Jazz

Jazz

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jazz is a uniquely American style of music that developed in the early twentieth century in urban areas of the United States. As it grew in popularity and influence, jazz served as a means of bringing young people together. It has always created and sustained artistic subcultures, which have produced new and increasingly sophisticated artistry. As a pervasive and influential musical style, jazz has at times been a great social leveler and unifier. It has melded black and white citizens in a love of fast, rhythmic music, which was first proliferated through radio and the recording industry. Jazz became the basis for most social dance music and also provided one of the first opportunities for public integration.

Jazz first emerged in the black cultures of New Orleans from the mixed influences of ragtime (songs with a syncopated rhythm), blues, and the band music played at New Orleans funerals. The term jazz or jass derives from a Creole word that means both African dance and copulation. The term jazz referring to peppy dance music first appeared in a March 1913 edition of the San Francisco Bulletin, an appearance that indicates jazz’s rapid spread as a popular musical genre as well as its connection to dancing and nightlife. Developed by such innovative musicians as Buddy Bolden (1877–1931) in New Orleans in the first decade of the twentieth century, jazz had moved west, east, and north to Chicago by 1919. Spread by such New Orleans jazz groups and performers as King Oliver (1885–1938) and his Creole Jazz Band and Jelly Roll Morton (1890–1941), jazz first became popular in the nightclub cultures of big cities. King Oliver’s band in Chicago was soon joined by a young Louis Armstrong (1901–1971), who pioneered the rapid rhythmic jazz style called hot jazz. White musicians such as Bix Beiderbecke (1903–1931), Jack Teagarden (1905–1964), and Joe Venuti (1903–1978) began to copy the jazz style of New Orleans bands, and soon jazz was an American national phenomenon, appealing to sophisticates and young audiences around the country.

Jazz evolved simultaneously in the 1920s in New Orleans, Chicago, and Kansas City, performed by both black and white ensembles and orchestras. As it developed from its Dixieland forms, jazz styles ranged from the hot jazz of Louis Armstrong to the “symphonic” jazz of Paul Whiteman’s (1890–1967) band. Hot jazz, one of the first influential developments of jazz, featured a strong soloist whose variations on the melody and driving momentum were accompanied by an expert ensemble of five or seven players. The idea of soloists playing in relation to backup ensembles also worked easily with larger bands, which began to form in the 1920s.

Fletcher Henderson (1897–1952) and Duke Ellington (1899–1974) established black jazz orchestras that began performing at prominent nightclubs in Chicago and New York. Henderson employed some of the most accomplished jazz musicians of his time, including Armstrong and saxophonist Coleman Hawkins (1904–1969). Ellington, who began as a piano player, established another orchestra, noted for its sophistication in its long-running appearance at New York’s Cotton Club. Paul Whiteman, a successful white California orchestra leader, adapted jazz for his larger dance orchestra, which became the most popular band of the 1920s. Whiteman was interested in distinguishing a high art jazz as represented by George Gershwin’s (1898–1937) Rhapsody in Blue (1924, which Whiteman had commissioned for his orchestra) from what he thought of as the cruder jazz of such white jazz ensembles as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, booked into New York in 1917, was one of the first successful jazz groups.

Live band appearances and a booming recording industry increased jazz’s audience, as did Prohibition, which paradoxically made nightlife even more fashionable. Associated with nightclubs and nightlife, jazz became attractively exotic both in the United States and in Europe. Popular jazz bands traveled widely, playing at all kinds of venues from dancehalls and nightclubs to restaurants. The rapidly growing record industry quickly became interested in jazz performers. Such artists as Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman (1909–1986), Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and others made records that reached audiences who did not venture into city nightlife.

The Great Depression, however, took its toll on smaller and less successful jazz bands, black bands more than white bands. With the advent of swing music, many white bands could continue to prosper, but many black bands had more difficulty finding large audiences. They were less commercially successful in general, since most black orchestras did not have the mainstream connections and recording contracts of white bands. In addition, Jim Crow segregation laws kept black orchestras separate from white orchestras. For these reasons, many black jazz musicians went to Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, where they were welcomed. Coleman Hawkins and clarinetist Sidney Bechet (1897–1959) both played in Europe, where audiences were captivated by the erotic suggestiveness of jazz.

Swing, a jazz-inflected dance music, developed in the 1930s and was hugely popular during World War II (1939–1945). Swing jazz was designed for larger musical groups. It continued hot jazz’s back-and-forth between a solo player and the supporting ensemble, but it framed and balanced the solo with a more structured accompaniment, which often involved a musical battle between various sections of the band. Swing developed gradually, but Benny Goodman’s August 21, 1935, performance at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles is often considered swing’s debut. Its popularity established swing as a dance music and style that cut across classes and races. Swing bands—known as Big Bands —also employed band singers, many of whom became hugely popular in their own right. Frank Sinatra (1915–1998), for example, caused riots during his appearances with the Tommy Dorsey Band, while Bing Crosby (1903–1977), Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996), Billie Holiday (1915–1959), Doris Day, and Rosemary Clooney (1928–2002) all became stars in their own right.

Female singers, especially Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn (1924–1990), had a larger part in the evolution of jazz than most women did. Since its inception, innovations in jazz seemed to come mainly from those who played wind instruments—trumpet players Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie (1917–1993), and Miles Davis (1926–1991); saxophonists Charlie Parker (1920–1955) and John Coltrane (1926–1967); and clarinetist Benny Goodman. Players of other instruments, such as piano, drums, bass, and guitar, though enjoying roles as soloists, were primarily responsible for maintaining the driving rhythm of jazz pieces. Until they became prominent as jazz vocalists, women musicians seemed to have little role as jazz artists or innovators. Although they occasionally played in jazz groups, women musicians were most often pianists, such as Louis Armstrong’s wife, Lillian Hardin (1898–1971). The introduction of female vocalists whose role was increasingly like that of other featured wind instruments broadened the dimensions of jazz. Scat singing, or singing nonsense syllables, which had been used earlier by Ethel Waters (1900–1977), Edith Wilson (1896–1981), and Louis Armstrong, made the voice sound more like a jazz instrument. Melodic voice improvisation developed by such women vocalists as Adelaide Hall (1904–1993), Ivie Anderson (1905–1949), and most notably Fitzgerald made the voice an instrument and an important part of the jazz repertoire. Vocalist Billie Holiday added her own brand of blues inflected improvisation, phrasing like a wind player and injecting fun and suggestiveness into the music. In the 1940s two other vocalists, Dinah Washington (1924–1963) and Sarah Vaughn, added their own imprimatur to jazz: Washington imported a powerful clarity from gospel music, and Vaughn further developed the voice as an instrument in the context of bebop.

The popularity of swing music beginning in the 1930s also enabled bands to cross color lines. Before swing, bands mostly played to audiences of their own race, but with swing, white audiences began to follow black bands as well. In the mid-1930s, Benny Goodman integrated his jazz ensemble, working with Teddy Wilson (1912–1986), a pianist, and Lionel Hampton (1908–2002), a vibraphonist. Because jazz musicians knew, admired, and even borrowed one another’s work, jazz ensembles were among the first integrated public performance groups.

Swing also helped moor up the national mood both during both the Depression and the Second World War. Armed Services Radio broadcast swing music to soldiers. Although musicians and record companies were at a standoff over musicians’ royalties for airplay in 1942, a special V-Disc program produced records for the use of the military.

After the war, many musicians who had begun their careers in swing bands—including Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie—began exploring a more frenetic smallensemble form of jazz known as bop. With such younger artists as Miles Davis and Art Blakey (1919–1990), bop developed as a more hard-driving, difficult jazz characterized by the prominence of soloists who played rapid complex improvisations in business suits. Bop was primarily the bailiwick of black musicians, who were rescuing the form from the pleasant popularity of swing and who would, with their development of hard bop or bebop and cool jazz, turn jazz into something more intellectual, difficult, and soulful. These later forms became a connoisseur’s jazz, played again in smaller clubs and establishing jazz artists as the avant-garde of music. Such beat artists as Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) extolled bop jazz as representing an expression of soul that beat writers wished to emulate by breaking down traditional forms.

Despite its often improvisational character, jazz benefited from a number of talented composers. Instrumentalists such as Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus (1922–1979), Miles Davis, Horace Silver, Thelonious Monk (1917–1982), Sun Ra (1914–1993), Wayne Shorter, and Randy Weston contributed to the growing body of jazz music, as did Duke Ellington and his collaborator Billy Strayhorn (1915–1967). Ellington and Strayhorn, both pianists, forged a productive association, writing Ellington’s theme song, “Take the ‘A’ Train” (1941), as well as other well-known favorites played by the Ellington orchestra. More recently, other composers have continued jazz’s evolution, including Jeff Wains and Wynton Marsalis.

Jazz had also long incorporated a broader base of musical styles and influences, so even as it became cool and increasingly sophisticated, it also dipped again and again into a variety of sources, renewing itself and extending its influence into more popular musical forms. As Dizzy Gillespie developed bop, he also infused his music with Afro-Cuban jazz rhythms and musicians. Chano Pozo (1915–1948), a Cuban percussionist, joined Gillespie’s band in 1947, and the addition of Pozo and a wide array of Latin percussion instruments, such as the congas, bongos, timbales, and claves, produced complex and rapidly moving pieces. Latin musicians such as trumpet player Arturo Sandoval also joined Gillespie. In the 1950s Puerto Rican percussionist Tito Puente (1923–2000) and Cuban musicians Chico O’Farrill (1921–2001) and Chucho Valdés played Latin mambo in New York, influencing both big band and jazz ensemble sounds. In the early 1960s Brazilian jazz, called bossa nova, emerged in the United States. João Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim (1927–1994) brought the style to the United States, and their work was taken up by saxophonist Stan Getz (1927–1991). Miles Davis worked with Brazilian drummer Airto Moreira, and in the 1990s Roy Hargrove incorporated Afro-Cuban elements in his Crisol project. The influence of Latin rhythms and styles enlarged the appeal of jazz, making it more joyous and rhythmic, and via such forms as bossa nova, linking it to more mainstream styles.

As jazz became more esoteric, it became more sophisticated than popular. Although it continued to influence the styles of newer music, such as rock and roll, its audience shrank to those who could appreciate its difficulties, and jazz no longer played as direct a role in the evolution of popular music. It retained its links to nightclubs, but lost its aura of carefree joy. Jazz musicians of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s became associated with the innovations and countercultural sentiments of the beats. Some, such as pianist Dave Brubeck and saxophonist Paul Desmond (1924–1977), became campus favorites, touring with their jazz quartet around Midwest college campuses in the 1950s. In its links to countercultural art and lifestyles, as well as to a more intellectual milieu, jazz also became associated with civil rights efforts, Black Nationalism, and other radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Although jazz musicians (like many performers) had long been linked to drugs and less-than-suburban lifestyles, as drugs became an openly rebellious facet of the hippie and youth movements of the 1970s, they became a part of the myth of jazz as well.

At the same time, jazz also became more academic and respectable as a high culture phenomenon. Music conservatories and universities began offering courses in jazz history and composition and training jazz musicians. Such renowned institutions as the Berklee College of Music in Boston, the Juilliard School in New York City, and the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, as well as numerous universities in the United States and throughout the world, train jazz musicians.

Jazz of the later twentieth century continued to develop multiple styles—free jazz, soul jazz, jazz-rock fusion—that represented attempts to reclaim jazz as a specifically black musical tradition, even though jazz continued to be an integrated effort. Jazz groups again became smaller ensembles and their work became more experimental and aimed at appreciative listeners rather than at dancing. Jazz clubs developed in larger cities; the clubs attract audiences of jazz lovers but not nearly the kind of widespread adulation given to swing. In the 1990s Wynton Marsalis and his brother Branford Marsalis led a renaissance in the widespread popularity of jazz. Wynton Marsalis, a classically trained trumpet player, won Grammy Awards in both classical and jazz categories. More important perhaps was his energetic advocacy of jazz as a central genre of American music. Collaborating with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, Wynton Marsalis contributed his own more conservative perspective to Burns’s twenty-hour documentary, Jazz (2001). Some musicians, such as Miles Davis, thought that Marsalis’s ideas of a pure jazz were too conservative, but Marsalis has certainly been responsible for the revival of jazz as an important musical form.

As it has throughout its history, jazz continues to find talented and innovative musicians who continue to reinvent and redefine jazz. Becoming increasingly international and opening slightly to greater participation by women musicians, jazz continues to influence developing musical styles, but its mixture of styles, its contributions to racial integration, and its establishment of a uniquely American form as a central influential musical tradition already form its legacy.

SEE ALSO Music, Psychology of; Popular Music; World Music

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Erenberg, Lewis. 1998. Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Giddings, Gary. 1998. Visions of Jazz: The First Century. New York: Oxford University Press.

Shack, William. 2001. Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Shipton, Alyn. 2001. A New History of Jazz. London: Continuum.

Szwed, John. 2000. Jazz 101: The Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz. New York: Hyperion.

Ward, Geoffrey C., and Ken Burns. 2000. Jazz: A History of America’s Music. New York: Knopf.

Judith Roof