Jazz : from the Cathouse to Carnegie Hall

Grover Sales’ book, “Jazz: America’s Classical Music,” is generally regarded as one of the most succinct and accurate surveys of its kind. But Sales was not the first to offer this definition of jazz. Classical composers and conductors from Andre Previn to Gunther Schuller, involved with jazz as performers or historians, have been similarly convinced that this art form, once denounced as “nigger music” and long confined to brothels, dance halls and nightclubs, will be remembered as America’s most vital and durable contribution to the music of this century.

Jazz was not born on Feb. 24, 1917, but its first step out of obscurity was taken on that day when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a five-piece group of white musicians from New Orleans, went into a studio in New York where they recorded “Livery Stable Blues” and “Dixie Jass Band One Step.” Quaint though they sound today, the ODJB’s first sessions helped disseminate, to what soon became a worldwide audience, a music created by Afro-American musicians. (Ironically, it was not until 1922, in Los Angeles, that a black jazz group, trombonist Kid Ory’s Sunshine Orchestra, was finally put on record.)

The origins of jazz extend back as far as this century, probably much longer. Ragtime, popularized by Scott Joplin and believed to have been originally a banjo music that evolved during the 1890s into a structured piano music, overlapped into “ragtime band” performances that were looser and more improvised.

The black church, with its spiritual and gospel music, and the work song, all were interwoven and were at least first cousins of the blues.

Though marching bands, ragtime bands and the blues were active throughout the United States, black Creoles in New Orleans played a particularly important part in “jazzing up” the rags and blues. Among them were the clarinetist Sidney Bechet the trombonist Kid Ory and the pianist Jelly Roll Morton. The Creoles tended to be better educated musically than the relatively unschooled blacks, yet it was the latter, most notably Louis Armstrong, who made the most definitive leap into jazz.

Very gradually, with the use of more written music and of larger bands that called for arrangements, jazz became a mixture of composition and ad-libbing. One of the unsung heroes of the early 1920s was Don Redman, a saxophonist who wrote most of the music for Fletcher Henderson’s band, in which Armstrong played for a year. The classic pattern of breaking down the orchestra into a brass section (trumpets and trombones), reed section (saxes doubling on clarinets) and rhythm section (piano, banjo or guitar, drums, and bass) was firmly set in the Henderson band. The compositions left enough solo space for Armstrong to establish himself as a creative force in music circles. By the time Armstrong left the band in 1925 to return to Chicago (where his genius was more fully framed in the famous “Hot Five” records), the Jazz Age was in full swing.

That was the year when Duke Ellington began recording, and when a cadre of white pioneers like the violinist Joe Venuti, the guitarist Eddie Lang and the cornetist Bix Beiderbecke began to come into their own. Though these men worked in the “symphonic jazz” ensemble of Paul Whiteman, it was in recorded small-group settings that they had a real chance to display their improvisational gifts.

By the end of the 1920s, Ellington had expanded his orchestra and was known to millions who had heard his broadcasts from the Cotton Club; Armstrong had scored in a Broadway show, “Hot Chocolates” (with a score by Fats Waller), and the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem became a cynosure for black dancers (and a few white jazz fans) as the great pre-swing bands of the day played there.

Black entertainment, in short, was very much in vogue in the United States, but for the most part it was treated, both by blacks and by the growing white audiences who patronized it, as entertainment or dance music. In Europe, on the other hand, records by American jazz artists were regarded more and more seriously, and were discussed at length in several music publications. As a result, there were triumphant transatlantic visits by Armstrong in 1932, Ellington in 1933 and even Joe Venuti and Coleman Hawkins (both all but unknown to the general public in the United States) in 1934.

The Depression made a deep impact, particularly in the recording industry, which reached a state of near-collapse. Bessie Smith, the “Empress of the Blues” who had been a tremendous seller since 1923, stopped selling, and an era noted for many great blues vocals recordings came to an end. A new genre of singing, using popular songs and very few blues, emerged in the 1930s with the rise of Billie Holiday, Mildred Bailey and Ella Fitzgerald. Unlike the blues singers, they had a white audience.

The post-Depression years saw the rise of small-group swing music, most memorably in the 52nd Street clubs where the phenomenal pianist Art Tatum, the violinist Stuff Smith and groups led by Red Norvo and Wingy Manone held forth; and the coalescence of the early orchestral values in the guise of what was soon called swing music--big-band jazz, with Benny Goodman as the Pied Piper.

As a clarinet genius, Goodman became a symbol of what was now evolving from an almost unlettered folk music into a sometimes sophisticated blend of complex composition and do-it-yourself virtuosity. Coinciding with the advent of swing music was the belated and still limited recognition of jazz by the American media. Occasional magazine pieces were devoted to the swing phenomenon, and Down Beat magazine, launched in 1934, became the first U.S. publication devoted to jazz and dance music. The Swing Era was the only period in jazz history when a form of jazz enjoyed mass popularity. Records such as Artie Shaw’s “Begin the Beguine,” Chick Webb’s “A Tisket a Tasket” (with Ella Fitzgerald) and Goodman’s “Sing Sing Sing” became best sellers.

Then jazz ran into two major impediments: from 1942-43 and again in 1948, musicians were stopped by their union from making records on the grounds that they were thereby limiting the performance of live music. This prevented some of the great works of those years from being preserved for posterity; it also provided an advantage to singers, who recorded with a cappella groups. But between the two bans, a generation of revolutionaries, determined to find their way out of what they saw as the dead end of swing music, began recording what became the definitive works of the decade. They were Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and a few others.

Violently attacked by most of the critics and even by some musicians, these be-bop pioneers established concepts for the playing and writing of jazz that ultimately made their way into (and are now considered a part of) the mainstream.

By the end of the 1940s the big-band dominance had faded. Ellington had been responsible for many initiatives. His was the first orchestra to give concerts regularly (starting in 1943, annually at Carnegie Hall), the first to build miniature concertos around a particular soloist, and the first to present works that shattered the three or four minute barrier imposed by the 78 disc. His “Black, Brown & Beige,” at the first Carnegie concert, running to 48 minutes and incorporating all the values of pure jazz without any pseudo-symphonic trappings, was a milestone.

The chief trends of the 1950s were the growth of the small combos’ influence (the Modern Jazz and Dave Brubeck quartets, Gerry Mulligan’s various groups), and the escape of jazz, at least partially, from the nightclub to the mass exposure offered by concert halls and (starting in 1954 at Newport) festivals. Jazz became an international phenomenon as George Shearing established his quintet; no longer was France’s Hot Club Quintet assumed to have a monopoly on non-domestic jazz.

West Coast Jazz was a phrase often bandied about, and the source of much confusion .The worldwide interest in the music was catered to by the U.S. government as the Voice of America launched a nightly jazz record show, hosted by Willis Conover. The State Department authorized Gillespie to take an all-star band (organized for him by Quincy Jones) on tours of the Middle East and of Latin America.

Beginning in the 1960s, the jazz world splintered into so many factions that the term jazz became harder to define. “That’s not jazz!” was a cry hurled at innovators just as Gillespie and Parker had been the objects of contumely two decades before. Miles Davis helped launch the transition from chords to modes (arrangements of a scale) as a basis for improvisation. Ornette Coleman broke loose from the structures of form and harmony that had governed jazz. John Coltrane and his disciples took music into a spiritual, often mystic area marked at times by Indian influences and by improvisations of unprecedented length. It was a far cry from the two-bar “break” of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band to Coltrane’s 45-minute solos.

Some musicians certainly transcended the conventional definition of the jazzman. The pianist Cecil Taylor’s atonal forays and staggering technical prowess were best classified as avant-garde. Long orchestral works by John Lewis, Gunther Schuller and others were sometimes defined as “Third Stream,” the purported result of a confluence of two streams, classical and jazz.

Still later came the use of electronic instruments (with Miles Davis again pioneering, on his “Bitches Brew” LP), the joining of jazz and rock elements under the guise of fusion, and arrival of the impressionistic New Age music.

Listen to any jazz record made 70 or 60 or 50 years ago, then study some of the more successfully adventurous contemporary products. Whether your taste leans to classical music, jazz, rock, or all of the above, and regardless of your personal predilections within the jazz landscape, you will almost certainly agree that jazz has made extraordinary headway in the relatively short space of seven decades. Perhaps no less significantly, its identification by some scholars as “America’s Classical Music” has at long last gained credence among all but the most stubborn of reactionaries.