HISTORY OF JAZZ
Part 2: Traditional Jazz and
The Jazz Age
Traditional Jazz is a broad term used to define
a jazz style employed by musicians working in New Orleans
between 1900 and 1917, and musicians from New Orleans who
played and recorded in Chicago from around 1917 throughout
the 1920s, a period known as "The Jazz Age." It
is also used to describe the music played by revivalists
from various periods who have sought to perform music in
the same style as that employed by these groups of musicians.
Some reserve the term to describe a variant of traditional
New Orleans and classic jazz styles.
The first music that is generally referred
to as jazz is that of New Orleans trumpet player Buddy Bolden
and pianist Jelly Roll Morton.
While Bolden is a legendary figure of the distant past,
with no recordings and few photos to define his musical
style, Bolden is still considered to have been the man who
first blew jazz in New Orleans, and this fact is confirmed
by Morton in his interviews by Alan Lomax for the Library
of Congress. Morton himself is generally considered to be
the first jazz composer and arranger, well-known for his
many compositions as well as for the meticulous care with
which he orchestrated the performances of his Red Hot Peppers.
Morton's Red Hot Peppers sessions, recorded in Chicago in
1926 and 1927, are generally thought to be the best existing
recorded representation of New Orleans jazz.
Joe "King" Oliver is another legendary
figure in the development of New Orleans jazz, and is also
known as the mentor of Louis Armstrong. Oliver, Armstrong,
Morton, and a host of other musicians from the Crescent
City ended up in Chicago during the 1920s. This was partly
due to the closing of the legendary Storyville District
in New Orleans by the U.S. Navy during the U.S. involvement
in World War I, though it was not the only factor that led
to the migration.
The first
generally recognized jazz recording was made in 1917 by
the Original Dixieland Jass Band, a white band from New
Orleans who cut their record, "Livery Stable Blues"
in New York. Of course, jazz was being simultaneously created
by a large number of black musicians in New Orleans but
these musicians were not recorded due to the lack of recording
facilities in that city. Joe Oliver went to Chicago in part
because of the opportunity to be recorded there. Cornetist
Freddy Keppard was to have been the first recorded jazz
musician, but he turned down the offer, reportedly because
he was afraid other musicians would steal his ideas from
the recordings.
Louis Armstrong arrived in Chicago to play
in Joe Oliver's band, but he was invited to join the Fletcher
Henderson band a short time later in New York. Returning
to Chicago, Armstrong cut his legendary Hot Fives and Hot
Sevens recordings and forever transformed jazz music. Armstrong's
conception placed the soloist at the center of jazz music,
a concept that was foreign to those familiar with contraputnal
New Orleans groups. On numbers like "West End Blues"
and "Potato Head Blues" Armstrong blew solos of
such incredible force and originality that others quickly
followed in his footsteps.
The 1920s are generally referred to as "The
Jazz Age", and the 20s are usually thought of as the
first truly modern decade. Everything was seemingly done
to excess. Women's fashions became scandalous, loose and
scanty, with hemlines nearing the knees, which had been
unthinkable only a few years previous. Josephine Baker became
a society hit in Paris, while Mae West entertained audiences
in the U.S. with her risque humor. Thanks to Prohibition,
drinking became a sporting pasttime for both the upper and
lower classes. Many became wealthy in the stock market boom
of the time, and business became bigger than ever. Evangelists
such as Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple Macpherson held sway.
Literature in this era is generally represented by F. Scott
Fitzgerald, but there were an incredible number of great
writers working during this decade, including Faulkner,
Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Huxley, and Dorothy Parker.
Of course, it all came to an end with the stock market crash
of late October, 1929, made all the more remarkable by the
fact that the New York Stock Exchange had set a record in
March of that same year for number of shares traded in a
day.
By the end of the 1920s and the dawn of the
1930s, a new musical sound, swing, was on the horizon, and
the Swing Era was eventually ushered in.
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Era and Big Bands | << BACK
