Jazz is widely thought to have originated in New Orleans in the first years of the 20th century. Ragtime, blues, and classical were musical precursors that grew out of the gumbo of cultures that was New Orleans. French, English, Spanish, African, West Indian, Cuban, native American – all contributed something to this new music called jazz.
During the period known as Reconstruction following the abolition of slavery, African Americans in the south lived under Draconian Jim Crowe laws, that professed ‘separate but equal’ but were anything but. One of the few outlets for their ideas and emotions was music. And New Orleans Congo Square offered one of the first places that blacks could gather legally to make music; their music. The weekly gatherings were full of dancing, drumming, merriment and community. Mixed race Creoles, many of whom had classical music training, now mixed with blacks, another result of segregation laws. As the two groups intermingled, so to did their respective musical forms. The west African-derived polyrhythms that had been carried down over centuries of slavery led to what Ted Gioia refers to as the ‘Africanization of American music’ or, alternately, the ‘Americanization of African music’. The great jazz contribution of improvisation was born as musicians sought personal and creative expression within the framework of melody, rhythm, and harmony.
By the time of Jelly Roll Morton, the first great jazz entertainer, jazz had begun to diffuse to new cities beyond New Orleans: Memphis, Detroit, St. Louis, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. Morton claimed that to be jazz the music had to have the ingredient of a ‘Spanish tinge’, reflecting the multicultural roots of the growing art form.
It was in the windy city that jazz would become part of mainstream of American culture under the genius of New Orleans native Louis Armstrong. With a history of nightlife and entertainment, Chicago provided freedoms and financial rewards not possible in the south. The expanding railroad network then provided a natural conduit for the mass migration of blacks to the cities of the north.
It was not long before New York became the center of the jazz universe. The years before and during World War II saw the growth of big bands and the Swing Era. Cosmopolitan white audiences sought out the exotic music coming out of Harlem, and dancing often went hand-in-hand with the music. Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman were the rock stars of the day.
By the early 1940s the smooth stylings of the Swing generation was replaced by an emphasis on personal and artistic expression. Kansas City saxophonist Charlie Parker and New York trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie were at the vanguard of the revolution known as bebop. Soon Miles Davis, Max Roach, Dexter Gordon, Bud Powell and a host of others would push the musical boundaries. Mintons playhouse, Birdland, and the Village Vanguard were among the nightspots frequented by these legendary performers and composers.
Reflecting the cultural milieu in which they lived, jazz became a form of deep artistic expression and way of challenging authority. Bebop in many ways set the foundation for the civil rights and black power movements to follow in the 1960s.
In its first half century of existence, jazz was largely performed, and appreciated, in the cities of the United States. A logical conclusion would be that jazz is an urban art form, but in truth its rural roots run deep .
Two of the most seminal figures in jazz, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, were born in rural North Carolina, but made the names and careers in New York City. How, one might ask, did these rural roots contribute to the great artistic achievements that these two men would come to make.
Rural southern blacks, in North Carolina as in other slave states, had suffered brutal subjugation and unspeakable indignities. For generations the fears, prayers, frustrations and aspirations were channeled into music. Meanwhile, the years of slavery had served to distill a vast array of musical styles. Emotions stirred by repeated trauma and indignation were channeled into drumming circles, dances, chants, and ultimately, the blues. In the post-emancipation years, share-cropping left most southern blacks in abject poverty with only limited freedoms. These were the essential conditions of rural North Carolina at the time Monk and Trane were born.
By contrast, blacks had been living in the cities of the northeast since the founding of the republic, enjoying freedoms afforded by the great diversity of peoples from every corner of the globe and every color in the palette. The general atmosphere of tolerance of people who were different cultivated artistic expression in all forms. While ethnic enclaves did segregate different races to some extent, intermingling was inevitable. The arrival of rural blacks into the cities of the north, therefore resulted in the mixing of deeply rooted musical and expressive traditions of the rural south with sophistication and a spirit of innovation that characterized the urban north. It is in this context that we find among Monk and Coltrane and their contemporaries a transcultural exchange of ideas, values, approaches and attitudes and the resultant flowering of creativity that followed.
Jazz was now great art, on par with Picasso or Mozart, not merely entertainment. Of course white musicians, who had played an integral role in jazz since the days of Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman, continued in the 1950s with the contributions of Bill Evans, Gerry Mulligan, Dave Brubeck, and Stan Getz, among others. Some might argue that, just as Elvis had hijacked rock and roll from Chuck Berry, these artists were co-opting jazz for the white audience. Yet one need only look to the white personnel employed by Mile Davis, known to make the occasional disparaging remark about his white contemporaries, to see that in the end it came down to making good music, irrespective of the origin of the players.
In San Francisco, jazz and the beat poets found a home in North Beach in the years before the 1960’s explosion of flower power, psychedelic music, and free love. But jazz had actually found root some 50 years earlier in The City. In the half century following the discovery of gold in 1848, San Francisco became one of the most culturally diverse cities the world has ever known, much like its Gulf Coast cousin New Orleans. The mix was different as the Pacific Coast drew Chileans, Chinese, Filipinos, Mexican, Salvadorans, Europeans of all stripes, and blacks. The gambling houses, saloons and brothels had employed bands since the arrival of the first gold seekers. Minstrel and medicine shows are among the venues that musicians plied their trade.
In his book, Jazz on the Barbary Coast, Tom Stoddard explains that “San Francisco grew from 459 people in 1847 to a hell-roaring, boot-stomping metropolis of 36,154 within 5 years”. “Along the Barbary Coast, the underworld whirled in fantastic steps to the rhythmic tunes of banging pianos, banjos, tom-toms and blaring brass horns.” The Depression era WPA project concluded that “few cities in America have such intensely variegated musical life as early San Francisco. In terms of richness of background, only New York and New Orleans can compare to it."
Conditions on the Barbary Coast prompted newspaper editor, B.E. Lloyd wrote in 1876 to declare: “like the malaria arising from a stagnant swamp and poisoning the air for miles around does the stagnant pool of human immorality and crime spread its contaminating vapors over the surrounding blocks on either side”
In this atmosphere of lawlessness, black men were as free as any to make a go of it, and many chose music as their vocation of choice. Stoddard goes on to say that “Whatever the Barbary Coast offered in virtues and vices, it was a place that accepted the black man, danced and cavorted with the black woman, and listened to black music”.
The word jazz was first applied to music in San Francisco in 1913 and was the home of the first black band to call itself a “jazz band”. Barnard Taylor, writing in 1850s California, said black music is “the national airs of America...following all its emigrations, colonizations, and conquests.” This sentiment expressed some 150 years ago seems to epitomize the role of jazz in reflecting and shaping American culture.
The Barbary Coast was effectively shut down in 1913 and the west coast jazz scene shifted to Los Angeles in the 1920, where it remains a nexus, along with New York, Chicago, and New Orleans, to this day. Of course jazz is an international artform with practitioners and fans from Europe to the Far East to South America. But jazz will always remain the quintessential American music, mirroring our culture in all its inventiveness and sophistication, its simple origins and moral contradictions.
- Log in to post comments