Jazz a Way Of Life

Introduction

Music is and has always been an incredibly important part of black culture.When studying any type of black music, it is like exploring the back mind. Music has been part of the black cultural scene dating back to slavery. Although jazz is loved and performed by people of every national background, in America, the groundbreaker, the leader and the innovator in every step forward of Jazz has been the Negro. Precisely because the black culture speak so powerfully in jazz, it has become loved and admired by all people.

In this essay, I will be looking at how important black music is to the black culture at the way it has developed and the struggles involved. The music of black culture can be seen as a reflection of the values within a society,which explains the importance of musical expression compared to that of western culture. Western theory tends to detach art from life, whereas in black culture art is life. It is seen as a potential foundation for social activity.

Black music and oral tradition are an essential part of black culture. The oral tradition has become important through spontaneous, often improvised acts, of a group nature.It expressed a wide range of emotion and descriptions of African American life. Black music communicates through the experiences of those involved. Bound together by struggle, the black culture have built up a history, tradition and cultural life of their own. Jazz music is a flow of emotion guided by the most conscious skill, taste, artistry and intelligence.

Jazz is a music with a history and a heart, it is both historically and musically a very deep expression of American culture, it has grown in to a vast and deep current of American culture. Historically and culturally, it is a music that had to happen, it is a deep expression of Black American culture. It is undoubtably Black America's gift to the world.

The background of black culture and music

Jazz is the art of expression set to music! Jazz is said to be the fundamental rhythms of human life and man’s contemporary reassessment of his traditional values. Volumes have been written on the origins of jazz based on black American life-styles. The early influences of tribal drums and the development of gospel, blues and field hollers seems to point out that jazz has to do with human survival and the expression of life.

The origin of the word "jazz" is most often traced back to a vulgar term used for sexual acts. Some of the early sounds of jazz where associated with whore houses and "ladies of ill repute." However, the meaning of jazz soon became a musical art form, whether under composition guidelines or improvisation, jazz reflected spontaneous melodic phrasing. 1

Those who play jazz have often expressed the feelings that jazz should remain undefined, jazz should be felt. "If you gotta ask, you’ll never know" –Louis Armstrong.

The standard legend about jazz is that it was conceived in New Orleans and moved up the Mississippi River to Memphis, St. Louis and finally Chicago. Of course that seems to be the history of what we now refer to as jazz, however, the influences of what led to those early New Orleans sounds goes back to tribal African drum beats and European musical structures.

"Jazz, like any artistic phenomenon, represents the sum of an addition. The factors of this addition are, to my mind, African music, French and American music and folklore."

In reviewing the background of jazz one can not overlook the evaluation over the decades and the fact that jazz spanned many musical forms such as spirituals, cakewalks, ragtime and the blues. Around 1891 a New Orleans barber named Buddy Bolden reputedly pitcked up his cornet and blew the first stammering notes of jazz, thereby unconsciously breaking with several centuries of musical tradition.

A half-century later, jazz1, America’s great contribution to music, crossed the threshold of the universities and became seriously, even religiously considered.

Jazz functions as popular art and has enjoyed periods of fairly widespread public response, in the "jazz age" of the 1920s, in the swing era of the late 1930s and in the peak popularity of modern jazz in the late 1950s. Beginning in the 20s and continuing well into the 30s, it was common to apply the word "jazz" rather indiscriminately, melodically or tonally. Thus George Gershwin was called a jazz composer. For Gershwin’s concert work he was acclaimed to have made a respectable art form out of jazz. Somewhat similarly, Paul Whiteman, playing jazz-influenced dance music, was billed as the King of Jazz. Perhaps the broader definition of jazz, such as the one that would include the blues influence as well as those who shared our understanding of the art form, even if they did not perform it, would be the most useful historical approach.

The influence and development of the blues can not be over looked when discussing the early years of jazz. "The blues as such are synonymous with low spirits. Blues music is not. With all its so called blue notes and overtones of sadness, blues music of its very nature and function is nothing if not a form of diversion." -Albert Murray.

Those feelings as expression of blues music fits very comfortably with the strains and phrases of jazz. Today, Bessie Smith is considered primarily a blues singer, however in the 1920s, she was most often referred to as a jazz singer. An ability to play the blues has been a requisite of all jazz musicians, who on first meeting one another or when taking part in a jam session, will often use the blues framework for improving. Blues, stemming from rural areas of the deep South, has a history largely independent of jazz. Exponents of blues usually accompanied themselves on guitar, piano or harmonica or were supported by small groups who often played unconventional or homemade instruments.

A number of the early jazz performers relied on the blues for more than the chord exchanged. Many of these jazz musicians used the blues for the driving force of their musical emotions, such as the work of Don Redman, Stuff Smith, Ma Rainey and the early works of Louis Armstrong and Benny Carter.

I.1.The main events in the history of black people .The freedom of expressing their feelings through music

Jazz emerged in the late 1800s in the cosmopolitan port city of New Orleans. A former colony of both France and Spain, the coastal city was home to an astounding variety of cultures and people who struggled to live and work together within the confines of crowded streets, schools, and storefronts. Though hardly immune to the racism and segregation that plagued the rest of the country, French colonialism had left New Orleans with a tolerance and cultural sophistication that made it unique. African Americans, Creoles, Native Americans, and people of varied European, Caribbean, and Latin American descent pushed and pulled in a social and political dance that continues today. They found common ground, however, in music. The city swelled with opera, marching bands, ragtime piano, Latin dances, symphony orchestras, string ensembles, barbershop quartets, society dance music, sacred hymns, not-so-sacred blues, and the last vestiges of African song and dance kept alive in Congo Square. Elements of all of these styles, with particular emphasis on ragtime, the blues, and the church, converged in a new music called jazz.

Like most aspects of American life, jazz abounds in legends, some more true than others. Though the precise birth of jazz is still shrouded in mystery, the impact of Crescent City cornetist Charles Buddy Bolden is affirmed by countless musicians, patrons, and scholars who echo the tale of his resonant tone. Some say Bolden could call the entire city to attention with a simple fanfare. Though his mythic sound was never recorded, the rhythmic lilt that propelled his band (which peaked around 1905) would be appropriated by dozens of New Orleans musicians who heard him "rag" every kind of popular song, filling them with the sound of the blues and the church.

The sheer highwill of Bolden's forceful personality and the driving swing of his band taught a profound lesson: make every piece of music your own; fill it with swing and the spirit of the blues and make it sing with individuality.

Bolden's brand of self expression became a calling card for New Orleans musicians, who playfully embellished familiar melodies and developed distinctive phrasing and timbres that became their trademarks. Among these pioneers were pianist Jelly Roll Morton and cornetist King Oliver, who led their peers in a new exploration of improvisation. They expanded what were once brief moments of embellishment into longer improvisatory statements and found ways of incorporating the freedom of self-expression into their written arrangements. Generally performed by a small ensemble of cornet, clarinet, trombone, tuba (or bass), guitar (or banjo) and drums, early New Orleans jazz highlighted collective improvisation—that is, by two or more members of the band. It was Oliver's protégé however, who would lead the shift towards individual expression, and ultimately transform early jazz from folk art to fine art.

The 1960's were a time of embracing radical new ideas, including black nationalism and protesting American military action in Vietnam. Saxophone players Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, and Sam Rivers were playing, fierce sometimes angry music that wailed and lamented. Jazz as it was originally conceived and in most instances of it's most vital development was the result of certain attitudes, or empirical ideas, attributed to the Afro-American culture.

Early Jazz

"Storyville," the city’s famed red light district, was forced to close during World War I, leaving many musicians in search of work. The nation's economy was changing from rural to industrial, and jazz musicians, like many African Americans, joined the Great Migration to urban areas of the North in search of work and solace from the prevailing racism of the South. They brought the music to cities like Chicago and New York, where jazz adopted a sophisticated veneer, blending an urban sensibility with its Southern roots.

Wartime also brought the music to Europe, where Lieutenant James Reese Europe and the Fifteenth Regiment Hellfighters Band entertained soldiers and civilians with their distinct brand of martial ragtime.

Their jazz-tinged renditions of "Memphis Blues" prepared audiences for Will Marion Cook's Southern Syncopated Orchestra and his star soloist, saxophonist/clarinetist Sidney Bechet.

„Jazz found a permanent place in the home as recordings, and later radio, became more widely available. The astounding success of the first known jazz record, performed by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917, brought the music into the commercial marketplace and helped to usher in the "Jazz Age" of the 1920s. Just as importantly, this relatively new technology brought the language of jazz to a generation of musicians in a way that print music could not. Through repeated listening, young musicians learned improvised solos note for note, absorbing and eventually expanding the jazz vocabulary.”1

The Swing Era

Large ensembles created a varied yet powerful sound that could propel a ballroom full of dancers without amplification, which was still largely unavailable.This volume, along with a subtle rhythmic velocity, became a necessity as clubs began to swell with young audiences eager to dance away the Depression. In spite of the downward economy, or perhaps because of it, the infectious bounce of swing quickly became the pulse of young America. Audiences crowded enormous dance halls and even stayed home Saturday nights to hear big band music streaming through their radios. At the center of this commercial whirlwind was clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman, whose participation in the radio show, "Let's Dance," invited listeners across the nation into the my, or perhaps because of it, the infectious bounce of swing quickly became the pulse of young America. Audiences crowded enormous dance halls and even stayed home Saturday nights to hear big band music streaming through their radios. At the center of this commercial whirlwind was clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman, whose participation in the radio show, "Let's Dance," invited listeners across the nation into the exuberant feeling of jazz. Perhaps more importantly, Goodman used his popular success to challenge the segregation then common in jazz ensembles. He hired the African American pianist Teddy Wilson, and later vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, in a pioneering step towards the integration of jazz on screen, in the recording studio, and on the bandstand.

Goodman brought jazz to the cutting edge of civil rights and made a strong case for a fully integrated America, Swing eventually became the signature music of wartime America, edging its way into small towns through local “territory bands” – dance bands that toured much of Mid- and Southwest beginning in the 1920s – and ultimately traveling abroad with U.S. soldiers.

The Bebop Revolution

Although Swing Era big bands continued to tour and record into the 1950s, their audience did not always follow. The fickle transience of popular taste in combination with a souring economy and new, unfavorable entertainment taxes made the maintenance of a big band nearly impossible. Competition for work grew even more intense as newly available amplification equipment allowed smaller groups to play with the volume of a big band at a fraction of the cost. These setbacks provided a welcome challenge to a handful of artists, who, by the mid-1940s, longed for an outlet for more extended improvisation and dynamic group interplay.

The result was bebop, a revolutionary small group art form pioneered by alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie in the after-hours clubs of Harlem. Though bebop never attained the popularity of Swing Era jazz, the music’s rebellious spirit and unbridled virtuosity lured its own audience and cemented the idea of jazz as fine art. It is considered by many to be the turning point in jazz history, irrevocably influencing nearly every style to follow.

The Birth Of The Cool

Bebop provoked a contentiousness never before seen in jazz. It drew a line between the hip and the has-been, and inspired musical reactions that span from reverent to near vengeful. As a result, jazz entered the 1950s and 1960s as a plurality of styles. Amid the nightclubs on New York’s 52nd Street (then known as “Swing Street”), established leaders like Louis Armstrong, vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, and saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young performed next door to emerging talents like trumpeter Miles Davis, saxophonist Stan Getz, and pianist and composer Thelonious Monk. It was the beginning of a now-defining eclecticism that continues to impact the music.

Despite hard bop’s strong following, jazz’s strong exploratory impulse was unrelenting. Never complacent, Miles Davis once again led the way in search of greater freedom of self-expression. He found this freedom in modal jazz, an approach to composition and improvisation based on scales rather than the long sequence of chords that characterized most jazz.

Beyond bop

The experimental impulse of jazz was not defined by bebop alone. In 1939,a young Dizzy Gillespie befriended band mate Mario Bauza, who piqued the trumpeter’s growing interest in Afro-Cuban rhythms. The two would reconvene in the mid-1940s, along with conguero Chano Pozo, bandleader Frank “Machito” Grillo, and others to create Latin jazz, a highly danceable blend of Latin rhythms, jazz harmony, and improvisation. Latin jazz would also be touched by the cool school. In the 1960s, saxophonist Stan Getz, guitarist Charlie Byrd, composer and pianist Antonio Carlos Jobim, and others brought together the subtle textures, challenging harmonies, and relaxed rhythms of cool jazz and Brazilian samba in a popular style known as bossa nova.

The 1950s also saw the emergence of the third stream, a musical merger conceived by French hornist and composer Gunther Schuller that combined jazz and Western classical music. Although this fusion of sorts was hardly new, Schuller’s philosophy that “all musics are created equal” garnered a following that included pianist/composer John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet, composer George Russell, and trombonist J.J. Johnson, among others.

Perhaps the most dramatic break with the jazz tradition came with free jazz and the atonal experiments of the late 1950s and 1960s. Pioneered by alto saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman, free jazz represented a departure from Western harmony and rhythm in search of even greater freedom of expression. While still grounded in the blues, Coleman literally freed himself from Western musical traditions in an effort to more honestly portray the sounds of human emotion. To this end, he developed his own musical theory called “harmolodics” and avoided common song forms in his compositions. Still, even in its most liberated moments, Coleman’s music retained links to Western music and the bebop legacy of Charlie Parker.

Swing On

As the 1960s progressed, many jazz musicians found themselves increasingly marginalized. Nearly 40 years into his career, Duke Ellington, perhaps America’s greatest composer, lost his record contract, as did Thelonious Monk. The legendary New York nightclub Birdland closed, and many established artists, including Ornette Coleman, moved to Europe in search of work. John Coltrane’s death in 1967 dealt the music a crippling blow, depriving the jazz world of one of its most promising innovators. By the end of the decade, there seemed to be a new gulf between jazz and the general public. It was this divide that inspired Miles Davis and his colleagues to experiment with the electric instruments and rhythms of rock, a movement that earned the name fusion.

Jazz endured, however fractured, and by the 1970s the record companies, radio stations, and nightclubs that had closed began to reemerge. In some ways, the overall state of jazz had remained largely unchanged since bebop: an art form of individuals, dominated by no single style. Legends like alto saxophonist Benny Carter, vocalist Betty Carter, and bassist Charles Mingus, practiced their art alongside fusion leaders like bassist Jaco Pastorious, pianist Herbie Hancock, and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and new talents like pianist Keith Jarrett, bassist Dave Holland, saxophonist Joe Lovano, and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. Like Ellington himself, jazz and its practitioners were simply “beyond category.”

Today, jazz is found wherever there is music. It can be heard in nightclubs and concert halls, on TV and radio, and in classrooms across the country and around the world. Every day musicians young and old uphold the jazz tradtion and create new legacies of their own. They play with swing and the blues and the spirit of irrepressible self-expression that gave rise in New Orleans at the turn of the century. One hundred years later, we still love to listen.

II .Jazz…the sound that put New Orleans on the map, musically speaking

II.1. The New Orleans style

Jazz music was, ultimately, the product of New Orleans' melting pot. At the turn of the century, the streets of New Orleans were awash in blues music, ragtime and the native brass-band fanfares. The latter, used both in the Mardi Gras parades and in funerals, boasted a vast repertory of styles, from military marches to "rags" (not necessarily related to Scott Joplin's ragtime music). Notably missing from this mix was religious music, that played a lesser role in the birth and development of jazz music. Also missing was white popular music, that would define the "commercial" format of jazz music, but not its core technical characteristics.

The performers who shared a passion for syncopation and for improvisation were either brass bands (cornet or trumpet for the melody, clarinet for counterpoint, trombone or tuba or percussion for rhythm), that very often were marching bands, or solo pianists, who very often were ragtime pianists. Jazz music was very much a continuation of blues music, except that it took advantage of the instruments of the marching band. The jazz musician was basically "singing" just like the blues singers even though he was playing an instrument instead of using his vocals. The kind of dynamics and of improvisation was identical. The call-and-response structure was replicated in the dialogue between solo instrument and ensemble. Compared with European music, that for centuries had "trained" the voice to sound as perfect as the instruments, jazz music moved in the opposite direction when it trained the instruments to sound as emotional as the human voice of the blues. After all, many jazz instrumentalists made their living accompanying blues singers in the vaudeville circuit. The main difference between jazz and blues, i.e. the heavy syncopation, was the original contribution of ragtime.

II.2. The historical and style changes

In 1898 the US defeated Spain (gaining Puerto Rico and "liberating" Cuba). The troops that were coming back from the Caribbean front landed in New Orleans with European brass instruments that were sold cheaply on the black market. Within a few years, every neighborhood in New Orleans boasted a brass band. The influence of blues music could be heard in the way these instruments were played, because they basically imitated the vocal styles of blues music (often on a syncopated rhythm borrowed from ragtime).

A fundamental attribute of New Orleans was the perennial party atmosphere. This was not New York's melting pot, very competitive in nature: this was a melting pot that allowed for a lot of fun. New York was a cosmopolitan financial center. New Orleans was a cosmopolitan amusement park. Thus music was always in demand, not just as paid entertainment but as the soundtrack of a never-ending party. In other cities ethnicity was a problem. In New Orleans ethnicity was an opportunity to improve the party, because each ethnic group brought its different style of partying.
The most popular orchestras emphasized the cornet/trumpet (the main melodic instrument) and the clarinet (the counter-melody), while the trombone provided the bass counterpoint and the other instruments (drums, banjo, guitar, contrabass, piano) provided the rhythm section.

In 1911 Bill Johnson, a New Orleans bass player, moved to California and eventually managed to get his orchestra to follow him. From 1913 till 1917 the Original Creole Band was the first black orchestra to tour outside New Orleans.

Unlike blues music, that was exclusively performed by blacks, jazz music was as interracial as the melting pot of New Orleans. Blacks were not the only ones who played jazz. Jazz groups were formed by Italians, Creoles and all sorts of European immigrants. The "African" roots of the music may or may not have been obvious to the practitioners, but clearly it did not stop them from adopting it.

New York was the epicenter of a fusion of the three great fads of the time: syncopated orchestras, ragtime and blues. Chicago soon became a middleground of sorts. The soul of the city's black music was Joe Jordan, and the main mentors were the clubs of the "Black Belt", such as the "Pekin Theatre". Tony Jackson's Pretty Baby (1915) was the first big hit.

The New Orleans Jazz Band was performing at the "Royal Gardens". During World War I, Chicago witnessed the rivalry between the orchestras of Dave Peyton and Erskine Tate. They featured several young talents who had immigrated from the South, such as Joe "King" Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet. A tour by Will-Marion Cook's orchestra in 1919 introduced Chicago to the syncopated world of New York, and involuntarily led to an exodus of black musicians towards New York. At the end of the war Cook formed the American Syncopated Orchestra.

In 1917, after relocating to New York from Chicago, some white veterans of New Orleans, led by an Italian-American, Nick LaRocca, who back home had been playing in Jack "Papa" Laine's mixed-race band specializing in private and public events, rechristened themselves Original Dixieland Jass Band and recorded the first jazz record (with their Dixie Jass Band One Step). The success of that novelty prompted many other New Orleans musicians to move to New York. The Original Dixieland Jass Band went on to cut many more songs, mostly composed by the members of the band, in a variety of styles: Barnyard Blues (august 1917), Tiger Rag (august 1917), based on the traditional square dance Praline, Ostrich Walk (february 1917), At The Jass Band Ball (september 1917), Clarinet Marmalade Blues (july 1918), Fidgety Feet (february 1918), Lazy Daddy (july 1918), Skeleton Jangle (february 1918), Satanic Blues (august 1919), Bluin' The Blues (december 1920). But their specialty remained the frantic group improvisation, with a staccato style influenced by syncopated ragtime, the kind of jazz performed by white musicians that came to be called "dixieland jazz". In april 1919 LaRocca took his orchestra to London, where it was equally successful, particularly with Soudan (april 1920). The British recordings actually slowed down the tempo a bit, proving that some of the frenzy was simply due to the need to fit a song into the three minutes of a 78 RPM record (in Britain they recorded four-minute 12" records). These songs were "jazz" only insofar as they mimicked negro styles of music.

The term "dixieland jazz" had already been employed by another white band, Tom Brown's Dixieland Jass Band, also based in Chicago, and the first white jazz band to tour the north (although not New York).

The most sophisticated of Chicago's "dixieland" bands was perhaps the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, assembled in 1922 to exploit the popularity of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and Tom Brown's band. They, too, featured an "Italian" from New Orleans, clarinetist Leon Roppolo, as well as cornetist Paul Mares (the original founder), trombonist George Brunies, pianist Elmer Schoebel (the main composer) and bassist Steve Brown. Initially they recorded as the Friars Society Orchestra: Oriental (august 1922), Bugle Call Blues (august 1922), Farewell Blues (august 1922). But achieved their artistic peak with Tin Roof Blues (march 1923), and for the first time Chicago heard white musicians play jazz music worthy of the black masters. Unlike the stormy collective playing of the Original Dixieland Jass Band, these pieces also contained solos.

Chicago had become a major center of ragtime music after the World's Fair of 1893. New Orleans trombonist Tom Brown was the leader of a white ragtime orchestra and moved to Chicago in 1915. He adopted the term "jass" that had been first been used on the West Coast and his success spawned a "jass" trend. "Jass" was identified not so much with a musical style but with a geographical place (New Orleans), with frenzied fun (bordering on slapstick) and with sexual innuendoes in a period when the authorities were trying to crack down on immoral dances. "Jass" was a term with sexual connotations, but the instrumental music of jass bands was tolerated by the moral bigots. Thus it found the right balance between being allowed to reproduce and appealing to an audience that craved morbid entertainment.

The backdrop for the boom of "dixieland jazz" was World War I: while millions of young men were being slaughtered in the trenches of Europe, Chicago was dancing at the sound of this exuberant and clownish music. The new medium that helped spread the boom of "dixieland jazz" to the rest of the country was the record. It was the first new genre of music that spread thanks to the new medium.

Previously a new form of music or dance had required the physical movement of its protagonists who had to personally evangelize the rest of the country. Dixieland jazz spread thanks to the virtual movement of the protagonists via the record. The history of jazz was, from the beginning, also the history of how the music industry learned to make music travel without making its musicians travel, first with the piano rolls of ragtime and then with the records of dixieland jazz. The appeal to see the protagonists live was still very high, but the live performance was becoming less and less indispensable. The market for records had boomed thanks to the dance craze. During the war the price of records had been significantly reduced, making records affordable for a much larger segment of society. In 1919 a law was introduced to break the monopoly of the two majors, Victor and Columbia, and allow their competitors to sell the same kind of "lateral-cut records" that could be played on the most popular phonographs. Despite the fact that the sudden popularity of the radio (followed by the Great Depression) caused a sharp decline in sales of records (that did not recover until the end of the Great Depression), the turmoil in the industry allowed more musicians to record and more fans to listen to them.

Dixieland jazz was a gross misrepresentation of jazz music for the white audience. It was a novelty architected for an unsophisticated audience that was interested only in novelties. New Orleans musicians who emigrated in the 1910s had never heard the term "jass" before they arrived in Chicago.

Black musicians were not recorded partly because of racial discrimination but partly also because they were much more jealous of their style: their aim was to hide their sound from the competition, not to spread it all over the nation.
The Original Creole Band, led by Creole trumpeter Freddie Keppard, was one of the New Orleans bands that never recorded for fear of being copied, but was nonetheless influential in exporting the sound of New Orleans to Los Angeles (1911), where they were lured by bassist Bill Johnson (who already had a Creole Band there), New York (1915) and Chicago (where in 1918 Johnson engineered the mutation of the band sans Keppard into King Oliver's orchestra).

Keppard had been raised in Creole bands (that prevailed downtown), but, after Bolden's death, became the archetype of "hot jazz", the style of black musicians (who ruled uptown). Johnson himself popularized the swinging four beats per bar of jazz bass that made the two beats per bar of ragtime bass obsolete.

Bill Johnson transplanted jazz into the West Coast, and may be responsible for exporting the very name of the new music because "jass" was the term used around San Francisco for any kind of black music. The first group to use the term "jazz" in their name was the So Different Jazz Band led by pianist Sid LeProtti in San Francisco around 1914, seven years after Johnson had first performed there with his pre-Keppard band. A white bandleader of San Francisco, Art Hickman, was billed as playing "jazz" already in 1913.
The first instrumental record by a black orchestra (i.e., the first black jazz record) was in fact cut in Los Angeles: Ory's Creole Trombone (july 1922) by Edward "Kid" Ory's Creole Orchestra, formed in 1919 by that veteran New Orleans band-leader with former New Orleans musicians who had relocated to the West Coast. Ory stayed in Los Angeles until 1925, before moving on to Chicago, where he contributed to Louis Armstrong's success (e.g., his Muskrat Ramble, recorded by Armstrong in february 1926).

Black songwriter William Handy (the same man who had inaugurated the age of notated blues) recorded one of the first songs with "jazz" in the title: Benton Overstreet's Jazz Dance (september 1917), and performed a "jass concert" in april 1918 at New York's Selwyn Theatre. The word "jazz" began to circulate throughout the dancehalls for white people of the USA. Although initially considered only a new kind of ragtime, jazz became rapidly a sensation both in the USA and abroad.

Harlem musicians were evolving ragtime into a faster and louder syncopated style, that relied a lot more on individual improvisation. Its roots were still in blues music: the soloists were often trying to emulate the singing of the blues, and the counterpoint was trying to emulate the call-and-response of the blues.

After all, many jazz musicians cut their teeth accompanying blues singers, and learned to respond to the nuances of those passionate singers. Jazz bands took the piano from ragtime, the saxophone and the trumpet from dancehall bands. But the popularity of blues singers in the 1920s was such that New York's recording industry did not show much interest for jazz orchestras.

If the origins of jazz music were confusing, the difference between New Orleans and the other epicenters was more clear: improvisation. The ragtime pianists, the syncopated orchestras (both black and white), the blues singers and even the various outfits (black and white) that used the proto-term "jass", were playing composed music with minimal (if any) degree of improvisation.

The real improvisation was done only in the south, first by blues musicians (who mainly used vocals and guitar) and then by the musicians of New Orleans (who used also the horns). Improvisation introduced a different concept of musician.

The musician of written music is, mainly, the composer, whereas the musician of improvised music is, mainly, the player. Because of improvisation, blues and jazz music were emphasizing the persona of the player to a degree unheard of among opera singers or classical violinists. The emphasis shifted from playing (or singing) the exact notes in a sublime manner to playing (or singing) as far as possible from the exact notes while still playing the same tune. Needless to say, the latter allowed the player a greater degree of personal emotion.

Among the early protagonists of New Orleans were: trumpeter Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, equally famous for his "scat" singing (wordless vocal improvisation); soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, another black Creole, the first master of an instrument that had not previously been identified with African-Americans; trumpeters Bunk Johnson and Freddie Keppard, another black Creole (whose "fat" sound was influential in Chicago); clarinetists Johnny Dodds (one of the wildest soloists of his time), Jimmie Noone (the epitome of elegance) and George Lewis; drummer Warren "Baby" Dodds.

Thus the marching bands contributed the instruments, blues singers contributed the improvisation, and ragtime contributed the syncopation (that ragtime had, in turn, taken from the "minstrel shows").

Jazz as a separate genre of music was born at the intersection of collective improvisation and heavy syncopation. Another defining feature was that it was mainly instrumental (blues music was mainly vocal). For some observers of the time jazz music may have sounded simply like the instrumental side of blues music, or the group version of ragtime, or a non-marching club-oriented evolution of the marching bands.

Soon, new instruments were incorporated (such as the saxophone) and some habits developed (the "riff", a rhythmic phrase repeated several times, or the "break", a brief solo during a pause by the ensemble). The material that was played came from the most diverse sources: William Handy's songs, Scott Joplin's rags, pop songs, blues songs, and traditional slave songs. Initially, jazz musicians showed little interest in being also composers.

When Storyville was shut down in 1917, jazz simply moved with the black entertainers who had to relocate to Memphis and Chicago (e.g., King Oliver in 1918, Louis Armstrong in 1922). But the exodus of black musicians was also part of the "Great Migration" that saw thousands of blacks leave the South for the northern cities, mostly because of better job opportunities created by World War I in the North (the defense industry was mostly based in the North) and because of a boll weevil infestation that caused great damage to cotton plantations in the South. But also because of more tolerant attitudes: the industrialists of the North were literally luring blacks to their factories while plantation owners were still treating them like slaves. The result of the migration was the establishment of large black communities in Chicago, Detroit and New York, where they displaced white middle-class communities (as in New York's Harlem, that used to be a rich white neighborhood).

Jazz eventually spread to every corner of the USA. In fact, jazz was one of the first musical genres to owe its diffusion to a whole new world of communication of information. The birth of jazz music parallels a revolution in music "media".

The first revolution was caused by the networks of vaudeville theaters that were formed by entrepreneurs such as Pericles "Alexander" Pantages in 1902, Martin Beck in 1905 and especially Fred Barrasso in 1907 (whose brainchild, the Theater Owners's Booking Association, or T.O.B.A., became the most important for black performers). These circuits created a low-inertia way to distribute musical novelties to the entire country: the musicians would simply follow the circuit. The dance craze of the 1910s was spread around the USA mainly by "territory bands" (both white and black) that traveled the circuit of vaudeville theaters and other improvised dancehalls. Many of them converted to jazz music after 1917. Another revolution came (in the following decade) with the popularity of the phonographic record, that turned a local phenomenon into a city-wide, state-wide and eventually country-wide phenomenon. And later (in the 1920s) the boom of jazz would come thanks to the radio, that dramatically accelerated that communication from region to region. Jazz was as much the product of New Orleans' melting pot as the product of an organizational and technological revolution.

The basic labors of archaeological reconstruction and periodization aside, working on the contemporary forms of black expressive culture involves struggling with one problem in particular, and that is the puzzle of what analytic status should be given to variation within black communities and between black cultures. The tensions produced by attempts to compare or evaluate differing black cultural formations can be summed up in the following question: How are we to think critically about artistic products and aesthetic codes that, although they may be traced back to one distant location, have been somehow changed either by the passage of time or by their displacement, relocation, or dissemi-nation through wider networks of communication and cultural exchange? This question serves as a receptacle for several even more awkward issues. These include the unity and differentiation of the creative black self, the vexed matter of black particularity, and the role of cultural expression in its formation and reproduction.

These problems are especially acute because black thinkers have been largely unwilling or unable to appeal to the authoritative narratives of psychoanalysis as a means to ground the cross-cultural aspirations of their theories.

With a few noble exceptions, critical accounts of the dynamics of black subordi nation and resistance have been doggedly monocultural, national, and ethnocentric. The transnational structures that brought the black Atlantic world into being have themselves developed; these structures now articulate its myriad cultural forms into a system of global communications. This fundamental dislocation of black cultural forms is especially important in the recent history of black musics which, produced out of racial slavery, now dominate the popular cultures of the Western world. In the face of the conspicuous differentiation and proliferation of black cul-tural styles and genres, a new analytic orthodoxy has begun to grow. It suggests that since black popularity is socially and historically con-structed, the pursuit of any unifying dynamic or underlying structure of feeling in contemporary black cultures is utterly misplaced. The attempt to locate the cultural practices, motifs, or political agendas that might connect the dispersed and divided blacks of the New World and of Europe with each other and even with Africa is therefore dismissed as essentialism, idealism, or both.

The dangers of idealism and pastoralization associated with the idea of the diaspora ought, by now, to be obvious, but the very least that it offers is a heuristic means to focus on the relationship of identity and nonidentity in black political culture. It can also be employed to project the rich diversity of black cultures in different parts of the world in counterpoint to their common sensibilities-both those features residu-ally inherited from Africa and those generated from the special bitter-ness of New World racial slavery. This is not an easy matter. The proposition that the postslave cultures of the Atlantic world are in some significant way related to each other and to the African cultures from which they partly derive has long been a matter of great controversy that sometimes arouses intense feeling which goes far beyond dispas-sionate scholastic contemplation.

The situation is rendered even more complex by the fact that the fragile psychological, emotional, and cul-tural correspondences that connect diaspora populations in spite of their manifest differences are often apprehended only fleetingly and in ways that persistently confound the protocols of academic orthodoxy. There is, however, a great body of work that justifies the proposition that some cultural, religious, and linguistic affiliations can be identified even if their contemporary political significance remains disputed.

There are also valuable though underutilized leads to be found in the work of the feminist political thinkers, cultural critics, and philosophers who have formulated stimulating conceptions of the relationship between identity and difference in the context of advancing the political project of female emancipation 1

Precisely because some of the most idealized constructions of black-ness, Africanity, and pan-Africanity have ironically relied upon an abso-lute contempt for the lived complexities of black vernacular cultures in the New World, I want to propose that the possible commonality of postslave, black cultural forms be approached via several related prob-lems that converge in the analysis of black musics and their supporting social relations. One particularly valuable pathway is afforded by con-cern with the distinctive patterns of language use that characterize the contrasting populations of the modern African diaspora (Baugh 1983). The oral focus of the cultural settings in which diaspora musics have developed presupposes a distinctive relationship to the body-an idea expressed with exactly the right amount of impatience by Glissant (1989, 248): "It is nothing new to declare that for us music, gesture, dance are forms of communication, just as important as the gift of speech. This is how we first managed to emerge from the plantation: aesthetic form in our cultures must be shaped from these oral struc-tures." The distinctive kinesis of the postslave populations was the product of these brutal historical conditions. Though more usually raised by analysis of sports, athletics, and dance, it ought to contribute directly to the understanding of the traditions of performance that continue to characterize the production and reception of African diaspora musics. This orientation to the specific dynamics of performance has a wider significance in the analysis of black cultural forms than has so far been supposed. Its strengths are evident when it is contrasted with ap-proaches to black culture that have been premised on textuality and narrative rather than, say, dramaturgy, enunciation, and gesture-the pre- and anti-discursive constituents of black metacommunication.

Each of these last three areas merits detailed treatment in its own right (). All of them are marked by their compound and multiple origins in the mediation of the African and other cultural forms that are sometimes referred to as "creolization." However, my concern here is less with the formal attributes of these syn-cretic expressive cultures than with the problem of how critical (anti)aesthetic judgments on them can be made and with the place of ethnicity and authenticity within these judgments. If, for example, a style, genre, or performance of music is identified as being expressive of the absolute essence of the group that produced it, what special analyti-cal problems arise? What contradictions appear in the transmission and adaptation of this cultural expression by other diaspora populations, and how will they be resolved? How does the hemispheric displace-ment and global dissemination of black music get reflected in localized traditions of critical writing, and, once the music is perceived as a world phenomenon, what value is placed upon its origins in opposition to its contingent loops and fractal trajectories? Where music is thought to be emblematic and constitutive of racial difference rather than just associ-ated with it, how is music used to pinpoint general issues pertaining to the problem of racial authenticity and the consequent self-identity of the racial group?

All these questions have acquired a special historical and political significance in Britain. Black settlement in that country goes back many centuries. Indeed, affirming its continuity has become an important part of the politics that strive to answer contemporary British racism. However, most contemporary black communities are of relatively recent origin, dating only from after World War II. If these populations are unified at all, it is more by experience of migration than the memory of slavery and the residues of plantation society. Until recently, this very newness and conspicuous lack of rootedness in the "indigenous" cultures of Britain's inner cities conditioned the formation of syncretic racial subcultures that drew heavily from a range of "raw materials" sup-plied by the Caribbean and black America. This was true even where these subcultures also contributed to the unsteady equilibrium of antagonistic class relationships into which Britain's black settlers found themselves inserted not only as racially subordinated migrant laborers but also as working-class black settlers.

The musics of the black Atlantic world were the primary expressions of cultural distinctiveness which this population seized upon and sought to adapt to its new circumstances.

It used these separate but converging musical traditions if not to create itself anew as a conglomeration of black communities, then at least as a means to gauge the social progress of the spontaneous self-creation that was formed by the endless pressures of economic exploitation, political racism, displacement, and exile. This musical heritage gradually became an important factor in facilitating the transition of diverse settlers to a distinct mode of blackness. It was instrumental in producing a constellation of subject positions that was openly indebted to the Caribbean, the United States, and even to Africa. It was also indelibly marked by the British condi-tions in which it grew and matured. It is essential to appreciate that this type of process has not been confined to settlers of Afro-Caribbean descent. In reinventing their own ethnicity (Sollors 1989), some of Britain's Asian settlers have also bor-rowed the sound system culture of the Caribbean and the soul and hip hop styles of Afro-America, as well as techniques like mixing, scratch-ing, and sampling, as part of their invention of a new mode of cultural production and self-identification.' The experience of Caribbean migrants to Britain provides further examples of cultural exchange and of the ways in which a self-consciously synthetic culture can support some equally novel political identities.

The cultural and political histories of Guyana, Jamaica, Barbados, Grenada, Trinidad, and Saint Lucia, like the economic forces at work in generating their respective migrations to Europe, are widely dissimilar. Even if it were possible, let alone desir-able, their synthesis into a single black British culture could never have been guaranteed by the effects of racism alone. Thus the role of external meanings around blackness, drawn in particular from Afro-America, became important in the elaboration of a connective culture that drew these different "national" groups together into a new pattern that was not ethnically marked as their Caribbean cultural inheritances had been. Reggae provides a useful example here. Once its own hybrid origins in rhythm and blues were effectively concealed, it ceased, in Britain, to signify an exclusively ethnic, Jamaican style and derived instead a dif-ferent kind of cultural power both from a new global status and from its expression of what might be termed a pan-Caribbeano Creole culture. The style, rhetoric, and moral authority of the civil rights movement and of black power suffered similar fates. They too were detached from their original ethnic markers and historical origins, exported and adapted with evident respect but little sentimentality to local needs and political climates. Appearing in Britain through a circulatory system that gave a central place to the musics that had both informed and re-corded black struggles in other places, this legacy was rearticulated in distinctively European conditions. How the appropriation of these forms, styles, and histories of struggle was possible at such great physi-cal and social distance is, in itself, an interesting question for cultural historians. It was facilitated by a common fund of urban experiences, by the effect of similar but by no means identical forms of racial segrega-tion as well as by the memory of slavery, a legacy of Africanisms, and a stock of religious experiences defined by them both.

Dislocated from their original conditions of existence, the soundtracks to this African- American cultural renaissance fed a new metaphysics of blackness that was elaborated and enacted within the underground and, alternatively, public spaces constituted around an expressive culture that was domi-nated by music. The inescapably political language of citizenship, racial justice, and equality was one of several discourses that contributed to this transfer of cultural and political forms and structures of feeling. A commentary on the relationship of work to leisure and the respective forms of free-dom with which these opposing worlds become identified provided a second linking principle. A folk historicism, animating a special fascina-tion with history and the significance of its recovery by those who have been expelled from the official dramas of civilization, was a third com-ponent here. The representation of sexuality and gender identity-in particular, the ritual public projection of the antagonistic relationship between black women and men in ways that invited forms of identifica-tion strong enough to operate across the line of color-was the fourth element within this vernacular cultural and philosophical formation re-produced by and through the music of the black Atlantic world. The conflictual representation of sexuality has vied with the discourse of racial emancipation to constitute the inner core of black expressive culture. Common rhetorical strategies developed through the same repertory of "enunciative procedures" have helped these discourses to be-come interlinked. Their association was pivotal, for example, in the mas sive secularization that produced soul out of rhythm and blues and per-sists today. It can be observed in the bitter conflict over the misogynist tone and masculinist direction of hip hop. The most significant recent illustration of this is provided by the complex issues stemming from the obscenity trial of 2 Live Crew.

This episode is also notable because it was the occasion for an important public intervention by Afro-America's best-known cultural critic, Henry Louis Gates, who went beyond simply affirming the artistic status of this particular hip-hop product, arguing that the Crew's material was a manifestation of distinctively black cultural traditions that operated by particular satiri-cal codes in which one man's misogyny turns out to be another man's parodic play. In dealing with the relationship of "race" to class it has been commonplace to recall Stuart Hall's suggestive remark that the former is the modality in which the latter is lived.

The tale of 2 Live Crew and the central place of sexuality in the contemporary discourses of ra-cial particularity points to an analogous formulation: gender is the mo-dality in which race is lived. Experiencing racial difference through par-ticular definitions of gender has been eminently exportable. The forms of connectedness and identification it makes possible cannot be con-fined within the borders of the nation-state. They create new concep-tions of nationality in the conflictual interaction between the women who reproduce the black national community and the men who aspire to be its soldier-citizens. These links show no sign of fading but the dependence of blacks in Britain on black cultures produced in the New World has recently be-gun to change. The current popularity of Jazzy B and Soul II Soul, Maxie Priest, Caron Wheeler, and Monie Love in the United States con-firms that, during the eighties, black British cultures ceased to simply mimic or reproduce wholesale forms, styles, and genres that had been lovingly borrowed, respectfully stolen, or brazenly hijacked from blacks elsewhere. Critical space/time cartography of the diaspora needs, there-fore, to be readjusted so that the dynamics of dispersal and local auton-omy can be shown alongside the unforeseen detours and circuits that mark the new journeys and new arrivals, which, in turn, prompt new political and cultural possibilities .At certain points in the recent past, British racism has generated tur-bulent economic, ideological, and political forces that have seemed to act like a kind of centrifuge upon the people they oppressed, concen-trating their cultural identities into a single, powerful configuration.

Whether these people were of African, Caribbean, or Asian descent, their commonality was often defined by its reference to the central, irr ducible sign of their common racial subordination-the color black. More recently, though, this fragile unity in action has fragmented, and their self-conception has separated into its various constituent elements. The unifying notion of an "open" blackness has been largely rejected and replaced by more particularistic conceptions of cultural difference. This retreat from a politically constructed notion of racial solidarity has initiated a compensatory recovery of narrowly ethnic culture and iden-tity. Indeed, the aura of authentic ethnicity supplies a special form of comfort in a situation where the very historicity of black experience is constantly undermined. These political and historical shifts are regis-tered in the cultural realm.

The growth of religious fundamentalism among some populations of Asian descent is an obvious sign of their significance, and there may be similar processes at work in the experi-ence of the peoples of Caribbean descent, for whom a return to ethnicity has acquired pronounced generational features. Their desire to anchor themselves in racial particularity is not dominated by the longing to return to the "Victorian" certainties and virtues of Caribbean cultural life. However, in conjunction with the pressures of economic recession and populist racism, this yearning has driven many older settlers to re-turn to the lands in which they were born. Among their descendants, the same desire to withdraw has found a very different form of expres-sion.

„It has moved toward an overarching" Afrocentrism,"which can be read as inventing its own totalizing conception of black culture. This new ethnicity is all the more powerful because it corresponds to no ac-tually-existing black communities. Its radical utopianism, often an-chored in the ethical bedrock provided by the history of the Nile Valley civilizations, transcends the parochialism of Caribbean memories in fa-vor of a heavily mythologized Africanity that is itself stamped by its origins not in Africa but in a variety of pan-African ideology produced most recently by Afro-America. This complex and frequently radical sensibility has been recently fostered by the more pedagogic and self-consciously politicized elements within hip hop.” 1

The Afrocentric discourse the idea of a diaspora tends to disappear somewhere between the invocations of an African motherland and the powerful critical commentaries on the immediate, local conditions in which this music originates. These complexities aside, hip-hop culture (which is not neatly reducible to its Afrocentric components) is simply the latest export from black America to have found favor in black Brit-ain. It is especially interesting then that its success has been built on structures of circulation and intercultural exchange established long ago.

The role of music and song within the abolitionist movement is an additional and equally little-known factor that must have prefigured the Jubilee Singers' eventual triumph (Dennison 1982, 157-187).

The choir1, sent forth into the world with economic objectives that must have partially eclipsed their pursuit of aesthetic excellence in their musical per-formances, initially struggled to win an audience for black music produced by blacks from a constituency that had been created by fifty years of "blackface" entertainment. Needless to say, the aesthetic and political tensions involved in establishing the credibility and appeal of their own novel brand of black cultural expression were not confined to the concert halls. Practical problems arose in the mechanics of touring when innkeepers would refuse the group lodgings having mistakenly assumed that they were a company of "nigger minstrels" (i.e., white). One landlord did not discover that "their faces were coloured by their creator and not by burnt cork" (Marsh 1875, 36) until the singers were firmly established in their bedrooms. He still turned them into the street. The choir's progress was dogged by controversies over the relative value of their work when compared to the output of white performers. The Fisk troupe also encountered the ambivalence and embarrassment of black audiences unsure or uneasy about serious, sacred music being displayed to audiences conditioned by the hateful antics of Zip Coon, Jim Crow.

Understandably, blacks were protective of their unique musical culture and fearful of how it might be changed by being forced to compete on the new terrain of popular culture against the absurd representations of blackness offered by minstrelsy's dramatization of white supremacy. The Fisk singers' success spawned a host of other companies that took to the road to offer similar musical fare in the years after 1871.

The meaning of this movement of black singers for our un-derstanding of Reconstruction remains to be explored. It will comple-ment and extend work already done on representations of blackness during this period and promises to go far beyond the basic argument to be emphasized here: black people singing slave songs as mass entertainment initiated and established new public standards of authenticity for black cultural expression. The legitimacy of these new cultural forms was established precisely through their distance from the racial codes of minstrelsy. The Jubilee Singers' journey out of America was a critical stage in making this possible.

There are many good reasons why black cultures have had great difficulty in seeing that displacement and transformation are unavoidable and that the developmental processes regarded by conservatives as cultural contamination may be enriching. The effect of racism's denials not only of black cultural integrity but of the capacity of blacks to bear and reproduce any culture worthy of the name are clearly salient here. The place prepared for black cultural expression in the hierarchy of creativity generated by the pernicious metaphysical dualism that identified blacks with the body and whites with the mind is a second significant factor that has roots in eighteenth and nineteenth-century discussions of aesthetics. However, beyond these general questions lies the projec-tion of a coherent and stable culture as a means to establish the political legitimacy of black nationalism and the notions of ethnic particularity on which it has come to rely. This defensive reaction to racism can be said to have taken over its evident appetite for sameness and symmetry from the discourses of the oppressor.

Because the self-identity, political culture, and grounded aesthetics that distinguish black communities have often been constructed through their music and the broader cultural and philosophical meanings that flow from its production, circulation, and consumption, music is espe-cially important in breaking the inertia that arises in the unhappy polar opposition between a squeamish, nationalist "essentialism" and a skep-tical, saturnalian "pluralism" which makes the impure world of politics literally unthinkable. The preeminence of music within the diverse black communities of the Atlantic diaspora is itself an important element in their essential connectedness. But the histories of borrowing, displace-ment, transformation, and continual reinscription that the musical cul-ture encloses are a living legacy that should not be reified in the pri-mary symbol of the diaspora and then employed as an alternative to the recurrent appeal of fixity and rootedness. Music and its rituals can be used to create a model whereby identity can be understood as something other than a fixed essence or a vague and utterly contingent construction to be reinvented by the will and whim of aesthetes, symbolists, and language gamers. Black identity is not simply a social and political category to be used or abandoned according to the extent to which the rhetoric that supports and legitimizes it is persuasive or institutionally powerful.

Whatever the radical constructionists may say, it is lived as a coherent (if not always stable) experiential sense of self. Though this identity is often felt to be natural and spontaneous, it remains the outcome of practical activity: language, gesture, bodily significations, desires. These significations are con-densed in musical performance, although it does not, of course, monopolize them. In this context, they produce the imaginary effect of an internal racial core or essence by acting on the body through the specific mechanisms of identification and recognition that are produced in the intimate interaction of performer and crowd. This reciprocal relation-ship serves as a strategy and an ideal communicative situation even when the original makers of the music and its eventual consumers are separated in space and time or divided by the technologies of sound reproduction and the commodity form which their art has sought to resist

The figuration of black genius constitutes an important cultural nar-rative that tells and retells not so much the story of the weak's victory over the strong but explores the relative powers enjoyed by different types of strength. The story of intuitive black creative development is personalized in the narratives of figures like Jones. It demonstrates the aesthetic fruits of pain and suffering and has a special significance because musicians have played a disproportionate part in the long strug-gle to represent black creativity, innovation, and excellence.

New York—the Art Deco city of skyscrapers and dazzling lobbies, theaters, jazz bars, restaurants, and stylish gates and towers—awakens slowly, deeply, from industrial and mechanical dreams, or perhaps from vivid fantasies of its dark and eclectic past.

It awakens, and the Empire State Building tantalizes at dawn: a rousing giant, a beacon, which only a few hours before was moored like a ship to the dark.

Perhaps New York, under its melting blanket of haze, was dreaming of a great American ferment, way back between the end of the first world war and the onset of the depression, when the stock market soared, modernism captured every remaining territory, and technology climbed like fresh sap through industry.

Perhaps New York was remembering the beginning of one of the great ages of its progress, when mornings like this emerged like Miles Davis’ “In a Silent Way”—against electric guitar and piano, bass, and floating dreams: the sun of a smokeless skyline like the face of a loved one gazing, singing softly with a voice still as the ray of a single soprano sax.

The roaring twenties and the jazz age

The years of the prosperous Roaring Twenties, or what is also known as the golden Jazz Age, were bright with inventions, discoveries, and innovations. Radio broadcasting gathered audiences in living rooms and talking movies herded people into theaters; mass-produced Ford Model T’s thronged the streets; airline travel became the vogue; and mass communication through the telephone was launched.

Technology and economic boom swept an America that was fast outgrowing traditions. With evolutions in industry, the banners of individualism, enjoyment, and pleasure were raised defiantly against the wake of the misery, destruction, and decay of the recent war.

Art and culture, revitalized by new possibilities of craft, grew the flesh over girded glass and steel. Sinewy and sensual, the new aesthetic called Art Deco was daring and calculated, with precise design and spare ornament; was functional and beautiful, feisty and tender.

Architecture, literature, cinema and theater, painting, dance, fashion, and music thrived in this age, alongside the development of sports, the expansion of civil rights and suffrage, and the emancipation of women. But only one vein of gold ran from one trend and crossed the rest. It was only the darkness of jazz—shadow over stone, melancholy of the soul, rhythm of movement and speech, shapes of emotions, and weave and pattern of courage and hope—that held things together. Only jazz gave the verve of identity to the lost post-war generation.

Famous Big Band swing tunes include Benny Goodman’s defi nitive rendition of “Sing, Sing, Sing”, which shines with energy, hot breath, sweat, booze, and smoke. Goodman was also famous for the jazz pied piper of a song “In the Mood”. Count Basie, jazz pianist, organist, and composer, also had his Count Basie Orchestra, which by the middle of the 1950s became one of the leading big bands for the fi nest jazz singers.

Basie was famous for his teasing and sensual show tune “One O’Clock Jump” and the youthfully vigorous “Jumpin’ at the Woodside”, touted as one of Swing’s greatest. Though also known for the succeeding jazz genre bebop, pianist and bandleader Duke Ellington entered the scene at the beginning of the Big Band period. He is regarded as one of the most important jazz composers in history. Ellington is known for the swing standard “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing”. The 1956 “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” likewise created a stir, with straining trumpets, trilling saxophones, and a crashing piano. Besides bandleaders, singers also rose to prominence in the Swing Era. Among them was singer and trumpeter Louis Armstrong, a charismatic and innovative performer, who had a major infl uence on jazz with his extensive improvisations and scat singing—a kind of vocal improvisation where singers use nonsense syllables to reproduce melodic lines. An example is “Heebie Jeebies”, which goes something like: “Heebie, I mean the Jeebies…Don’t feel blue. Someone will teach you… Keep-dap-doop..reep-beep-da-dood-a-roop.” Armstrong is also famous for his memorable rendition of the gospel-song-turned-jazz-band-favorite “When the Saints Go Marching In”.

Instrument players who honed their craft and perfected their personal styles drew attention, especially when solo instrument parts began to gain more importance. Sidney Bechet is said to have brought the saxophone to prominence. Bechet was called “Le Dieu” (the god) in France. His “Petite Fleur” (Small Flower) is a piece tender yet bitter, sultry with a hint of despair, like the lonely song of an estranged lover in a deserted bar: the smoke of his cigarette fi lling out his sadness. Another jazz player, Bix Beiderbecke, was a well-known cornet player, who brought the influence of classical romanticism to jazz. His superb cornet playing was golden and mellifluous, clean, heartfelt, and warm. In “Clarinet Marmalade”, Bix’s cornet is sweet, and has a citrus and tangy tone perfect for a delicious dance. Elegant, the song is slippery and bright as brass.

As the sun rises, heights are rebuilt by the light, floor by floor. Climbing the old General Electric Tower, the sun grazes granite and glazed-brick fi gures suggesting the power of electricity—silver detail of lightning bolts and birds with long, sharp wings; lime green spires the color of patina; gold lining on stone like electric currents; black rays surrounding grim headstones; and windows like electrifi ed honeycombs—until fi nally raised fi sts are grappled with, extending to great lightning bolts raised against the sky.

The sun screams at the silver scale crescents of the Chrysler Building, at the windows, at the chrome, steel, and nickel that challenge its prominence. The rebellious bebop of the 1940s arose when several jazz musicians grew weary of the sweet and ever-smiling Swing. In place of popular dance tunes, technical improvisations were sought. Musicians harnessed new innovations, and returned the rawness of jazz through complexity and unpredictability, even to the extent of cantankerousness. Unlike Swing, bebop was nervous, fragmented, and sometimes even furious.

The word “bebop” is onomatopoeic of a characteristic jazz technique. It has the same name as the swing-bebop crossover song by trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. He and saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker helped shift jazz from swing to the more challenging bebop. Some call Charles “Bird” Parker the “greatest saxophonist of all time”. Two of his famous pieces are “Bird of Paradise” and “Ko-Ko”. As with Parker, Dizzy Gillespie was a virtuoso musician. His piece “Groovin’ High” is easy and jumpy, lighthearted as its composer. “Bebop”, on the other hand, is unsteady, rapturous, and taut: the string of trumpet notes ready to break at any moment. In comparison, Gillespie’s bebop standard “A Night in Tunisia” whistles and dances around a bonfi re with sparks fl ying, skirts twisting, and stars clapping with brass hands. In the late 1950s and 1960s, hard bop developed from bebop, incorporating infl uences from R&B, the blues, and gospel music. Dizzy Gillespie’s music still falls under hard bop, but the most prominent hard bopper is bandleader, pianist, trumpeter, and composer John Coltrane. Bebop standards falling under hard bop include John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”, with smooth and volatile sax, and “Blue Train”, which is mainly about moods. Also among these are the ragged “Impressions”, which is a storm of sensations melded into a single trumpet–a mob of a song; and the confessional love testament “I Want to Talk About You”. Coltrane has other tender pieces, such as “Crescent”, which begins like an epilogue of a long and memorable romance; “Naima”, which is tender and sweet, unbeholden to any possessive desire; and “Aisha”, a piece perhaps about young love, recalling faintly happy past days.

Prohibition

It is broad daylight. Inside the El Dorado Apartment Building are exceptional murals with warm tones and rich illustrations of what can be playful nymphs, Nereid, and a Bacchus.

There is still one former speakeasy existing in New York City: Chumley’s at 86 Bedford Street. It retains its original decoration, with Art Deco inspired table lamps. Typical of speakeasies, there are no signs outside to indicate that there is a bar within. There is even a secret back door so that customers could easily exit when police came. Speakeasies became popular and numerous during the years of the Prohibition. It is in such places that bootlegged liquor was served, jazz musicians entertained and suffused the smoky air with Swing and the blues, and “flappers” danced the Charleston and Breakaway. It was in speakeasies that the Lost Generation, chronicled by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his novels, asserted and fl aunted their rebellion and scorn for tradition. These rooms were heady with the seething atmosphere of continuous change and the certainty of greater prosperity. “Stay away from me coz I’m in my sin. If this joint is raided somebody give my gin. Don’t try me nobody coz you will never win… I’ll fight the army and navy. Somebody give me my gin.” (“Gin House Blues” by Nina Simone)

Spirituals and the blues

In the partial darkness of New York, the seat of jazz bands, the limestone skyscraper of the General Electric broods over green ponderings. At its jagged setbacks, Art Deco style, night still sits. Then at 749 Fifth Avenue, carefully, light caresses the sharp and delicate designs at the façade of Tiffany & Co.’s. shaped like silver suns. They are peered into by the sunrise like gemstone mirrors. Dim, the entrance to the Fred F. French Building is still, but the classical fi gures at corner friezes already glimmer.

The Art Deco structure and ornamentation of these well-known New York buildings are as dark and detailed before sunrise as the deep African musical traditions before jazz, which include, among others, spirituals and the blues. Spirituals were the expressions of religious faith of Christianized African slaves, who reinterpreted the religion according to their own aspirations for freedom, and combined this worship with their own loud and lively musical and religious traditions of communal shouts, chants, and fi eld songs, producing intricate harmonies of struggle, belief, forbearance, overcoming, and hope. Like spirituals, blues, in its early form, was comprised of call-and-response shouts.

As it is now known, the blues is a combination of European musical structure and the West African call-and-response tradition, transformed into a conversation between voices and instruments. Having “the blues” means having a fi t of the “blues devils”, or possessing “down” spirits. Thus, the expression has referred to experiences of woe, oppression, and sadness. Robert Johnson, of whose song, “Stones in My Passway”, was just quoted, was a (Mississippi) Delta Blues musician considered to be the “Grandfather of Rock and Roll”. Johnson sang and played with painfully raw and spare emotion. His music was simple and powerful, a dark naked cry for help: “Standin’ at the crossroads…Didn’t nobody seem to know me, everybody pass me by…the risin’ sun goin’ down I believe to my soul now…is sinkin’ down… Lord, baby I’m sinkin’ down.” (Cross Road Blues). “I gotta keep movin’. Blues fallin down like hail… And the days keeps on worryin’ me, there’s a hellhound on my trail.” (Hellhound On My Trail)

Only known through his records, Johnson was surrounded by legend. Because he often referred to the blues as “the devil”, the story was told that he sold his soul to play sublime music. Another blues singer vulnerable as Robert Johnson was 1930s vocalist Billie Holiday, considered among the greatest female jazz singers, beside Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald. Her personal history scarred, her voice issues like wisps of weeping willow, like strains of rain joining a fl owing river. Slow ballads became Holiday’s signature.

Many called her voice lovingly sweet, weathered and experienced, sad and sophisticated, as in her famous songs “Fine and Mellow” and “I Cover the Waterfront”, which she could have sung about her diffi cult life “standing alone by the desolate docks in the still and the chill of the night”.

Ragtime- Above the marquee of the Radio City Music Hall, the heroes Theater, Dance, and Music, depicted on plaques, shake out their magnifi cent garments in rich blue, red, green, and gold coloring. The sun opens its eyes and their bodies shine metallic. The origins of jazz likewise trace to tinny European military band music, hillbilly music, and other African musical traditions, including early twentieth century ragtime. Ragtime peaked in popularity between 1899-1918. Ahead of jazz, it is said to be the fi rst truly American musical genre. Like spirituals and the blues, it descended from African-American music, originating from the jig and marches. Scott Joplin was the “King of Ragtime”. He himself described the music “weird and intoxicating”.

His best known songs include “Maple Leaf Rag”, which is jumpy and perky, debonair, with fl air and ritz; and “Elite Syncopations”, a tirelessly playful piece. Already, before the genre even existed, Joplin used the word “swing” in describing how to play ragtime. Hence, music that developed from it was categorized as Swing.

Sing, swing, sing

As dark recedes from the peak of the Fuller Building, sunburst designs fl ash like badges. New York enters day, leaving behind the sadness of Duke Ellington’s “Sultry Sunset”. The city forsakes the desolation “Round Midnight”, when Miles Davis’ trumpet conversed with John Coltrane’s sax: two lampposts at an empty street. The French Building sings as its bright bronze paneling and jaggedly geometric terra-cotta decoration in Middle Eastern motifs dance in the light. The Jazz Age danced its way into the Swing Era, which historians believe shimmied from 1935-1946. The major characteristics of Swing are a strong rhythm, usually with the double bass and drums, and fast, danceable tempo. Though swing music had already been around since the twenties, it is asserted that the era began with a specifi c performance of Benny Goodman’s band at the Palomar Ballroom on 21 August 1935, which brought swing to the rest of the country, and earning him the recognition “King of Swing”. Before this time, Paul Whiteman, the self-proclaimed “King of Jazz”, was the most popular bandleader of the twenties, heading Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. He was hugely responsible for revolutionizing the dance orchestra and dance music after the war.

Whiteman’s Orchestra could be considered one of the fi rst “Big Bands” made popular in the Swing Era. Consisting approximately 12 to 19 musicians, big bands contain saxophones, trumpets and trombones, drums, bass, the piano, and guitars. Big bands were also referred to as jazz bands, stage bands, jazz orchestras, or dance bands. “I got stones in my passway and all my roads seem dark at night. I have pains in my heart… I have a bird to whistle. I have a bird to sing…” (“Stones in My Passway” by Robert Johnson)

Famous Big Band swing tunes include Benny Goodman’s defi nitive rendition of “Sing, Sing, Sing”, which shines with energy, hot breath, sweat, booze, and smoke. Goodman was also famous for the jazz pied piper of a song “In the Mood”.

Count Basie, jazz pianist, organist, and composer, also had his Count Basie Orchestra, which by the middle of the 1950s became one of the leading big bands for the fi nest jazz singers. Basie was famous for his teasing and sensual show tune “One O’Clock Jump” and the youthfully vigorous “Jumpin’ at the Woodside”, touted as one of Swing’s greatest. Though also known for the succeeding jazz genre bebop, pianist and bandleader Duke Ellington entered the scene at the beginning of the Big Band period. He is regarded as one of the most important jazz composers in history. Ellington is known for the swing standard “It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got That Swing”. The 1956 “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” likewise created a stir, with straining trumpets, trilling saxophones, and a crashing piano. Besides bandleaders, singers also rose to prominence in the Swing Era.

Among them was singer and trumpeter Louis Armstrong, a charismatic and innovative performer, who had a major infl uence on jazz with his extensive improvisations and scat singing—a kind of vocal improvisation where singers use nonsense syllables to reproduce melodic lines. An example is “Heebie Jeebies”, which goes something like: “Heebie, I mean the Jeebies…Don’t feel blue. Someone will teach you… Keep-dap-doop..reep-beep-da-dood-a-roop.” Armstrong is also famous for his memorable rendition of the gospel-song-turned-jazz-band-favorite “When the Saints Go Marching In”. Instrument players who honed their craft and perfected their personal styles drew attention, especially when solo instrument parts began to gain more importance. Sidney Bechet is said to have brought the saxophone to prominence. Bechet was called “Le Dieu” (the god) in France. His “Petite Fleur” (Small Flower) is a piece tender yet bitter, sultry with a hint of despair, like the lonely song of an estranged lover in a deserted bar: the smoke of his cigarette fi lling out his sadness.

Another jazz player, Bix Beiderbecke, was a well-known cornet player, who brought the influence of classical romanticism to jazz. His superb cornet playing was golden and clean, heartfelt, and warm. In “Clarinet Marmalade”, Bix’s cornet is sweet, and has a citrus and tangy tone perfect for a delicious dance. Elegant, the song is slippery and bright as brass. As the sun rises, heights are rebuilt by the light, floor by floor.

Climbing the old General Electric Tower, the sun grazes granite and glazed-brick fi gures suggesting the power of electricity- silver detail of lightning bolts and birds with long, sharp wings; lime green spires the color of patina; gold lining on stone like electric currents; black rays surrounding grim headstones; and windows like electrifi ed honeycombs—until fi nally raised fi sts are grappled with, extending to great lightning bolts raised against the sky. The sun screams at the silver scale crescents of the Chrysler Building, at the windows, at the chrome, steel, and nickel that challenge its prominence. The rebellious bebop of the 1940s arose when several jazz musicians grew weary of the sweet and ever-smiling Swing. In place of popular dance tunes, technical improvisations were sought. Musicians harnessed new innovations, and returned the rawness of jazz through complexity and unpredictability, even to the extent of cantankerousness. Unlike Swing, bebop was nervous, fragmented, and sometimes even furious.

The word “bebop” is onomatopoeic of a characteristic jazz technique. It has the same name as the swing-bebop crossover song by trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. He and saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker helped shift jazz from swing to the more challenging bebop. Some call Charles “Bird” Parker the “greatest saxophonist of all time”. Two of his famous pieces are “Bird of Paradise” and “Ko-Ko”. As with Parker, Dizzy Gillespie was a virtuoso musician. His piece “Groovin’ High” is easy and jumpy, lighthearted as its composer. “Bebop”, on the other hand, is unsteady, rapturous, and taut: the string of trumpet notes ready to break at any moment. In comparison, Gillespie’s bebop standard “A Night in Tunisia” whistles and dances around a bonfi re with sparks fl ying, skirts twisting, and stars clapping with brass hands. In the late 1950s and 1960s, hard bop developed from bebop, incorporating infl uences from R&B, the blues, and gospel music. Dizzy Gillespie’s music still falls under hard bop, but the most prominent hard bopper is bandleader, pianist, trumpeter, and composer John Coltrane. Bebop standards falling under hard bop include John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”, with smooth and volatile sax, and “Blue Train”, which is mainly about moods. Also among these are the ragged “Impressions”, which is a storm of sensations melded into a single trumpet–a mob of a song; and the confessional love testament “I Want to Talk About You”. Coltrane has other tender pieces, such as “Crescent”, which begins like an epilogue of a long and memorable romance; “Naima”, which is tender and sweet, unbeholden to any possessive desire; and “Aisha”, a piece perhaps about young love, recalling faintly happy past days.

Prohibition

It is broad daylight. Inside the El Dorado Apartment Building are exceptional murals with warm tones and rich illustrations of what can be playful nymphs, Nereid, and a Bacchus. There is still one former speakeasy existing in New York City: Chumley’s at 86 Bedford Street. It retains its original decoration, with Art Deco inspired table lamps. Typical of speakeasies, there are no signs outside to indicate that there is a bar within. There is even a secret back door so that customers could easily exit when police came. Speakeasies became popular and numerous during the years of the Prohibition. It is in such places that bootlegged liquor was served, jazz musicians entertained and suffused the smoky air with Swing and the blues, and “fl appers” danced the Charleston and Breakaway. It was in speakeasies that the Lost Generation, chronicled by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his novels, asserted and fl aunted their rebellion and scorn for tradition. These rooms were heady with the seething atmosphere of continuous change and the certainty of greater prosperity. “Stay away from me coz I’m in my sin. If this joint is raided somebody give my gin. Don’t try me nobody coz you will never win… I’ll fight the army and navy. Somebody give me my gin.” (“Gin House Blues” by Nina Simone) .

The Metropolis

Sheltered from the sun, the interior of Chanin Building at 122 East 42nd Street dazzles. At its lobby are fi nely and exquisitely designed light fixtures. Inspired from French styles are fantastic bronze grilles and relief with zigzags and spirals, windmill stars, fi ligree, sunrays, arms of smoke, and muscular human fi gures of strength and vigor. Running above the storefront level is an amazing bronze frieze of a simplifi ed story of evolution: amoeba swimming to become jellyfi sh, then fi sh, then geese: all of these rushing forth like the men and women along Wall Street at rush hour. “All the newest and most beautiful designs in automobiles were out on Fifth Avenue, and ahead of them the Plaza loomed up rather unusually white and attractive. The supple, indolent Gloria walked a short shadow’s length ahead of him, pouring out lazy casual comments that fl oated a moment on the dazzling air before they reached his ear.”(“The Beautiful and Damned” by F. Scott Fitzgerald) With the economy surging in the Roaring Twenties, incomes increased and consumerism became a culture.

In “Smack Dab in the Middle”, Count Basie’s Orchestra proclaims: “So I can rock and roll to satisfy my soul, with ten Cadillacs, a diamond mill, ten suits of clothes to dress to kill, a ten room house, some barbeque…” In 1950, from the acute and angular music of hard bop, trumpeter, bandleader, and composer Miles Davis released “Birth of the Cool”, a jazz album like a sleek and fast car. It was still in the range of bebop, but without the sharp edges. Some consider it to fall under the genre Cool Jazz. “Birth of the Cool” tells the plot of the metropolis, is a collection of interesting urban stories. Listening to the piece “Move” is like hearing a fast approaching parade: the ray of trombone and strains of horn under Davis’ lively trumpet. “Moon Dreams” glimmers in the light of the alto and baritone saxophones, surrounded by trombone darkness and cymbal chill. “Deception” tells like a story of a middle-aged woman in her fur and Art Deco print, eluding glances from the crowd of brasses and percussion, confi ding only to the tenor saxophone.

Through Traffic

At the entrance to the City Bank Towers Trust Company Building are several bronze doors bearing sleek depictions of various forms of transportation: locomotive trains, ships, and planes—centerpieces of octagons and squares surrounded by crests, fl owers, and small copper-colored studs. As the style of Art Deco imbibed the personality of industry and commerce, paintings during the Jazz Age reflected the era’s values. Schools of art such as Fauvism, Futurism, and Cubism influenced Deco visuals. One remarkable painter of this period was Polish-born Tamara De Lempicka, who lived in Paris during the Roaring Twenties as a bohemian. She painted strong and sensual fi gures, including businessmen, scientists, and royalty. In her “Auto-Portrait”, she depicted herself in the latest 20s fashion, with steely eyes and driving a green car. She created portraits of men depicted with exaggeratedly wide shoulders; tall, serious, and tense. She presented women holding lilies—strong and supple fl owers, pure and rich, as in “Calla Lilies”—with shawls fl owing, blown by the wind. De Lempicka showed strong sexuality, as that of women in rich furs as serious and intense as the men she painted; they are also set against backdrops of the city. Faces are soft or angular. Garments and cloth meanwhile fl ow sensuously in her canvas, as smoothly as the metal of automobiles. There was always strength and power in her pieces, masculinity and femininity in distinct breeds.

In 1959, amidst the traffic and the confusion of artworks and many jazz styles, Miles Davis released what was to be his and perhaps the entire jazz industry’s best-selling album, “Kind of Blue”. Categorized under Cool Jazz, it is freely melodic and deceptively simple. It is in fact as exquisite as a haiku. Miles Davis’ trumpet is rebellious in the piece “So What”, which includes the dashing tenor sax of John Coltrane and the ebullient piano of Bill Evans. With piano, trumpet, sax, and drums, “Freddie Freeloader” loiters in side streets and back alleys, empty hand in pocket, and slips past the eye of strict authority, while his double bass sidekick struts and pouts at the police. The piano of Evans and the bass of Chambers form the foliage of “Blue in Green”, while Davis’ trumpet and Coltrane’s sax compose the thick darkness. One of the smoothest in jazz, “All Blues” is a trilled rushing sea of song. Lastly, “Flamenco Sketches” is the rain of the alto and tenor sax fl ooding the song’s Iberian night.

Fusion

The stone walls of the Rockefeller Plaza come alive with allegorical fi gures. Above the main entrance of 30 Rockefeller is the relief “Wisdom with Light and Sound”, with Wisdom as the noble Zeus and Sound and Light as a man and a woman, both athletic and strong, exuding the vitality of change. Also at Rockefeller Plaza are Pegasus, Atlas, and Prometheus. After so many styles that have developed from jazz, only improvisation remains characteristic of it, stays its key element. In the late 1960s, a new form of jazz was developed, called Fusion. It is the genre that merges jazz with other musical styles, like funk, rock, R&B, and electronica. It fully utilizes musical improvisations through the use of old and newly available instruments, motifs, recording and editing studios, and various electronic effects. Again Miles Davis came ahead in this new genre, releasing two consecutive fusion albums: in 1968, the subtly sublime “In a Silent Way”, to be followed in 1969 by the phenomenal “Bitches Brew”.

When it was released, “Bitches Brew” roiled immediate controversy because of its boldness and its agility of innovation, its essential visionary savagery. In the album, Davis mixed free jazz with dancing funk, electric rock, blues, and his own musical breakthroughs. He wove multiple tones and rhythms with volatile chords to achieve complete power over emotion. Down the fantastic sands of a desert at dusk or in the dark corners of bars and performing joints, the piece “Pharaoh’s Dance” thrives.

Built on the soil of the muted beat of drums, the bass, and the conga, the song strikes in psychedelic outbursts, electronic ideas and affectations. The song, together with the other pieces of the album, is Davis’ chronicle into the formerly incommunicable dark dreams of jazz. It is the funk-infl uenced, dissonant interpretation of the subconscious of swing; it is bebop spelled backwards. “Pharaoh’s Dance” threatens and thunders, falls into pitch, only to reemerge undistracted and majestic. Next comes the title song, “Bitches Brew”, which is an incantation of trumpets and the echoes of trumpets, a divination through the skeletal chords of the bass, the magic of the wings of electric piano, and the ramblings of shaker and percussions—a primal conversation with the feline. As unpredictable as “Bitches Brew”, “Spanish Key” begins with the suspense before an illicit act set by tempting drums and electric bass, demonic guitar and bass clarinet, and tense electric piano. The guitar goads, chides, lures, and ridicules. The sax vacillates, gives in, and is surrounded, weeping release. Lastly, “Sanctuary” is another retelling, which begins with the lonely sigh of a soprano sax. Electric piano, drums, shaker, and guitar console her as the memory of pain and loss is unfurled. Lost emotions are rediscovered. In one brief moment, anguish crowds the throat of the saxophone and she lets out a trumpet wail.

Art Deco’s Birdsong

Under afternoon suns, birds sing like saxophones, cornets, and trumpets. They sound like Sidney Bechet’s “Weary Way Blues”, which is carried by the wind; like Duke Ellington’s intent siren song “Creole Love Call”; and like Miles Davis’ otherworldly “Shhh/ Peaceful”, an esoteric jazz lullaby, a sax nightingale singing across the vast percussion Milky Way. Birdsong is not only alive in jazz; it is also evident in the patterns, symmetries, textures, and designs of the Art Deco period, especially of Art Deco textiles. Melody, harmony, and rhythm guide both the stark and elaborate designs of these fabrics; there are notes and chords in beautiful shapes and lines. The exoticism of fl oral and animal prints, ferns and vines, fruits and butterflies only comes alive through the singing vibrancy of color: of ruby, orange, royal blue, and buttercup. The term “Art Deco” came from the 1925 International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts in France. Participating in this exposition were pattern makers and painters who sold their designs to textiles manufacturers. These artworks and designs were inspired by a variety of sources, including the art schools that infl uenced Tamara De Lempicka’s paintings. But even way before 1925, it is said that it was the fl amboyant Ballets Russes, established in Russia in 1909, that was the catalyst for the Art Deco movement. Art Deco became the meeting of cultures, where designs were drawn both from the “primitive” or exotic arts of the ancient world, Africa, Egypt, Indian America, and Asia and from the forms and geometries introduced by industry through machines, transportation, technology, and infrastructure. Design and material elements of the Art Deco architecture for New York buildings previously mentioned drew from this pool of inspiration. But the Art Deco textile houses of France were not only inspired by these designs, compositions, and colors, they were also empowered by new technology in the creation of dyes and artifi cial fi bers, in weaving, and in silk-screen printing. Inevitably, these developments in Art Deco textiles led to changes in clothing, which were epitomized in the Art Deco fashion created by Coco Chanel and Madeleine Viviene, and as popularized by the chirping “flappers”.

Fashion, flappery, and freedom

“Noon would come—she would hurry along Fifth Avenue, a Nordic Ganymede, her fur coat swinging fashionably with her steps, her cheeks redder by a stroke of the wind’s brush, her breath a delightful mist upon the bracing air—and the doors of the Ritz would revolve, the crowd would divide, fi fty masculine eyes would stare, as she gave back forgotten dreams to the husbands of many obese and comic women.” (“The Beautiful and Damned” by F. Scott Fitzgerald) Development in textiles brought Art Deco into the street. In offi ces, shops, drinking houses and restaurants, in the cities and in the movies, and in the dresses worn by shop girls, new designs and patterns could be seen.

New tastes were cultivated. In the 1920s, as women gained the right to vote, they threw away their corsets and pantaloons and put on short skirts, dropped waistlines, pantsuits, and straight and loose dresses, similar in shape to Japanese kimonos. They bobbed their hair, powdered and put on rouge, and topped their looks with cloche hats. This new breed of women, who now dressed androgynously, drank hard liquor, smoked tobacco, rode bicycles and drove cars, and probably had jobs, have become known as the “fl appers”—the term simply meaning young women who went out on dates without a chaperone.

1920s fashion, flapper or otherwise, was also much influenced by Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel, who launched the influential Chanel suit in 1923, which was comprised of a knee-length skirt and an angular jacket, traditionally made of woven wool and worn with large costume pearl necklaces. Chanel also popularized the “little black dress”, which was versatile enough for day or evening wear. She was also famous for her minimal costume jewelry, which included brooches, buckles, and clips inspired by African and Cuban figures and styles. In the twenties, women were not merely given the choice to wear what they wanted; because they earned incomes of their own and were able to vote, they gained more social, economic, and participative freedom. Outside of their restrictive homes, they earned confidence.

II.3. The most important figures that influenced the evolution of this music style

Louis Armstrong (1901-1971) trumpet, vocals: The first great soloist in jazz and one of the most influential artists in the history of American music, Louis Armstrong taught the world to swing. He played the trumpet with unmatched virtuosity, perfected the improvised jazz solo, and popularized scat singing.

Armstrong grew up in dire poverty in New Orleans, Louisiana, when jazz was very young. As a child he worked at odd jobs and sang in a boys' quartet. In 1913 he was sent to the Colored Waifs Home as a juvenile delinquent. There he learned to play cornet in the home's band, and playing music quickly became a passion; in his teens he learned music by listening to the pioneer jazz artists of the day, including the leading New Orleans cornetist, King Oliver. Armstrong developed rapidly: he played in marching and jazz bands, becoming skillful enough to replace Oliver in the important Kid Ory band about 1918, and in the early 1920s he played in Mississippi riverboat dance bands.

Armstrong quit Oliver's band to seek further fame. He played for a year in New York City in Fletcher Henderson's band and on many recordings with others before returning to Chicago and playing in large orchestras. There he created his most important early works, the Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of 1925–28, on which he emerged as the first great jazz soloist. By then the New Orleans ensemble style, which allowed few solo opportunities, could no longer contain his explosive creativity. He retained vestiges of the style in such masterpieces as “Hotter than That,” “Struttin' with Some Barbecue,” “Wild Man Blues,” and “Potato Head Blues” but largely abandoned it while accompanied by pianist Earl Hines (“West End Blues” and “Weather Bird”). By that time Armstrong was playing trumpet, and his technique was superior to that of all competitors. Altogether, his immensely compelling swing; his brilliant technique; his sophisticated, daring sense of harmony; his ever-mobile, expressive attack, timbre, and inflections; his gift for creating vital melodies; his dramatic, often complex sense of solo design; and his outsized musical energy and genius made these recordings major innovations in jazz.

William“Count” Basie(1904-1984) piano, bandleader: His orchestra was legendary for its tight rhythm section, riff-oriented arrangements, bluesy style, gifted soloists, and propulsive 4/4 swing feel. His spare, syncopated piano playing and exquisite timing influenced generations of musicians.

Sidney Bechet(1897-1959) soprano saxophone, clarinet: A New Orleans jazz pioneer and virtuoso, he helped to popularize jazz at home and in Europe. He was the first to bring the soprano saxophone to prominence in jazz.

Bix Beiderbecke(1903-1931) cornet, piano, composer: One of the great innovators of the 1920s, Beiderbecke developed a distinctive, introspective style, characterized by an intense, bell-like tone.

Art Blakey(1919-1990) drums, bandleader: A master of the hard bop style, his explosive, driving rhythms and aggressive solos propelled his band members to new heights. His longstanding band, the Jazz Messengers, was a veritable jazz university, schooling young jazz musicians for over three decades.

Buddy Bolden (1877-1931) cornet: The first of the New Orleans cornet “kings,” he was celebrated for his powerful tone, rhythmic drive, and strong blues sensibility. His skill in embellishing melodies predated the fully improvised solo.

Benny Carter(1907-2003) multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, bandleader: A major figure in jazz since the 1920s, Carter was a premier saxophone stylist and a principal architect of big band swing. His innovative voicing of the reed section in the 1930s and 1940s became the standard for swing arrangements.

Ornette Coleman (1930-) multi-instrumentalist, composer: As a founding member of the jazz avant-garde, he created new performance practices and theories. His emphasis on spontaneous, collective interplay and freedom of expression continues to inform both his compositions and performance.

John Coltrane(1926-1967) tenor and soprano saxophones, bandleader, composer: A tireless innovator who combined incredible technique and a profound understanding of harmony with a deep sense of spirituality. He is one of the most influential saxophonists in the history of jazz, owing largely to his soulful sound and deep exploration of improvisation.

Coltrane developed what came to be known as his “sheets of sound” approach to improvisation, as described by poet LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka): “The notes that Trane was playing in the solo became more than just one note following another. The notes came so fast, and with so many overtones and undertones, that they had the effect of a piano player striking chords rapidly but somehow articulating separately each note in the chord, and its vibrating subtones.” Or, as Coltrane himself said, “I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.” The cascade of notes during his powerful solos showed his infatuation with chord progressions, culminating in the virtuoso performance of “Giant Steps” (1959).

Miles Davis(1926-1991) trumpet, bandleader: One of the most consistently innovative musicians in jazz history, he was a primary force in the development of jazz from bebop through fusion. His concise, lyrical phrasing, introspective style, and boundless invention serve as a model to jazz musicians of all instruments.

Davis's early playing was sometimes tentative and not always fully in tune, but his unique, intimate tone and his fertile musical imagination outweighed his technical shortcomings. By the early 1950s Davis had turned his limitations into considerable assets. Rather than emulate the busy, wailing style of such bebop pioneers as Gillespie, Davis explored the trumpet's middle register, experimenting with harmonies and rhythms and varying the phrasing of his improvisations. With the occasional exception of multinote flurries, his melodic style was direct and unornamented, based on quarter notes and rich with inflections. The deliberation, pacing, and lyricism in his improvisations are striking.

In the summer of 1948, Davis formed a nonet that included the renowned jazz artists Gerry Mulligan, J.J. Johnson, Kenny Clarke, and Lee Konitz, as well as players on French horn and tuba, instruments rarely heard in a jazz context. These recordings changed the course of modern jazz and paved the way for the West Coast styles of the 1950s. The tracks were later collected in the album Birth of the Cool (1957).

Edward Kennedy“Duke” Ellington (1899-1974) piano, composer, bandleader: Arguably America’s most important and prolific composer, he wrote nearly 2,000 pieces of music, helped to create the big band sound of the Swing Era, and toured worldwide with his big band for nearly 50 years.

One of the originators of big-band jazz, Ellington led his band for more than half a century, composed thousands of scores, and created one of the most distinctive ensemble sounds in all of Western music.

Ellington grew up in a secure middle-class family in Washington, D.C. His family encouraged his interests in the fine arts, and he began studying piano at age seven. He became engrossed in studying art during his high-school years, and he was awarded, but did not accept, a scholarship to the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. Inspired by ragtime performers, he began to perform professionally at age 17.

Ellington first played in New York City in 1923. Later that year he moved there and, in Broadway nightclubs, led a sextet that grew in time into a 10-piece ensemble. The singular blues-based melodies; the harsh, vocalized sounds of his trumpeter, Bubber Miley (who used a plunger [“wa-wa”] mute); and the sonorities of the distinctive trombonist Joe (“Tricky Sam”) Nanton (who played muted “growl” sounds) all influenced Ellington's early “jungle style,” as seen in such masterpieces as “East St. Louis Toodle-oo” (1926) and “Black and Tan Fantasy” (1927).

Bill Evans(1929-1980) piano, composer: One of the most influential musicians of his generation, his fresh, refined approach to the bop language, sensitive comping, lyrical and introspective phrasing, and emphasis on group interplay inspired musicians on every instrument.

Gil Evans(1912-1988) arranger, composer, piano: Known by many for his work with Miles Davis in the 1950s, his lush and inventive arrangements feature rich harmonic language and unusual orchestrations.

Ella Fitzgerald (1918-1996) vocals: Her gift of swing, impressive scatting, precise diction, and extraordinary range made her as adept a soloist as any horn player.

She began her solo career and by the mid-1950s, she had become the first African-American to perform at the Mocambo. Her lucid intonation and broad range made her a top jazz singer. Her series of recordings for Verve (1955-9) in multi-volume "songbooks" are among the treasures of American popular song. Fitzgerald is known as "The First Lady of Song," and was the most popular American female jazz singer for over fifty years. In her lifetime, she won 13 Grammy awards and sold over 40 million albums.

ErrollGarner(1921-1977) piano: A brilliant virtuoso, Garner developed a completely original style that included long, playful introductions, dazzlingly fluid runs, and a distinct rhythmic approach in which the left-hand comps much like rhythm guitar while the right hand plays lines or chords that lag just behind the beat.

John Birks“Dizzy” Gillespie(1917-1993) trumpet, composer, bandleader, vocals: An architect of bebop and a pioneer of Latin jazz, his virtuosic technique, bright tone, and infectious personality inspired musicians and audiences alike.

Benny Goodman (1909-1986) clarinet, bandleader: A virtuoso clarinetist and accomplished bandleader, Goodman was the first white bandleader to adopt an uncompromising jazz style. His hugely popular big band sparked the Swing Era and introduced jazz to a wider audience.

Coleman Hawkins(1904-1969) tenor saxophone: His warm, earthy tone, harmonic virtuosity, and modern sensibility popularized the tenor saxophone and kept him at the forefront of jazz for over 40 years.

Fletcher Henderson (1897-1952) piano, bandleader, arranger: A keen talent scout and a first-class arranger, his orchestra served as a model to all big bands from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s.

Billie “LadyDay” Holiday(1915-1959) vocals: One of the most original interpreters and vocalists in jazz, she was known for her sensitivity to lyrics and phrasing and the uniquely mournful yet uplifting sound of her voice.

Lee Konitz(1927-) alto saxophone: A leader of the cool school and one of the few saxophonists who did not follow the model of Charlie Parker, Konitz is known for his smooth, clear tone, melodic and harmonic inventiveness, and steady, subtle swing.

Charles Mingus(1922-1979) bass, composer, bandleader: A virtuoso player, he helped bring the bass into the spotlight as a solo instrument. He was also an inventive and prolific composer who seamlessly blended the traditional and modern. His Jazz Workshop repertory group experimented with new approaches to composition that were less dependent on notated music.

Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917-1982) piano, composer:

His unconventional compositional style and unique piano playing helped lay the foundation for modern jazz. Monk performed mainly his own pieces, which were known for their complex harmonies, unusual rhythms, and often playful quality.

As the pianist in the band at Minton's Play House, a nightclub in New York City, in the early 1940s, Monk had great influence on the other musicians who later developed the bebop movement. For much of his career Monk performed and recorded with small groups. His playing was percussive and sparse, often being described as “angular,” and he used complex and dissonant harmonies and unusual intervals and rhythms. Monk's music was known for its humorous, almost playful, quality.

He was also one of the most prolific composers in the history of jazz. Many of his compositions, which were generally written in the 12-bar blues or the 32-bar ballad form, became jazz standards. Among his best-known works are “Well, You Needn't,” “I Mean You,” “Straight, No Chaser,” “Criss-Cross,” “Mysterioso,” “Epistrophy,” “Blue Monk,” and “ ‘Round Midnight.” He influenced the flavour of much modern jazz

Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941) piano, composer, bandleader: One of the first great jazz composers, he understood the full range of American music, from marches to church hymns to the blues, and incorporated these styles into his music. His compositions and arrangements captured the spirit of improvisation.

Original Dixieland Jazz Band This five-piece, white New Orleans jazz band garnered sensational levels of popularity after releasing the first jazz recording in 1917.

Charlie“Bird” Parker(1920-1955) alto saxophone, composer: A pioneer of bebop, his long, twisting melodies, unconventional rhythms, and exploration of complex harmonies have become hallmarks of modern jazz. Though widely recognized for his dense, fast-paced solos, his playing was equally impressive on soft, slow ballads.

Don Redman (1900-1964) composer, arranger, bandleader: A master of orchestration, Redman was the first great arranger in jazz. He was a pioneer of big band writing, integrating improvised solos with ensemble passages, and employing the breaks, riffs, and call and response patterns that would become hallmarks of big band jazz.

Sonny Rollins(1930-) tenor saxophone: A leading figure among modern saxophonists, his melodically inventive, rhythmically adept improvisations have kept him at the forefront of jazz for over 40 years.

Wayne Shorter(1933-) tenor and soprano saxophones, composer: A uniquely gifted improviser and master of a wide range of musical styles, he blossomed as a composer in the 1960s and many of his pieces have since become jazz standards.

Bessie Smith (1894-1937) vocals: The “Empress of the Blues,” she brought the blues to rural and urban audiences nationwide and sold millions of records in the process. Her strong blues sensibility, emotional intensity, expressive range, and phrasing set a new standard for jazz vocalists.

Lennie Tristano(1919-1978) piano, composer: His music stands apart from the jazz mainstream, offering an alternative to bop that emphasized even rhythms, long, angular melodies, harmonic complexity, and free improvisation. A lifelong teacher, he developed a strong following that included Warne Marsh, Lee Konitz, Bill Russo, and Billy Bauer.

Frank Trumbauer(1901-1956) alto and C-melody saxophones: His delicate tone, long, lyrical phrasing, and graceful improvisations inspired saxophonists Lester Young and Benny Carter.

Sarah Vaughan (1924-1990) vocals: One of the most influential and popular jazz vocalists, she used her voice like an instrument, fluidly altering her timbre and vibrato, negotiating wide leaps, improvising with subtle melodic and rhythmic embellishments, and incorporating the bop phrasing of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

Mary Lou Williams(1910-1981) piano, composer, arranger: An accomplished pianist, Williams sounded modern throughout her half-century career, while never forgetting her roots in the blues, church music, and early jazz. Her distinctive compositions and arrangements helped fuel many Swing Era bands, including those of Andy Kirk, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington.

Lester “Pres” Young (1909-1959) tenor saxophone, clarinet: His cool, lyrical style was a primary force in the development of modern jazz. He was known for his light, graceful tone and long, flowing solos that featured astonishing leaps, bold contrasts, and witty surprises.

American tenor saxophonist who emerged in the mid-1930s Kansas City, Mo., jazz world with the Count Basie band and introduced an approach to improvisation that provided much of the basis for modern jazz solo conception.

Young's tone was a striking departure from the accepted full-bodied, dark, heavy variety, with its quick vibrato, because his was light in weight, colour, and texture, with a slow vibrato. The swinging, rhythmic feeling in his improvisations was far more relaxed and graceful than that usually heard in the work of others during the 1930s. His lines were streamlined, logical, and refreshingly melodic. The impact of his style was so broad that he has been cited as a favourite by such diverse modern jazz figures as Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, and John Coltrane. Much of the West Coast “cool” style was a direct product of Lester Young's approach, many saxophonists playing his lines note for note in their own performances.2

CONCLUSION

No other period approaches both the greatness and the impermanence of the Jazz Age as today, when technology has reached another peak, creativity flows freely from unhampered individualism, and society thrives on technological developments. When all these seem other than impermanent and unstable.( Miguel Paolo Celestial- „ The Jazz Age”)

Jazz was born from the aspirations of the African-American race. Even in its inception, jazz was born of struggle: it began from stories and aspirations of free people of color, of whose cutting memory of slavery was still very fresh, and who even after gaining freedom, experienced much oppression and discrimination. This is the very first source jazz drew from, a source that was dark, deep, and painful. In the late 1930s, Billie Holiday was introduced to a song telling of such an experience, entitled “Strange Fruit”.

It is about the lynching of a black man. Holiday said that the images of the song reminded her of her father’s death, and that this experience played a role in her persistence to perform it at Café Society in 1939, at a time when retaliation was not impossible. Nina Simone, an intense and mercurial performer of jazz, the blues, and other genres, later sang a cover of “Strange Fruit”. She also participated in this struggle with pieces such as “Four Women”, “To be Young, Gifted, and Black”, and “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”. Besides Simone, John Coltrane also had his haunting “Alabama”, a page from the history of the Civil Rights Movement. This dynamic of liberation alive in the preceding songs, was similar to the force, that together with the native tradition of innovation, pushed ragtime, spirituals, and the blues to develop into jazz—into swing, bebop, and fusion—to enable new expression.

Jazz begins with pain and despair, creeps through to hope through dance and song, and unfurls with the fullness of life and its many forms with the passion known only to those that have been deprived it. Jazz is sublime, lyrical, and soulful because it is inseparable from life; it embraces it. It is the most honest, frank, and vulnerable among the musical genres. Industrial innovators, the Lost Generation, women, and artists identified with the spirit of change and rebelliousness intrinsic in the craft and the history of jazz. It has become an inspiration for every age in the overcoming of struggles.

These are what make jazz music modern and relevant. The Jazz Age was the time for development, emancipation, expression and innovation, and equal rights. It was the time of liberation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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