The History of Jazz

by Ted Gioia

Perhaps because of this marked Moorish legacy, Latin cultures have always seemed receptive to fresh influences from Africa.

Perhaps this convoluted chapter of Western history also provides us with the key for unlocking that enigmatic claim by Jelly Roll Morton, the pioneering New Orleans jazz musician, who asserted, “if you can’t manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz.”

A little-known and undated work titled “Los Campanillas,” by black New Orleans composer Basile Barès (1845–1902), effectively employs a Cuban habanera rhythm long before W. C. Handy relied on it to make “St. Louis Blues” into a hit, or Morton himself adopted it for his composition “The Crave.”

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.

The resulting amalgam—an unprecedented mixture of European, Caribbean, African, and American elements—made Louisiana into perhaps the most seething ethnic melting pot that the nineteenth-century world could produce.

In the warm, moist atmosphere of New Orleans, sharp delineations between groups and customs gradually softened and ultimately gave way.

Unlike jazz, which first came to the fore in New Orleans and flourished in other large cities, early blues found its most fertile breeding ground in rural areas and the most impoverished parts of the country.

Blind Lemon Jefferson,

Charley Patton’s

Eddie “Son” House,

Robert Johnson.

griots,

Despite these efforts, many key aspects of blues music—its distinctive bent thirds, its chord patterns, and its heady mixture of bravado and alienation—resist reduction into African antecedents.

The songs of the great women blues singers of the 1920s and 1930s—sometimes referred to as “classic blues”—would find a commercial market several years before Blind Lemon Jefferson or Charley Patton made their first recordings.

Gertrude “Ma” Rainey,

Rainey recorded with some of the finest jazz musicians of her day, including Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins.

W. C. Handy.

Ragtime music rivals the blues in importance—and perhaps surpasses it in influence—as a predecessor to early jazz.

In his Library of Congress recordings, pianist Jelly Roll Morton demonstrated an illuminating comparison of two ways of playing Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag”—one reflecting the Missouri ragtime tradition and the second showing a New Orleans jazz–inflected approach to the composition.

But even with Morton, the dividing line between these two styles could be elusive: in this same series of interviews, Morton asserted that the celebrated jazz pianists of the 1930s, such as Fats Waller and Art Tatum, were simply “ragtime pianists in a very fine form.”

Scott Joplin,

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.

but the birth of this music would have been unthinkable without the extraordinary local passion for brass bands, an enthusiasm that lay at the core of that city’s relationship to the musical arts.

The repertoire of these bands was remarkably varied. In addition to concert and march music, the ensembles also knew a range of quadrilles, polkas, schottisches, mazurkas, two-steps, and other popular dance styles.

This blurring of musical genres was, as we shall see, central to the creation of jazz music.

The influence of this highbrow, European musical tradition was especially strong within the local black Creole culture. The role of these New Orleans Creoles in the development of jazz remains one of the least understood and most commonly misrepresented issues in the history of this music.

Even after the Civil War, these Creoles of color did not associate with black society; instead they imitated the ways of the continental European settlers, often spoke a French patois, and, in general, clung tenaciously to the privileges of their intermediate social position.

Slowly, but inexorably, these Creoles of color were pushed into closer and closer contact with the black underclass they had strenuously avoided for so long.

This forced association took place not only in the broader social arena, but also in the musical subculture of New Orleans. The Creole musicians were, for the most part, better trained than the black players from uptown; they were steeped in the classics and skilled at reading music.

Buddy Bolden, often cited as the first jazz musician,

By the 1920s, when the first recordings of a wide range of New Orleans jazz ensembles were made, the ethnic mix of the local bands was almost as diverse as the city’s population.

These recordings featured, in addition to the major black and Creole players, such ensembles as Johnny Bayersdorffer’s Jazzola Novelty Orchestra, a solid New Orleans jazz band composed of musicians of central and southern European ancestry; Russ Papalia’s orchestra, another jazz unit, this one primarily comprising Italian Americans; and the New Orleans Owls, which included in its ranks, among others, clarinetist Pinky Vidacovich, pianist Sigfre Christensen, trombonist Frank Netto, banjoist Rene Gelpi, and tuba player Dan LeBlanc—a lineup whose lineage spanned much of Europe.

Certainly jazz was primarily an African American contribution to the city’s—and, eventually, the nation’s—culture; but like all such contributions, once given, it did not l...

Instead, destined to become part of the broader cultural gene pool, jazz would be taken up with fervor by musicians ...

Hear, for example, the distinguished tracks made by Sam Morgan’s band in New Orleans during 1927 with their uncanny anticipation of the later four-beats-to-the-bar Kansas City swing style.

By almost any measure—historical, musical, biographical—Joe “King” Oliver stands out as a seminal figure in the history of American music.

Armstrong, more than anyone else in the jazz idiom, somehow managed to bring together these two seemingly incompatible approaches: a music of sound and a music of defined notes and phrases.

This difference in temperament between the two great New Orleans players is evident in their December 1924 pairing on “Early Every Morn,” where they ostensibly support vocalist Alberta Hunter.

Surely no other body of work in the jazz idiom has been so loved and admired as the results of these celebrated sessions, the immortal Hot Fives and Hot Sevens. In historical importance and sheer visionary grandeur, only a handful of other recordings—the Ellington band work of the early 1940s, the Charlie Parker Savoy and Dial sessions, the Miles Davis recordings of the late 1950s come to mind—can compare with them.

Yet the Dickerson connection was not without its benefits, if only for its fortuitous pairing of Armstrong with pianist Earl Hines, another rising star laboring in semi-obscurity in the band. The intersection of these two careers would produce some of the most exciting jazz of the decade.

Armstrong leads off “West End Blues” with an unaccompanied introduction that has justly been praised over the years. It lasts a brief twelve seconds, but what an amazing twelve seconds.

This was jazz, pure and simple, freed from both the shadow of ragtime and the dictates of dance music.

He could take a dirge and make it into an ode to joy, transform the despair of “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” into, in the words of Ralph Ellison, “a beam of lyrical sound.”9 As early as his March 1929 recording of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” Armstrong was already demonstrating his sure instinct for deconstructing the vocal line, departing radically from the melody, and singing far behind the beat in a performance that ranks among the finest early ballad recordings in the jazz idiom.

A few weeks later, Armstrong dazzled the audience of the Broadway musical revue Hot Chocolates with his performance of “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” Although Armstrong merely sang from the orchestra pit between acts, the New York Times reviewer heralded this performance by “an unnamed member of the band” as the highlight of the show.

One month after the Times review, Armstrong entered the studio to capitalize on the popularity of his work in Hot Chocolates.

Even among his contemporaries—singers only a few years younger than Armstrong, such as Bing Crosby, Fats Waller, Jack Teagarden, and Mildred Bailey—his impact can be clearly heard.

Among the next generation, it is pervasive. Armstrong’s music stood out as the most dominant early influence on Billie Holiday, who carefully studied and assimilated aspects of both his singing style and trumpet work.

Later singers in many different orbits, from Frank Sinatra to Betty Carter, Billy Eckstine to Anita O’Day, Louis Prima to Harry Connick Jr. (names that hint at the diversity of influence; to probe the depth would take a volume), were equally satellites, albeit at varying distances, each feeling the gravitational pull and drawing on the warmth and fire of Armstrong’s overarching star.

Jabbo Smith and Henry “Red” Allen,