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Slavery There were two types of slave music in the United States a secular music that consisted of field hollers, shouts, and moans that used folk tales and folk motifs, and that made use of homemade instruments from the banjo (which became a standard American instrument in the 1th century, largely through minstrelsy), tambourine, and calabashes to washboards, pots, spoons, and the like. From the 1740s, many states had banned the use of drums in fear that Africans would use them to create a system of communication in order to aid rebellion. Nonetheless, blacks managed to generate percussion and percussive sounds, using other instruments or their own bodies.
There was also a spiritual music the spirituals that became well known after the Civil War, (when the Fisk Jubilee Singers toured the nation and eventually the world, starting in 1871, to raise money for their school), and remains, in many circles, as the most highly regarded black musical expression ever invented in the United States, having almost become a kind of African-American lieder. Indeed, W. E. B. Du Bois, a graduate of Fisk, and highly influenced by German ideas of folk culture, wrote about the sorrow songs, as he called them in his seminal 10 book, The Souls of Black Folk, as if they were Americas lieder. (No major black opera star from Roland Hayes to Kathleen Battle has ever refused to sing them, nor indeed, are they expected to do so.) Africans also used dances, stomps and hand games from the ring shout to Pat Juber in their musical expression, all of which clearly came from Africa. The Cakewalk, for instance, a popular dance in post-bellum America, had its roots in slavery. (It was a dance that actually made fun of white people.)
Whites found black musical performances on the plantation fascinating and often went to the slave quarters to watch slaves sing and dance. There are many such accounts in books by whites who visited or lived on plantations, from Fanny Kemble to Frederick Law Olmsted, architect of New York Citys Central Park. Black musical performances on the plantation are described in virtually all slave narratives, personal accounts of slavery written by fugitive slaves between 180 and 1860 indicating even then how closely associated blacks were with singing and dancing. The most famous American novel of the 1th century, Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin (185), opens with a scene of a little black boy dancing for two white men. In places like Congo Square in New Orleans, whites would congregate to watch blacks perform songs and dances both during and after slavery. Blacks also became prominent as plantation musicians, providing music for their masters and mistresses on social occasions, usually dance music. Fiddling was a common profession for black men during the days of slavery.
Both of these forms of music had similar features, although they did not appear in every single instance use of call and response; improvisation as an essential part of the creative process; extensive use of slurs, moans, cries, and bends in both the vocal and instrumental performance; and, in the secular music, poly-rhythms. The secular music was undoubtedly influenced by common white folk music, but was largely its own unique style and substance. The biblical language and standard Protestant denominational hymnals heavily influenced the spirituals. But once again, they were still largely a product of the African imagination pitched to an American key.
It has been suggested that several of the spirituals had double-meanings, and this is almost certainly true. It is unlikely, however, that these songs were codes for slave revolts. Slaves were simply watched too carefully to be able to get away with songs like that, which almost certainly would have been recognized by their masters and overseers. More reasonably, songs like Steal Away, Come With Me to My Fathers House, Let Us Break Bread Together on Our Knees, and One Morning Soon and the like were code songs for secret meetings. (It was difficult for slaves to meet without some whites being present.) They may have also been codes for slaves who were getting ready to run away. Some of the most common secular songs were Easy Rider, which became a standard blues tune, and You Gonna Reap. Clearly, more polished folk tunes that emerged after the Civil War like John Henry and Stagger Lee emerged from this secular slave tradition combined with the tradition of the English ballad. Under the entrepreneurship of W. C. Handy, blues became a regularized, formularized commercial music that came into its own in the 10s with the rise of black women blues singers, who became so popular that the recording industry invented a new genre called Race Records, music made by blacks for blacks.
This body of music was of great importance in the development of jazz. First, almost certainly, the field secular music was the forerunner of the blues, which appeared in the 180s and was such an important aspect of jazz and the gutbucket feature of black dance music. The unschooled techniques from this music, the slurring and bending of notes, the wild falsetto cries and the like, became common features of jazz as both an instrumental and vocal music, but in far more artful ways as jazz developed sophisticated principles for its performance.
The spirituals actually became the basis of a highly arranged choral music done by professional black composers like Harry T. Burleigh and Samuel Coleridge Taylor. But it was this sort of arranging tradition that produced a number of black musicians, including James Reese Europe, Will Vodery, R. Nathaniel Detts, Will Marion Cook, Ford Dabney, and William Grant Still. It is from this choral and compositional tradition of black music that emerged after the Civil War that black musical theater came into being in the 180s with such writers as Bob Cole and James and Rosamund Johnson. (The connection between jazz and popular show music is an intricate and long-standing one.) This tradition, combined with the piano compositions of the ragtime players of the 180s and early 100s, greatly influenced aspects of jazz. It is clear that later bandleaders like Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington were continuations of this type of approach.
World War One
But these enlisted men were all black. So were all the members of the big regimental band, and as it swung into its distinctive version of the Marsellaise, the onlookers on shore were still more puzzled. These Americans played with such spirit and rhythmic drive that it took the French eight or 10 bars to recognize their own national anthem. Then, one of the musicians in the band remembered, there came over their faces an astonished look followed instantly by alert snap-to-it attention and [a] salute by every French soldier or sailor present.
Marching at the head of the band was its director, Lieutenant James Reese Europe, who had been the most eagerly sought-after society dance bandleader in New York before America entered the war; the man who, as musical director for the dancers Vernon and Irene Castle, had introduced the country to the fox-trot. He had joined the army in 115, he told a friend, not out of any special sense of patriotism or because he was especially fond of martial music, but because he thought a National Guard unit for Harlem would bring together all classes of men who stand for something in the community and he would have felt remiss if he were not part of it.
A Red Flag in the Face of a Bull
The regiment had first been sent south for training, to Spartanburg, South Carolina, over the strenuous objections of the citys mayor. I was sorry to learn that the 15th Regiment has been ordered here, he told the press, for, with their northern ideas about race equality, they will probably expect to be treated like white men. I can say right here that they will not be treated as anything except Negroes ... This thing is like waving a red flag in the face of a bull, something that cant be done without trouble.
On the first Saturday after the regiments arrival, Europes band played a concert in downtown Spartanburg. A big muttering crowd of local whites gathered. The next day, however, members of the Spartanburg chamber of commerce came calling. Would the band be available to play to dancing the following Saturday at the country club?
Europes music may have mollified some white citizens of Spartanburg, but others continued to be angered by the presence of black troops. In the interest of keeping the peace, the men pledged to follow Jim Crow practice whenever they went into town and to do their best to look the other way when insulted. But white troops from other New York units training nearby had made no such promises. They berated shop owners who wouldnt serve their fellow soldiers, whatever their color, and when a black doughboy was assaulted for failing to leave the sidewalk fast enough to suit several lounging whites, white New Yorkers beat his attackers to the ground. Then, when the proprietor of a downtown hotel knocked a black private down for having failed to doff his hat before buying a newspaper in the lobby, officers had to restrain angry white troops from burning the place down. Finally, it was thought best to have the regiments training completed in France, where, their commander assured his men, there was no color line.
The Jazz Germ Hits France
James Reese Europes band playing for hospital patients, 118
Image courtesy of the National Archives
Not long after the Europe band came ashore in France, Army brass saw that its brand of martial ragtime would be good for morale, providing the feel of home for bored or battered doughboys, while winning new friends among the French. The songwriter Noble Sissle, who served as the bands vocalist, remembered its first appearance before French civilians, a Lincolns Birthday concert at the Nantes opera house. The men played French marches, The Stars and Stripes Forever, plantation melodies, and ragtime pieces, which the French had never heard before. Then came the fireworks, Sissle wrote, W. C. Handys Memphis Blues; it began with a soul-rousing crash of cymbals by the drummers, their shoulders shaking in time, then both director and musicians seemed to forget their surroundings ... The audience could stand it no longer, the jazz germ hit them and it seemed to find the vital spot, loosening all muscles and causing what is known in American as an eagle rocking it.
The music Europes men played was still orchestrated ragtime meant for marching, not jazz, and no one was allowed to improvise. But it was filled with jazz elements breaks, riffs, trombones smears, and rhythmic excitement no other marching band could come close to matching. The British and French and Italian bandmasters were impressed, too, and asked to examine the instruments Europes men had used; they couldnt believe that such sounds could be made through ordinary horns. It was not the instruments his men played, Europe patiently explained, but the way they played them that made the difference.
On the night of April 0, 118, Europe became the first African-American officer to face combat during the war, accompanying a French night patrol across no-mans-land under heavy enemy fire. Six weeks later, he survived a German poison gas attack that left his lungs too weak for further fighting but failed to dim his creativity. Lying on a hospital cot he wrote a new song, On Patrol in No Mans Land, then arranged it for the regimental band with special effects sirens and alarm bells, artillery explosions, and rattling bursts of machine-gun fire, all to be produced by the bands two drummers.
The Hellfighters
Meanwhile, the men of the 15th New York its name now changed to the 6th Infantry Regiment, U.S. Army endured 11 unbroken days of combat, won 171 decorations for bravery, more than any other American unit, and took special pride in the name the French gave them the Hellfighters. After the fighting was finally over, they came home to New York on February 17, 11, to a victory parade up 5th Avenue to Harlem. Thousands of New Yorkers, white as well as black, poured into the streets to cheer them. Never in the history of Father Knickerbocker, one newspaperman wrote, has such a rousing royal welcome been given returning heroes ... Not for many a day it is likely that thousands of white and colored citizens will participate in such a tumultuous and enthusiastic demonstration.
World War I proved one of the bloodiest and most brutal wars in history, with 10 million people killed, and some 0 million wounded from 114-118. The carnage was unspeakable. As historian Bernd Huppauf explained, soldiers suffered horrific wounds that were inflicted by modern ammunition. There were soldiers who returned who had suffered psychological shock ... They were not even capable of functioning in the society at the end of the war. The world had entered a new, mechanized age, one in which the frailty of life was clearer than ever before. The slaughter forced inhabitants of every nation to question their philosophical and spiritual beliefs, and altered their perspective of the world.
In America, the war paved the way for what would one day be caricatured as the Roaring Twenties, a period of fast living characterized by organized crime, corrupt politicians, speakeasies, and the wild, vibrant beats of a new music known as jazz.
Roaring Twenties
The decade following World War I would one day be caricatured as the Roaring Twenties, and it was a time of unprecedented prosperity the nations total wealth nearly doubled between 10 and 1, manufactures rose by 60 percent, for the first time most people lived in urban areas and in homes lit by electricity. They made more money than they ever had before and, spurred on by the giant new advertising industry, spent it faster, too on washing machines and refrigerators and vacuum cleaners, 1 million radios, 0 million automobiles, and untold millions of tickets to the movies, that ushered them into a new fast-living world of luxury and glamour their grandparents never could have imagined. Meanwhile, at the polls and in the workplace as well as on the dance floor, women had begun to assert a new independence.
The Parisian Red Heads, 17
Image courtesy of Frank Driggs Collection
Nothing quite like it had ever happened before in America. And by the mid-10s, jazz was being played in dance halls and roadhouses and speakeasies all over the country. The blues, which had once been the product of itinerant black musicians, the poorest of the southern poor, had become an industry, and dancing consumed a country that seemed convinced prosperity would never end. There were all-girl orchestras on the road now including Babe Egans Hollywood Red Heads, a band billed as the Twelve Vampires, and the Parisian Red Heads, all of whom actually came from Indiana. More than 100 dance bands regularly criss-crossed the wide-open spaces between St. Louis and Denver, Texas and Nebraska, playing one-nighters. They were called territory bands the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks; the Alphonso Trent and Doc Ross and Troy Floyd and Benny Moten Orchestras; the Deluxe Melody Boys and Happy Black Aces; Jesse Stones Blue Serenaders; George E. Lee and his Singing Novelty Orchestra; Walter Page and his Blue Devils; and Andy Kirks Clouds of Joy. People didnt think anything about going 150 to 00 miles to dance back in those times, one territory band veteran remembered. Theyd say, We came 00 miles to see yall.
Meanwhile, radio and phonograph records Americans bought more than 100 million of them in 17 were bringing jazz to locations so remote that no band could reach them. And the music itself was beginning to change an exuberant, collective music was coming to place more and more emphasis on the innovations of supremely gifted individuals. Improvising soloists, struggling to find their own voices and to tell their own stories, were about to take center stage.
Gary Giddins, critic
On Prohibition, speakeasies and Jazz
(Audio Excerpt from JAZZ A Film by Ken Burns)
But for many of the millions of people for whom the 10s never roared at all, fearful of such rapid change and nostalgic for the small-town America of the turn of the century, jazz music came to seem not merely an annoyance but a threat, one more cause of loosening morals and frightening dislocation. Ragtime had been bad enough, with its insinuating rhythms and daring couple-dancing, but the jumpy, rancorous version of New Orleans polyphony projected by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and many of its imitators seemed much worse. As I understand it, said Professor Henry Van Dyck of Princeton University, it is not music at all. It is merely an irritation of the nerves of hearing, a sensual teasing of the strings of physical passion. Its fault lies not in syncopation, for that is a legitimate device when sparingly used. But jazz is an unmitigated cacophony, a combination of disagreeable sounds in complicated discords, a willful ugliness and a deliberate vulgarity. The editor of Musical Courier reported on a poll of academically trained musicians most found the ad libbing or jazzing of a piece ... thoroughly objectionable, he said, and several of them advanced the opinion that this Bolshevistic smashing of the rules and tenets of decorous music spelled disaster for American music.
Entertainer at Smalls Paradise Club in Harlem, 1
Image courtesy of UPI/Corbis-Bettman
For some, jazz simply became synonymous with noise. Thomas Edison, whose invention of the phonograph had made its sudden rapid spread possible, claimed that he played jazz records backward because they sound better that way. When the New York Times reported that the citizens of one Siberian village had driven hungry polar bears from its streets by banging pots and pans, the headline read Jazz Frightens Bears, and when a celebrated British conductor collapsed while visiting Coney Island, the same paper blamed the jazz bands now loudly competing with one another along boardwalk for his demise.
Jazz and the dancing it inspired was also said to be having a catastrophic impact on the national character. Moral disaster is coming to hundreds of young American girls, reported the New York American, through the pathological, nerve-irritating, sex-exciting music of jazz orchestras. In just two years in Chicago alone, the Illinois Vigilance Association reported in 1, the downfall of one thousand girls could be traced directly to the pernicious influence of jazz music. In Cincinnati, the Salvation Army obtained a court injunction to stop construction of a theater next to a home for expectant mothers on the grounds that the enforced proximity of a theater and jazz palace would implant dangerous jazz emotions in helpless infants. A social worker reported on the unwholesome excitement she now encountered even at small-town dances in the Midwest. Boy-and-girl couples leave the hall in a state of dangerous disturbance. Any worker who has gone into the night to gather the facts of activities outside the dance hall is appalled ... by the blatant disregard of even the elementary rules of civilization ... We must expect a few casualties in social discourse, but the modern dance is producing little short of holocaust.
Beyond its disturbing sounds, its fast pace, and its supposed impact on morals, jazz was also condemned because of its origins. Many white older Americans were appalled to see their children dancing to music that was believed to have emerged from what the music critic of the New York Herald Tribune called the Negro brothels of the South. Jazz, said the editor of Etude, is often associated with vile surroundings, filthy words, unmentionable dances. It was originally the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer, declared Mrs. Max Obendorfer, national music chairman of the General Federation of Womens Clubs, stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds ... [It] has also been employed by other barbaric people to stimulate barbarity and sensuality. Blacks were not the sole sources of the jazz contagion. The critic Carl Engel also worried about the effects on Anglo-Saxon youth of what he called Semitic purveyors of Broadway melodies, while Henry Fords Dearborn Independent blamed what it called the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes on sinister Jews.
There was nothing new in these attitudes. Twenty years earlier, many whites had deplored ragtime in part because it was based on black songs and dances, just as their descendants would one day denounce rock n roll because of its links to the African-American blues tradition. But something altogether new really was happening here and there across the country. A few white youths living in small towns and comfortable suburbs as well as big-city slums started to see more than mere novelty and excitement in this new primarily black music, began actually to hear their own feelings mirrored in the playing of African-Americans, and to look for ways they might participate in it themselves. In a country in which by law and custom blacks and whites were forbidden to compete on anything like an equal basis in any arena even boxing (the heavyweight title was then off-limits to black challengers) these young men were willing to brave a brand new world created by black Americans and in which black musicians remained the most admired figures.
The Great Depression
In 1, the Stock Market crashed. The Great Depression that followed was the worst crisis in America since the Civil War. As the 10s began, one out of every four wage-earners more than 15 million men and women was without work. In Mississippi, on a single day in 1, one quarter of the entire state was auctioned off. Thousands of jobless men wandered the landscape. Dust storms born in Texas and the Dakotas darkened skies all the way East to Washington. Prices of wheat and corn and cotton fell so low, the crops were left to rot in the fields. In Boston, children with cardboard soles in their shoes walked to school past silent shoe factories with padlocks on the doors. In New York, a jobless couple moved into a cave in Central Park and stayed there for a year. They could find nowhere else to live.
Hard times hit black America hardest. In some northern cities, six out of 10 African-American workers lost their jobs. Poor southern migrants continued to come north, crowding into neighborhoods already packed with people, competing for the fast-dwindling number of jobs. Black businesses failed, crushing the entrepreneurial spirit that had been an essential element of the Negro Renaissance. But the people of Harlem endured.
The music business came close to collapsing. In Chicago, shivering jobless men burned old phonograph records to keep warm. American record companies, which had sold more than 100 million copies a year in the mid-0s, were soon selling just six million. Most of them went out of business. The Victor Company stopped making record players altogether for a time and sold radios and radio programs instead.
Nevertheless, the Depression meant that millions of people all over America would now be able to hear music all kinds of music played by all kinds of people for free. And jazz, which had always thrived in adversity and come to symbolize a certain kind of American freedom, would be called upon to lift the spirits and raise the morale of a frightened country. And in the process, it would begin to break down the barriers that had separated Americans from each other for centuries.
Hard Times
The Brown Family
Image courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
The Great Depression took a terrible toll on millions, jazz musicians among them. On November 4, 11, Buddy Bolden died at the Louisiana State Hospital for the Insane. A quarter of a century earlier, he had been the most celebrated cornet-player in New Orleans King Bolden among the first men ever to play the music that had come to be called jazz. But when the time came to escort his coffin to potters field in New Orleans, there was no money to pay a marching band to play him home as he had played so many home in the old days. Most of the New Orleans musicians who had once marched and played with him had passed on, or moved elsewhere and were encountering hard times, along with the rest of the country.
Jelly Roll Morton, who claimed to have invented jazz all by himself, moved to New York, where he bossed his men around so badly his band fell apart. He lost his bus, his clothes, his diamonds, and began calling New York that cruel city. He blamed his bad luck on a West Indian voodoo curse. Sidney Bechet, the turbulent New Orleans master of the clarinet and soprano saxophone, exiled from France after a Paris shooting, came to New York as well and formed a group called the New Orleans Feetwarmers to play the kind of music he had always loved. But when he opened at the Savoy, few turned out to hear him. The Lindy Hoppers couldnt dance to his music. To get by, Bechet and the trumpet player Tommy Ladnier abandoned music for a while and opened a tailor shop at 18th Street and St. Nicholas. Ladnier shined shoes and Sidney Bechet did the pressing. Musicians everywhere were struggling. There was some work for whites playing commercial music on the radio, but the studios were completely closed to blacks.
The NPR 100 Sing, Sing, Sing
Many say that swing music arrived on January 16, 18, when Benny Goodman performed his killer diller, at New Yorks Carnegie Hall. The song is a selection from National Public Radios list of the 100 most important American musical works of the 0th Century.
(Courtesy NPRJazz.org)
Swing
In the mid-10s, as the Great Depression stubbornly refused to lift, jazz came as close as it has ever come to being Americas popular music. It had a new name now Swing and its impact was revolutionary. Swing rescued the recording industry. In 1, just 10 million records had been sold in the United States. By 1, that number would grow to 50 million. Swing which had grown up in the dancehalls of Harlem would become the defining music for an entire generation of Americans.
Swing provided Hollywood with its theme music and offered entertainment, elegance and escape for a people down on their luck. Radios and jukeboxes could be heard playing swing along every Main Street in America, providing the accompaniment for a host of exhilarating new dances the Big Apple and Little Peach, the Shag and Susy Q, and the dance that had started it all the Lindy Hop now called jitterbugging. Hundreds of bands were on the road and young people followed the careers of the musicians who played in them just as they followed their favorite baseball players.
Hotter Than Ell by Fletcher Henderson
Recorded September 5, 14
(Courtesy Verve Music Group)
Millions of white Americans who had never listened to jazz before suddenly filled ballrooms and theaters all over the country the Aragon in Chicago, the Alcazar in Baltimore, and the Ali Baba in Oakland; the Twilight in Fort Dodge, Iowa and the Moonlight in Canton, Ohio; the Arcadia Ballroom in Detroit, the Paramount Theater in New York and the Palomar Ball Room in Los Angeles, where Benny Goodman had thrilled audiences with his version of the music first played by Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Chick Webb, and Duke Ellington. As critic Gary Giddins explained,
Swing music was an electrifying development in American popular culture. It... unleashed forces that, I think, people didnt know existed. There had been dance bands, sweet bands, sentimental bands. But when Benny Goodman reached those kids at the Palomar ballroom in California, it was like 0 years later with rock and roll... he was playing a swinging rough music that had been played in black communities for years. Ellington, you know, wrote It Dont Mean a Thing if it Aint Got that Swing three years earlier and Chick Webbs band was doing it and Fletcher Hendersons... it swept the country. It was, it unleashed some kind of pent up...excitement and, and, and physicality that I think nobody was quite prepared for... And, also, this was the Depression. It was not an easy period. And this was a music that was just pure pleasure. Pure physical pleasure.
The NPR 100 In The Mood
Alice Winkler has the surprising story behind Glenn Millers swing classic, a selection from National Public Radios list of the 100 most important American musical works of the 0th Century.
(Courtesy NPRJazz.org)
Forgetting the Trouble
Drought refugees from Texas in California camp, 16
Image courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
In 17, the Great Depression, which had begun to show signs of lifting, suddenly deepened. The stock market collapsed again. In less than six months, four million more men and women lost their jobs. They called it the Roosevelt Recession, the steepest economic decline in American history. Black Americans continued to suffer most and white southerners wielded such power on Capitol Hill that even Franklin Roosevelt lacked the political will to support a federal law against the savagery of lynching.
Nevertheless, people still found ways to see jazz. It provided them with a welcome respite from their daily hardships. As saxophonist Jerry Jerome described
I traveled with Harry Reser and his Cliquot Club Eskimos back in l6 through the mid-West on a series of one nighters only, the whole summer literally. And it was very hot and destructive, it was just terrible ... and people were poor, they had no money, the Depression was on.... I turned around to Harry one time, I said, Harry, why do, where do people get the money to come hear us? Cause we, you know we had people come hear us. He says, You know, Jer, they save their pennies for the weekend so they can get ... some beer and go out and pay whatever it costs to go to a dance with their wives or girlfriends, have a ball, forget about their trouble and then ... after its all over, start all over again, get that money back.
And there were more worries A new war in Europe seemed just a matter of time and the United States was utterly unprepared.
A Glimpse of Things to Come
In March of 1, Duke Ellington and his orchestra set sail for Europe for an extended concert tour. Even he could not have foreseen the sort of impact it would have. In the United States, Ellington was often overshadowed by more commercial bands, but in Europe, he reigned supreme. Crowds met their ship at Le Havre with such adoration and genuine joy, his trumpeter Rex Stewart remembered, that for the first time in my life I had the feeling of being accepted as an artist, a gentleman, and a member of the human race.
Gary Giddins, critic
On the pure physical pleasure of swing music
(Audio Excerpt from JAZZ A Film by Ken Burns)
Duke Ellington on his way to Europe, 1
Image courtesy of Frank Driggs Collection
Thousands turned out in Brussels, Antwerp, The Hague, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Stockholm, where fans filled Ellingtons hotel room with flowers for his 40th birthday. A Paris critic proclaimed that Ellingtons music revealed the very secret of the cosmos and the French poet Blaise Cendrars pronounced his music not only a new art form but a new reason for living. But that same spring, when the train carrying Ellingtons band across northern Germany was delayed at Hamburg, uniformed soldiers patrolled the platform and his men could not get off even to stretch their legs. The Nazis had barred both black foreigners and jazz which they called Nigger-Jew Music.
As their train crossed Holland, the clarinetist Barney Bigard remembered, we could see out of the ... windows that they were putting machine-gun posts in all the haystacks and in the ditches. And in Paris, the band played in a new underground theater, built to withstand the German bombs the French were sure would soon be falling. Ellington and his band returned to America in May. Europe was only months away from war.
World War Two
On December 7, 141, America found itself at war. Jazz went to war, too, and overseas, swing still Americas most popular music would serve to remind the men and women of the armed forces of home. Bandsmen today are not just jazz musicians, said Down Beat, they are soldiers of music.
On the home front, the music industry found itself struggling again. Blackouts and late-night curfews darkened some nightclubs and dance halls. A 0 percent entertainment tax closed ballrooms all across the country. The rationing of rubber and gasoline eventually drove most band buses off the roads, and servicemen now filled the Pullman trains, making it difficult for musicians to get around by rail. A shortage of shellac, which was used in the manufacture of records, curtailed the recording of music, and companies stopped making jukeboxes and musical instruments altogether for a time because they were deemed unnecessary to the war effort.
The draft stole away good musicians Jack Teagarden lost 17 men to the army in just four months. He and other bandleaders were forced to pay their replacements more for less talent. Im paying some kid trumpet player $500 a week, Tommy Dorsey complained, and he cant even blow his nose. With so many male musicians in uniform, more than a hundred all girl bands were on the move across the country, playing for dances, helping to sell war bonds.
NPRs Morning Edition Review of Swing Shift
Lynn Neary speaks with Swing Shift author Sherrie Tucker and Clora Bryant of the legendary Prairie View Co-Eds about all-girl bands that arose during the war.
(Courtesy NPRJazz.org)
By October 14, Down Beat was running a regular column headed Killed in Action. At one point during the fighting, there were bandleaders enlisted in the Army, 17 in the Navy, three in the Merchant Marine, and two more in the Coast Guard. Glenn Miller, whose infectious swing hits like In the Mood epitomized the war years, disbanded his own hugely successful orchestra to form an all-star Air Force unit and perished when his airplane disappeared over the English Channel. Benny Goodman, still the King of Swing, was deferred because of a back injury, but he and many other musicians volunteered for the USO, and made special V Discs for the men and women stationed overseas.
Artie Shaw, musician and bandleader
Hear the quote below
(Audio Excerpt from JAZZ A Film by Ken Burns)
Artie Shaw led a Navy band that toured the South Pacific playing in jungles so hot and humid that the pads on the saxophones rotted and horns had to be held together with rubber bands. Seventeen times they were bombed or strafed by Japanese planes. I remember an engagement on the USS Saratoga, this huge carrier, said Shaw. And we were put on the flight deck and we came down into this cavernous place where they, three thousand men in dress uniforms ... and a roar went up. I tell ya you know it really threw me. I couldnt believe what I was seeing or hearing, I felt something extraordinary. I was by that time inured to success and applause and all that youd take that for granted after a while. You could put your finger out and say, Now theyre gonna clap. But this was a whole different thing. These men were starved for something to remind them of home and whatever is mom and apple pie. And the music had that effect I suppose.
African-Americans Join the War Effort
Fort Bragg, NC, 14
Image courtesy of Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
African-Americans rallied to the flag just as they had 4 years earlier. A million black Americans served in the armed forces before the fighting ended nearly half a million of them overseas. But there was a new and growing impatience in black America, a determination that its sacrifices not be repaid with renewed mistreatment as they had been after World War I. Though I have found no Negroes who want to see the United Nations lose this war, said the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, A. Philip Randolph, I have found many who want to see the stuffing knocked out of white supremacy ... American Negroes ... are confronted not only with a choice but with the challenge both to win democracy for ourselves at home and to help win the war for democracy the world over. Even before the fighting began, Randolph had forced Franklin Roosevelt to issue an executive order opening up jobs in defense factories by threatening a 100,000-man march on Washington if he failed to act.
No one willing to look could miss the hypocrisy of being asked to fight bigotry abroad while experiencing it at home. The nation cannot expect colored people to feel that the United States is worth defending, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote early in the war, if the Negro continues to be treated as he is now. But even A. Philip Randolph was unable to persuade President Roosevelt to integrate the armed forces. Black Americans served throughout the war on a strictly segregated basis. Blood supplies for saving the lives of the wounded were carefully separated by race. On one base, a schedule listed separate services for Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and Negroes. Some commanders forbade black troops to read black newspapers. There were violent confrontations between black and white troops at military installations. Off base, black soldiers were harassed, beaten, even refused service at restaurants where German prisoners of war were allowed to eat. The Pittsburgh Courier mounted a Double-V campaign, calling for simultaneous victories over the nations enemies abroad and discrimination at home. Heavyweight champion Joe Louis got in trouble with his black fans when, after defeating Buddy Baer, he donated his purse to the navy, when that branch of the armed forces still restricted most African-American sailors to menial tasks.
Armed Forces Band, World War II
Image courtesy of The National Archives
No one felt more alienated from the war effort than young black musicians. They knew that once drafted, they were likely to be sent to the Jim Crow South for basic training, where the relative freedom they had experienced in the North would vanish, and when that ordeal was over, they were less likely than their white counterparts to be offered jobs in military bands.
Many musicians served, anyway. But some simply kept moving, hoping their draft notices would never catch up with them, and a few feigned homosexuality or pretended to be psychotic or addicted to drugs to avoid conscription. The trumpet player Howard McGhee said he won an exemption by assuring an army psychiatrist that if inducted he would ask to be sent South so that he could organize black soldiers to shoot whites Whether hes a Frenchman, a German or whatever ... how would I know the difference? Those attitudes only hardened as musicians became special targets of white policemen and white servicemen who objected to their good clothes, their hipster language, their new assertiveness. The enemy, by that period, was not the Germans, Dizzy Gillespie said, it was above all white Americans who kicked us in the butt every day, physically and morally ... If America wouldnt honor its Constitution and respect us as men we couldnt give a [damn] about the American way. And they made it damn near un-American to appreciate our music.
Jazz in Occupied Europe
Through World War II, jazz the music that German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called the art of the subhuman stayed stubbornly alive in Nazi-occupied Europe, a bright symbol of resistance. When the Germans barred even the use of the word jazz, the Hot Jazz Club of Belgium renamed itself the Rhythmic Club and kept on swinging. And when the Germans banned the performance of all American music in Paris, local musicians simply changed the titles of the tunes they loved In the Mood became Ambiance; Holy Smoke became Joyeuse fumee; and Count Basies Jumpin at the Woodside turned into Dansant dans la Clairiere. Swing was the magic word for young people everywhere, the French jazz enthusiast Charles Delaunay recalled. Swing was on everyones lips, you swore by it. Everything that was at all original or redolent of American life was baptized swing.
Bertrand Tavernier, director, Round Midnight
On the perception of jazz in occupied Europe
(Audio Excerpt from JAZZ A Film by Ken Burns)
In 14, Goebbels changed tactics. Realizing that he could not do away with jazz, he resolved to turn it to the advantage of the Reich, and ordered his ministry to organize its own radio swing band, then aim its broadcasts of familiar American tunes like Makin Whoopee at the Allies with new and poisonous anti-Semitic lyrics added
Another war, another profit, another Jewish business trick,
Another season, another reason for makin whoopee!
We throw our German names away,
We are the kikes of USA.
You are the goys, folks,
We are the boys, folks
Were makin whoopee!
In Germany itself, young fans called swing kids continued to defy the Gestapo all through the war, meeting in secret, playing records, tuning in to Allied radio, and dancing. The German-born jazz pianist Jutta Hipp later struggled to explain to an American interviewer how important the music had been to her and to her friends during the massive Allied bombing of Germany. You wont be able to understand this because you were born [in America], but to us, jazz is some kind of religion. We really had to fight for it, and I remember nights when we didnt go down to the bomb shelter because we listened to [jazz] records. We just had the feeling that you were not our enemies, and even though the bombs crashed around us ... we felt safe.
To divert attention from their hideous crimes, the Nazis eventually made a propaganda film intended to demonstrate to the world their supposed kindness to the Jews. The infamous Terezin concentration camp outside Prague was dressed up as a model village, and its occupants given new clothes. They were then filmed being entertained by inmate musicians, including a jazz band called the Ghetto Swingers. Once the filming was over, the musicians reward was to be sent to the death camp at Auschwitz, along with hundreds of thousands of other innocent people.
Long after the war, an interviewer asked Dizzy Gillespie if jazz should be considered serious music. Men had died for this music, he said. You cant get more serious than that.
The Sixties
When the English historian and sometime jazz writer Eric Hobsbawm visited the United States for the first time in 160, he found the nights too short to listen to everything that could be heard in New York from the Half Note and the Five Spot in the Village to Smalls Paradise and the Apollo in Harlem. Two years later, when he came back to America, eager to hear more music, he wrote, Bird Lives could still be seen painted on the lonely walls, but the celebrated New York jazz venue named after him, Birdland, had ceased to exist and jazz had virtually been knocked out of the ring.
What had happened? The tenor player Johnny Griffin blamed those who had taken jazz out of Harlem and put it in Carnegie Hall and downtown in those joints where youve got to be quiet. The black people split and went back to Harlem, back to rhythm and blues, so they could have a good time. Meanwhile, the pianist Hampton Hawes wrote, white kids were jamming the rock halls and the older people were staying home and watching TV. Maybe they found out they couldnt pat their feet to our music anymore. And after 16, the astonishing popularity of the Beatles and other British rock groups their sound initially derived from African-American blues performers, precisely as the music of white American rockers had been a decade earlier produced a second, still more spectacular surge in the sales of rock music, and a still deeper decline in public enthusiasm for jazz. Even promoter John Hammond now edged away from the music he had always loved most and applied his scouting skills to rock and folk music instead, signing Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and later, Bruce Springsteen, for Columbia Records.
The NPR 100 A Love Supreme
Eric Westervelt has the story of John Coltranes 164 classic, a selection from National Public Radios list of the 100 most important American musical works of the 0th Century.
(Courtesy NPRJazz.org)
Some desperate jazz musicians took jobs wherever they could find them in cocktail lounges, studio orchestras, playing background music for the movies, backing rock n roll performers on records. Others abandoned performing altogether. Tenor saxophonist Eddie Lockjaw Davis, a veteran of the Count Basie band, became a booking agent for rock groups. Dicky Wells, who had played trombone with Basie, as well as Fletcher Henderson, Benny Carter, and Teddy Hill, took a job as a bank guard on Wall Street, in part, he said, because there were at least a hundred other musicians already working in the financial district with whom he could hang out at lunchtime. Still other musicians left for Europe in search of an audience Chet Baker, Donald Byrd, Don Cherry, Art Farmer, Bud Freeman, Stan Getz, Jimmy Heath, Philly Joe Jones, Oscar Pettiford, Bud Powell, Stuff Smith, Art Taylor, Lucky Thompson, Ben Webster, Randy Weston, Phil Woods.
Civil Rights March in Memphis
Image courtesy of Archive Photos
The country these men left behind was entering an era unlike any it had ever experienced before, a period of selfless struggle and shameless self-indulgence; of unprecedented progress in civil rights and deepening divisions between the races; of calls for collective action and relentless focus on the individual; and of the mushroom growth of a youth culture powerful enough to begin to dictate Americas tastes. Jazz music would struggle to deal with it all, and in the process would increasingly find itself divided into factions, so many factions, Duke Ellington said, he didnt see how such great extremes as now exist can be contained under the one heading. The debate over what was jazz and what was not raged as it never had before, and for a time, the real question would become whether this most American of art forms could survive in America at all.
No book, nor shelf of books, could adequately map the course of jazz after 160, let alone trace the meandering paths of all its proliferating tributaries. No Great Man can be said to have towered over everyone else, as Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker could be said to have done in their time, but John Coltrane and Miles Davis were surely among the most influential of all post-bebop musicians, and their careers touched upon many of the most important developments in the music, for both good and ill. During Coltranes too-brief career he began recording with Miles Davis in 155 and died in 167, at the age of 40 his music would first exemplify the idealism that may have been the most admirable quality of the 160s, and then prefigure what Cecil Taylor called the hysteria of the times, the chaos that characterized the decades end.
A Love Supreme
In 161, saxophonist John Coltrane formed an extraordinary quartet. Jimmy Garrison brought both ferocity and steadfastness to the bass. McCoy Tyner played the piano; his love for the blues, percussive block chords, and riffs and vamps (brief patterns played over and over to produce something like the drones effect in Indian music), worked out with Garrison, helped provide the perfect setting for Coltranes increasingly relentless musings. Elvin Jones played drums all the drums. For him, as Stanley Crouch has written, the trap set was an ensemble on which rhythm was not merely played but orchestrated. It may sound like a duet or duel, Jones once said of his ruffling, swirling work, filled with cymbal splashes, that sometimes seemed not to back Coltrane so much as engulf the whole group, but its still a support Im lending him, a complementary thing.
The men with whom Coltrane played shared his visionary belief in the importance of what they were doing. Many years later, the tenor saxophonist Branford Marsalis recalled, a lot of younger musicians were hanging around with Elvin Jones, and they were talking about, Man, you know, you guys had an intensity when you were playing with Coltrane. I mean, what was that like? How do you play with that kind of intensity? And Elvin looks at him and says, You gotta be willing to die with the [guy]. They started laughing like kids do, waiting for the punch line, and then they realized he was serious. How many people do you know that are willing to die period? Die with anybody! And when you listen to those records, thats exactly what they sound like. I mean, that they would die for each other.
On December, 164, the Coltrane quartet made one of the best-selling and best-loved jazz albums of all time, a four-part devotional suite called A Love Supreme. For Coltrane, music and religion had now become one My music is the spiritual expression of what I am my faith, my knowledge, my being ... When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hangups ... I want to speak to their souls. Divided into four sections Acknowledgment, Resolution, Pursuance, and Psalm it is a personal affirmation of Coltranes faith in a Creator, and during the fevered 60s its air of meditative serenity struck a chord with hundreds of thousands of young people. It continues to be a favorite among young musicians to this day. I think that record is one of the purest jazz records ever, said the tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman. The intent is so pure and the feeling is so pure, you just feel than John Coltrane is laying his soul out there, you know. Thats one of the first records I ever heard and I hope its the last record I ever hear.
Born Out of Oppression
The 160s had begun with the unshakable optimism of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. the conviction that Americans were fully capable of realizing the nations promise of full equality that jazz embodied at its best but they would end with the Black Panthers and the all-too-pervasive belief that Americas racial divisions could never be bridged, that black and white Americans were fated perpetually to live apart. Nineteen sixty-five marked a kind of turning point. The non-violent civil rights movement and the political skills of President Lyndon Johnson had combined to force Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act the previous year, empowering the attorney general to bring suit for discriminatory practices in public accommodations. But that victory had come at a fearful cost civil rights workers murdered, marchers beaten and killed. Malcolm X was shot to death in February 165. In March, Alabama state troopers on horseback clubbed some 70 citizens asking for the right to vote at Selma. In June, Dr. King led a march for desegregated housing in Chicago that was met with mob violence as bad as any hed encountered in the South. In August, the Watts section of Los Angeles exploded in riots. For many young black Americans, impatient for justice, it was all taking far too long and amounting to far too little. Stokely Carmichael would not formally call for Black Power until the following summer, but despair and anger had already fueled the growth of a kind of self-defensive nationalism, a growing conviction that if whites were unwilling to share power, black people would have to wrest it from them.
That idea gripped the imaginations of many of the musicians identified with the New Thing. The grievances of black musicians were older than jazz itself. Whats new? a friend once asked Louis Armstrong. Nothing, he answered, White folks still ahead. From the minstrel era to the age of rock, much of the music white Americans loved most had been created out of African-American forms, yet with only a handful of exceptions, white performers had always reaped the profits. Whites continued to own most of the clubs and concert halls in which jazz was played. They ran the companies that recorded and distributed it, decided how much musicians got paid, defined the conditions under which they had to work, determined who got critical attention and who did not.
Some young musicians now saw it as their mission not only to revolutionize the music but to reclaim it for their community, to reassert what they believed to be its African roots, to reject every vestige of the European tradition that had been an integral part of it from the beginning. Much of their music was meant to aggravate, not please; one of its most ardent journalistic champions gleefully confessed that he enjoyed recommending to his readers only those records he was sure they would dislike. When another writer suggested that the tenor saxophonist and sometime playwright Archie Shepp and his colleagues were undercutting their own message by being too angry, Shepp answered, We are not angry men. We are enraged. You can no longer defer my dream. Im gonna sing it. Dance it. Scream it. And if need be, Ill steal it from this very earth. Jazz, Shepp assured another interviewer, was then and had always been revolutionary music, anti-war; it is opposed to Vietnam; it is for Cuba; it is for the liberation of all people ... Why is that so? Because jazz is a music itself born out of oppression, born out of the enslavement of my people.
Not a Memory Yet
By 16, George Wein remembered, even the Newport Jazz Festival was in trouble. It was slipping in the eyes of the press because at that time, if you were over 40, you were finished. This was when corporations were hiring 1 year-old kids to tell them about what the youth market was. Rock had taken over so completely that Wein finally decided he had to include it on the program and called friends to find out which rock musicians could actually play. Well, they told him, Jethro Tull plays the flute and Frank Zappa plays good guitar, and Jimmy Page with Led Zeppelin plays good blues. So I hired all these groups. I had a rock festival, but I also had some good jazz. On the last night I had poor Stephane Grappelli playing with the Worlds Greatest Jazz Band with Yank Lawson, and right after them, I had Sly and the Family Stone, so you can see what a mess it was.
The astonishing popularity of rock and funk had not been lost on jazz musicians, especially on the more youthful among them, who had grown up dancing to rock and R&B rather than listening to swing and bebop. In 167, saxophonist Charles Lloyd had started what would become something like a stampede of jazz musicians eager to find a way of getting in on the action. With a quartet that included the drummer Jack DeJohnette and the pianist Keith Jarrett, he was a hit at the Fillmore. Time heralded the arrival of the first psychedelic rock group, and Lloyd seemed to fill the bill. I play love vibrations, he said. Love, totality like bringing everyone together in a joyous dance. His band soon dissolved, and for a time Lloyd became a teacher of transcendental meditation. But other musicians had been watching. I wanted a wider audience, said the alto saxophonist John Handy. I was a little tired of playing for those who sit all night saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, all 5 of them. I wanted to know what is was like to play for a stadium full of people. I wanted to see black women in the audience.
Miles Davis had been watching, too, and he was listening to the funk music of James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone, with its overwhelming backbeat, its heavy use of vamps and electronic instruments. His music had already begun to reflect what hed been hearing. The electric guitarists George Benson and Joe Beck made appearances on his records. His groups harmonies no longer shifted as they once had. The beat grew ever more dominant. Herbie Hancock began playing electric piano, and was joined by other keyboardists, including Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, and Joe Zawinul; and two Britons, Fender bassist Dave Holland, and electric guitarist John McLaughlin. Davis had realized, he remembered, that most rock musicians didnt know anything about music ... But they were popular because they were giving the public a certain sound, what they wanted to hear. So I figured that if they could do it reach all those people and sell all those records without really knowing what they were doing then I could do it, too, only better... I wasnt prepared to be a memory yet.
On August 16, 16, a little over a month after the Newport festival, some 400,000 young people gathered in a cow pasture near Woodstock, New York, willing to endure hours of rain and mud and discomfort just to be together in the presence of their rock idols. Three days later, Miles Davis made his bid to become one of those idols and began recording the curious melange of jazz and rock he called Bitches Brew. Even before it was released, Davis agreed to appear at the Fillmore East, the New York equivalent of the San Francisco venue hed turned down as beneath him just a few months before. He would be the opening act for Laura Nyro, a rock singer less than half his age.
Bitches Brew was a commercial triumph. It sold 400,000 copies in its first year, more than any Miles Davis record ever had sold before. During the next six years he would make 1 more albums, each one less like jazz than the last. Were not going to play the blues anymore, hed told Herbie Handcock even before making Bitches Brew. Let the white folks have the blues. They got em, so they can keep em. Play something else.
Beyond the Sixties
Jazz has developed exponentially since the 160s. As it gained status around the globe as a music representing freedom, musicians have freely integrated jazz elements into their own musics. Out of this symbiosis, many genres have evolved which bear little relation to jazzs American roots. This is the fate of a universal art form, and it should be welcomed.
Take, for instance, the recent efforts of the Japanese pianist/composer Masahiko Sato, who has been integrating the jazz idiom with that of traditional Japanese music. One offshoot of this movement has been to raise yet again a question that has been debated since the 10s What is jazz? Suffice it to say that if someone calls their music jazz, then those who like it may consider it such. We know that Duke Ellington, as early as the early 10s, found the term jazz restricting. Indeed, the time may be approaching to abandon all the categories and just refer to music by the person who played it. After all, bop is much too large an umbrella to cover the music of Parker, Gillespie, Monk and Dameron. As so venerable an observer as Benny Carter told graduates during his 11 commencement address at Rutgers University
Ive always been wary of labels, not just in jazz, but in the arts in general. Besides being imprecise, labels can be limiting. They limit you in what you may draw from, as well as what you may become. For example, when people ask me some of my influences as a saxophonist, they think Im joking when I mention names like Rudy Wiedoft, a saxophone wizard of the 10s, who specialized in highly technical pieces like Saxophobia, which demonstrated incredible mastery of the instrument. Or Wayne King, who was known as The Waltz King, and whose saxophone sound was beautiful to me. People gasp and say, But theyre not jazz musicians! My answer is that I never tried to learn jazz from them. I simply respected what they could do with the instrument-how they played, not what they played. So, one piece of advice I can offer is, learn whatever you can from whomever you can. Dont limit yourselves by labels, whether in music or any other artistic endeavor. Furthermore, artists can learn from other artists, no matter what the medium.
Thats the best advice one can give these days. The trio Carter, who is now, led in 15 with pianist Eric Reed (born 170) and bassist Charlie Haden (born 17) played a kind of jazz that would be impossible to put into one of the pre-fabricated jazz categories. Reed is a fully contemporary pianist who has played with Wynton Marsalis and now leads his own band. Haden was the musical anchor of the original Ornette Coleman Quartet, founded the Liberation Music Orchestra and in recent years has been leading his Quartet West. Hadens conception cuts a wide swath across American music. Add to that Carters experiences, which parallel the development of jazz across the century, and the futility of finding a label to cover it becomes obvious.
Throughout the history of jazz, critics and fans have always debated what they considered to be the real thing. Take for instance smooth jazz. There have always been more commercial forms of the music that have diluted the art to reach a wider audience. It happened in the 10s with Ted Lewis, and it happened in the 10s with Kenny G. It has frequently been said that these musicians bring more people into contact with pure jazz, and that very well may be so. But within the realm of the serious jazz artists, categories these days have been rendered pretty much meaningless. While categories such as Free Jazz, Avant-Garde and the like are convenient, they frequently confuse as much as they clarity.
A handful of the players who came to be known as free jazz musicians, such as Andrew Cyrille, Steve Lacy and Roswell Rudd, shared the bandstand with swing (another vague term) masters such as Coleman Hawkins, Pee Wee Russell and Vic Dickinson, and spoke their language. Where does one put pianist Paul Bley, who adapted Ornette Colemans music to the piano, but who was a past master of traditional jazz harmony? The bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik played in Thelonious Monks quartet with John Coltrane, and then spent many years mastering the oud and combining jazz with Middle Eastern music. What category would he go in? Today it would be world music, a rather meaningless term when you think about it, given the cross-cultural influences that have effected so much of the music around the world. Other musicians with less direct ties to the tradition also became original voices. In recent years John Zorn, Steve Coleman, Bill Frisell, Dave Douglas and Don Byron have explored diverse musical landscapes, some of which intersect with jazz, and some of which dont.
Fusion was named after the blending of jazz with rock (with a more than a dollop of funk thrown in), a mixture that eventually hit a brick wall. The rhythmic bases of the two styles were incompatible, but there is no denying that many creative musicians found the genre enticing. Certainly, the electric bassist Jaco Pastorius created many masterpieces in the idiom, as did a handful of others. As the writer Stuart Nicholson (in his definitive book Jazz-Rock A History) put it For at least two years prior to Bitches Brew, jazz-rock had been bubbling beneath the surface, but the style needed someone of sufficient stature to sanction the dawn of a new era.
The fact that Miles Davis was the prime instigator was undeniably the major factor in the musics initial appeal. Davis jettisoned the music that he had been such a pivotal figure in for a quarter of a century. This is not to imply that it lacks complexity, but at the base of the music is a rhythmically static cycle that would have been an anathema to Davis just a few years earlier. Fusion as a concept continues today, as many musicians, including Joshua Redman, Christina McBride, Russell Gunn and James Carter are creating new amalgams of contemporary pop trends and the jazz tradition.
In other words, any sort of definitive list of who and what is happening today is doomed to failure. Jazz has been treated so poorly by the mass media that the advent of a documentary such as JAZZ has, within the jazz community, taken on a responsibility that is in some regards misplaced. It is as though all of the slights and misrepresentations of the past must be rectified by mentioning every major players name, at the expense of a clear narrative that is aiming for something much larger in scope in terms of our American experience. Such detail would quickly lose the great majority of viewers who have no previous interest in the music or its background. JAZZ has also been taken to task for not addressing in depth the musics more recent developments, but such judgements would be premature, for the dust has yet to settle.
What does it mean to call someone a neo-Traditionalist in the year 001? What tradition, and why neo? Ornette Colemans music of 160 is now 40 years old, but a mPlease note that this sample paper on jazz and its history is for your review only. In order to eliminate any of the plagiarism issues, it is highly recommended that you do not use it for you own writing purposes. In case you experience difficulties with writing a well structured and accurately composed paper on jazz and its history, we are here to assist you. Your paper on jazz and its history will be written from scratch, so you do not have to worry about its originality. Order your authentic assignment and you will be amazed at how easy it is to complete a quality custom paper within the shortest time possible!