conspiracy to “africanize” America’s music. He reserved a special venom for jazz: in a series of 92 unsigned articles in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, in 1921, we find this:
Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, the slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin…it is sold at the music store to addle-pated young men and women who fill their leisure with hearing or humming this syncopated senility…[xiv]
Despite the bald, bold bias here, the writer does give us an interesting morsel in the next week’s edition:
The public is blind to the source of that upon which it lives, and it adjusts itself to the supply. Public taste is raised or lowered as the quality of its pabulum improves or degenerates. In a quarter of a century, given all the avenues of publicity like theater, movie, popular song, saloon and newspaper…you can turn out nearly the kind of public you want. It takes just about a quarter of a century to do a good job.[xv]
Food for thought indeed, especially in the subsequent days of mass media advertising-driven consumerism.
The author generously accepts ragtime as a “legitimate development of Negro minstrelsy,” but laments that in its wake
Seductive syncopation captured the public ear. The term, “ma baby,” brought in on the flood of Negro melody has remained in uncultivated musical speech ever since…a small group of men are deliberately and systematically forcing jazz and movies and dances upon the country…[xvi]
Ford was not alone. The Ladies’ Home Journal warned its readers of “The Jazz Path of Degradation, calling it “lewd to the physiological limit,” and the Musical Courier noted a women’s meeting called to “annihilate jazz.”[xvii]
Ford was, as we know, a man of action, and proceeded to organize a series of fiddle concerts around the country in the late twenties, in hopes of putting Africa and the Jews in their places, wherever that might be.
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Jazz was developing around the country in various local styles. In general, the style tended to evolve towards a more polished sound, partly because at that time the main purchasers of recordings were Whites. As Schuller says, “the music played depended almost entirely on for whom it was played.”[xviii] For White folks, there were two contradictory values it offered: it reflected the complexity and quickened tempo of life in the industrial, post-War age, and it offered access to a fantasized “primitive” lifestyle or ethos that, wrote Kathy Ogren, “could liberate overcivilized Whites.”[xix] For those who cared to think about it, then, it offered a synthesis of a new and challenging present with an imagined past—and a bridge between cultures severely alienated from each other. Some gravitated to mellow, if not gutless, bleached versions that helped them take a baby step; others leaped over the chasm and changed identities. Mezz Mezzrow said his Jewish background helped propel him from a White community to total identification with Black culture. Some folks from marginalized culture groups do tend to gravitate away from assimilation and into the orbit of even more marginalized groups—luckily for all of us.
[i] Berry, 7.
[ii] See the film, The Land Where the Blues Began, in the series A Patchwork Quilt.
[iii] E. Simms Campbell, “Early Jam,” in The Negro Caravan, 984.
[iv] Quoted by Bob Wilber in liner notes to Sidney Bechet, Bluebird CD 6590-2-RB.
[v] Ken Burns, Jazz: The Story of American Music, Sony Audio, 2000.
[vi] Shapiro and Hentoff, 123.
[vii] Mezz Mezzrow, Really the Blues, New York: Random House, 1946, 146.
[viii] Quoted in Shapiro and Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya.
[ix] Rublowsky, 123.
[x] Longstreet, 69.
[xi] Feather, 22.
[xii] Southern, 1971, 357.
[xiii] Malone 1979, 38.
[xiv] “Jewish Jazz Becomes Our National Music,” unsigned, The Dearborn Independent, Dearborn, Michigan, August 6, 1921, 8-9.
[xv] “How the Jewish Song Trust Makes You Sing,” unsigned, The Dearborn Independent, August 13, 1921, 8.
[xvi] ibid.
[xvii] Gates, New Yorker.
[xviii] Schuller, 1968, 70.
[xix]Ogren, 1989, 151.