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The JAZZ Story

An Outline History of Jazz

In the span of less than a century, the remarkable native American music called Jazz has risen from obscure folk origins to become this country's most significant original art form, loved and played in nearly every land on earth. Today, Jazz flourishes in many styles, from basic blues and ragtime through New Orleans and Dixieland, swing and mainstream, bebop and modern to free form and electronic. What is extraordinary is not that Jazz has taken so many forms, but that each form has been vital enough to survive and to retain its own character and special appeal. It takes only open ears and an open mind to appreciate all the many and wide-raging delights jazz has to offer.

THE ROOTS

Jazz developed from folk sources. Its origins are shrouded in obscurity, but the slaves brought here from Africa, torn from their own ancestral culture, developed it as a new form of communication in song and story. Black music in America retained much of Africa in its distinctive rhythmic elements and also in its tradition of collective improvisation. This heritage, blended with the music of the new land, much of it vocal, produced more than just a new sound. It generated an entire new mode of musical expression. The most famous form of early Afro-American music is the spiritual. These beautiful and moving religious songs were most often heard by white audiences in more genteel versions than those performed in rural black churches. What is known as gospel music today, more accurately reflects the emotional power and rhythmic drive of early Afro-American music than a recording of a spiritual by the famous Fisk Jubilee Singers from the first decade of this century. Other early musical forms dating from the slavery years include work songs, children's songs, and dances, adding up to a remarkable legacy, especially since musical activity was considerable restricted under that system.

BIRTH OF THE BLUES

After the slaves were freed, Afro-American music grew rapidly. The availability of musical instruments, including military band discards, and the new-found mobility gave birth to the basic roots of Jazz: brass and dance band music and the blues. The blues, a seemingly simple form of music that nevertheless lends itself to almost infinite variation, has been a significant part of every Jazz style, and has also survived in its own right. Today's rock and soul music would be impossible without the blues. Simply explained, it is and eight (or twelve) bar strain with lyrics in which the first stanza is repeated. It gets its characteristic "blue" quality from a flattening of the third and seventh notes of the tempered scale. In effect, the blues is the secular counterpart of the spirituals.

BRASS BANDS AND RAGTIME

By the late 1880's, there were black brass, dance and concert bands in most southern cities. (At the same time, black music in the north was generally more European-oriented.) Around this era, ragtime began to emerge. Though primarily piano music, bands also began to pick it up and perform it. Ragtime's golden age was roughly from 1898 to 1908, but its total span began earlier and lingered much later. Recently, it has been rediscovered. A music of great melodic charm, its rhythms are heavily syncopated, but it has almost no blues elements. Ragtime and early Jazz are closely related,
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 but ragtime certainly was more sedate. Greatest of the ragtime composers was Scott Joplin (1868-1917). Other masters of the form include James Scott, Louis Chauvink Eubie Blake (1883-1983) and Joseph Lamb, a white man who absorbed the idiom completely.

ENTER JASS

Ragtime, especially in its watered-down popular versions, was entertainment designed for the middle class and was frowned on by the musical establishment. The music not yet called Jazz (in its earliest usage it was spelled "jass"), came into being during the last decade of the 19th century, rising out of the black working-class districts of southern cities. Like ragtime, it was a music meant for dancing. The city that has become synonymous with early Jazz is New Orleans. There is reality as well as myth behind this notion.

New Orleans: Cradle of Jazz

New Orleans played a key role in the birth and growth of Jazz, and the music's early history has been more thoroughly researched and documented there than anywhere else. But, while the city may have had more and better Jazz than any other from about 1895 to 1917, New Orleans was by no means the only place where the sounds were incubating. Every southern city with a sizable black population had music that must be considered early Jazz. It came out of St. Louis, which grew to be the center of ragtime; Memphis, which was the birthplace of W.C. Handy (1873-1958), the famed composer and collector of blues; Atlanta, Baltimore, and other such cities. What was unique to New Orleans at the time was a very open and free social atmosphere. People of different ethnic and racial backgrounds could establish contact, and out of this easy communication came a rich musical tradition involving French, Spanish, German, Irish and African elements. It was no wonder that this cosmopolitan and lively city was a fertile breeding ground for Jazz. If New Orleans was the birthplace of Jazz in truth as well as in legend, the tale that the music was born in its red light district is purest nonsense. New Orleans did have legalized prostitution and featured some of the most elaborate and elegant "sporting houses" in the nation. But the music, if any, that was heard in these establishments was made by solo pianists. Actually, Jazz was first heard in quite different settings. New Orleans was noted for its many social and fraternal organizations, most of which sponsored or hired bands for a variety of occasions -- indoor and outdoor dances, picnics, store openings, birthday or anniversary parties. And, of course, Jazz was the feature of the famous funeral parades, which survive even today. Traditionally, a band assembles in front of the church and leads a slow procession to the cemetery, playing solemn marches and mournful hymns. On the way back to town, the pace quickens and fast, peppy marches and rags replace the dirges. These parades, always great crowd attractions, were important to the growth of Jazz. It was here that trumpeters and clarinetists would display their inventiveness and the drummers work out the rhythmic patterns that became the foundation for "swinging" the beat.

The best way to account for the early development of jazz in New Orleans is to familiarize yourself with the cultural and social history of this marvelously distinctive regional culture. One might say that jazz is the Americanization of the New Orleans music developed by the Creoles,

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