Archives for category: Music

The Rise of Bebop!

November 1, 2013 //

Joe’s History of Jazz
Lesson 4B
I’ve decided to add the tracks in this lesson to the Jazz 4 playlist covering the war years. Start with Charlie Parker’s Now’s The Time.

Bebop was the new style of jazz that came out of the breakup of the big bands, following the call-up. The progenitors of bebop include saxophonist Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker and trumpeters Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie. The style is characterized by chordal improvisation as opposed to the melodic improvisation of earlier jazz styles. Can I tell you precisely what this means in non-musical terms? Probably not, but “In Bebop an artist would be free to explore whatever improvised melody they saw fit, as long as it fit within the chord structure of the piece.” (emphasis mine)

Bird, Dizzy, Miles Parker claims to have come upon this kind of improvisation independently. “According to an interview Parker gave in the 1950s, one night in 1939, he was playing “Cherokee” in a jam session with guitarist William “Biddy” Fleet when he hit upon a method for developing his solos that enabled one of his main musical innovations. He realized that the twelve tones of the chromatic scale can lead melodically to any key, breaking some of the confines of simpler jazz soloing.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Parker#Bebop)

Because of the musicians’ strike discussed in the last post, there are few if any recordings of the first bebop performances. In November, 1945 Parker did a session for the Savoy label released under the name Charlie Parker’s Reboppers. This session also included Dizzy and Miles both on trumpet, Dizzy and Sadik Hakim on piano, drummer Max Roach, and Curly Russell on bass. These sides would probably have been released on 45s (and possibly 78s even this late). All clock in at less than 3 ½ minutes. You’re not going to get much of a feel for the improvisation going on, but the sound is a real leap from what jazz was holding onto during the war years.

Born in 1920, Parker started playing at the age of 11 and toured with Jay McShann from the age of 18 until McShann was drafted in 1944, and was 25 when these recordings were made.

Between 1945-48, Parker recorded 13 sessions for the Dial and Savoy labels. Ten of these included Miles (once with Miles as bandleader of The Miles Davis All-Stars). Listen to Lover Man – it’s not a very well-preserved recording, but the theme is introduced on piano, and when Parker comes in, he’s already improvising. It’s several bars before he gets to iterating the theme himself. At which point he’s off again. For a contrast, I’ve dropped in a recording of Billie Holiday performing the same song in the same year. (I’m pretty sure this one’s from her February 1946 Jazz at the Philharmonic performance.)

Dizzy performed in a number of bands from the the mid-30s onward, including a stint with Cab Calloway, who didn’t much like Dizzy’s approach to soloing, among other things. Dizzy was sacked in ’41 and worked freelance (including stints with Ella Fitzgerald, and writing for Jimmy Dorsey and Woody Herman).

The next bit of text I had to nick wholesale from the Wikipedia entry because it hits on the origins of bebop and where it sits in the continuum of jazz:

In 1943, Gillespie joined the Earl Hines band. Composer Gunther Schuller said:

… In 1943 I heard the great Earl Hines band which had Bird in it and all those other great musicians. They were playing all the flatted fifth chords and all the modern harmonies and substitutions and Gillespie runs in the trumpet section work. Two years later I read that that was ‘bop’ and the beginning of modern jazz … but the band never made recordings.^[9]

Gillespie said of the Hines band, “People talk about the Hines band being ‘the incubator of bop’ and the leading exponents of that music ended up in the Hines band. But people also have the erroneous impression that the music was new. It was not. The music evolved from what went before. It was the same basic music. The difference was in how you got from here to here to here … naturally each age has got its own shit”.^[10]

The Hines in question would be Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines we discussed back in the 1920s. Once again, we have that bloody musicians’ strike to blame for not having these essential sounds.

I’ve included several of Dizzy’s songs including “Night In Tunisia”, originally performed with Hines in the early 40s, and covered by dozens of artists.

What’s interesting about these recordings to me is primarily their exuberance. In addition, we have the elbow room Gillespie gives his band members – the longest cut here is only four minutes long but we still get vibraphone and piano solos before Dizzy pulls it all back in.

Between the 30s and the early 50s there was a two-block stretch of 52^nd Street (about half a mile) which featured about a dozen clubs. In the post-war period Gillespie taught and worked with a number of upcoming musicians, including the ones already mentioned, and Milt Jackson, John Coltrane, J.J. Johnson, and Yusef Lateef and regularly performed in Norman Granz’ Jazz at the Philharmonic(JATP) performances.

Granz was a producer and promoter who started the JATP series at the LA Philharmonic Auditorium in 1944. “The JATP concerts featured Swing and Bop musicians. They were among the first high-profile performances to feature racially integrated bands, and Granz cancelled some bookings rather than have the musicians perform for segregated audiences.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_at_the_Philharmonic) Happily almost all of these were recorded and released on various labels Granz owned or was contracted to. Tours of the US, Canada, and Europe ran through 1959. The Verve label released a 10-CD set of the complete 1944-49 tours. It’s a sweet collection. Check out Stompin’ at the Savoy, which may not be bebop, per se, but it’s notable for the lineup and the extended solos the various musicians are afforded, given the 12-minute length of the track:

Bass – Charles Mingus
Drums – Dave Coleman
Guitar – Dave Barbour
Piano – Milt Raskin
Tenor Saxophone – Coleman Hawkins, Corky Corcoran
Trumpet – Neal Hefti, Shorty Sherock

Hawkins you’ve met already, but Mingus would be huge – he toured with Louis Amstrong among others in the early 40s, taking a lot of inspiration from Parker’s techniques and would form his own band in the 50s. We’ll be hearing more from him in the next jazz lesson. The other notable member of this crew is Neil Hefti. He mainly played swing and big band music at the time, but made a name as an arranger and composer as well. In the mid-late 40s he played in Woody Herman’s First Herd which was focusing on bebop at the time, and to which he contributed arrangements. Later he found a lot of work in scoring films and TV. When mama Ru and I were kids, we were well familiar with his theme for the Batman series. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAstFcVDwiI ) I had no idea he’d been working that much earlier.

I note as I write, that today (August 6) would have been Granz’ 95^th birthday.

I mentioned Miles Davis a couple of times at the top of this lesson. One could defend the argument that between 1949 and 1975, there was no more important musician in jazz than Miles. His recordings, his bands and band leadership, his performances and his innovations continually reshaped the musical landscape.

The son of a dentist in Illinois, Miles started studying trumpet at the age of 13. By 17, he was sitting in with bands coming through town and was invited to tour with Billy Eckstine’s band (which featured Gillespie and Parker at the time). His parents insisted he continue with his studies. At 18, in 1944, he moved to New York to study at Julliard. He stayed a year, but as he was already gigging in Harlem and getting work, he asked his father’s permission to drop out.

In the mid-40s, as noted, he was recording and touring with Parker’s combos, but split from him in December, 1948. Through much of ’48, he’d been working on a project with arranger Gil Evans that culminated in the performances and recordings of the Miles Davis Nonet (nine-piece band) called The Birth of the Cool.

Cool Jazz tended to be sweeter and more melodic than bebop and was a conscious move away not only from bebop, but also from swing and the much earlier Hot Jazz. The nonet featured the piano and arrangements of another Gillespie alumnus, John Lewis, who would go on to form the Modern Jazz Quartet, saxophonists Gerry Mulligan and Lee Konitz, and drummer Max Roach. Yes, I know I’m just throwing out names, but trust me, we’re already seeing that Miles is pulling in young musicians who would go on to be the leading lights of jazz in the 50s and 60s. (I’m pretty sure the oldest of the nonet’s players during its 18-month lifespan was about 28.)

I’m sure there’s something to be said here about the integrated nature of the nonets, but suffice it to say that for Miles, the talent was everything, skin color – nothing.

Remember Gil Evans’ name, too – in the late 50s and early 60s, Davis recorded several albums with Evans’ orchestra, not one of which isn’t a classic.

Note Kenny Hagood’s vocal on Darn That Dream. This is one of only two vocals on Miles Davis-led recordings, the other being Bob Dorough’s Nothing Like on 1967’s The Sorcerer.

I occasionally mention labels – the nonet made the Birth of the Cool recordings between January 1949 and April 1950 for Capitol, but these were not released until 1956. In the meantime, Davis made several recordings under contract to the Prestige label, and recorded several sessions for Blue Note (released as Volume 1 and Volume 2), and then signed to Columbia. Davis recorded almost exclusively for Columbia for over 30 years.

Tags charlie parker, dizzy gillespie, jazz at the philharmonic, miles davis

Categories Jazz

Jazz Goes to War

October 21, 2013 //

Joe’s History of Jazz
Lesson 4A
Jazz Goes to War
NB: There are three entries in my look at jazz in the 40s, and the playlist covering all three is linked below. This entry covers the first 13 tracks, though I don’t reference them by name for the most part.

The early 40s might be the last period during which jazz was entirely a pop affair. Going back to Dixieland, it was always possible to take the edge off of a jazz song and make it more palatable. This isn’t a bad thing, in my opinion, but it made for accessibility. Note, also, that by the late 30s, the main/high-earning swing acts were white, and they tended to make the music easy on the ear.

I’m being a little obtuse here – there have always been artists and movements in jazz that take the edge off. In the late 60s and early 70s, for example, the term ‘fusion’ was used to describe a jazz-rock hybrid (like many things in jazz, fusion was pioneered by Miles Davis and his band mates). By the 80s, fusion was almost easy listening and synonymous with the ‘quiet storm’ radio format. I get ahead of myself, but there have always been efforts to make difficult music easy on the ears (and difficult art easy on the eyes, and exotic cuisines easy on the tongue).

There were several threads of jazz during the years of World War 2. The biggest of the big bands often ended up in the USO or at least toured the fronts playing for the troops. But there was a draft and membership in a band wasn’t a dispensation from service. Jack Teagarden lost 17 men to the army in just four months.

And at home there was a 20% entertainment tax imposed – this led to the closing of many of the ballrooms.

The big names continued to play – Glenn Miller for example, toured up until September 1942, announcing at a show in Passaic, New Jersey that he’d be joining the war effort. From then until his death over the English Channel in December of 1944 he served as music director in various military organizations, performing over 800 shows and making many recordings at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios. On the one hand Miller took criticism for draining jazz of its feeling. On the other, many considered the big band era over when Miller joined the war effort. It Must Be Jelly (Cause Jam Don’t Shake Like That) was first recorded by Miller, but underneath Miller’s slick delivery, the song is something more akin to early Louis Armstrong, or Slim & Slam. The St. Louis Blues March was an attempt by Miller to update military music, by taking on a song we already know was made popular about 30 years before.

It would take a bit of research, but I figure the role of Armed Forces Radio in the history of American music could use some discussion. Acts including Count Basie recorded Command Performances throughout the war. My Old Radio (www.myoldradio.com) seems to have quite an archive of these. In the introduction to Basie’s 1943 broadcast, the announcer says “We deal in all kinds of performance: Boogie woogie, symphony, and corny. Also jokes, new, used, and stale. Don’t delay, write today.” Count Basie’s “Dance of the Gremlins” starts at 4:40 here.

Side note: Gremlins were creatures that tinkered with aircraft. Roald Dahl (who flew for the RAF in WWII wrote a story about them, there’s also an episode of the Twilight Zone and a 1943 Bugs Bunny cartoon, ‘Falling Hare’ which defines gremlins as “a constant menace to pilots…who wreck planes with die-uh-boh-lickle sab-o-tay-gee” and also makes a poke at gas rationing.)

Adding to the issues with performing during the war – the entertainment tax, the rationing of rubber and fuel (not to mention the shellac used to make records!), and so forth, there was also a musicians’ strike that lasted from July 1942 to November 1944. The musicians struck over royalties the record companies paid to artists. Musicians didn’t record, but vocalists did and records made before the strike (and during the strike with non-striking vocalists performing the roles of striking musicians) sold quite well. “Over the long term the record companies were not hurt by the strike. In 1941, 127 million records were sold; in 1946, two years after the strike, that number jumped to 275 million and it jumped higher in 1947 to 400 million.” [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1942%E2%80%9344_musicians%27_strike#Consequences]

Note that the strike only had to do with recordings – the main distribution of music moved from live performances and sheet music to both recordings and radio. In 1940, 96% of urban northern households had radios, and even in the rural south, 50% of households had a radio. Those command performances were just a small part of the number of broadcast performances made at the time.

Musicians who continued to have success in the war years included drummer Gene Krupa who made a cameo in the 1941 Barbara Stanwyck film Ball of Fire with his track Drum Boogie (in the playlist sung by Anita O’Day). And it’s also Krupa’s great tom toms on Benny Goodman’s Sing Sing Sing. (Yeah, than song is from ’34, but listen to those drums!) Krupa had been performing since the 20s and in the 30s played with Goodman, but led his own band in the 40s (shrunk down from an earlier orchestra). He’s an example of the older musicians touring because the young men were almost all in uniform.

And with the men all in uniform, all-girl bands toured raising money for war bonds, among other things. One such group was the well-integrated International Sweethearts of Rhythm who toured the entire country, but when in the Jim Crow South had to eat, sleep, and rehearse on their tour bus because no hotel would admit both black and white band members. What such places would have made of the group’s Asian members, I don’t know. (The Apr/May 2013 issue of Bust Magazine has a great article on this crew called No Man’s Band. Alas, not available online.)

Over in Europe, the Nazis banned jazz in the occupied countries, but it managed to thrive. The German propaganda minister called jazz “the art of the subhuman”, but later retooled swing tunes with anti-Jewish, anti-American lyrics. There was, in fact, a jazz group at the Terezin concentration camp which was filmed as part of propaganda insisting that the concentration camps were humane. While trying to find music by the Ghetto Swingers or Eric Vogel, two elements of jazz at Terezin, I found a short film in Italian. I have no idea about the text or whether the music is representative, but it’s still quite moving. The Nazis made a piece of propaganda for the Red Cross in which the Ghetto Swingers performed portraying the concentration camp as more of a resort. (After the film was made, most of those in it were deported to Auschwitz.) The film is available online, but I’ll just link to an audio snippet of their verison of Bei mir du bist schön, made popular in the US by the Andrews Sisters.

Next up: The Rise of Bebop!

Tags Gene Krupa, Glenn Miller, International Sweethearts of Rhythm, Jack Teagarden

Categories Jazz, Music

The Swing Era – Part 2

October 1, 2013 //

Joe’s History of Jazz
Lesson 3B – The Swing Era – Part 2

In the previous entry, I should have made reference to the 1927 film The Jazz Singer. This picture is notable for a number of reasons. Primarily, it was the first full-length movie with synchronized sound and images, and is generally called the first ‘talkie’. From what I gather, the plot goes something like this: son of a cantor doesn’t want to follow in dad’s footsteps, he wants to sing jazz. Son wants one thing; dad wants another. Big disagreement follows, but with some kind of reconciliation at the end. Jolson, himself a nice Jewish boy from Lithuania (who grew up in DC, as did much of my family) performed in blackface both in his own act and in the movie. The thing is, Jolson didn’t actually sing (much) jazz. Coming out of the early 20^th century vaudeville scene, he used his strong tenor mostly in the service of sentimental ballads. Even his version of Alexander’s Ragtime Band seems to have the jazz feeling drained from it.

(Side note A: The release of The Jazz Singer is the crux of the action in Singin’ In The Rain. Gene Kelly’s character is working on a silent film that takes place in pre-revolution France (if I recall correctly) and the studio says, because of The Jazz Singer’s success, Kelly’s new film has to be a talkie too. His co-star however, has a lousy Brooklyn accent she can’t overcome.)

(Side note B: The 1980 remake starring Neil Diamond also features little music that could be called jazz. Diamond, another nice Jewish boy, sings pop and rock in his main career and didn’t stretch it out for the movie either. That said, I skip tracked the soundtrack while I was writing this, and it’s really quite good stuff.)

Jolson performed in several other movies, including The Singing Kid with Cab Calloway in which he and Calloway sang a parody of the Jolson style called I Love To Singa. Calloway started performing in the 20s, but hit it big in the 30s at (among other places) the Cotton Club, where his band stood in for a touring Duke Ellington. He recorded throughout the 30s (and beyond), but his first hit was 1931’s Minnie the Moocher, which he was still performing in the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers. I’ve also included a big band recording of his track Jumpin’ Jive which served as the title track for new wave singer Joe Jackson’s exploration of jump and swing music in 1981. (That’s not entirely fair – Jackson’s early albums are distinctly new wave, but from 1982’s Night and Day onward, he refused pigeonholing.)

Meanwhile, across the pond, jazz was going in a different direction in Paris where guitarist Jean “Django” Reinhardt formed Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934 with violinist Stephane Grapelli. A lot has been written about Django’s style which was influenced by having lost two fingers on his left hand as a result of a fire that burned much of his body. He had to re-teach himself how to play and created fingerings that used two fingers instead of the four that most guitarists use. The Quintette, interestingly, was originally made up of string players who would use their instruments to add percussion. Horns and piano are present on many recordings, however.

You can get a feeling listening to Django’s take on WC Handy’s St. Louis Blues (performed by Louis Armstrong back in lesson 1) of how jazz evolves. Parts of it feel like a tango, and very little of it feels like the blues anymore.

According to Wikipedia, the Quintette performed and recorded with a number of American musicians who visited Paris in the 30s including Coleman Hawkins and a “jam session and radio performance” with Louis Armstrong. A quick web search for a surviving recording of this session has yielded no results.

Slim Gaillard, another interesting cat who got his musical start in the 30s, first recorded as half of the duo Slim and Slam with bassist Slam Stewart. Their first hit was Flat Foot Floogie, which was covered by several others including Benny Goodman. Gaillard continued to perform well into 1980s (including an appearance in the 1986 film Absolute Beginners). Gaillard is notable primarily for his humour and for singing in several different languages, including Yiddish and Vout, a language of his own invention for which he wrote a dictionary. I’ve also included Ferdinand the Bull, which seems to have been inspired by the book we all know and love. Pay particular attention to how Slam’s bowed bass solo sounds almost like a Dixieland trombone solo.

Stewart would go on to work with notables including pianists Art Tatum and Erroll Garner, Benny Goodman, and Fats Waller. We’ll hear more from these combos in the next entry.

Gaillard wasn’t necessarily a key figure in jazz, but he (along with Calloway and Louis Jordan in the jump/swing world) answer Frank Zappa’s musical question Does humour belong in music very much in the affirmative. As jazz evolves, it’s easy to lose sight of the humour as technique, improvisation, and the journey through the music seem to overtake the joy that intrinsic in the making of the music.

One player who straddles the swing and post-swing eras is the aforementioned Art Tatum who had been playing for several years and earning the interest of musicians such as Ellington, Armstrong, and Fletch Henderson. I’m pretty sure his first recordings are the ones here with Adelaide Hall. It’s a little tough, but try to listen to the piano behind Hall’s vocal gymnastics on You Gave Me Everything But Love. Later on, Tatum eschewed playing in groups in favour of solo work, feeling that others couldn’t really keep up with him.

I’ve had the following paragraphs about music publishing waiting to be used for several weeks, but haven’t been able to incorporate it into my looks into the various artists and their interconnections. The main thing is that bands and singers brought jazz to popular compositions – the products of the Brill Building and other Tin Pan Alley houses weren’t necessarily jazz to start with.

Tin Pan Alley – Wikipedia shares that in the Big Band era, the song publishers in places like the Brill Building would send “song pluggers” to the white band leaders and to radio stations to sell the latest songs. So bands like Goodman’s, the Dorseys’, and Miller’s got first crack at songs composed there by folks like the Gershwins, Johnny Mercer, and Irving Berlin. The thing about Tin Pan Alley, though, is that the songwriters/lyricists/composers worked in whatever idiom was popular. Broadway, movie revues (think Ziegfeld Follies, for example) and the Big Bands, the popular (pop) music of the 30s and 40s. Later Tin Pan Alley efforts would be more in the pop vocal realm. Acts like the Drifters (On Broadway), Neil Sedaka (Calendar Girl), and The Monkees (Pleasant Valley Sunday, I’m a Believer) all had hits with Brill Building songs. (Another sidenote to bring this full circle – Neil Diamond, who wrote I’m A Believer and three other Monkees hits, was a Brill Building song writer before his own hits as well.)

Next time, Big Bands Go To War!

Tags brill building, django reinhardt, jazz, slim gaillard, swing

Categories Jazz, Music

The Swing Era – Part 1

September 22, 2013 //

Joe’s History of Jazz
Jazz 3A – The Swing Era Part 1

Historically, the 1930s are called The Great Depression, which began with the crash of the stock market in October, 1929. The exuberance of the Jazz Age started to drain away with the fortunes of much of the country, though the repeal of the 18^th Amendment ending Prohibition in December of 1933 breathed new life into the scene.

The recording industry, at the onset of the Depression went into great decline and really didn’t pick up again until about 1935 when Swing really took off. In Jazz history, the decade of the 1930s is called The Swing Era and the Age of the Big Bands. In fact, the popularity of swing music continues all the way through WWII.

Duke Ellington, who makes a national name for himself in this period, is joined by Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, and Glenn Miller. In Paris at this time, we see a European jazz sound emerge with such names as Django Reinhardt, Stephane Grappelli, and Josephine Baker adding to the chanson of Edith Piaf.

It’s hard to pin swing down. Technically, this form features “accented triplets (shuffle rhythm), suitable for dancing” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_time#Transcription). Swing time (in terms of time signature) indicates 6/8, 9/8 or 12/8, though an argument is made that that the shuffle rhythm applied to music played in common time (4/4, but you knew that) is sufficient. It’s the swing feel that matters. The steps in swing dancing (to the extent that I managed to learn them) involve counts of 4.

Swing music comes from three distinct angles:

Musicians and band leaders themselves composed their own tunes,
Ellington, Dorsey, Miller’s In The Mood
Bands arranging songs originally composed for Broadway shows in the swing style,
The Gershwins’ songs from Girl Crazy were especially popular in the early 30s; many of Cole Porter’s Broadway songs were jazz hits (and continue to be standards).
Composers from outside both of those threads – Tin Pan Alley in Manhattan where professional songwriters had their offices dating back to the 1880s. Noted Tin Pan Alley composers include the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Jerome (Show Boat) Kern, and Porter.
Not far away from Tin Pan Alley sits the Brill Building where Goffin and King, Lieber and Stoller, Greenwich and Barry, Sonny Bono, Pomus and Shuman, and Phil Spector composed hits in the 50s and 60s. (There’s a playlist to be had just of the fantastic songs to come out of that one piece of real estate. I’m pretty sure at least one recent Broadway musical was inspired by those songs).

Clarinettist and band leader Benny Goodman (tracks 1-4) was known as The King of Swing. Interestingly, Goodman (born in 1909) was the son of a Polish tailor and a Lithuanian girl who met in Baltimore before moving to Chicago. As a Chicago teenager, he was in a band with Bix Biederbecke. In the late 1920s he recorded in bands with Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey and in the early 30s made recordings with (among others) drummer Gene Krupa, and vocalists Jack Teagarden and Billie Holiday.)

In 1934, Goodman contracted with NBC to perform on the weekly Let’s Dance program. In order to have enough music, he arranged to purchase swing arrangements from composer/bandleader Fletcher Henderson. King Porter Stomp (track 1) was a hit in 1935.

Now before reading the Wikipedia article on Benny Goodman, I was familiar with his work – I had a few albums including 1956 recordings of two Mozart pieces for clarinet recorded with the Boston Symphony. I even taped a postcard image of Goodman to my clarinet case (I took lessons in the 90s from a member of the SF Opera’s orchestra – alas not a smidge of his talent rubbed off on me). That said, I had not heard of this breakthrough 1938 performance at Carnegie Hall (The following is lifted right from Wikipedia – there’s no escaping the full original quote):

The concert began with three contemporary numbers from the Goodman band—”Don’t Be That Way,” “Sometimes I’m Happy,” and “One O’Clock Jump.” They then played a history of jazz, starting with a Dixieland quartet performing “Sensation Rag”, originally recorded by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1918. Once again, initial crowd reaction, though polite, was tepid. Then came a jam session on “Honeysuckle Rose” featuring members of the Count Basie and Duke Ellington bands as guests. (The surprise of the session: Goodman handing a solo to Basie’s guitarist Freddie Green who was never a featured soloist but earned his reputation as the best rhythm guitarist in the genre—he responded with a striking round of chord improvisations.) As the concert went on, things livened up. The Goodman band and quartet took over the stage and performed the numbers that had already made them famous. Some later trio and quartet numbers were well-received, and a vocal on “Loch Lomond” by Martha Tilton provoked five curtain calls and cries for an encore. The encore forced Goodman to make his only audience announcement for the night, stating that they had no encore prepared but that Martha would return shortly with another number.

By the time the band got to the climactic piece “Sing, Sing, Sing“, success was assured. This performance featured playing by tenor saxophonist Babe Russin, trumpeter Harry James, and Benny Goodman, backed by drummer Gene Krupa. When Goodman finished his solo, he unexpectedly gave a solo to pianist Jess Stacy. “At the Carnegie Hall concert, after the usual theatrics, Jess Stacy was allowed to solo and, given the venue, what followed was appropriate,” wrote David Rickert. “Used to just playing rhythm on the tune, he was unprepared for a turn in the spotlight, but what came out of his fingers was a graceful, impressionistic marvel with classical flourishes, yet still managed to swing. It was the best thing he ever did, and it’s ironic that such a layered, nuanced performance came at the end of such a chaotic, bombastic tune.”^[27]

This concert has been regarded as one of the most significant in jazz history. After years of work by musicians from all over the country, jazz had finally been accepted by mainstream audiences. Recordings were made of this concert, but even by the technology of the day the equipment used was not of the finest quality. Acetate recordings of the concert were made, and aluminum studio masters were also cut.

That would have been something to attend. After learning of these recordings, I didn’t listen to much else for a while. One O’Clock Jump was a signature tune for Count Basie and Sing Sing Sing became (and might already have been) Goodman’s own signature tune.

One thing to listen for in the three tracks I’ve selected is that you can feel the swing in the mid-tempo arrangement of One O’Clock Jump, the relatively slow Body and Soul and the very fast Swingtime in the Rockies.

New Jersey native William James “Count” Basie (tracks 5 and 6) spent the mid-20s cutting his teeth on the vaudeville circuit. In the 30s his band featured vocalist Billie Holiday who already had a career in her own right. Sadly they never recorded together. From his early recordings, I’ve shared Roseland Shuffle and his own take on One O’Clock Jump.

Duke Ellington, who you’ve already met, spent the early 30s primarily performing on radio and on tour. That said, he had hits in this period, notably with It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing [track 7]). This would be a signature number for Ellington long into his career (a 1961 recording with Louis Armstrong is particularly tasty) as well as for artists including Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald. (And the phrase “it don’t mean a thing” sneaks into some weird places including industrial band Skinny Puppy’s 1996 song Death.)

Vocalists

I’m not sure the addition of vocalists to swing/jazz acts was anything that new in the 30s. What may be new is that many of the vocalists in the 30s and later (as noted regarding Billie Holiday above) started as guests with existing acts went on to have careers of their own.

Ethel Waters (track 8) actually got her start in the teens, working the same clubs as Bessie Smith. In the 20s, she sang both pop and blues. (Columbia had a ‘race music’ series – it’s probable that all the big labels separated music marketed to whites from music marketed to others. Billboard, prior to the rock and roll era had ‘race music’ charts.) In the 30s she sang at the Cotton Club as well as in an Irving Berlin Broadway revue.

Smith was still touring in the early 30s, though in some obscurity. Her last recordings were made with John Hammond (who was starting to record Billie Holiday at the same time) in 1933 and these sessions included some attempts at swing, but Hammond himself preferred the blues work in these sessions and those are the sides that were released. Bennie Goodman and Jack Teagarden are both listed as performing on these sessions. (tracks 9-12)

Hammond’s an interesting one to bring in. He’d recently graduated Yale (and in 1933 this meant you were male and white), but insisted when he could on using integrated bands on his records and pushed white band leaders to bring in black musicians. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_H._Hammond#Career) He made his name primarily as a producer, and almost exclusively for the Columbia label to which he signed such talents as Holiday, and later Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and (after his retirement) Stevie Ray Vaughn.

Billie’s recordings in the 30s, however, were mostly for smaller labels, but under her own name. Indeed, at one time the name on the records was Billie Holiday and Her Orchestra. In 1937 she did sweet versions of the Gershwins’ Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off and They Can’t Take That Away From Me (the latter usually associated with Sinatra though many have recorded it). (tracks 13 and 14)

Louis Prima, a trumpeter and vocalist who would continue to record and perform swing music well into the 1960s made his first recordings in the mid-30s with Joe Venuti and later with Pee Wee Russell before forming the Louis Prima Jump Band. (Perhaps you know the song I Wanna Be Like You from Disney’s The Jungle Book? Yeah, that’d be Louis Prima as the king of the orangutans.) (tracks 15-17)

In 1939, Harry James (a trumpeter in that Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall show) contracted a young Frank Sinatra to sing with his orchestra. They recorded a number of tracks, that year, but in November of that year, James released Sinatra from his contract so that he could accept an offer from the much bigger Tommy Dorsey. (track 18)

In the next instalment we’ll hear from Reinhardt and Grapelli, Cab Calloway, Ella Fitzgerald, Al Jolson and quite a few others.

Tags bennie goodman, cab calloway, Duke Ellington, john hammond, louis prima

Categories Jazz, Music

Jazz Origins

September 2, 2013 //

Earlier this year I started compiling a history of jazz at the request of my nieces in California. So far there are six lessons which bring us through the rise of Bebop.I hope to post them here on a regular schedule, but knowing me. A lot of my facts are garnered from that font of all wisdom, Wikipedia. I try to source my quotes and factoids, but occasionally I fail. Apologies in advance. Comments, corrections, criticisms, and questions are always welcome.

Note also that the target audience for these posts are a pair of teenagers. Sometimes I’ll sound like a junior high school teacher.

Joe’s History of Jazz
Lesson 1
Jazz Origins

A music critic (whose name is lost to history) once noted that “talking about music is like singing about economics.” In the 70s this was updated to “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” (http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/11/08/writing-about-music/) The fact remains that learning about music is best done in the experience of music.

The origins of jazz can be traced to the music of pre-abolition slave gatherings, post-abolition minstrel shows, and the interchanges in the late 19th century between African-American musicians and those who had developed Afro-Caribbean musical forms. (A twice-daily ferry ran between New Orleans and Havana at the time. My guess is this ferry ran until Castro’s revolution in 1959.) The big difference between the two is that slaves in the American south where not allowed to use drums, whereas Africans in the Caribbean were able to maintain the drumming traditions brought over from Africa.

It starts in New Orleans, though others might argue that St. Louis, MO deserves the credit. Others will argue for Memphis. Later on, jazz will have centers all over the US – Chicago, New York, San Francisco, even Los Angeles (a most un-jazzy town, if you ask me). There are periods, one could argue, in which the purest jazz could only be found in Europe. Mind you, “pure” jazz sounds to be almost an oxymoron. Jazz is muddy, crazy, claims multiple inheritance, and is very hard to pin down.

The earliest recognizable jazz music includes ragtime and the blues in the 1890s and Dixieland from the period around World War I, though the forms of ragtime appeared as early as 1860 (!) in the music of a half-Jewish, half-Creole gent from New Orleans named Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Gottschalk performed extensively throughout the US, Caribbean, and South America before his death in 1869 (track 1).

Note that the term ‘ragtime’ does not indicate a time signature (as waltz time is 3/4, for example). “The defining characteristic of ragtime music is a specific type of syncopation in which melodic accents occur between metrical beats.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragtime#Musical_form)

While Scott Joplin is the best-known proponent today of ragtime, he was far from the only one (and Joplin himself was prolific in other musical forms as well, including opera). Tom Turpin’s Harlem Rag (track 4), for example, was the first rag published by an African American. Whole books on the subject of music publishing have been written and much of the history of popular music is wrapped up in publishing and rights ownership. Suffice it to say that in the 1890s, publishing referred primarily to sheet music. Vess Ossman, a white banjo player and dance band leader, recorded popular versions of rags in the first decade of the 20th century, including the Buffalo Rag (track 3), another Tom Turpin composition. The Mississippi Rag (track 2), is considered the first ragtime composition, was published in 1897.

W.C. Handy was one of the first to document the blues, which evolved out of 19th century spirituals and work songs, publishing St. Louis Blues (track 9) in 1912. She’s a Mean Job Blues and Gulf Coast Blues (tracks 7 and 8) are examples of Handy’s own work. I preferred Armstrong’s take on St. Louis Blues to the Handy recording I found.

Other early published blues songs include Jelly Roll Morton’s Jelly Roll Blues (track 5, a band version featuring banjo and clarinet, and track 6 a solo piano version, composed 1905, published 1915). To my ears, however, this is more ragtime than blues.

“The basic 12-bar lyric framework of a blues composition is reflected by a standard harmonic progression of 12 bars in a 4/4 time signature. The blues chords associated to a twelve-bar blues are typically a set of three different chords played over a 12-bar scheme.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blues#Form) Note also the AAB rhyme scheme in vocal blues.

Memphis Blues (track 10) is sometimes considered the first published blues, it’s also argued to be more of a cakewalk, one of the precursors of ragtime. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz#Within_the_context_of_Western_harmony) I’d argue that Handy’s St. James Infirmary (track 11) straddles blues and what became jazz better than some of Handy’s other songs.

Dixieland includes elements of both blues and ragtime and is sometimes called Early Jazz or Hot Jazz. Louis Armstrong had early combos called the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, perhaps for this reason. (You’ll hear Armstrong’s name a lot in these little essays as he was one of the earliest jazz performers and had a long and prolific career.) “The term Dixieland became widely used after the advent of the first million-selling hit records of the Original Dixieland Jass Band in 1917.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixieland#History) You can hear both ragtime and blues in their recordings. It seems to me that Satanic Blues (track 12) is really neither, but it sounds almost as quintessentially Dixieland as When the Saints Go Marching In.

When the Saints Go Marching In (track 13) was traditionally a funeral march. In the funeral music tradition of New Orleans, often called the “jazz funeral”, a band accompanying the coffin to the cemetery would play The Saints as a dirge. On the way back, the band would switch to the familiar “hot” or “Dixieland” style. You can hear a small taste of that dirge in Pete Fountain’s version, though I have heard versions which make the distinction much clearer.

Next: The Jazz Age.

Categories Jazz, Music