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.

Swing and Sweet: Big Bands and Their Audience

Sweet and Swing
In the 1930s and 1940s, dance orchestras became the normative for live entertainment, performing music for dancing at upscale clubs.
The earliest "big band" was likely that formed by James Europe, an employee of W.C. Handy's publishing company, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. By the mid 1930s, other bands emerged, and the most important leaders included, besides Europe, Flecther Henderson, Paul Whiteman, and Jean Goldkette. Goldkette, a Frenchman living in the United States, was Bix Beiderdecke's employer and, as such, involved in the promotion of Mid-western music that used very sophisticated harmonic progressions. This is the same music that you read about in the account of the migration of New Orleans-style musicians (King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet) to Chicago and other northern cities.

Big band orchestras differed from the earlier Dixieland band. The rhythm section changed dramatically. The drums were expanded to a configuration more akin to the modern trap set. The string bass (double bass of the classical symphony orchestra) replaced the tuba as the bass melody instrument. The supple guitar replaced the banjo. The “frontline” changed slightly. The clarinet and trumpet (a more agile relative of the cornet) remained as the primary instruments. A brand new instrument, the saxophone, joined the frontline. The numbers of these instruments increased so that each now filled a section. The piano was often featured as a solo instrument with the orchestra, and bowed strings (violins) were often added.

Two tendencies emerged in this music, swing and sweet. “Swing” embodied the African American tendencies and divided the beat into three equal parts instead of two, giving the “swing” feel characteristic of blues (listen to all blues audios). The music retained a harder blues/jazz edge, hard forward drive, and syncopated character. In Swing arrangements “Rifts,” the jazz term for motive, became the building block of Swing melodies. After the “head,” the written portion of music, the frontline soloists each took a turn improvising. Unlike Dixieland jazz, the musicians played in turn, not all at once. The texture, then, became more homophonic and less polyphonic, though secondary melodies were carried in the bass. Another important shift in swing was the move from the “two-step” meter to a four beat one. The shift becomes especially apparent in the “walking” bass.

The tendency to “Sweet” represented a white, European-influenced musical sensibility. First and foremost, the music and often the text bordered on safe and saccharine. The melodies fell on the accented beats rather than be syncopated. The melody and the arrangements possessed a cute and clever quality rather than edginess, and the texts were often simple and sentimental. Sweet catered to popular tastes and, like pop music today, aspired first and foremost to commercial success. Sweet is exemplified on your campanion CDs by Hoagy Carmichael's "Heart and Soul." Carmichael was one of the most successful of the Tin Pan Alley composers and is the author of some very fine music. His best known song is "Georgia on My Mind," which is familiar to most of us in Ray Charles' fine version. Although contained in its entirety on your companion CD, a snippet of "Heart and Soul" is included here for ease of comparison.

It is critical to note that "sweet" exerted its influence on contemporary musical theater, studied later, far more than "swing." The reasons are quite simple. The audience for musical theater was white at the poorest, middle class. The music intended for theater supported the melodrama inherent in the story rather than fulfilling the need for "hot" dance music. Theater music needed to capture immediately the emotions of the character who sang the music, and these emotions were often cloying and intensely sentimental. The music was not intended to stand on its own merit as the result of sophisticated content, though some very fine music resulted nonetheless.

The economic reality for the big bands was that they made background music for dancing, not art music. In order to draw the audiences, Swing bands were forced to play sweet pop tunes and pop-tune dance bands were forced to play swing. Not surprisingly, cross-pollination occurred so that a pop tune could be sung in a jazz style and the aggressive quality of a swing tune could be toned down by a sweeter delivery. The audio exemplify the point. Crosby sings a pop song in a jazz style, and Glenn Miller homogenizes a swing composition. Notice that Miller’s theme consists entirely of rifts. Also notice the two-step in "After You've Gone" and the shfift to four-beat patterns in "In the Mood." The meeting of sweet and swing can be contrasted in the following musical examples by Bing Crosby's "After You've Gone" (heard with Paul Whiteman's big band and contained in its entirety on companion CD) and Glenn Miller's "In the Mood." Note that the melody of "In the Mood" consists of a single three-note idea played repeatedly throughout the stanza. This motive or "lick" is called a "rift." Rifts are crucial components of Swing music and to much of the music of modern jazz. Also note that Carmicheal's "Heart and Soul" starts with a motive that is sounded immediately at a higher pitch. Although not exactly a rift, the cross influences of Sweet and Swing are evident even in the construction of this sweet melody!

As in every other period and style of music, musicians somehow manage to imbue even incidental (i.e. dinner or dance) music with art. The notable examples of the infusion of art in Swing is found in the music of Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. Goodman, the jazz clarinetist of his generation, was equally fluent in jazz and classical styles, and the effect of his classical interests is evident in his jazz. His lines are not particularly syncopated, as in blues or the music of contemporary African American musicians.

Benny Goodman

Ellingtons's music retains the African and jazz elements yet is slick enough Swing to satisfy the pop-oriented listener. More importantly, however, he understood and mastered the implications of European classical theoretical developments found in the music of composers such as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Igor Stravinsky. The connection between European modern classical composers and American jazzmen does not stop with Ellington. The entire school of modern jazz (bop and cool) bears marks of this influence.

Debussy's contributions include advanced harmony (chord progresssions). Note that, like Swing musicians in America, Debussy also builds his melodies from the same kind of motives that are called "rifts" in jazz. Debussy's use of harmony in "L'Apres midi d'un faune" ("Afternoon of a Faun") does not not follow strict, conventional rules; instead he searches in his chord juxtapositions for new colors and effects.

Ravel's contributions include the use of modal scales. These scales doubtless came into France in Ravel's time through the cultural influence of France's colonial holdings in African and the Middle East, where these scales are to this day still in active use. The origin of the modes is far older, however, and form the bedrock upon which European music is formulated. The modes were first used in chant and remained the important scales until the sixteenth century, when the concepts of major and minor scales finally supplanted them.

You can easily demonstrate the modes for yourself, even if you have no musical training. At the piano, play the white keys only. If you play:

C-C, the mode is Ionian (also our major scale)
D to D, the mode is Dorian
E-E, the mode is Phrygian
F-F, the mode is Lydian
G-G, the mode is Mixolydian
A-A, the mode is Aeolian
B-B, the mode is Locrian

In Ravel's "Bolero," I have extracted the segment of the work that uses the Phrygian mode as the basis for its melody. Ravel's programmatic intent was to capture an "Arabic" or "Arab-African" flavor.

Ellington’s music contains many of the European tonal advances without sacrificing the African voice. His music displays the sophisticated harmonic progressions found as early as the turn-of-the-century music of Debussy. His music also contains more radical approaches delevoped in the first three decades of the twentieth century in the music of composers such as Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky was a Russian immigrant living in Paris and composing music for the Ballet Russe. One of the most prominent features of his music is polytonality, the simultaneous use of two different keys!

Not all the dissonance in Ellington's music derives from European classical advances. Some come froms the the same wellspring as the dissonance of blues, African American harmonic sensibililties. The introduction to Ellington's "Harlem", however, demonstrates the dissonance brought into the music by polytonal thinking. "Caravan" is not as dissonant during Cootie William's trumpet solo, but not that the piano stabs are not in the same key! Like "Harlem," the polytonal influences are more evident in the introduction and sections that feature the full orchestra. "Caravan" was a composition whose arrangement Ellington experiment with his entire life. Unfortunately, the recording available here is one of the more conservative settings. All the arrangements of "Caravan" contain characteristics that must be noted. The trumpet solo is delivered in a style that is deliberately very similar to the way a slave would have sung an arhoolie in the field! Also, the rift is pushed to the background, and the rhythm of the rift creates when contrasted to the solo a polyrhythmic texture. Moreoever, the rhythm of the background rift is one derived directly from Latin rumba (see lecture on Latin influences). Careful listening to "Ko-ko," the Ellington cut on the companion CD reveals many of the same features discussed above.

Duke Ellington

Swing began in the 1930s with the formation of the big bands. The period lasted until the late 1940s, when records and radio made the big bands economically infeasible.

Modern Jazz

Modern Jazz: Bebop and Cool

Count Basie
Significant changes occurred in their music. Pianist “Count” Basie opened the texture of jazz by eliminating the every-beat strum of the chord player (guitar or piano). Instead, Basie staggered the chords he played, “stabbing” in little groupings so that the highest notes of the chords he did play created melodic motives. The elimination of the chord on each beat also gave the soloist an open musical texture in which to experiment. The style of chord-playing is called “comping,” fittingly shortened, like the style of playing, from the word “accompanying.” The shift in accompanying style also eliminated at rhythm-section trademark of Swing, the "wump wump wump" of the strummed guitar.

Another important feature of Basie's soloing style was his economy, a characteristic entirely consistent with his style of accompanying. Basie was not afraid of the pregnant pause created by the silence between phrases of the melody. His melodies were always carefully constructed, each note having been considered for its value, meaning, and role in the context of the overall phrase.

Count Basie

New Kinds of Melody: Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young
While Basie's new "comping" became a critical feature of the new style, his contemporaries (and often band members) worked to develop new phrasing. Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, two of the most significant saxophone players of the era, began to develop a new concept of melody. Instead of rifts, they began playing extended, unbroken melodies. The important notes of his melodies fell more often on accented beats than those of blues and swing, but the African American component was still evident in the rhythmically unusual stopping and starting points. These new, long melodies often seemed breathless, extending sometimes through nearly the entire stanza! Both musicians were alumni of the Kansas City scene as well as, later, the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra (big band). While the new style of phrasing won critical praise, it did not suit well the Swing rift sensibilities of Henderson, who regarded especially Young's playing as reckless and eccentric.

Lester Young

As the big band lost the economic support it required to survive, many musicians, including those based in Kansas City, began to follow the lead of "jump" bands such as those maintained by Louis Jordan. These bands retained essentially the same instrumentation, but not the same number of personnel. All doublings were eliminated so that only one instrument of each type remained. When finished, the new "combos" were very similar to those found in Louis Armstrong's "hot" recordings except that the rhythm section of the Swing band, not the New Orleans band, was preferred. Hence the combo line-up featured a rhythm section of drums and bass. The guitar was sometimes included, but more often the more flexible piano took its place. The better was better suited to function as both a rhythm (chordal) and solo instrument (melody) and, more importantly, did not have problems playing in the difficult flat keys that suited the instruments of the front line. The front line of the combo consisted of saxophone and trumpet. The flute found occasional work in these bands, but not in Kansas City or in East Coast jazz. The presence of the flute is almost always a dead giveaway that the music was very late in the period, potentially included as part of a more commerical "jazz" recording, and recorded in sunny California.

Classical Music Influences on Modern Jazz Harmony
Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century music devleoped along different lines than American music of the same time period. The reasons for diferent lines of evolution were largely cultural. The African-American influence and the "melting pot" character of America juxtaposed music form a large variety of cultures. The accommodation of these different musical styles and their fusion into a single style occupied American musicians.

By contrast, Europe retained a more homogeneous character to its culture, and its musical evolution did not center on an infusion of new ideas from other cultures, particularly African, but simply continued a line of unbroken growth from its earliest days. The central issue for European musicians was finding ways to deal with a tonal system that was running out of possible note combinations. With the exception of the music of Igor Stravinsky, the meters and rhtyhms of European music changed little from one century to the next.

Modern classical music sought solutions by experimenting in different directions. In the late nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth, French "Impressionist" composers such as Claude Debussy experimented with the effects that unusual harmonic progressions could create, and these experiments often resulted in "atmospheric" effects, as in "L'Apres midi d'une faune" ("Afternoon of a Faun"). His music was melodically built up of short motives, a similar device to later Swing jazz. He never sought to venture from the ideal of beauty but rather reacted to the overbearingly grand and serious character of Germanic music traditions, especially those embodied by the heavy operas of Wagner. Debussy explored both the orchestra and the solo piano for new timbres and new means to lay out chord progressions that were at once beautiful, refreshing, and coherent. These experiments had a profound effect on modern jazz men, especially from Charlie Parker onward.

A second area of exploration was offered by French Impressionist Maurice Ravel. Ravel also sought relief from German music, leading him to explore orchestration and the ressurrected use of older scales,or modes. The scales he chose were used first in Church music, in particular, chant, and enjoyed the greatest currency between the ninth and sixteenth centuries. Each mode has a name and a characteristic sound. In Bolero, the second section of the musical example, the section that sounds "Spanish" or "Arab," is actually the Phrygian Church mode. Jazz players and teachers use these Medieval Church modes to this day in both improvisation and educating younger players.

Significant strides in both tonality and rhythm (in European music) were made by one of the most important classical composers of the first half of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky was a Russian emigre to Paris, where he workd composing music for the Ballet Russe. His collegues included some of the most important composers (i.e. Ravel) and artists fo the period. His friendship with Pablo Picasso and Picasso's interest in African art which resulted in Cubism led him to develop a curiosity about African music and African-American music. Stravinsky was able to hear African music first hand at the frequent African expositions mounted at the time in Paris (remember that France's colonial holdings were and are in Africa). He could not hear jazz in France, but Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario responsible for the success of the Ballet Russe brought back ragtime scores for Stravinsky each time business took him to America.

The influences become apparent in two areas: polytonality and polyrhythm. The audio first example demonstrates Stravinsky's polytonal thinking. Polytonality is effected when the musicians play simultaneoulsy in two different keys, as in the first audio excerpt from "Le Sacre du printemps" ("The Rite of Spring")! The impact on later American jazz would be heard in the acceptance of greater tonal experimentation and especially in the consideration of formerly dissonant sounds as consonant ones. Beginning with Parker, jazz musicians began to fashion solos that embraced not the key of the music of the accompaniment, but the music of a key a third, fourth, or fifth higher. The process works because each of the applied keys shares a significant number of notes with the other key sounded.

Stravinsky's polyrhythmic experiments were likely prompted by firsthand experience but somewhat guided by the handling of polyrhythmic concepts in American music. American musicians had far more extensive experience with polyrhythm, having first encountered it in African drumming. Much of the history of American music involves the modification and absorption of polyrhythm into its mainstream. The result of the adaptation is seen, oof course, in the presence of syncopation of the majority of American music styles. Nonetheless, Stravinsky's efforts are worth a listen. The second audio file demonstrates "additive" rhythm. In "additive" rhythm, each successive measure is expanded by one beat so that the count might be 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 5, etc. The effect is one of syncopation but also one of "chugging."

A final radical approach is found in the early music of Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg believed that tonal music had no more possiblities to offer, that it was finally depleted of its ability to create new music or even to renew itself. His appraoch was one in which all tonal references were avoided. In brief, he fashioned melodies that gave to signal as to beginning, middle, end, or even key. The accompaniment was handled in the same way, with the intent that nothing familiar would exist in his music and that the listener would be forced to make new associations as in "Mondestrunken" ("Moon-drunk").

These European developments had a profound impact on modern jazz, though they were invariably filtered through American, and especially African-American sensibilites. Jazz musicians did not hide the fact that they sought new ideas in Europe's music, a music they heard first as soldiers in World War I. World War I also opened direct opportunities for black jazz musicians. Europeans, and in particular the French, heard this music and embraced it. Paris offered employment and succor to many black jazzmen who felt unwelcome at home, even through both wars and most of the twentieth century.

Suggested Listening:
Claude Debussy, "L'Apres midi d'une faune"
Marurice Ravel, "Bolero"
Igor Stravinsky, excerpts from "Le Sacre du printemps"
Arnold Schoenberg, "Mondestrunken" from Pierrot Lunaire

The New Style: 'Modern' Jazz of Parker and Gillespie
One of the two most important musicians of the period was saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker. Parker studied the records of Hawkins and especially Lester Young and learned the basic tenets of their new approach to soloing. He would later expand the approach into a new style, “bebop” or just “bop.” He retained the long lines and the unusual starting and stopping points, but added two features. First, Parker played the music at tempi that most of his contemporaries could not follow.

Second, although the blues remained a constant feature, songs that did not follow the twelve-bar progression were approached differently than in earlier jazz. In Parker's approach, not only did the tempo fly, but the rate of harmonic change (the rate of changes from one chord to the next) also dramatically increased. In a Swing piece, then, a chord might be sustained through several measures; in Bop, it was customary to play two chords in a single measure! Moreover, Parker used French Impressionist music, especially that of Claude Debussy, as a harmonic model. He began to incorporate unusual chord progressions, often moving from one chord to another chromatically and, in the process, stepping out of key for a measure before returning to the original key. The same chord progression as it might appear at the end of the stanza in a Swing tune and in a Bop tune are contrasted. The chord patterns graphed below are found on two audio files. The numbers in parentheses represent the duration of the chord in beats. The first files gives the chord progressions only. The second furnishes the proessions with a lead overlaid. Notice that the second lead, like the chords that support it, goes in and out of key with each successive set of chord changes. Improvising over bop progressions presents very speical challenges (or opportunities if you paly really well), a hard fact that many Swing players who could not make the cut discovered in the day.

<>Audio File! "Bop Turnaround Chords Only" and "Bop Turnaround with Lead"
Swing: Bm7(4)-E7(4)-Am7(4)-D7(4)-G(4)

Bop: Bm7(2)-E7(2)-B flat m7(2)-E flat7 (2)-Am7(2)-D7(2)-G(4)

The same chords found in the Swing tune remain as the superstructure, but in the Bop version chromatically determined chords are interpolated. The melody improvised over the Swing tune could not remain the same in the Bop rendering--the soloist had not choice but to change keys with each new chromatic pair of chords! The new chromatic feature was part of neither Hawkin's nor Young's music, but an modification by Parker. The scope of Parker's abilities is brought into even sharper focus when one considers the incredibly fast tempi at which he insisted the band play! Parker's new style assured exclusivity, and only the finest musicians of the day could, when they played with him, keep up.

An important social feature of Bop was the sense among its creators of alienation from the musical mainstream. Part of this view was the result of the failing music economy of the big band, but also a product of what Parker and his contemporaries regarded as a compromise and prostitution of musical art in order to sell music. Racial overtones were also doubtless present, though Parker did not make racial distinctions among his musical colleagues. Race did not enter into his choice of musicians, only ability.

Parker and Young later became friends and musical colleagues. Both playing styles of both Hawkins and Young changed to keep up with the new development of the very style they started! Young remained active as a player, but Hawkins retired in the 1960s from all but occasional public performances.

Charlie Parker ("Bird")

The other important Bop musician was trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Gillespie was not born in Missouri but in rural South Carolina. He grew up in abject poverty, the youngest of nine children. He taught himself to play the trumpet at age 12, by his late teens was working as a full time musician. His first significant job came playing with Cab Calloway's group, who shortly put him out on the street for his thoroughly modern and unorthodox approach to solo improvisation. Calloway rather unaffectionately called Gillespie's playing "Chinese music."

Gillespie's music models for his phrasing were the saxophonists of the day, and his understanding of Bop harmony came from Parker, who he soon harmonically superseded. Gillespie also developed his skills as a scat singer and, with his horn-rimmed glasses and ever-present beret, cultivated an image as an eccentric artist. The most significant visual trademark, however, was his trumpet, which had been bent in an accident. Gillespie liked the sound and continued to play that particular horn, with its upward-directed bell.

Unlike Parker, who had tendencies of self-absorption due to addiction and a slightly anti-social streak, Gillespie enthusiastically tutored and encouraged the next generation of Bop players, including the likes of Miles Davis. Gillespie's later embrace and promotion of Afro-Cuban music likely had an impact on both Davis' musical experiments and his ultimate move from jazz to Fusion. Gillespie and Parker were friends and on-stage rivals, and played together in New York off and on throughout Parker’s short, troubled life. More importantly, they intellectually fed each other new ideas.

Miles and “Cool”
Miles Davis was, like Parker, a native of Missouri. Unlike Parker and Gillespie, he came from an upper middle class family (his father was an oral surgeon). He enrolled at Julliard and lasted only a few months because, instead of attending to his studies, Davis prowled the nightclubs to play with the bop musicians he found there. He finally found Charlie Parker, and the latter immediately took him under wing. Jazz historians have noted the differences in style between the two musicians, but more than one historian commented that Parker might have recognized the future of jazz in Davis.

Miles Davis

Early in his New York City career, Davis conformed to mainstream Bop. There he had an opportunity to play with and learn from the most importatn players of the day. These included not only Parker, his mentor, but the more experimental Dizzy Gillespie. As noted, Gillespie found a strong attraction in the Afro-Cuban rhythms of rumba and its layered percussion, and perhaps saw in the music new directions jazz could take when Bop had expended itself. The revelation and the experimentation could not have been lost on Davis who, himself, would later take similar steps in his musical evolution.

Once Charlie Parker, the driving force of Bop had died in the early fifties, the style began to wind down. Bop, as dynamic as it was, also had very clearly and narrowly defined parameters. These parameters insured full exploration and development of the style would occur in a very short time. Davis’ first musical breakthrough was a stylistic evolution that retained most of the features of bop—the pared-down combo, the same instrumentation, the open texture of “comping,” and the long bop lines--but changed the approach.

His new music, called "Cool" jazz, eliminated the both the blistering tempi of Bop and the rapid fire rate of harmonic change. The progressions that underpinned music of this period often consisted of only a few chords, and each of these chords was sustained for very long durations.

In the Swing tune, a chord might be sustained for measure or for several measures. In Bop, the chords often changed every two beats. In Cool jazz, a chord might sustain for eight or more measures! Unlike Swing and like Bop, the chords that underpinned Miles' Cool compositions were often chromatically related. For example, an entire stanza might consist of eight measures of an A7 chord followed by eight of a G7 chord. The two chords are not in the same key.

The resulting effect is a broad musical canvas that unfolds in a "laid-back," unhurried rate. The breadth of the music, that is, that the music remains on a single chord for a protracted time span, permitted the soloist to more extensively explore not only the standard scales of the key, but to experiment with unusual nonstandard scales derived from other time periods and other cultures. Among the favorite scales were the Church modes, the scales used in Medieval times as the basis of chant! Miles developed Cool jazz away from the New York orbit, largely on the West Coast, where Davis moved as the bop movement ground to a halt. Once the Cool style had been exhausted, Miles declared that "jazz is dead." He moved on to other hybridizations created, for example, by combining jazz and rock.

Other Important Modern Jazz Musicians
Two other musicians figure prominently in the modern jazz movement, and they are Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane.

Thelonius Monk
Thelonius Monk was born in North Carolina, but he grew up in New York City. His earliest musical experiences involved Church music and, as a teen, he toured as pianist with an Evangelist group and played church organ. His interests soon turned to jazz, and he was hired as house pianist in the early 1940s at the legendary jazz club, Minton's Playhouse. The work brought him into close contact with the most important musicians of the day including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Milt Jackson, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. Monk made his first recordings around 1944 as sideman to Coleman Hawkins and his first recordings as a bandleader in 1947.

Monk developed a highly personal and syncopated style of solo piano playing that overlapped and complemented but did not wholly embrace Bop. His career was derailed on two occasions by problems with the law. Both involved narcotics that were found in cars in which he was riding but which did not belong to him. The first arrest resulted in the suspension of his cabaret license, the all-critical card to musicians working in any place where alcohol was served. The second resulted in police brutality. The severe beating with a blackjack resulted in little more than a dismissal of charges. Despite setbacks, Monk rose to international prominence through his live performances and recordings, reaching the apogee in Carnegie Hall concerts and a feature on the cover of Time magazine.

Monk had the reputation in later years as an eccentric. His style of dress--the dark wuit and the sunglasses--became the standard uniform of jazzmen and the iconic stuff of modern paradies such as the Blues Brothers. On a more serious level, Monk was known to go through an entire tour without speaking a word to the other musicians, or to stand in the middle of his solo and dance instead of play!

John Coltrane
Coltrane was also born in North Carolina. He moved to Philadelphia in his teens. Coltrane's first instrument was the clarinet, but he switched to alto saxophone as he grew interested in jazz. In 1949, he had his first major professional break in joining Dizzie Gillespie's band. He remained with one of another Gillespie organization, switching to tenor sax until 1953. Coltrane recorded as early as the mid 1940s, but he received little recognition until the mid 1950s. His first truly significant recording came as second soloist to Miles Davis on the ground-breaking, "Cool" jazz composition "So What?" Coltrane's music evolved rapidly in the late 1950s, in part the result of his successful rehabilitation from heroin addiction and his association with Thelonius Monk, alto sax player Cannonball Adderly, and Miles Davis. Coltrane participated in some of Davis' most important recordings including Milestones and Kind of Blue.

Coltrane's musical sensibilites included the rapid runs of Bop played twice as fast (quadruple time). In the 1960s, he switched to the obsolete soprano saxophone, a move made perhaps as a result of his admiration of clarinetist Sidney Bechet and partially as a result of pain in his gums. New musical directions became evident in the 1960s, and Coltrane began to move toward a style of music in which harmonic structure grew less important. The style was known as "Free Jazz." The style was essentially the incorporation of Arnold Schoenberg's atonal classical composition methods, and involved melodic lines not encumbered by tradition concepts such as "key." The new directions are still often denigrated by "traditionalist" jazz musicians, but the impact in other musical styles is most evident in the work of Jimi Hendrix!

Latin Influences in Jazz and Popular Music

The Latin Interpretation of African Musical Elements
Historical and Cultural Overview
Like American music, the classical and popular music of the Caribbean Islands and the South American countries bordering the Caribbean is the marriage of African and European musical elements but, as you might imagine, the accent is considerably different. For one, the European influences are different, with Spanish and Portuguese influences being at the fore rather than English and German ones. The African elements remain pretty much the same, the different African regional musical dialects blended into a roughly singlular code of practices.

The process of melding the disparate African musical traditions was accomplished in the same was as it was for slaves brought to North America. Each African underwent a period of “seasoning” on one of the Caribbean islands before transport to the plantations of North or South America. “Seasoning” entailed breaking the individual’s will and teaching him enough of the master’s language so that he could follow orders. The strongest African traditions were found on the islands themselves, and the next strongest were located in the geographical regions ringing the Caribbean. All Latin rhythms, regardless of origin, found their way into American music in dance music. The Argentine tango and Cuban rumba rhythms arrived first; the Brazilian samba came in the late 1950s.

Afro-Cuban Influences
Afro-Cuban influence found its way initially into the United States in the 1930s in the clave rhythm. The rhythm is named after the sticks upon which the pattern is played. It is also sometimes called the Habanera rhythm after the prinicipal city in Cuba, Havana. It evolved quickly into the dance, the "rumba" (also "rhumba"), by means of commercial radio broadcasts that made it known in all corners of the island.

Clave or Habanera Rhythm of the Rumba

From its earliest importation, the rhythm found life in the music produced by Cubans living in the United States, but also supplied a viable alternative rhythmic structure in big band jazz swing music. From the 1930s to the 1950s it was popularized by musicians such as Xavier Cugat and by Desi Arnaz, of "I Love Lucy" television fame.

The clave rhythm also appeared in mainstream popular music in the 1950s. It may be heard in the bass of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog," a song which does not display obvious Latin influence, and "It's Now or Never," which does.

The rhythm may also be found in other songs by Elvis. Other musicians used it as a superstructure for their songs, and it was not an uncommon feature of some of the hit tunes of the day. An example, "Under the Boardwalk," follows.

First section of "Under the Boardwalk" sung by Ben E. King and the Drifters

Two other Latin styles, Mambo and Salsa, have their roots in rumba. The rhythm of both are identical to the rumba but for the last beat of the pattern, which is counted but no percussive strike occurs on it. Mambo emerged in the 1950s as a music to serve the needs of the Latin community of Spanish Harlem. It had all but disappeared when a "back to roots" movement resurrected it in the 1970s. The differences between Mambo and Salsa are slight. Both rely upon the Mambo rhythm and feature the horn section absorbed from the big bands of the 1930s and 1940s.

Argentina's Contibution to Rhythm: Tango
Tango is the clave rhythm after it had migrated south in the nineteenth century and underwent the adaptations to suit the Argentine temperament and dance needs. Like the rumba, the tango rhythm is steady and unchanging from one piece of music to the next. It is described as follows:

Tango, like rumba, found its way into American music through popular dance. It arrived late in the nineteenth century and, with the rhythms and character of marching band music, subtley influenced the rhythms of ragtime. The early "blues" publications by W.C. Handy in the first two decades of the twentieth century featured pieces that were a hodgepodge of blues, ragtime, and tango. To be frank, the relationships or ranking of relative importance in rag and the early music of Handy of the cakewalk and tango rhythms have not been adequately sorted out. Tango was well-known by the second decade of the twentieth century, and the interwining of tango, jazz, and dance music is evident in the roles of James Europe, one of the first "big-band" leaders, W.C. Handy, and dancers Vernon and Irene Castle in the invention of the foxtrot!

Tango Rhythm

Tango has been popular in American music since its initial appearance. The most important composer of tangos is Astor Piazzolla. Piazzolla was born in Argentina but raised in New York City. Upon hearing a concert of tango music when he was a teenager, he devoted his life to it. After study in France with Nadia Boulanger, he returned to Argentina. His musical style elevates the tango since it combines the best elements of tango with the harmonic influences of modern classical music. An instrument that is central to tango is the bandoneon, an accordian brought from Germany by immigrants to Argentina. In "Oblivion" on the companion CD, Piazzolla is featured on the bandoneon. Note that the tango rhythm is stated in the bass.

Tango is found in popular and jazz music, as well as in film scores, especially movies from the 1960s. Tango is the rhythmic backbone of such more recent pop tunes as the Eagles “New Kid in Town” and “Tequilla Sunrise.”

Brazil and Its Culture
The culture of Brazil stands apart from the other South American regions, of course, because it was settled by the Portuguese. The population embraces peoples of European background, predominantly Portuguese but also including Italians and members of other national groups. Peoples of Oriental background as well as those of Jewish background are also members of Brazilian society. There is also a very large component consisting of indigenous Indians within the society.

The culture stands apart in two ways: human rights and musical expression. Tensions within the society are based less upon race and more upon qualification, with economic class and education playing a significant role. If there is discrimination, it is not the result of skin color but of one’s ability and preparation to succeed within the society. Hence the poor are treated rather shabbily, regardless of ethnic origin. At the same time, the individual with most apparent African background, if he is successful in ascending to any position of respect or economic security, will not be shunned as the result of visible racial features.

Brazilian Music
The musical influences found in Brazil, then, include the European traditions brought by the Portuguese settlers, the African elements brought by the slave trade, and the influences already in place among the indigenous Indian population. The rain forest still guarantees that the further from civilization one goes, the stronger the indigenous influences. As a consequence of the three influences, Brazilian music differs significantly from music found elsewhere in South America.

Portuguese musical influences come to the fore most prominently in the use of sequence within the melodies. Unlike North American popular music, melodies retain their European rhythmic characters by adhering strongly to the accented beats, and so most frequently start and end on the first and third beats of the measure. The African influence, especially of the drum ensemble, is found at the surface in the heavy use of percussion.

On a deeper level, the influence of the polyrhythmic drum ensemble is found in the accompaniment. If the North American tried to create the illusion of polyrhythm by avoiding the accented first and third beats as the starting and stopping points for the melody while strongly stating these beats in the accompaniment, the reverse may be said to be true for Brazilian popular music. Here the melody is placed on the accented beats, and even heavily sequenced, and the accompaniment is rhythmically independent. This feature is apparent in the primary form of Brazilian popular music, the Samba.

The background rhythms found in samba occupy a vast continuum. Unlike rumba or tango, there is no single "samba rhythm." Instead, a variety of figures spin out in the background, and these figures also differ from rumba and tango in that they are quite long. It is not unusual to find samba rhythms that are four measures (16 beats) in length!

The Jazz Version of Samba: Bossa Nova
Bossa nova, a type of samba which embodies a significant type of North American jazz music to this day, was largely the invention of two Brazilian composers living in the 1960s in Rio de Janeiro near a strip of beach called Ipanema. The composers are Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfa. Jobim is the composer of “Girl from Ipanema,” the most famous and overplayed of bossa tunes. The two composers, who were friends, combined samba rhythms with sophisticated harmonies taken from North American jazz, the attitude of "cool" West Coast Jazz," and, to some degree, from French Impressionist music filtered through the musical sensibilities of Brazilian classical composers such as Heitor Villa-Lobos. French Impressionist music also had a significant influence upon the harmonic structures of North American jazz. Joao Gilberto sings and plays Jobim's "Girl from Ipanema," still a great tune despite over exposure, on the companion CD (note the rumba rhythm in the introduction!).

Antonio Carlos Jobim


Luiz Bonfa

Summary of Latin Styles
A significant difference in execution is found between rumba, mambo, and salsa, om one hand, and tango and Bossa nova, on the other. The music of the rumba, mambo, and salsa requires a percussion section that features a variety of Afro-Caribbean percussion instruments including maracas and differently pitched drums. The background to the music always features layers of polyrhythm played on percusssion instruments.

Tango and Bossa nova do not use percussion instruments. In tango, the signature rhythm is carried in the bass. In Bossa nova, the polyrhythms are found spread among the instruments, the guitar most often playing a long and syncopated part.

As noted, the rumba, mambo, salsa, and the tango use set one-measure patterns that serve as rhythmic signatures. Bossa nova, on the other hand, embraces no single pattern, and a rhythmic idea in Bossa nova may be quite long!

American Musical Theater

A Brief Overview of American Musical
Theater

Early Musical Theatre
American musical theater has origins in several nineteenth century and early twentieth century musical entertainments. The wellspring, of course, was Minstrelsy. Later developments, such as Burlesque, Musical Revue (as based upon the Folies Bergiėre), and musical comedy, contributed significantly to the new genre. The music of the Musical Revue, especially that of George S. Cohen, did contribute to the body of music that “everyone knows,” and an example is “Yankee Doodle Boy.” Cohen’s songs, along with those of Stephen Foster, are the oldest songs that still circulate among the American general public. Echoes of Burlesque are found in the modern variety and variety-talk show, melodrama, and even stand-up comedy.

Musical theater differs from Burlesque and musical comedy in several respects. A principle feature that distinguishes musical theater is the use of a dramatic story as a central unifying thread. Burlesque and musical theatre often used loose story lines, but interrupted it with unrelated skits, songs, and stand-up routines. Interpolations were a regular feature. The interpolation was an unrelated popular song presented in the theater production, but which had no relation to it. Interpolations were underwritten by their publishers and were essentially promotions of new songs. In musical theater, all dialog, action, and music in musical theater are dedicated to enhancing the dramatic and emotive thrust of the story.

Jerome Kern was the first to recognize the potential of the marriage of music and story in theater. He drew upon the operettas of Britons Gilbert and Sullivan for his models, but fashioned his work to reflect American culture. Kern composed the music, and he enlisted Oscar Hammerstein II to furnish a libretto based on a contemporary novel. Showboat was mounted successfully in 1926. It represented a critical step forward. Not only did it utilize the music exclusively to enhancing the drama, but the libretto itself explored difficult social issues such as racial inequality and intermarriage. From it came a song still known today, “Ole Man River.”

The next important musical in this genre was not mounted until 1943. The large period of inactivity in the musical theater did not reflect shortcomings of Showboat, but rather the economic hard times of the 1930s. Other attempts to create meaningful musical theater were attempted in the 1930s, but met with only limited economic success. The most notable of these productions were the musical vignettes of George Gershwin.

Oklahoma was the product of the collaboration of Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers. As in Showboat, Oklahoma’s music was composed specifically to support the drama and the libretto addressed important social issues. The central action chronicles the competition of the two leads. Curly and Judd, for the love of the ranch owner’s daughter, but the lead roles are also the embodiment of the two conflicting frontier needs of land use, the rancher’s need to have cattle roam freely and the farmer’s need to fence in the land. “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” exemplifies the use of music to set scenes, move the action along, or intensify the dramatic moments. The song, which opens the show, describes an idyllic land of “milk and honey,” essentially a world of peace, harmony, and plenitude that must be shattered by conflict and restored at the end if the production is to have social significance or dramatic bite.

The Golden Ages of Musical Theater in the 1940s and 1950s
Oklahoma cemented the viability of the musical, and the late 1940s and 1950s became the first “golden age” of musical theater. Rodgers and Hammerstein led the way with productions such as Carousel, State Fair, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. Most of these productions were also made into films, and the best-selling records of the 1950s were not rock ‘n’ roll, but the soundtracks to these musicals! Other composers and librettists produced fine works during this period, and this creative group included popular-song composer Cole Porter and the dynamic team of Alan Lerner and Frederick Loewe (example on CD).

Later Musical Theater in the late 1950s to Present
Later musical theater saw dramatic changes in the character (but not the spirit or intent) of the productions. Three important figures emerged as central to the integration of new features, Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein, and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Of all musical theater productions, the one that comes closest to unifying different art genres is West Side Story (1959). Here modern dance, classic literature, and modern classical music and jazz are fused. The dance was choreographed by Jerome Robbins. Stephen Sondheim, who later emerged after Bernstein as one of the three important figures in theater, updated Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in his libretto. The most stunning feature of West Side Story, however, is its music. Bernstein, who was known at the time for his modern classical compositions and for his role as the conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, couched jazz in the harmonic vocabulary of modern classical music (with most evident influences coming from Stravinsky). The finale is included in the CD set.

One of the great curiosities of is Sondheim’s role in it. Sondheim produced the libretto though he himself was an accomplished composer. To his credits are Fiddler on the Roof, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, and others. His success did not come, however, until the 1970s. Unlike he composers of early musical theater or Bernstein, Sondheim draws more upon contemporary popular music of his inspiration and stylistic features. His musical plays invariably examine the difficulties and subtleties of human interaction in the modern urban world and its subsequent states of loneliness, confusion, infatuation, and love His productions do not require special scenery or costumes, and they are set in the same environment in which we live.

Briton Andrew Lloyd Webber invented the concept of the “rock opera” (no, it wasn’t the Who). Webber’s productions include Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Evita, Phantom of the Opera, and, of course, Cats. Cats established Webber as the preeminent composer of our time. His musicals have done more to breathe new life into the London theater district than any composer since Gilbert and Sullivan, and have also been vital to the economy of Broadway. Webber’s approach to musical theater differs considerably from his contemporaries. His stories are invariably set in fantasy “other worlds” that require special sets and effects and which create stunning images such as trains on roller skates. His characters are portrayed in a way very akin to those of cartoons (we never see the real faces of the performers in Cats). The actual music draws upon a wide variety of resources through which the rock aspect shines through. Most of his songs start like typical commercial popular songs but soon expand into highly intense emotive vehicles. Unlike other earlier and contemporary productions, Webber’s musicals do not contain spoken dialog but are propelled forward solely on his music.

Folk Music in the Twentieth Century: A New Tradition Parading as an Old One

Nineteenth-Century Models for a Twentieth-Century Tradition
The origins of twentieth-century Folk music are the same as those for country music. Among the important early models were the English ballad or broadsheet, one of the important starting points for nineteenth-century folk music and the Spiritual, the fiddle and banjo tune, the Minstrel/parlor song, and the Spiritual, itself. Chief among the later musical styles that served as springboards, most end-of-the-century offshoots of the aforementioned early models, was the music that evolved in rural isolation, especially in isolated regions of the Appalachian Mountains.

Woody Guthrie
With regard to Country and Folk music, the Carter family wears two caps. Their “white spirituals” and performance style were instrumental in laying the foundation for Country music. The music, complete with the “Vernon Dalhart” style singing but now containing a new “nasal twang,” and Maybelle Carter’s new and unique guitar accompanying by playing melody on the lower strings and strumming the chord whenever a pause occurred in the melody line, established some of the basic parameters of the Country style.

Woody Guthrie

A direct link may be drawn between the music of the Carters and Woody Guthrie. As a young country musician, Guthrie absorbed contemporary musical practices, likely directly from radio broadcasts and records of the Carters. The influences include form, singing style (but without the “twang,” and especially Maybelle’s “Carter-pickin’.” His application of these borrowed stylistic elements, however, was quite different, and therein lies the elements fundamental to the establishment of a folk music style. Rather than sing about the bliss to be found in embracing mountain Christianity, he focuses his lyrics upon changing social inequity.

Guthrie was, by choice rather than necessity, a roustabout, often traveling from place to another by hopping a train. In California, he saw the treatment by big-business orchard and farm owners of workers new arrived from sections of the country ravished by the Dustbowl. The owners did not pay fair wages and, as a result of their advantage, were essentially able to exploit the benefits of the worker’s labor while keeping him in poverty. The experience left him stunned, shocked, and angry. He turned his music to the cause of union organizing, receiving more than a few beatings at the hands of union thugs as reward for his efforts. The experience also left so deep a trace upon him that he joined the Communist Party. One of his best-known activist-songs is “This Land is Your Land.”

Although commercially viable, Guthrie never polished his delivery so that it would have the “sweet” appeal required for the mass audience. Nevertheless, he was immensely proud (and arrogant) about the money and prestige a recording contract with Columbia Records brought. In later years, he became New York-based. In his city circle, he came into Ralph Peer who, in turn introduced him to Pete Seeger. Guthrie and Seeger played together for some time.

Commercial Possibilities: Pete Seeger
Seeger did not expose himself to the same kinds of danger that Guthrie often risked, but did like both the possibilities of music as a political tool and the potential for economic gain. To this end, his group the Weavers, homogenized the raw model furnished by Guthrie into slickly performed and arranged music that would fill a pleasant evening’s concert as well as two sides of vinyl. Seeger composed some of the music, such as “If I Had A Hammer,” but drew largely upon an unexploited body of American folksongs including Spirituals. In the process, he often combined two or more songs into a single one, offering a great disservice to the authenticity of the American folksong repertory.

Seeger’s polished musical product and commercial success spawned a generation of other “folk” artists including Burl Ives (“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Raindeer”); The Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Joan Baez, Mimi and Richard Farina. Seeger’s success also paved the way for later singers such as Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell, but, in time, it spawned a self-absorbed, elitist, self-congratulatory “folk” movement. Many of these performers were not songwriters, turning instead for material to older folksongs or to old English ballads, the same sources that served as the model for American popular song in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Baez, in particular, was fond of rehashing English folk songs, and her musical style did not differ significantly from the overly formal renditions that characterize the music of Stephen Foster. Dylan would later come to national prominence on the popularity this group, as many of them would benefit by recording his music, and then later come to irresolvable loggerheads with it.

The Times They Are A Changin’: A Musical Poet Laureate Arrives
Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in 1941 in Hibbing Minnesota to middle-class parents. His early influences include blues, country, and early rock ‘n’ roll. While in high school, he formed a short-lived band called the “Shadows” and, later he formed a more successful second band called the “Golden Chords.” In 1959 he briefly toured as pianist to singer Bobby Vee, under the pseudonym Elston Gunn.

Dylan became involved in the folk scene in during his brief time at the University of Minnesota. There he began calling himself “Bob Dylan,” the last name likely derived from that of the poet Dylan Thomas. In 1961, he had the unmitigated gall to go to New York to visit the dying Woody Guthrie. He did not know Guthrie, but remarkably, Guthrie received him from his hospital bed. In New York, Dylan began to play the “basket clubs,” so named because the payment for services came by passing the basket. He further developed his performing skills and materials in these clubs and there received his first important favorable notice by New York Times critic Robert Shelton. He also met John Hammond, who signed him shortly thereafter to a contract with Columbia Records.

His first album, made in 1962, did not contain original materials but remakes of songs by other people or older blues and Gospel songs. The melody of one Gospel song included on the album, “No More Auction Block,” was later appropriated for “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Dylan’s romantic connection with Joan Baez (1963-5), who was already established as an important folk singer, lead to wider professional exposure. His 1963 album, “Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” helped to establish him as a singer and composer of protest songs obviously styled after the music of Woody Guthrie. “Blowin’ in the Wind” comes from this period of transition singing from the materials of others to singing his own. Over the next few years, other artists including Joan Baez, the Byrds, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, would record his songs, a situation critical to pushing Dylan to the professional forefront as a poet-composer. In the most charitable description, Dylan’s singing and instrumental skills could be called marginal. The reaction by a significant number of listener’s is that they really liked Dylan’s songs, but only when performed by anyone else. The following record, “The Times, They Are A Changin’,” was far more sophisticated and political than his first two, and notable songs of the period include “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” and, of course, “The Times They Are A Changin’.” The vein continued in his 1964 recording “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” which is somewhat lighter in intensity but still contains songs such as “My Back Pages,” “Chimes of Freedom,” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” These lyrics of these songs tend to use a literary style at once poetic and ‘Biblical’ in their scope, terror, and setting, a debt and tribute perhaps not to Woody Guthrie, but to Dylan Thomas.

By 1965, Dylan had grown tired of the smugness and inbreeding of the folk movement, and shifted his musical style back to his roots, rock ‘n’ roll. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” owes more than a little debt to Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business.” The times they were a changin’, but his populist supporters failed to notice. His performance on electric guitar in the same year at the Newport Jazz Festival with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band prompted some of his audience to openly denounce him. Another performance with the Hawks, the band that would later become famous as The Band, was also met unfavorably. The Band owes its name to Dylan, who could never remember their professional name as a group. He simply referred to them as “the band.” Instead of bucking the current, they simply changed their name!

Electric Bob Dylan

The last years of the decade brought other stylistic changes. His 1967 album contains the song “All Along the Watchtower,” later immortalized by Jimi Hendrix. The record also included “Poor Immigrant” and another song that would anticipate a stylistic shift to Country music, “Be My Baby Tonight.” By 1969 he decided to explore Country music wholeheartedly, and “Nashville Skyline” includes a duet with Johnny Cash. The album also included.

The history of Dylan’s performance and songwriting styles show frequent and abrupt chameleon-like changes. Although the changes were often met by hostility by listeners who wanted his style to be frozen forever in one place, the shifts were essential to Dylan’s survival as an artist. Although not a practical musician whose performance skills would attract a following, his music maintains a very high quality throughout the different periods. The melodic and harmonic structures always display a “classic” but satisfying simplicity. “Blowin’ in the Wind” is an example of a song that displays these traits. It is difficult to imagine that the song was composed in the 1960s; like Christmas carols, it has a quality of “always having existed” as a folksong. The other characteristic of Dylan’s songs which cannot be underemphasized and which is critical to their success as lasting music is incredibly literate quality of his lyrics, regardless of his literary style of the period, especially taking into account that the popular song is not one in which literacy is the normative.