Early Jazz

Ragtime
A new style of music emerged in the late eighteenth century in St. Louis, ragtime. Ragtime was the product of the curious pairing of the spiritual/blues and marching band music. Not surprisingly given the trauma of the Civil War, military bands had become by the mid-eighteenth century a standard municipal feature nearly every town and village in America. The military band manifested itself in America in the form of the Revolutionary-War fife-and-drum banner carriers, the drum-and-bugle corps, the marching band and, later, stage band. The model for the American military band dates back to Medieval Europe and beyond.

Ragtime was first and foremost piano music, and a leading composer was Scott Joplin. College-educated and musically trained, Joplin’s music showed the influence of the marching band, the formal character of contemporary European piano music by composers such as Schumann and Chopin, and the syncopated nature of African American music as it is found in the work song and the spiritual. Ragtime is syncopated dance music meant largely for listening, not dancing. Tap your foot as you listen to the examples on the CDs; you will notice that the melody quite often occurs on the upbeat, not the downbeat.

Ragtime is the first printed music that featured high levels of syncopation yet was accurately notated. The importance is that, since the music was written, white musicians could study and learn the syncopations that formed the rhythmic backbone of African American music.

Cakewalk

One particular rhythm, the cakewalk, is found in ragtime. The cakewalk was a slave dance for couples. The dance itself was an opportunity for slaves to poke fun at the formal dancing of their masters, and the prize for the best dancers was a cake. The distinctive rhythm of the cakewalk follows.

Cakewalk Rhythm

Moreover, other influences from outside American territorial borders also found their way into ragtime music. The rhythmic signature of tango is found in this music, long before its introduction to the American public as a dance. The publications of W.C. Handy, one of the first if not the first important black publisher, are titled as “blues” but many, in fact, are hodgepodges of blues, rag, and tango. An example is “St. Louis Blues” (1914) one of the most recorded pieces of the first half of the twentieth century.

In the audio file, I have divided the piece into three segments because furnishing the entire piece would violate copyright laws. Each segment contains the opening two lines of each section, of which there are three. Each segment is based on the twelve-bar blues progression. The first and third are in the major key, but the middle section is in the minor. Each section features a different melody, as if three different twelve-bar blues songs were combined into a single one! There is a second audio file which contains the entire, unfractured song in an instrumental version.

Later arrangements of ragtime music for dance band led to the many two-step “animal dances” that hit America as fads in the early twentieth century, especially the 1920s. These include the Turkey Trot, Chicken Glide, Grizzly Bear and, of course, Fox Trot. The Charleston is a later two-step dance that belongs in this category. [The two-step is found in "Sunday," "After You've Gone," "Cheek to Cheek," and "Heart and Soul," among many other pieces, on the CDs]. Note the prototypical two-step underpinning in the "Mapel Leaf Rag," also on your CDs. The other early style to spring in part from rag or to develop nearly concurrently was New Orleans jazz, discussed below. Note that "Dippermouth Blues" is also a two-step, but that "West End Blues" is not, unfolding instead to the clear four count of Blues, later Swing, and later jazz. Both examples are on the CDs and given below as audio files. Tap your foot to the examples!

The Fox Trot was invented by dancers Irene and Vernon Castle in 1908 to W.C. Handy’s tune “Memphis Blues” as arranged for dance orchestra by the important black band leader James Europe.

New Orleans as the Birthplace of Jazz
New Orleans occupies a special place in the history of American music. At the end of the nineteenth century, it had an unusual social organization for a city in the Deep South or, for that matter, any city anywhere in America. The city’s strong cultural ties with Spain and later with France made possible a class of African American that enjoyed the same privileges and economic opportunities as whites. Many blacks profited from business enterprise, earning enough money to place them in the middle and upper middle classes. These black families invested in education for their children, and this education included the study of Western European classical music. This education, which embraced not only music lessons but also the study of music theory, produced musicians of very high caliber.

The “Jim Crow” segregation laws, enacted in the opening years of the twentieth century, divided the population of the city into two groups, black and white, regardless of mixed blood lineage. The laws not only reordered society into segregated groups, it forced all African American musicians to seek work in only one part of New Orleans, the red light district known as Storyville. The music of Storyville became one of two cultures. The highly refined, classically trained musician found himself working alongside darker-skinned blacks, many of whom had recently arrived from the Caribbean islands and all of whom had closer ties to African culture.

The classically trained musician brought melodic and harmonic sophistication and a working knowledge of music theory to the mix; the more pure-blooded African American brought rhythmic sophistication, energy and drive, and non-musical sounds such as grunts and cries. The result of the melding was jazz.

King Oliver and Louis Armstrong
King Oliver was one of the best known New Orleans jazz pioneers, and Louis Armstrong was one of the members of his small band. The music they played was called Dixieland or New Orleans jazz.

King Oliver

Dixieland jazz bands consisted of a rhythm section that consisted of drums, tuba, and banjo. The “front-men,” or soloists, consisted of cornet, clarinet, and trombone. Some bands bolstered their rhythm sections by adding a piano. The texture of the musical texture was, for the most part, polyphonic with occasional solos. The music invariably began with the band playing the music of one or another popular song. As soon as the tune was played through as written, the rhythm section continued to play the chord progression of the song and the front-men collectively improvised over it. When improvisation had run its course, the band ended by playing, as they had begun, the tune as it was written. The form was furnished by the composed music used as the starting point. General details, such as how many times the progression would be played or on which pass a certain member might take a solo, were often worked out in advance, but the improvisation itself differed from playing to playing. The harmonic progressions of most songs were blues or simple progressions from contemporary popular songs. Some pieces were newly composed in the style of the popular song.

King Oliver and His Band in 1922 (Louis Armstrong is fourth from the left)

By the second decade of the twentieth century, the commander of the nearby military base noticed that a significant portion of his troops were inflected with syphilis. In order to maintain the health of his troops, he threatened to move the base elsewhere, severely impacting the local economy, if the prostitution laws were not enforced. Storyville was closed and with the closing, musicians found themselves with no where to work. Many migrated northward to Chicago and later New York City including King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and others. In Chicago, these musicians found employment but also the opportunity to interact with other musicians from other places, notably Bix Biederdecke. Biederdecke was a white jazzman who led a small band that originated in, of all places, Iowa. The interaction had a profound impact. The white musicians learned to play with greater swing and feeling; the black musicians learned to improvise over more harmonically difficult harmonic progressions.

Louis Armstrong and Advances in Clarification of Texture in Jazz
The 1930s can be considered a "wellspring" decade in the formulation of American popular music. Many of the features that have become standard in modern music came into clearer focus in the decade. In jazz, we hear a dramtic shift in musical texture from the early recordings of King Oliver and those of Louis Armstrong a few years later. Compare "Dippermouth Blues" "West End Blues" on your CDs. "Dippermouth Blues" features the quintessential Dixieland texture--all the instruments in the front line improvising at once in a heavy and sometimes difficult to follow polyphonic texture.

In "West End Blues," a profound reordering of meter and of the player hierarchy has occurred. As noted, "Dippermouth Blues" is a two step, "West End Blues" is a four-count measure. With regard to the soloists, the rhythm section still functions in the same way, but the banjo is gone. Instead, the piano accompaniment, here by Lil Hardin, Armsrong's wife, imitates the "sawing" quality of the banjo. In group passages, one instrument carries the melody and the other instruments do not compete with it by playing melodies, but instead homophonically support it. The texture is now one in which a lead instrument is "out front," and the others are subservient to it.

As important, solos are truly solos. Each instrument takes a turn, and the remaining front-line instruments remain silent or one furnishes little snippets, or "fills," that do not interfere with the main improvised melody. Even the piano has a turn. Notice that the right and left hands or the treble and bass parts, are played in alternation in a style called "stride."

Louis Armstrong in his middle years. Note the ever-present hankerchief. It contained cocaine, which Armstrong used to kill the pain of his chronically split lip.

The new model would have profound effect to this day in all styles of popular music. The model basically defined how all ensembles would play together, from Jazz to Country to Rock. Without the new texture, all of the solo "gods," regardless of style, might very well be pumping gas or selling used cars! Imagine Jimmy Page in mechanic's overalls or in a cheap, polyester suit, hair cut and greased back as he sells vacuum cleaners door-to-door in London!

As noted, the change in texture was not just confined to Jazz, even in the 1930s. The texture is found in music as diverse as the new urban Blues of musicians like Tampa Red, Texas Swing of Bob Wills, and especially mainstream "Big-band" Swing emerging at the same time in mid-decade. In this period Armstrong's music retained much of the "art" aspect of Jazz, a sensibility that moern jazz players would later use as a guiding reference. Later in his career, Armstrong became one of the most beloved of African American performers, but in the process, surrendered his art to commerical success of "Sweet," a style explored in a subsequent lecture.