The History of Jazz

710 Pages·1998·1.98 MB·English

by  Ted Gioia

THE HISTORY OF
JAZZ
Ted Gioia
Oxford University Press New York Oxford
Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town
Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid
Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sio Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw
and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan
Copyright © 1997 by Ted Gioia
First published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 1997
First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1998
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or
otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gioia, Ted.
The history of jazz / Ted Gioia.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-509081-0
ISBN 0-19-512653-X (Pbk.)
1. Jazz ─ History and criticism. I. Title.
ML3506.GS4 1997 781.65'09 ─ dc21 97-102
All photographs in this book are courtesy of The Frank Driggs Collection.
7 9 10 8 6
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
for my wife, Tara
Contents
ONE
The Prehistory ofJazz 3
TWO
New Orleans Jazz 29
THREE
The Jazz Age 55
FOUR
Harlem 93
FIVE
The Swing Era 135
SIX
Modern Jazz 199
SEVEN
The Fragmentation of JazzStyles 277
EIGHT
Freedom and Beyond 337
Notes 397
Further Reading 407
Recommended Listening 411
Acknowledgments 427
Index 429
Index of Songs and Albums 459

ONE
The Prehistory of Jazz
The Africanization of American Music
An elderly black man sits astride a large cylindrical drum.
Using his fingers and the edge of his hand, he jabs repeatedly at
the drum head ─ which is around a foot in diameter and
probably made from an animal skin ─ evoking a throbbing
pulsation with rapid, sharp strokes. A second drummer, holding
his instrument between his knees, joins in, playing with the
same staccato attack. A third black man, seated on the ground,
plucks at a string instrument, the body of which is roughly
fashioned from a calabash. Another calabash has been made
into a drum, and a woman beats at it with two short sticks. One
voice, then other voices join in. A dance of seeming
contradictions accompanies this musical give-and-take, a
moving hieroglyph that appears, on the one hand, informal and
spontaneous yet, on closer inspection, ritualized and precise. It
is a dance of massive proportions. A dense crowd of dark
bodies forms into circular groups -perhaps five or six hundred
individuals moving in time to the pulsations of the music, some
swaying gently, others aggressively stomping their feet. A
number of women in the group begin chanting.
The scene could be Africa. In fact, it is nineteenth-century
New Orleans. Scattered firsthand accounts provide us with
tantalizing details of these slave dances that took place in the
open area then known as Congo Square ─ today Louis
Armstrong Park stands on roughly the same ground ─ and there
are perhaps no more intriguing documents in the history of
African-American music. Benjamin Latrobe, the noted
architect, witnessed one of these collective dances on February
21, 1819, and not only left a vivid written account of the event,
but made several sketches of the instruments used. These
drawings confirm that the musicians of Congo Square, circa
1819, were playing percussion and string instruments virtually
identical to those characteristic of indigenous African music.
Later documents add to our knowledge of the public slave
dances in New Orleans but still leave many questions
unanswered-some of which, in time, historical research may be
able to cast light on while others may never be answered. One
thing, however, is clear. Although we are inclined these days to
view the intersection of European-American and African
currents in music as a theoretical, almost metaphysical issue,
these storied accounts of the Congo Square dances provide us
with a real time and place, an actual transfer of totally African
ritual to the native soil of the New World.
The dance itself, with its clusters of individuals moving in a
circular pattern -the largest less than ten feet in diameter ─
harkens back to one of the most pervasive ritual ceremonies of
Africa. This rotating, counterclockwise movement has been
noted by ethnographers under many guises in various parts of
the continent. In the Americas, the dance became known as the
ring shout, and its appearance in New Orleans is only one of
many documented instances. This tradition persisted well into
the twentieth century: John and Alan Lomax recorded a ring
shout in Louisiana for the Library of Congress in 1934 and
attended others in Texas, Georgia, and the Bahamas. As late as
the 1950s, jazz scholar Marshall Stearns witnessed
unmistakable examples of the ring shout in South Carolina.
The Congo Square dances were hardly so long-lived.
Traditional accounts indicate that they continued, except for an
interruption during the Civil War, until around 1885. Such a
chronology implies that their disappearance almost coincided
with the emergence of the first jazz bands in New Orleans.
More recent research argues for an earlier cutoff date for the
practice, probably before 1870, although the dances may have
continued for some time in private gatherings. 1 In any event,
this transplanted African ritual lived on as part of the collective
memory and oral history of the city's black community, even
among those too young to have participated in it. These
memories shaped, in turn, the jazz performers' self-image, their
sense of what it meant to be an African-American musician.
"My grandfather, that's about the furthest I can remember
back," wrote the renowned New Orleans reed player Sidney
Bechet in his autobiography, Treat It Gentle. "Sundays when
the slaves would meet ─ that was their free day ─ he beat out
rhythms on the drums at the square ─ Congo Square they called
it. . . . He was a musician. No one had to explain notes or
feeling or rhythm to him. It was all there inside him, something
he was always sure of." 2
Within eyesight of Congo Square, Buddy Bolden ─ who
legend and scattered first-person accounts credit as the earliest
jazz musician ─ performed with his pioneering band at Globe
Hall. The geographical proximity is misleading. The cultural
gap between these two types of music is dauntingly wide. By
the time Bolden and Bechet began playing jazz, the
Americanization of African music had already begun, and with
it came the Africanization of American music ─ a synergistic
process that we will study repeatedly and at close quarters in the
pages that follow. Anthropologists call this process
"syncretism" ─ the blending together of cultural elements that
previously existed separately. This dynamic, so essential to the
history of jazz, remains powerful even in the present day, when
African-American styles of performance blend seamlessly with
other musics of other cultures, European, Asian, Latin, and,
coming full circle, African.
The mixture of African and European culture began, of
course, long before the slave dances in Congo Square ─ in fact,
at least one thousand years prior to the founding of New
Orleans in 1718. The question of African influence on ancient
Western culture has become a matter of heated debate in recent
years ─ with much of the dispute centering on arcane
methodological and theoretical issues. But once again, careful
students of history need not rely on abstract analysis to discover
early cultural mergings of African and European currents. The
North African conquest of the Iberian peninsula in the eighth
century left a tangible impact on Europe ─ evident even today
in the distinctive qualities of Spanish architecture, painting, and
music. Had not Charles Martel repelled the Moorish forces in
the south of France at the Battle of Tours in 732 A.D., this
stylized cultural syncretism might have become a pan-European
force. If not for "the genius and fortune" of this one man,
historian Gibbon would declare in his The Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire, the Moorish fleet "might have sailed
without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames" and "the
Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford." 3
As it turned out, the spread of African currents into the
broader streams of Western culture took far longer to unfold,
spurred in large part by defeat rather than conquest ─ not by
triumphant naval fleets toppling the continental powers, but by
the dismal commerce of slave ships headed for the New World.
Yet the traces of the early Moorish incursion may have laid the
groundwork for the blossoming of African-American jazz more
than a millennium later. Can it be mere coincidence that this
same commingling of Spanish, French, and African influences
was present in New Orleans at the birth of jazz? Perhaps
because of this marked Moorish legacy, Latin cultures have
always seemed receptive to fresh influences from Africa.
Indeed, in the area of music alone, the number of successful
African and Latin hybrids (including salsa, calypso, samba, and
cumbia, to name only a few) is so great that one can only
speculate that these two cultures retain a residual magnetic
attraction, a lingering affinity due to this original cross-
fertilization. Perhaps this convoluted chapter of Western history
also provides us with the key for unlocking that enigmatic claim
by Jelly Roll Morton, the pioneering New Orleans jazz
musician, who asserted that "if you can't manage to put tinges
of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right
seasoning, I call it, for jazz." 4 Around the time of Morton's
birth, a massive Mexican cavalry band performed daily in free
concerts at the Mexican Pavilion as part of the 1884-85 World's
Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans. Hart's music
store on Canal Street published over eighty Mexican
compositions during this period, influencing local
instrumentalists and providing one more link in the complex
history of interlocking Latin and African-American musical
styles. Beyond its purely musicological impact, the Latin-
Catholic culture, whose influence permeated nineteenth-century
New Orleans, benignly fostered the development of jazz music.
This culture, which bore its own scars of discrimination, was far
more tolerant in accepting unorthodox social hybrids than the
English Protestant ethos that prevailed in other parts of the New
World. Put simply, the music and dances of Congo Square
would not have been allowed in the more Anglicized colonies of
the Americas.
Less than a half century after the city's founding, in 1764,
New Orleans was ceded by France to Spain. In 1800, Napoleon
succeeded in forcing its return from Spain, but this renewed
French control lasted only three years before possession passed
to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase. As a
result, French and Spanish settlers played a decisive role in
shaping the distinctive ambiance of New Orleans during the
early nineteenth century, but settlers from Germany, Italy,
England, Ireland, and Scotland also made substantial
contributions to the local culture. The city's black inhabitants
were equally diverse: many were brought directly from various
parts of Africa, some were native-born Americans, still others