The History of Jazz

by Ted Gioia

Beyond its purely musicological impact, the Latin-Catholic culture, whose influence permeated nineteenth-century New Orleans, benignly fostered the development of jazz music. This culture, which bore its own scars of discrimination, was far more tolerant in accepting unorthodox social hybrids than the English-Protestant ethos that prevailed in other parts of the New World. Under Spanish law, slaves could be set free without official permission, could own property, and had the right of coartación, which allowed them to purchase their own freedom based on an adjudicated contract. This comparatively less rigid atmosphere helped shape attitudes and behavior patterns in New Orleans; indeed, it is hard to imagine the dances of Congo Square taking place in the more Anglicized colonies of the Americas.

In the same way that Bach might intermingle different but interrelated melodies in creating a fugue, an African ensemble would construct layer upon layer of rhythmic patterns, forging a counterpoint of implied time signatures, a polyphony of percussion.

Joplin’s single-minded determination to merge vernacular African American music with the mainstream traditions of Western composition prefigured, in many regards, the later development of jazz. By straddling the borders of highbrow and lowbrow culture, art music and popular music, African polyrhythm and European formalism, Joplin anticipated the fecund efforts of later artists such as Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, Benny Goodman, Charles Mingus, Stan Kenton, Art Tatum, and Wynton Marsalis, among others. In his own day, Joplin’s audience—both white and black— was ill prepared to understand the nature of such hybrid efforts; we can easily imagine them harboring a preconception that these different traditions were too radically opposed to allow a seamless merging. The idea of a ragtime ballet or opera must have seemed an oxymoron to most of those on both sides of the great racial divide that characterized turn-of-the-century American society.

The dictates of commerce made it inevitable that a major city would be established near the base of the Mississippi River. But, in the words of historian Ned Sublette, it was “a terrible place to build a town.”4 New Orleans has the lowest elevation of any major U.S. city, and with 41 percent of the continental United States’s runoff flowing down and through the Mississippi, the Crescent City is to America what plumbing pipes are to your home. Tropical storms are frequent visitors, brushing by or making a direct hit once every three or four years on average, and any resident who lives to middle age will likely confront the ravages of the region’s hurricanes, marauders that periodically force evacuations and leave behind untold damage. And in a land that is gradually sinking lower and lower below sea level—some foresee a day in which New Orleans will be completely surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico—the risk of flooding is ever present. In short, the city’s history of homegrown catastrophes, whether acts of God or merely those of the lower deities known as elected officials, testifies both to the challenges facing the inhabitants as well as to their hardiness and perseverance.

Oliver conceived of jazz as collective music making in which the instruments were interdependent, and no one horn was allowed to dominate. Armstrong, in particular, was especially constrained: as second cornetist, he was expected to add a supporting line or harmonic fill under Oliver’s lead line—and the recordings of the band show that, when so inclined, he was capable of doing this with great skill; nonetheless, Armstrong’s more powerful tone and greater technical facility made him a poor choice for such a subservient role.

Here we encounter one of the grand ironies of jazz history—and a telling reminder of the rapid pace of change in the music’s development—namely that, because of Armstrong’s presence, the King Oliver recordings from the early 1920s stand out both as a paramount example of the New Orleans collective style and also anticipate its obsolescence, already hinting at the more individualistic ethos that would replace it.

Harlem musicians were not prepared for the impact that Tatum made when he traveled to New York as an accompanist to singer Adelaide Hall in 1932. Within days of his arrival, the local piano titans had decided to test the mettle of the newcomer from Toledo. Tatum found himself escorted to a Harlem nightspot where the greatest masters of stride—including Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, and Willie “The Lion” Smith—were ready to do battle. When it came Tatum’s time to play, he let loose with a dazzling “Tea for Two” full of dense harmonies and sweeping runs and arpeggios that left the audience speechless.

the closer one gets to the core of Tatum’s music, and away from the surface activity, the more original it sounds. The strongest validation of this comes not from jazz critics but from the musicians themselves, who are anything but ambiguous on this account. A survey of musicians conducted in 1956 by Leonard Feather for his Encyclopedia of Jazz found a stunning 68 percent of them citing Tatum as the preeminent jazz pianist. A 1985 survey of jazz pianists conducted by Gene Lees again placed Tatum comfortably on top, suggesting that despite the passing of almost three decades, changing tastes, and the emergence of many new masters of the keyboard, Tatum had lost none of his power to astonish and inspire, and often to dismay, other practitioners of the art.

In the years before 1910, mainstream social dancing in America had relied primarily on European-influenced waltzes, galops, polkas, jigs, quadrilles, and the like with only occasional crossover dances, such as the cakewalk, coming from African American culture. But, by 1914, new and different dance steps were gaining widespread popularity—so much so that the Vatican felt compelled that year to publicly denounce the turkey trot and the tango.

Opened in 1923 by Owney Madden and his gang—Owney had recently been released from Sing Sing after serving eight years for murder—the Cotton Club served as the most glamorous distribution outlet for Madden’s bootleg beer business. The confluence of mobsters, money, and music may have created opportunities for Ellington, but with it came added pressures. In addition to playing its standard repertoire, the group now took on responsibility for backing up the other Cotton Club acts—a daunting change for a band that had, for all its merits, grown comfortable performing charts written to accentuate the instrumentalists’ strengths and avoid their weaknesses. But the demands of the new setting were as much psychological as musical. “When I went to the Cotton Club,” Sonny Greer recalls, “they put pressure on. They put pressure on us, and no denying at that time, when the Syndicate say they want something, they got it or you wasn’t in the business.”

At a time when jazz players were often treated as a musical underclass, Goodman used his preeminence to break through the many barriers—of racial prejudice, of class distinctions, of snobbery and close-mindedness—that served only to stultify and compartmentalize the creative spirit.

The most fruitful collaboration of these years may have been one that Goodman pursued off the bandstand. John Hammond, a Yale dropout and member of the wealthy Vanderbilt family who would come to make a career out of his advocacy for jazz music and civil rights, introduced himself to the clarinetist one evening in the fall of 1933. Hammond announced that he had just returned from England, where he had contracted to produce recordings by Goodman and others for the Columbia and Parlophone labels. This unexpected intervention on his behalf would represent a major turning point in Goodman’s career. Under Hammond’s guidance, he would record with many of the leading musicians in the jazz world.

Goodman’s prickly personality and autocratic approach to bandleading have been the subject of much criticism. But few could doubt his commitment to the highest quality standards in sidemen, in charts, in rehearsals, and in performance.

A formidable forerunner to Las Vegas, Kansas City boasted gambling revenues of around $100 million per year during this period; in addition, roughly $1 million worth of illicit drugs was sold annually; figure in prostitution and alcohol, and the total impact of the underground economy on the so-called Pendergast prosperity was enormous. As the effects of the Depression ravaged the music communities of other cities in the region, more and more players gravitated to Kansas City to share in the good times. By the middle of the 1930s, Kansas City had emerged as a potential rival to New York and Chicago in its concentration of outstanding jazz talent.

Early modern jazz, or bebop as it soon came to be called, rebelled against the populist trappings of swing music. The simple riffs, the accessible vocals, the orientation toward providing accompaniment to social dancing, the thick big band textures built on interlocking brass and reed sections— these trademarks of prewar jazz were set aside in favor of a more streamlined, more insistent style. Some things, of course, did not change. The thirty-two-bar song form and the twelve-bar blues remained cornerstones of the beboppers’ repertoire. Frequently bebop composers simply grafted an exotic name and a new (and usually more complex) melody onto the chords of earlier popular standards.

conception of musical time also changed hand in hand with this new way of phrasing; otherwise this less syncopated approach might have sounded rhythmically lifeless, a tepid jazz equivalent to the even sixteenth notes of baroque music. The 2/4 rhythmic feeling of New Orleans and Chicago was now completely replaced by the streamlined 4/4 sound favored by the Kansas City bands. But even more important, phrases often began and ended on the weak beats (two and four) or, increasingly, between beats, with unexpected points of emphasis adding to the querulous, incisive tone of the music. These characteristics imparted an off-balance quality to the proceedings and provided momentum for the solos, which now sometimes stretched on at great length, chorus after chorus.

with the advent of bebop, a whole generation of black musicians was asserting itself as coequals with the purveyors of highbrow culture, the classical composers, the dramatists, the poets, the painters, the sculptors. Another generation would pass before jazz musicians began attending music conservatories in large numbers, but already by the 1940s the ethos that would inspire such ambitions was already evident.

Miles Davis, who would emerge as the leader of the new cool players, had worked with Parker—even more, had looked up to the altoist as a guide and mentor. The Modern Jazz Quartet, which would earn praise as a quintessential cool combo, got its start as the rhythm section of Dizzy Gillespie’s big band. But even those with weaker links to bop—Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, Paul Desmond, Art Pepper—could not avoid its pervasive influence. They realized that bop was the defining style of their generation, and that even an attempt to sidestep the idiom would invariably be interpreted as rebellion against it.

Rollins’s various retirements, reclusions, and reconsiderations could stand as symbolic of the whole era. Jazz was in a period of transition, of self-examination, of fragmentation into different schools. The music’s modernist tradition, which Rollins epitomized, could no longer simply be taken for granted. Its assumptions—about harmony, melody, rhythm, song structure, instrumentation, and perhaps even more about the social role of jazz music—were constantly being questioned and increasingly found wanting by the more revolutionary musicians of the younger generation. Rollins’s self-doubts were in many ways the same anxieties felt by his whole generation as it struggled to clear a path through this seeming pandemonium. Some looked for even more, for a transfiguring movement, the next new thing, that would draw these fragments back together into a new coherence. Others, less sanguine, felt that there would be no more towering figures, titans of the caliber of Armstrong, Ellington, Goodman, or Parker, who could define a whole age, give impetus to an entire generation. Instead jazz, it seemed, was condemned to—or was it blessed by?—a pluralism, in which “next new things” would come and go with amazing alacrity.

Metheny’s most impressive achievements in the fusion idiom have been a series of genre-crossing recordings— Still Life (Talking) from 1987, Letter from Home from 1989, and Secret Story from 1992—that incorporate advanced jazz compositional techniques with pop-rock and Brazilian elements. These are highly original projects that sound deceptively simple, yet include some of the most sophisticated jazz writing of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Jarrett’s 1973 masterpiece Solo Concerts: Bremen and Lausanne built on these same elements in two titanic improvised performances, three hours of inspired keyboard music. Jarrett’s follow-up Köln Concert may have lacked the depth of Facing You and Bremen, but it attracted a large nonjazz audience with its sparse, simple harmonies and flowing melodic lines.

Pass’s 1973 solo recording Virtuoso attracted attention for the guitarist’s speed of execution and astonishing technical mastery of the instrument. Inspiring comparisons with Art Tatum and Oscar Peterson, Virtuoso justifiably ranks among the half-dozen most important recordings of modern jazz guitar music. It was followed by dozens of other Pass recordings, as leader or sideman, on the Pablo label.

The postmodern turn in jazz, in contrast, stood out for its vast inclusiveness, its reluctance to abandon any avenue of expression, no matter how far from the mainstream. “Rather than a single notion of ‘freedom,’ various freedoms were being asserted across a wide spectrum of musical possibilities,” George Lewis has written, offering what could easily serve as a definition of the postmodern impulse in jazz.

In contrast to the Art Ensembles’s motto of “Great Black Music,” Braxton daringly embraced European as well as African American visions of contemporary music and was not afraid to include Schoenberg, Webern, Cage, and Stockhausen among his influences, alongside Coltrane, Coleman, and Ayler. Further, he broke down the barriers between free and straight-ahead jazz, raising eyebrows by a series of “in the tradition” recordings featuring mainstream renditions of standards. He defied the dichotomies of white and black, still a stubbornly pervasive divide in the jazz world, by frequently lauding the music of Paul Desmond, Lee Konitz, and Warne Marsh and by working in racially diverse ensembles such as the Circle quartet (featuring Braxton, Chick Corea, Barry Altschul, and Dave Holland) or alongside Dave Brubeck, or with various European musicians. He ignored the categorization that separated free players into New York energy jazz advocates and Chicago sound landscapists. Finally, Braxton refused to recognize any conflict between the emotional and cerebral aspects of jazz, even inviting ridicule by his embrace of intellectual mannerisms— playing chess, smoking a pipe, dressing like an Ivy League academic, discoursing on philosophy, using pseudo-scientific diagrams rather than conventional titles for his compositions—a thoughtfulness that also permeated his music. One of the ironies of Braxton’s career was that his tearing down of these Berlin Walls within the jazz psyche, this ac...

pianist Jan Johansson’s Jazz på Svenska, a sly reworking of folk melodies that would delight even U.S. jazz fans—that is, if they ever had a chance to hear this music, which is hardly known in America.