History of Classic Jazz (from its beginnings to Be-Bop)

By Marco Ravasini

The history of classic Jazz presented interactively, with photographs, musical excerpts and video recordings from the era available through World Wide Web access, along with links to a glossary of all specialized technical terms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Youcanprint
• Release date: Jul 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9791221422290

Book preview

Copyright

Original title: History of Classic Jazz

First edition: November 2020

Second Edition: July 2022

English translation: Wendell Murray

© 2013 Marco Ravasini,

Via Carlo Boucheron 14,

10122 Torino, Italia

ISBN 978-88-908800-9-4

Preface

I don't need words. It's all in the phrasing

- Louis Armstrong

Music should always be an adventure

- Coleman Hawkins

Well, if you find a note tonight that sounds good, play the same damn note every night!

- ‘Count’ Basie

This is the English version of a book written in 2013, which had its origins in my more than ten years of teaching the history of Jazz at the Conservatory, both for the benefit of students of Jazz and of others who might come from a more traditional, classical orientation. In this case, as in the Italian original, the book is not intended as an exhaustive accounting of Jazz, because that would go against the idea of the book itself, designed for ease of use. Further, it is impossible to recount the lives of all individuals, whether rightly or wrongly, who might be considered important figures in jazz history. That is due to the fact that each of us, including the author, has the right to his or her own quirks and preferences.

Within the text itself, subdivided into 3 chapters and 22 sections, along with 3 appendices, a reader may click on a link to access a complete definition/explanation of any technical term. Other links, indicated as LISTEN or LISTEN-VIEW, take the reader to the respective pages on the World Wide Web, where the reader may listen to and/or watch those relevant musical pieces. To access these resources, it should go without saying, in opposition to the items in the glossary, that an Internet connection is needed either through a WIFI connection or through a SIM card in a mobile phone or tablet computer.

Lastly, I want to express my thanks to two special individuals: to my long-term friend, near brother in fact, Wendell Murray, without whom this translation would otherwise be unthinkable and to my father Giorgio, a life-long jazz aficionado, who passed on to me, starting as a young child, his passion for African-American music, even if, later on, as I grew, I pursued an interest in other musical genres. This book, in large part, is his product as well as mine.

M.R.

Magliano Alfieri, Piedmont Italy, September 2020 

CHAPTER 1

Beginnings of Jazz

Section 1

Calls, Cries, Work Songs, Ballads, Spirituals, Blues, Minstrelsy, Ragtime, New Orleans

Introduction

It is not possible to establish a precise chronology of all the expressions of vocal Folk Music in the Black population of the United States of America, from the simplest to the most complex, considering that the simplest (Calls and Cries) must naturally precede the more complex (Ballads and Blues), passing, perhaps necessarily, through the religious repertory (Gospels and Spirituals). Indeed, it is necessary to speak of ‘simultaneity’ or ‘same-timed-ness’ within Black culture. Finding and documenting the origins of these is no easy task.

During the time of slavery (also afterwards), many forms of song were heard in workplaces in the USA South, in cotton, sugar and wheat plantations and in ports along rivers and on the Atlantic coast.

Calls, Cries and Work Songs

Calls served to communicate any kind of message, to call people from the fields (see following figure), to call people to work, to catch the attention of a girl at a distance or simply to make one's presence known.

If a subjective dimension prevailed, in an expressive form and with vocalization of private emotions, then more appropriately these were Cries. Their structure was quite free in general and was often personalized by the singer, anticipating thereby the practice of improvisation that would become, with time, a key characteristic of the Blues and Jazz. Furthermore, if more elaborated and tied more to work, these became so-called Work Songs, of farm workers, of railroad workers, of dock workers, of wood-cutters, of fishermen and of prisoners.

These Work Songs, quite close to the original African tradition, with their typically antiphonal structure, made a strong impression on the whites who heard them, as testimony of the English singer-actress Fanny Kemble documents (Journal of a residence in a Georgia plantation, 1838-1839): "Our boatmen […] accompany the stroke of their oars with the sound of their voices. […] I’ve been quite at a loss to discover any […] foundation for many (songs) that I have heard lately, and which have appeared to me extraordinarily wild and unaccountable. The way in which the chorus strikes in with the burthen [in unison or in octave, often in falsetto, AN] between each phrase of the melody chanted by a single voice is very curious and effective. Above all else Kemble admired the admirable time and true accent" of the songs, all tightly connected with the rhythm of work that was performed at the same time, at times sad, at times instead happy and joyful, with the most varied of contents

Ballads

These were complex songs, sometimes very long, articulated in stanzas and at times derived from Work Songs which had lost their original meaning. Often they narrated actual events in epic form, as perhaps in the case of the famous Ballad of Ol' Riley, known under various titles, in which the story is told of an old prisoner who escapes from prison to attend his wife's funeral and is chased by the dog belonging to the prison guards, Rattle, also old, that however cannot catch him… Other times the theme is of conjugal infidelity, of the inadequacy and the fecklessness of husbands of the black race (see the mark of illegitimate children, a near constant in the modern era), a theme widespread also in the Blues, with reaction from the wives, at times resigned, but very often leading, after much tolerance, to violent and homicidal vengeance (see the Ballad of Frankie and Johnny also known by the title Frankie and Albert). Other times the theme had to do with the eternal dream of escaping the bitterness of life, as is the case of [LISTEN]: Midnight Special , perhaps of white origin, that is part of the repertory of the famous singer-guitarist-prisoner Lead Belly (1885-1949) who was discovered, and re-evaluated by the ethnomusicologists John and Alan Lomax. In this, the ‘Midnight Special’, or midnight express, that is the night train that passes huffing and puffing, heading who knows where, becomes the symbol of freedom and a beacon of salvation (imaginary) as much for the laborer who endures daily, hard labor as, in equal measure, for the prisoner who endures loss of his freedom…

Conversion to Christianity: Spirituals

Conversion to Christianity of black slaves, performed by Baptist and Methodist missionaries, appeared for the first time at the beginning of the 18th century, almost two centuries after the first arrivals from Africa. The slaveholders forbade conversion for a long time because they thought that religious parity would have denied to slaveholding society a large part of its supposed justification… Eventually, however, the slaveholders became aware that Christianity could serve as a powerful means of control and containment of the impetus towards and the desire for rebellion (one suffers in silence in this world with the certainty of proximate redemption in the next…) and no longer opposed conversion. For a long time, nonetheless, the converted slaves maintained memory of their former animist rites, giving life to a synthesized cult, halfway between the past and the present. And in their Spirituals, which almost always contained an optimistic and assertive theme, they highlighted their hopes for peace and future redemption without, however, renouncing the idea of reaching those goals while still on this earth, to the point that the performance of some of this music, during a sacred ritual, was absolutely prohibited. Following the Civil War and the consequent emancipation of the slaves, these songs underwent a process of acculturation and a cleansing, when presented to the general public, often that of white skin. Thus the songs often underwent significant transformations, converting themselves to a given vocalization and to new and more complex harmonizations much better appreciated by that audience, even if very far from the original spirit of the compositions. This was, evidently, the type of Spiritual known by European classical composers at the end of the 19th century, as for example by Antonin Dvořak: [LISTEN]: Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.

Blues

A companion genre to Ballads and Work Songs, the Blues, a genre initially vocal, but afterwards becoming instrumental, had its origin in the 19th century in the familiar scenarios of farm and domestic work, but conserving from its beginnings all African-rooted characteristics that, here and there, are sporadically found in the other genres (improvisation and antiphonal aspect, principally). It was made up of three lines of text (three musical phrases of four measures each, in total twelve beats), AA'B, with the first two lines (phrases) that emphasize a concept or a situation and the last that represents the response to them (with regard to the text) and simultaneously the harmonic conclusion (with regard to the music). The meter was in quadruple time (4/4), the harmony repetitive (A all in tonic, A' 2 measures in subdominant and 2 in tonic, B 2 measures in dominant and 2 in tonic) with chords always provided with sevenths (even tonic…), while the scale underlying the melody had thirds and sixths somewhat flat, almost as a harmonic minor used horizontally…  After the three lines, the text proceeded with another three lines and another again, maintaining the same melodic-harmonic scheme of the start. The themes addressed rested mostly on the horrid state of existential solitude of blacks who, once removed from slavery, were becoming aware of a new type of legalized exploitation, both in factories and on the farms of an earlier time. The Blues thus became the symbol of the consistently very trying life of the black population, evolving into a cultural emblem for blacks after the Civil War up to the present time, while enriching itself progressively with more complex musical contents.

Minstrel Shows

This genre of music is a type of musical theater, primarily improvised upon relatively simple plots, in which, in the period preceding the Civil War, companies of white actors-singers, appropriately made up, their faces blackened with polish, performed vignettes of the (presumed) life of black slaves on Southern plantations, with accompaniment of songs, dancing and recitations, a mixture of derision and fondness for the personalities represented…  These Minstrel Shows reached a maximum level of popularity towards mid-century in the 1800s when the set masks of Jim Crow (the bow-legged black sidekick, see following figure), Jim Brown (the know-it-all musician) or Sambo (the dumb domestic who did everything imaginable to please his white overlords) became almost proverbial.

Within the minstrel performances songs were born that were destined for great success, such as [LISTEN]: 1)Turkey In The Straw and 2) Old Dan Tucker. Later, the emancipation of the slaves after the Civil War (1861-1865) had the effect of permitting true black singer-actors to act for the first time in such scenes, creating the paradox of fake dark-skinned characters, originally thought up by whites, but now performed, finally and without makeup, by authentic actors of color… Thus, in the last years of the 19th and the first of the 20th centuries, Minstrel Shows ended up accommodating an ever-larger number of expressions, above all musical, from the nascent black culture, finally freed from slavery. Among these, probably the most important was Ragtime.

Ragtime

This genre