Online Jazz History Journal
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Reflections on Jazz
When I entered this class, I knew that jazz began as a specifically African American form of music. Other than that, I didn't know much about jazz other than names I heard growing up as the greatest jazz players: Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk. These names were my reference point for jazz. What I didn't realize until after taking this course is how much jazz both musically, socially, and historically relies on collaboration. Because jazz music has often emerged out of collaboration of different individuals and their personal styles, jazz is expressive of the community around it. But the concept that really took this concept to the next level for me was the idea of jazz as dialogue. Before taking this class, I would have assumed that jazz music was reflexive of the culture of the environment in which it was create. What was new for me was the other ways in which the spaces and cities developed due to the emergence and growing popularity of jazz. Specifically, jazz had a major impact on the race relations in Chicago, New York, and Kansas City. This dialogic aspect of jazz also greatly influenced jazz musicians and geniuses who would not have been able to flourish had they had not had both the support and diverse influences of their communities. This again emphasizes the importance of collaboration in jazz music. Jazz shaped the cities it developed in and the people who listened to it socially, culturally, economically, and historically. Before taking this class, I hadn't realized that a form of musical expression could have such serious effects on the history of people and communities. The fact that jazz did this for so many people and had such a large social impact is due to its expressive qualities and role as the first African American produced entertainment to enter the conscious of American popular culture.
Monday, March 4, 2013
The Unique Sound and Vision of Thelonious Monk
Thelonious
Monk had a much wider perspective of racial issues than many of his
contemporaries who responded solely to the tension between blacks and
whites. He had no desire to “go through
that Black Power shit now,” because he felt that he had already transcended traditional
racial politics through his music and his worldview. Instead, Monk’s playing
was characterized by unique influences from his diverse community in San Juan
Hill. San Juan Hill was so unique in
that its racial tensions were not just between blacks and whites but between
many different blacks and many different whites. There were race issues between the Irish,
Italians, and Germans (Kelley 18) as well as between blacks from the South,
native black New Yorkers, and immigrants from the Caribbean (Kelley 19). These more specific distinctions of ethnicity
and culture made Monk feel that each block was “another country”. This complicated Monk’s perspective on race as
not so clearly “black” and “white”. And
because it was “mean all over,” it was up to the individual to distinguish
himself and create his own community. This community enabled Monk to be the
unique individual both in his personal life and in his music.
Monk’s
success embodies the phrase “It takes a village to raise a child”. However, in his case, the word “village”
should be replaced by “community,” and
“child” by “genius”. As a child in San Juan Hill, Monk had exposure
to many different cultures from which he could build his community, or
“village”. He spent most of his time in
church and at the Columbus Hill Neighborhood Center (Kelley 28). These were both places where people could
come together in an all-inclusive setting to build extensive networks that
served as larger families in the intensity of New York.
These
places provided inspiration for Monk musically as well. As a child, Monk learned gospel tendencies
and sang with his mother in church. Another big influence on his musical
development were his piano teachers.
Simon Wolf was a Jewish Austrian immigrant who also lived in San Juan
hill and taught him classical piano (Kelley 26). Simeltaneously, Monk also learned stride
piano from another pianist in his community, Alberta Simmons. In addition to these specific influences, the
music being played in the streets and apartment buildings ranging in origin
from the Carribean to the South gave Monk an ear for very different styles of
music happening at the same time. This
later led to aspects of his distinct, dissonant sound. It was in this way that the diverse elements
and sounds of San Juan Hill effected Monk’s music.
The
way that Thelonious Monk opted out of mainstream jazz and instead created his
own very unique sound of Bebop is similar to how he ignored typical racial
stigmas on the national scale and instead created and reacted to his own
communities on the micro scale. I think
that this came from recognizing community at an early age as learning something
from those living around you. Monk’s
community shaped him by surrounding him with different musical sounds and the
understanding of community as something beyond skin color or a family
name. In turn, Monk’s art fostered a
community that was not fragmented by racial tensions but used different
cultures to form a multi-faceted ideology and musical sound.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
New Orleans and the Birth of Jazz
Blog Entry 1: New Orleans and the Birth of Jazz
When
slaves were to America from Africa, they brought with them distinct African
cultural traditions in music and dance.
These traditions, combined with other influences specific to New Orleans
and this point in history, produced jazz at the start of the 20th
century.
New
Orleans has a long and multi-faceted historical connection to African music and
cultural tendencies that distinctly encouraged and guided the development of
jazz. In this entry, I will discuss the
qualities of New Orleans that created jazz music beginning with Congo Square
and ending with the emergence of legends like Buddy Bolden and Jelly Roll
Morton.
New
Orleans’ unique conditions that would later allow the development of jazz began
before Louisiana was even American territory.
The main distinction between New Orleans in the eighteenth century and
other American cities, was the French and Spanish rule and their differing
viewpoints on the status of slaves. Catholic
French and Spanish settlers believed that slaves had souls that could be saved
which differed from the American understanding of slaves as property, and
therefore not human (Stewart). This
differentiation allowed a relatively more liberal environment in New Orleans in
which allowed slave culture and African musical tradition to, at times, exist
openly. An example of this was Congo Square, where on Sundays slaves were
allowed to play traditional African instruments, sing, and dance. This was perhaps one of the first occurrences
of “syncretism”, the merging of features from different cultures that were
previously separated. Gioia claims that historical accounts of Congo Square “provide
us with a real time and place, an actual transfer of the totally African ritual
to the soil of the New World” (Gioia, 4).
As he asserts that these purely African traditions played a significant
role in fostering jazz, Gioia is also clear that the “the Latin-Catholic
culture, whose influence permeated nineteenth-century New Orleans, benignly
fostered the development of jazz music…the music and dances of Congo Square
would not have been allowed in the more Anglicized colonies of the
Americas”(Gioia, 6). Without the more
Europeanized view of slaves that allowed for outlets like Congo Square to
exist, African musical traditions would not have combined with other factors to
create jazz.
Some of
the principles of African music can still be noticed in jazz music. One of these qualities is Ephebism: the power
that comes from youth. This youthful
energy is apparent when African dancers “step inside rhythms which are young
and strong and to this extent their bodies are generalized by vital rhythmic
impulse.”(Thompson, 7). This African youthful
“swing”, is also present in jazz music which was most popular with young people
when it began. Young people enjoyed jazz because of its loose and
improvisational qualities. Such
characteristics, especially syncopation, can be traced back trough African
roots as well, as “African style art and music forms are enlivened by off-beat
phrasing of the accents”(Thompson, 10).
The one
factor that is perhaps most important in the development of jazz was the
presence of black Creoles in New Orleans. Creoles were racially mixed Europeans
who identified more with their white ancestors. After post-Civil War
reconstruction, Creoles were viewed as black and viewed the same as other black
former slaves and port workers. These
Creoles were technically trained in European classical music. When they began taking classical melodies and
syncopating them, they created Ragtime.
This music was another example of cultural syncretism as whites took
Ragtime music and channeled it into minstrelsy. Gioia argues that along with
work songs and the development of the blues, “Minstrel music presents a rather
confoluted situation: a black imitation of a white caricature of black music
exerts its influence on another hybrid form of African and European music
(Gioia, 8). Without the influence of the
Creoles and their variations on the classic European melodies, jazz would not
have existed.
Similarly,
work songs originated during the days of slavery and later prompted The Blues. When jobs at the New Orleans port became available
after reconstruction, many blacks moved to live and work in a more liberal
city. They brought with them the sound
of the blues. The combination of the
blues and ragtime birthed jazz. This
combination could only have been possible in a city such as New Orleans in
which the diversity of people and tradition created a “gumbo” that, similar to
jazz, was made up of many specific yet essential influences.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Racial Factors of The Swing Era
As jazz entered the mainstream in the 1930’s, more white bandleaders and critics began to emerge. Race became an explicit subject matter during the “Swing Era” due to the popularity of the music, its newfound availability to whites, and the revolutionary popular front that taught anti-racism as an extension of the communist ideology. These developments led to race dialogues being publicized across the country and not just within black communities.
The popularization of jazz across racial borders began in Chicago when white musicians like the Austin High Gang dared to enter black jazz venues in the South side and attempted to replicate the music they heard there. This imitation started to popularize jazz within white communities. Though the appropriation of jazz angered many black musicians who weren’t getting credit for their innovations, the invention of the radio in the early 1930’s provided opportunity. When listeners all across the nation began to enjoy and appreciate jazz over the radio, white audiences could not distinguish between white and black musicians (Gioia, 129). Radio created an important desegregated national stage for the further popularization of jazz.
Still, spaces in which musicians performed were still extremely racially divided.. Competition was a key asset in sparking racial dialogue in the 30’s. As black and white bandleaders and musicians populated New York, the question emerged as to which race played better jazz music. This question was actualized in 1937 when Benny Goodman’s band battled Chick Webb’s on the stage of the desegregated Savoy club in Harlem. This event was important because most people in attendance thought that Webb beat Goodman’s band in terms of playing better swing. This proved that black jazz was comparable if not better than jazz played by whites.
The inequity of opportunity for blacks to book higher-brow venues persisted. Although Webb had beaten the “King of Swing” in a desegregated black space which opened its doors to whites attending the competition, black musicians like Webb still were unable to book high-brow venues which still booked shows according to lines of race and class rather than musical talent. An example of this was Goodman’s performance at Carnegie Hall in 1938. Even after being shown up at the Savoy a year earlier, Goodman still had the privilege of playing the first jazz show at Carnegie because he was white (Gioia, 142). What started as an issue for blacks getting cheated out of their music in seedy South Side clubs of Chicago publically took the main stage in the 1930’s. Mainstream media also responded to the question of race’s role in the music. A musical tradition that had previously been looked down upon by most whites was now written about by emerging white jazz critics like John Hammond. Hammond explicitly commented on the dialogue between whites and blacks within the context of jazz. This created a duality between the white critic and the black musician “because the majority of jazz critics are white middlebrows, most jazz criticism tends to enforce white middle-brow standards of excellence as criteria for performance of a music that in its most profound manifestations is completely antithetical to such standards” (Jones, lecture slides).
The white jazz critic was a product of the popular-front political movement happening at the time. The Swing Era happened at the same time as the Great Depression. Simultaneously, the Soviet Union’s dedication to Communism was appealing to those frustrated with America’s Capitalist system. The Communist party in America saw anti-racism as similar to anti-fascism, one of the cornerstones of the communist party. Thus, the Popular Front fostered radical white Leftists who learned anti-racism through “an appreciation of black culture and history” (Lecture, 2.14.13). This produced white allies of blacks and their culture like Hammond who had trouble navigating racial issues with his writing because he was affiliated though not fully embedded in the same reality as the black musician (Stewart, 2.14.13).
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
The Development of Jazz in the Harlem Crucible
The
dialogue between music and society in New York during the 1920’s resulted in
not just the culture of Harlem affecting jazz, but the music influencing the
social and spatial development of the city (Bakhtin). The key quality that differentiated New
York’s jazz from Chicago’s was the existence of multiple different
cultures and social and economic conditions within the black community. The
combination of affluent and lower-class blacks sharing the same space in
addition to the new commercialization of jazz paved the road for dualities in
jazz music and culture that were unique to New York. These dualities included the development of
both “hot” and “cool” styles, through the forms of both piano-based stride
and big-band ensembles, in spaces varying from Harlem rent parties to dance
halls. These competing forces existed in black Harlem because it concentrated
many different components of black life in a spatial crucible of modern New
York (Survey Graphic, 630). Similar conditions did not exist in Chicago, which
in comparison fostered a very unified black community, highly segregated in the
South Side, in which mostly black industrial workers made up the audience for
jazz.
After World War I, 150,000 blacks
moved to New York from along the East Coast (Stewart). Blacks moving North from
Carolina brought with them “ring shout” gospel music. Affluent blacks who had
resided in Harlem since before the war favored European ragtime music. The combination of these elements produced
“stride piano” which grew out of rent parties in lower-income Harlem and set
the foundation for swing music. Stride
had to make all blacks attending rent parties dance, despite their differnet
backgrounds and musical tastes. This resulted in musicians like James P. Johnson
playing emotive “gutbucket” (Henderson) music that combined European melodies
with blues and ring-shout music of the South to create a “hot” improvisational
sound specifically on the piano. Rent
parties existed in the lower-brow black communities while the higher-brow
members of the literary Harlem renaissance looked down upon jazz and stride
because it reminded them of the South they had escaped from in hopes of a
better life (Gioia).
Another development during this time
was big band jazz ensembles. “A casual, accidental affair” (Fletcher, 105) for
black musicians, jazz dance halls in New York grew on principles of
commercialization rather than their equivalents on the South Side of Chicago,
which were results of an industry based economy. While in Chicago the best, “hottest” jazz
clubs played for black audiences from similar backgrounds, Harlem big bands
played “cool” jazz for either higher brow blacks, or for whites who wanted in
on the increasingly popular novelty of black music. Fletcher Henderson directed the band at the
Cotton Club. When Henderson brought
Louis Armstrong to join his band, Armstrong propelled the ensemble to evolve
from the classic “cool” sound of legitimate, ragtime-influenced written rhythms
to a more free, rolling, improvisational sound with varying rhythms and a new
style: swing. Armstrong brought the same
“hot” and “dirty” qualities that appeared in stride piano and jazz from the
South to the dance hall big bands, which would later develop into the swing
ensembles of the 30’s. Simultaneously, a “cool” jazz style also existed in the
arrangements of Paul Whiteman and music of Joe Smith who played “with a
legitimate rather than dirty tone, used vibrato sparingly, and couched their
solos in an unhurried, reflective manner” (Fletcher, 103-4).
Hot
and cool jazz. High and low-brow blacks. New migrants from the South and long
time Harlem residents. Stride piano and big band jazz. White audiences in the dance
halls and blacks in rent parties. These dualities within different spaces and
cultures distinctly influenced Harlem style jazz. Similarly, the music that developed out the
Harlem crucible came to influence the social, economic, and spatial developments
of New York as a city. The symbiotic relationship between music as expression
and society as context and space, allowed for a new generation of educated
black musicians and arrangers like Johnny Dunn, Joe Smith, and Fletcher
Henderson to expertly combine all of these elements in their own crucibles: the
big band jazz ensemble.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
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