Jazz: A Regional Exploration (Greenwood Guides to American Roots Music)

318 Pages·2005·1.7 MB·English

by  Scott Yanow

JAZZ:
A Regional Exploration
Scott Yanow
GREENWOOD PRESS
J
AZZ

A Regional Exploration

GREENWOOD GUIDES TO
AMERICAN ROOTS MUSIC
J
AZZ
A Regional Exploration
Scott Yanow
Norm Cohen
Series Editor
GREENWOOD PRESS
Westport, Connecticut • London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yanow, Scott.
Jazz : a regional exploration / Scott Yanow.
p. cm. – (Greenwood guides to American roots music, ISSN 1551-0271)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Discography: p.
ISBN 0-313-32871-4 (alk. paper)
1 . Jazz—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series.
ML3508.Y39 2005
781.65'0973—dc22 2004018158
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 2005 by Scott Yanow
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2004018158
ISBN: 0-313-32871-4
ISSN: 1551-0271
First published in 2005
Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.greenwood.com
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Series Foreword vii
Preface xi
Chronology xiii
Introduction xxiii
1. Sedalia and St. Louis: Ragtime 1
2. New Orleans Jazz 7
3. Chicago: Classic Jazz 15
4. New York: The Classic Jazz and Swing Eras 29
5. Kansas City Swing, the Territory Bands, and the
San Francisco Revival 99
6. New York Bebop, Latin, and Cool Jazz 107
7. Los Angeles: West Coast Cool Jazz 149
8. New York: Hard Bop and Soul Jazz 169
9. New York: Free Jazz and the Avant-Garde 197
10. Chicago: The Avant-Garde 215
11. New Orleans: The Young Lions 219
12. Modern Jazz: Fusion and Beyond 223
Biographies of Jazz Leaders and Legends 247
Bibliography 277
Index 281

Series Foreword
If present trends are any indication, soon anyone with access to the Internet
will be able to tune in to music from any part of the world. When that happens,
listeners may well find Kentucky bluegrass bands playing Tex-Mex music along
with banjo tunes and gospel favorites, while musicians in India may intersperse
elements of American rap music with their own native raga traditions.
It’s difficult to predict right now, but even to understand the significance
of this revolution requires an appreciation for the fact that until recently
all musical genres, like every aspect of human activity, were associated with
relatively compact geographic regions, bounded not only by national boundaries
but also by the more limiting barriers of language, religion, geography, and
cultural heritage. In the United States, regional boundaries might enclose an
area as large as the vast Southwest or as small as the immediate environs of
Galax, Virginia.
This series of musical studies seeks to describe American musical traditions
that are, or once were, associated with geographic regions smaller than the nation
as a whole. These musical varieties include jazz, blues, country music, Hispanic
American music, Irish American music, polka music, Franco-American music
(including Cajun and Zydeco), Native American music, and traditional folk
music. Jazz music originated in New Orleans and other cities along the lower
Mississippi River in the early 1900s, but by midcentury it was equally at home
in New York and San Francisco as in New Orleans or Memphis. Jazz was in turn
viii Series Foreword
heavily influenced by blues music, an African American creation born in the
broader regions of the Deep South.
Country music of recent decades is a merger of two regional Anglo-American
musical traditions, one from the Appalachians and other southeastern states,
and the other from the southwestern plains. Its earlier name of country-western
music reflects more clearly that parentage. Irish American music, brought
to these shores mainly in the 1840s and later by emigrants from the Ireland,
flourished best in the big cities where the Irish made their new homes: Boston,
New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
Hispanic (Latino, Tex Mex) music migrated north from Mexico and other
Latin American countries. In the early 1900s it could be heard only in Texas,
New Mexico, and California; a century later, Spanish language radio stations
reach almost everywhere in the lower forty-eight. Polka music was brought to
the New World by musicians from Central Europe—Germany, Switzerland,
and what used to be Czechoslovakia. It was fruitfully transplanted to the
Midwestern states from Texas north to Nebraska and the Dakotas.
The music of First Nations (Native Americans) was spread across the
continent in varieties associated with particular groups of peoples, but as a
result of ethnocentric federal policies that forced their relocation to “Indian
Reservations,” was subsequently located in regions that were often at great
distances from the original homelands. Traditional folk music, the product of
evolved music of European American and African American immigrants, had
developed distinct regional characteristics in the New World by the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, but as a result of internal, primarily western migrations,
had changed considerably by the early twentieth century.
Four of these musical styles—jazz, blues, country, and traditional folk—are
treated in separate volumes; the other “ethnic” traditions (Hispanic, Cajun/
Zydeco, Polka, Irish, and Native American) are presented together in a fifth
volume.
American music continues to evolve. Readers of these volumes can doubtless
think of changes in music that have taken place in their own lifetimes. The
many musical heritages of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries laid the
foundations for today’s music. The advent and growth of national media—radio,
television, digital recordings, Internet—exert powerful forces on the nature of
musical genres that were once regional. Ironically, national media permit two
contradictory phenomena. At first, they introduce listeners to the regional
musical forms that a wider audience otherwise might never have known about.
Eventually, though, they provide the mechanism for the scrambling and cross-
pollination of what were once distinct styles.
This does not mean that American musical regionalism is gone forever,
doomed to a homogeneous culture that is the same in Key West, Florida, as in
the San Juan Islands of Washington. If the past is any guide, new regional styles
will continually emerge, gradually to become part of the national mix. As long
Series Foreword ix
as immigration to these shores continues, the influx of new musical styles will
contribute to and invigorate the old. It is an exciting prospect.
Norm Cohen
Portland Community College, Oregon
Series Editor