The History of Jazz

by Ted Gioia

Harry Carney

Barney Bigard,

Chick Webb

The addition of singer Ella Fitzgerald to the band in 1934 further enhanced the group’s jazz credentials and added to its popular appeal, while her vocal on “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” from 1938 propelled the song to an eighteen-week stint on the Hit Parade (a popular radio show that presented the bestselling commercial songs to radio listeners every Saturday evening).

The creation of a truly nationwide mass medium in the form of radio catapulted a few jazz players to a level of celebrity that would have been inconceivable only a few years before.

Even a cursory list of Goodman’s achievements makes one sit up and take notice: as a soloist he defined the essence of the jazz clarinet as no other performer before or since; as a bandleader, he established standards of technical perfection that were the envy of his peers, while his influence in gaining widespread popularity for swing music was unsurpassed; a decade later he reformed his ensemble to tackle the nascent sounds of bop music—a move that few of his generation would have dared make; in the world of classical music, Goodman not only excelled as a performer, but also commissioned a host of major works—Béla Bartók’s Contrasts, Aaron Copland’s Concerto for Clarinet, Paul Hindemith’s Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra, and Morton Gould’s Derivations for Clarinet and Band, among others.

Benny Goodman was born, the ninth of twelve children, on May 30, 1909.

Bunny Berigan,

Guitarist George Van Eps

Alan Reuss, who was Van Eps’s equal in providing inventive chordal support in a big band setting.

Gene Krupa.

Teddy Wilson

The Casa Loma band,

Bob Crosby’s

The Dorsey Brothers

Artie Shaw,

Roy Eldridge

The genealogists of jazz often cite Eldridge as a linking figure, whose work represents a halfway point between the styles of Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie.

Lionel Hampton,

Hampton stands out as the innovator who took what was a quasi-novelty sound—essentially a high-tech xylophone with added vibrato effect—and transformed it into a mainstream jazz instrument.

But just as telling, the concert signaled a newfound fascination with jazz as a historical phenomenon. The program that evening consciously presented a chronology of the music’s evolution, reaching back to the ragtime era and offering tributes to Beiderbecke and Armstrong in addition to featuring a selection of swing favorites. Later that year, Hammond would amplify on this same approach in his first “Spirituals to Swing” concert, also presented at Carnegie Hall. Over the next few years, this emerging sense of historical perspective would transform the jazz world, as witnessed by an outpouring of jazz writing and research, a revival of early New Orleans and Chicago styles, and, above all, a new attitude among fans and musicians, one that focused on discerning progressive and regressive trends—a quasi-Darwinian assessment of improvisational idioms—among the panoply of bands and soloists that made up the jazz world.

This was not a modernism resonant of Bartók and Hindemith, but one driven by hard-swinging monophonic lines, drenched in chromaticism and executed with lightning speed.

McKinney’s Cotton Pickers was one of these. Formed in Ohio and later enjoying a long residency in Detroit, this band was admired widely for its high-spirited recordings featuring the arrangements of Don Redman.

Alonzo Ross’s De Luxe Syncopators

Dave Taylor’s Dixie Orchestra, Jimmy Gunn’s Dixie Serenaders, the Carolina Cotton Pickers, and the Bob Pope Orchestra,

Sonny Clay, Curtis Mosby, Paul Howard, and Les Hite

Charlie Creath’s Jazz-O-Maniacs

Missourians, and the Jeter-Pillars Club Plantation

Bob Wills,

Kansas City offered a hospitable environment to most of the social vices.

And as the histories of New Orleans and Chicago attest, where leisure and whiskey flourished, so typically did jazz.

This new sense of time was accompanied by a shift in the nature of the rhythm section, a rejuvenescence that reached its fullest realization in the Count Basie band of the mid- and late 1930s.

No one filled this new role—that of the “comping” pianist—better than Count Basie, who stands out as the best-remembered and most beloved of the Kansas City pioneers.

Bennie Moten,

Walter Page’s Blue Devils.

Jones-Smith Incorporated

But Lester Young is the real star here. On “Oh, Lady Be Good,” he contributes a famous solo,

The contribution of guitarist Freddie Green,

Bandleader Andy Kirk,

Mary Lou Williams

International Sweethearts of Rhythm,

But the most influential of the Kansas City players from the 1930s would clearly be Lester Young,

Reinhardt’s earliest recordings, accompanying an accordionist and slide whistle player, are far removed from the cosmopolitan jazz of his later years, but by the time of the first Quintette session in 1934, he had come to terms with the African American idiom.

On “Dinah” he intermingles bouncy triplets and bluesy asides with forceful octaves, setting a standard for ease of execution and invention that would be amplified in later Quintette recordings such as “Djangology,” “Limehouse Blues,” “Chicago,” and “Minor Swing.” In time, the influence of Ravel, Debussy, and Gershwin would impart an impressionist tinge to Reinhardt’s jazz, revealed in his exploration of whole-tone scales and in the languorous beauty of his most famous composition, “Nuages.”

Ben Webster, who would soon join the Ellington band, also had drawn inspiration from Hawkins, but parted ways from his role model with a breathier, unhurried tone that would become even more languid with the passing years.

But the most prominent sign that Hawkins was ready to meet all challengers came on October 11 when he kicked off a series of recordings for RCA’s Bluebird label with a version of “Body and Soul” that became an instant hit with both the general public and musicians. “It’s the first and only record I ever heard of that all the squares dig as well as the jazz people,” Hawkins later remarked.

Not only was this Hawkins’s finest moment, but with “Body and Soul” the tenorist created what is undoubtedly the most celebrated saxophone solo from the first half of the twentieth century.

Among the earliest bandleaders to recognize the importance of the new idiom, Hawkins featured Dizzy Gillespie (as well as Max Roach, Oscar Pettiford, and Don Byas) on a momentous session from February 1944, which is usually acknowledged as the first modern jazz record date.

A short while later, Hawkins hired pianist Thelonious Monk, at a time when the latter’s eccentricities and modernist leanings made him persona non grata on most bandstands.

Young’s achievements with the Basie band no doubt contributed to this expanding influence, but it is in his small-combo work that his alternative conception of jazz is most telling. His recordings with the Kansas City Six and Kansas City Seven from the late 1930s are major milestones of the era.