The History of Jazz Quotes

“The role of these New Orleans Creoles in the development of jazz remains one of the least understood and most commonly mis-represented issues in the history of this music.”
― Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz

“In America, music was the first sphere of social interaction in which racial barriers were challenged and overturned. And the challenge went both ways: by the mid-1920s, white bands were playing for all-black audiences at Lincoln Theater and elsewhere. These intermediate steps between segregation and integration represented, for all their problems, progress of sorts.”
― Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz

“As recently as the twentieth century, some cultures retained religious prohibitions asserting the “uncleanliness” of believers eating at the same table as musicians.”
― Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz

“With few exceptions, the nature of jazz performance requires group interaction of the highest level. And much of the irony of jazz is that, for all its celebration of the individual soloist, it remains a music of ensembles.”
― Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz

“In music, purity is a myth, albeit a resilient one.”
― Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz

“Looking back at the first century of jazz's history, its most identifiable trademark may simply be this unwillingness to sit still, this mandate to absorb other sounds and influences, this destiny as a music of flux and fusion.”
― Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz

“During the so-called Jazz Age, most of the music's key exponents focused their creative energy on soloing not bandleading, on improvisation not orchestration, on an interplay between individual instruments not between sections.
[...] Commercial pressures, rather than artistic prerogatives, stand out as the spur that forced many early jazz players (including Armstrong, Beiderbecke, and Hines) to embrace the big band idiom. But even in the new setting, they remained improvisers, first and foremost, not orchestrators or composers.”
― Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz

“[T]he piano was to Harlem what brass bands had been to New Orleans. The instrument represented conflicting possibilities -- a pathway for assimilating traditional highbrow culture, a calling card of lowbrow nightlife, a symbol of middle-class prosperity, or, quite simply, a means of making a living.”
― Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz

“Like the New Orleans tradition that preceded it, and the Swing Era offerings that followed it, Chicago jazz was not just the music of a time and place, but also a timeless style of performance - and for its exponents, very much a way of life - one that continues to reverberate to this day in the works of countless Dixieland and traditional jazz bands around the world. For many listeners, the Chicago style remains nothing less than the quintessential sound of jazz.”
― Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz

“The resulting amalgam - an exotic 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. This cultural gumbo would serve as breeding ground for many of the great hybrid musics of modern times; not just jazz, but also cajun, zydeco, blues, and other new styles flourished as a result of this laissez-faire environment. In this warm, moist atmosphere, sharp delineations between cultures gradually softened and ultimately disappeared.”
― Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz