Jazz

A

New Orleans Jazz

Around the turn of the 20th century the earliest fully documented jazz style emerged, centred in New Orleans, Louisiana. In this style the cornet or trumpet carried the melody, the clarinet played florid countermelodies, and the trombone played rhythmic slides and sounded the root notes of chords or simple harmony. Below this basic trio the tuba or string bass provided a bass line and drums the rhythmic accompaniment. Exuberance and volume were more important than finesse, and improvisation was focused on the ensemble sound.

A musician named Buddy Bolden appears to have led some of the first jazz bands, but their music and its sound have been lost to posterity. Although some jazz influences can be heard on a few early phonograph records, not until 1917 did a jazz band record. This band, a group of white New Orleans musicians called The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, created a sensation overseas and in the United States (The term Dixieland jazz eventually came to mean the New Orleans style as played by white musicians.) Two groups, one white and one black, followed: in 1922 the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and in 1923 the Creole Jazz Band, the latter led by the cornettist King Oliver, an influential stylist. The series of recordings made by Oliver's group are the most significant recordings in the New Orleans style. Other leading New Orleans musicians included the trumpeters Bunk Johnson and Freddie Keppard, the soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, the drummer Warren “Baby” Dodds, and the pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton. The most influential musician nurtured in New Orleans, however, was King Oliver's second trumpeter, Louis Armstrong.

B

Armstrong's Impact

The first true virtuoso soloist of jazz, Armstrong was a dazzling improviser, technically, emotionally, and intellectually. He changed the format of jazz by bringing the soloist to the forefront, and in his recording groups, the Hot Five and the Hot Seven, demonstrated that jazz improvisation could go far beyond simply ornamenting the melody—he created new melodies based on the chords of the initial tune. He also set standards for all later jazz singers, not only by the way he altered the words and melodies of songs but also by improvising without words, like an instrument (scat singing).

C

Chicago and New York

For jazz the 1920s was a decade of great experimentation and discovery. Many New Orleans musicians, including Armstrong, migrated to Chicago, influencing local musicians and stimulating the evolution of the Chicago style—derived from the New Orleans style but emphasizing soloists, often adding saxophone to the instrumentation, and usually producing tenser rhythms and more complicated textures. Instrumentalists working in Chicago or influenced by the Chicago style included the trombonist Jack Teagarden, the banjoist Eddie Condon, the drummer Gene Krupa, and the clarinettist Benny Goodman. Also active in Chicago was Bix Beiderbecke, whose lyrical approach to the cornet provided an alternative to Armstrong's trumpet style. Many Chicago musicians eventually settled in New York, another major centre for jazz in the 1920s.

D

Jazz Piano

Another vehicle for jazz developments in the 1920s was piano music. The Harlem district of New York became the centre of a highly technical, hard-driving solo style known as stride piano. The master of this approach in the early 1920s was James P. Johnson, whose protégé Fats Waller, a talented vocalist and entertainer as well, became by far the most popular performer in this idiom.

A second piano style to develop in the 1920s was boogie-woogie. A form of blues played on the piano, it consists of a short, sharply accented bass pattern played over and over by the left hand while the right hand plays freely, using a variety of rhythms. Boogie-woogie became especially popular in the 1930s and 1940s. Leading boogie-woogie pianists include Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, and Pine Top Smith.

The most innovative pianist of the 1920s, comparable to Armstrong and present on some of the latter's best recordings, was Earl “Fatha” Hines, a Chicago-nurtured virtuoso considered to possess a wild, unpredictable imagination. His style, combined with the smoother approach of Waller, influenced most pianists of the next generation—notably Teddy Wilson, who was featured with Goodman's band in the 1930s, and Art Tatum, who performed mostly as a soloist, and who was regarded with awe for his complex virtuosity.

E

The Big-Band Era

Also during the 1920s, large groups of jazz musicians began to play together, after the model of society dance bands, forming the so-called big bands that became so popular in the 1930s and early 40s that the period was known as the swing era. One major development in the emergence of the swing era was a rhythmic change that smoothed the two-beat rhythms of the New Orleans style into a more flowing four beats to the bar. Musicians also developed the use of short melodic patterns, called riffs, in call-and-response patterns. To facilitate this procedure, orchestras were divided into instrumental sections, each with its own riffs, and opportunities were provided for musicians to play extended solos.

The development of the big band as a jazz medium was largely the achievement of Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson. Henderson and his arranger, Don Redman, helped introduce written scores into jazz music, but they also attempted to capture the quality of improvisation that characterized the music of smaller ensembles. In the latter aim they were aided by gifted soloists such as the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins.

Ellington, during the 1920s, led a band at the Cotton Club in New York. Continuing to direct his orchestra until his death in 1974, he composed colourful experimental concert pieces ranging in length from the three-minute “Koko” (1940) to the hour-long Black, Brown, and Beige (1943), as well as songs such as “Solitude” and “Sophisticated Lady”. More complex than Henderson's music, Ellington's music made his orchestra a cohesive ensemble, with solos written for the unique qualities of specific instruments and players. Other bands in the tradition of Ellington and Henderson were led by Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, and Cab Calloway.

A different style of big-band jazz was developed in Kansas City during the mid-1930s and was epitomized by the band of Count Basie. Originally assembled in Kansas City, Basie's band reflected the south-western emphasis on improvisation, keeping the written (or simply memorized) passages relatively short and simple. The wind instruments in his band exchanged ensemble riffs in a free, strongly rhythmical interplay, with pauses to accommodate extended instrumental solos. Basie's tenor saxophonist Lester Young, in particular, played with a rhythmic freedom rarely apparent in the improvisations of soloists from other bands. Young's delicate tone and long, flowing melodies, laced with an occasional avant-garde honk or gurgle, opened up a whole new approach, as Armstrong's playing had done in the 1920s.

Other trend setters of the late 1930s were the trumpeter Roy Eldridge, the electric-guitarist Charlie Christian, the drummer Kenny Clarke, and the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. Jazz singing in the 1930s became increasingly flexible and stylized. Ivie Anderson, Mildred Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, and, above all, Billie Holiday were the leading singers.