The first definition of jazz to be widely accepted was “collective improvisation.” If the question rose, “Improvisation on what?” the answer given was “on anything.”
A deeper study of jazz revealed the paramount importance of the blues to jazz, not as simply a special body of the music but permeating its fabric. It was also recognized that jazz had many aspects of a folk music. This is as far as many theorists have gone. Jazz remains “collective improvisation,” and as such, it is “formless.” It has no relation to the world history of music other than being different. To some who take their theories from the surrealist art and poetry of the 1920’s, jazz is the music of the “subconscious” or “unconscious.” To others, taking their theories from a flimsy understanding of the futurist painting of the ‘20’s, it is the “music of the future,” which will replace all composition and form as outmoded institutions.
The truth is not quite so startling. Jazz is largely improvisation, but the division between improvisation and composition is not as drastic as believed, nor is jazz so completely different from all other world music as to exist wholly by its own invented laws. Jazz follows old and familiar patterns of music, and is new only in that it follows these patterns in terms of its own rhythms, melodies and timbres.
Improvisation is a form of composition. Improvisation is music that is not written down, composition is music that is written down. The difference is very important. The ability to write music makes possible a bigness of form and richness of expression that is beyond the limits of improvisation. It is a great advantage to be able to plan a major, complex work, and spend many months on working out its structure and details. It is an advantage to have such forms as opera, sonata and symphony, granted that the cultural life of the times makes it possible for the composer to put living human images into them. These forms make possible a treatment in music of broad dramatic and psychological experiences that are necessary to a full cultural life. This difference, the extension of forms and expressive possibilities, is the real difference between improvisation and composition, not the fact that improvisation is “alive” and composition is “dead” or mechanical. The latter charge is frequently justified, but only because of the “dead man” attitude that marks much classical and composed music today. A work of composed music, properly performed, should sound as alive as if it were being improvised.
Improvisation was always a basic method of folk art. And it continued into the most advanced forms of musical composition, such as concerto and opera, up to the nineteenth century, when the drastic separation was finally established between the performer and composer. Handel, in the early eighteenth century, wrote his organ concertos with many “ad lib” directions, and all his composed work showed an almost improvisational flexibility. J. M. Coopersmith points out, in his edition of “The Messiah,”{6} for example, that the same aria was written by Handel in six different versions, ranging from a soprano solo to a duet for two contraltos with chorus; each version, like the several versions of a hot solo, as “right” as the other. Handel, J. S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, were famous improvisors, and while we have no record of their improvisations, there is every reason to believe that similar material was incorporated into their compositions.
If we examine carefully what happens in jazz improvisation, we see that it is really a kind of composition. It is the height of superficiality to imagine that a hot solo emerges directly from a performer’s “unconscious.” People simply cannot create on a consistent level this way. A great hot solo is generally worked up from performance to performance, using the same material. If we follow the work of a jazz performer, we can trace the growth of these solos. When the player arrives at a creation that satisfies him, he remembers it and repeats it. At a jam session of high quality, some solos are new and some old, although the spirit of the occasion, the contagion of the performance, makes them all sound fresh and new. A group of Dixieland players will often do a familiar “evergreen” with almost all the nuances of a previous performance.
To say this is not to detract from the jazz player’s originality, but merely to point out the conditions under which every creative mind works. The slow creation of a great jazz solo is a form of musical composition. If improvisation sounds to us more alive and contagious, it is because a fine improvisation is much more exciting than bad composed music, or even good, played by uninterested performers. Hot jazz improvisors are careful workmen and fine craftsmen; they generally know what they are doing every step of the way. Jazz improvisors are inspired by each other’s solos, but composers are also stimulated by hearing other composers’ music.
Improvisation is a basic characteristic of jazz, but jazz musicians are not a new kind of genius who pour forth music upon any provocation like water from Moses’ rock. The mediocre quality and dullness of the music that frequently results from “all-star combinations,” brought together for recording purposes, is due to the theory that places all its belief in the mystical “improvisational genius,” and forgets the need for musical material and a common language. Many jazz musicians are phenomenal musical thinkers. Their improvisation, however, like “genius,” is a product of infinite pains, of the slow germination and maturity of musical ideas.
When we understand jazz improvisation, as a process of unwritten composition consciously worked out and carefully built up from performance to performance, much then becomes clear about jazz that is otherwise a mystery. We can see why it is impossible to ask that a performance be wholly invented on the spur of the moment, wholly fresh and different in every phrase. A great improvised performance must necessarily be a combination of old and new, familiar and fresh material. If half of what is heard is truly new, the performance is miraculous. We can see why a group of the very finest performers generally do better with a familiar number than with a wholly fresh melody. They know all the nuances, the ins and outs of the old piece. They have worked it out many times, and have a base from which to go further. A fresh number is generally approached gingerly, played “straight” until its possibilities begin to be felt out. We can see, on the other hand, why so many performances by second-rate swing bands where every body seems to be improvising at white heat, sound abysmally dull. The reason is that the soloists, having made their bow to the starting tune, proceed to knock out the same hot solos they performed twenty times before to twenty other numbers; solos that in many cases are only a noodling of chords with a hot attack and intonation. This aimless swing, all “style” and no melody, springs from the fallacy that “improvisation” is everything, and the material worked with doesn’t matter. The poorer the material, the more the solos themselves tend to fall into dull, standardized patterns.
This leads us to a most important point to remember about improvisation. It is not only method, but matter. It requires not only the ability to invent, but a language in which to invent. If the average classical musician of today were asked to improvise, he would be at a loss. In the eighteenth century, however, the average performing musician would improvise very willingly, just as he could also turn out a respectable composed piece. What happens today in classical music, unlike jazz, is that the average conservatory graduate thinks of music in terms of a past language, one completely set and contained within the masterpieces or semi-masterpieces he performs. He can love the music of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms but not improvise in that language, except as a clever but artistically worthless reshuffling of their music. To improvise successfully he must have a musical language that has become part of his thought processes. The blues and rags are such a language to the hot jazz musician, as are other forms of folk and popular music when they become part of his musical thinking. The jazz improvisor’s mind is well stocked with musical phrases capable of countless variation and formation into new patterns.
An insight into the process of improvisation can be gotten from a description of one of the oldest and most widespread of improvised arts, that of acting. The “Commedia della Arte,” the “Italian Comedy” which flourished throughout Europe for three centuries, the sixteenth through the eighteenth, was a theatre of improvisation, building up countless new dramatic and comic patterns out of stock, masked figures such as Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, Scaramouche, and others. It was a most important art form in Europe, influencing opera, written drama and even painting. A description of the improvising actor, written by a contemporary, reads like a perfect description of the art of a jazz musician.
“For a good Italian actor is a man of infinite resources and resourcefulness...he matches his words and actions so perfectly with those of his colleagues on the stage that he enters instantly into whatever acting and movements are required of him in such a manner as to give the impression that all that they do has been prearranged.{7}
But all this improvisation rose from a memory base. “Certain it is that there never was such a thing as complete and absolute improvisation, nor ever can be....his (Barbieri’s) memory was stored with phrases, concetti (conceits), declarations of love, reproaches, delirium and despairs.”
It may sound paradoxical, but it is true that only because this body of musical language exists can hot jazz continue to be so fresh and inventive. One is impossible without the other. A performer, in a jam session, could not carry on so well from a previous performer’s solo, did he not speak the same musical language. In the two and three-voice improvised ensembles of New Orleans jazz, what we generally hear is basic blues line from trumpet, clarinet and trombone. One little fresh nuance from any instrument is enough to make the entire ensemble take on vibrancy and life. One new phrase, or old phrase in a new combination, is enough to transform the entire musical texture. It is because the jazz improvisor has so familiar a base to rise from that he can soar.
The blues are particularly adapted to improvisation because even the shortest blues phrase is a self-contained melodic phrase. This phrase can be built up into ever new combinations, like blocks of stone in an arch, and a continually fresh and interesting music made out of the simplest elements.
The construction of a hot jazz solo brings a considerable element of musical form into jazz. For a good hot solo is a musical structure. It follows the laws of all music of quality. The Oliver “Dippermouth” solo is built out of the repetitions of short germ phrases, as Schubert builds a song out of the repetitions of a few phrases, or as Beethoven, on a much larger scale, handles the four-note theme of his Fifth Symphony. All outstanding hot solos are similar constructions, such as that of Joe Smith in “Stampede,” Coleman Hawkins in “Hello, Lola,” the traditional Picou solo in “High Society,” Louis Armstrong in “Mahogany Hall Stomp,” Lester Young in “Slow Drag.” These solos have a perfect economy of material, and logic in putting their phrases together.
When a popular tune is “blued,” it is broken down into fragments, which are turned into blues phrases, and these made the basis for a new musical structure. A fine hot solo on a popular tune, like Louis Armstrong’s “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” and “Squeeze Me,” Bix Beiderbecke’s “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,” Lester Young’s “Lady be Good” and “Indiana,” Jack Teagarden’s “Dinah,” is simpler in the basic phrases it uses than the pop tune itself, yet far more complex, well constructed and interesting a musical composition.
Some of the outstanding performers, hailed as great improvisors, base their power on nothing more than a solid blues melody and phrase. This is pointed out not to detract from the originality of these players, but to define the character of their music. Johnny Dodds was a very great jazz performer, playing an almost pure blues, and George Brunis makes his Dixieland performance so exciting precisely because he plays so unvaried a blues and tailgate trombone style.
Another characteristic of the blues, lending themselves to fine improvisation, is their dual, antiphonal character, their “statement and answer,” giving the jazz performer the opportunity for the most subtle opposition of rhythmic figures, and for a soaring flight of melody followed by a “return home.” Out of this antiphonal pattern of the blues rises the exciting delayed attack, so characteristic of the “hot style.” It is really an underlining of the presence of two opposing rhythmic patterns.
Out of it also comes the basic character of the jazz “collective ensemble.” This is not, generally, a simultaneous soaring by all the instruments, but a subtle interplay of statement and answer. The ensembles of the King Oliver Creole Band records, with Johnny Dodds playing against the trumpet line of Oliver and Armstrong, are particularly beautiful examples, as are many of Sidney Bechet’s final ensembles, against a trumpet player of the calibre of Tommy Ladnier, Muggsy Spanier, Bill Davison and Max Kaminsky. Out of this duet form of improvisation comes the elaboration of the “chase,” familiar in bebop and riff music. Out of the statement-and-answer pattern comes the tight, unified musical form found in so many fine jazz performances. It is not to be described as a “theme and variations,” a form sometimes found in later attempts at “sweet swing” music. It is a much more subtle music of a continual flow and interweaving of melodic lines, repetition and contrast of melodic phrase. In many New Orleans and Ellington performances, it is impossible to tell where one “variation” ends and another begins. The same characteristic recurs in bebop. “Round about Midnight” by Theolonius Monk, for example, is built on the twelve-bar, antiphonal blues pattern, and we can trace the statement and answer, the downward and upward curve of blues melody, although it is hidden in an elaborate harmonic and instrumental texture.
If we study the antiphonal, duet character of the blues melodic line, we will see that it carries over into the hot solo itself. This may seem paradoxical, but if we examine the many great blues solos of jazz, such as those of Louis Armstrong, Johnny Dodds, and Sidney Bechet, we will find two contrasting melodic lines laid down within the same solo, as if the one instrument were playing both the melodic lead and the accompaniment or decoration, the riff and the break. Armstrong and Dodds, in “Wild Man Blues,” “Gully Low Blues” (“S. O. L. Blues”), provide fine examples, as do also Dodds’ “Lonesome Blues” solo, Armstrong’s “Melancholy Blues,” “West End Blues,” “Basin Street Blues.” Lester Young’s solos are often of this character, using the low, honking tones of the tenor sax to lay down the contrasting, bass melodic line. J. C. Higginbotham built up a similar brilliant solo style on the trombone, taking over many of Armstrong’s trumpet figures.
It is worth noticing that this creation of two contrasting melodic voices by the one instrument is exactly the principle which J. S. Bach uses in his suites and sonatas for unaccompanied violin, cello or flute, and in the writing for solo instrument in his concertos, employing organ-point and arpeggio.
Another characteristic of the blues, making for rich improvisational possibilities, is their non-diatonic character. The traditional chords used to accompany the blues are not determining factors of blues melody, but act rather as punctuation marks, commas or periods, in between which and against which the melodic lines can move with the widest latitude, striking off any kind of apparent dissonance.
This combination of a simple, familiar melodic, rhythmic and harmonic base, with a free range of movement, makes possible the ensemble and collective improvisation, so wonderful in New Orleans jazz. Every performer knows where he has to be, harmonically and melodically, at the right time. Every performer knows the same blues language, the restriction he must accept, and the latitude permitted him. Thus, in what seems to be and, of course, is, a free collective improvisation, each performer will actually be playing the blues; one its rapid, repeated, lead phrases, another its long held notes or slow-moving lines with off-beat accents, a third its inversions. In later swing jazz, such as that of Red Nichols and Benny Goodman, this quality tended to be lost, for the blues were no longer a familiar language to the players, and the solos tended to be bound by the underlying, “sweet” chords. In Ellington and modern jazz, such as bebop, the free harmonic and improvisational character return, as in the blues, but much different. The blues and jazz music have in the meantime gotten an education.
A last characteristic of the blues, making for successful improvisation, is that they are a language familiar to both performers and audience. The performers do not merely “express themselves,” but communicate to their listeners. Jazz improvisation reaches its greatest heights when its language is shared by both performers and listeners, so that the most subtle variation and twist of phrase immediately makes its impact on the mind; so that even when the audience is dancing, the melodic and rhythmic patterns will translate themselves into dance moods and dance patterns.
That jazz music speaks almost as if its melodic phrases and intonations were words may seem to make for a strange music, to those whose musical experiences are wrapped up in the concert-hall. This is not however a “secret” language that jazz is speaking. All music is meant to speak freshly and directly to the listener, as jazz does to those who know its language. Music in the past spoke sharply to its listeners, as we know from some of the reactions of listeners. A Beethoven dissonance, or a Mozart folk theme, was meant to affect the listeners of its time as it did, with a recognizable change of emotional connotation or human imagery. It is only in our present concert-hall atmosphere that all music is transformed into an escape to a romantic past world, and all musical languages become amalgamated into one dreamy sweetness. In its “speaking” quality jazz is not bringing an unheard-of quality to music, nor is it an example, as some would describe it, of a folkish quaintness. It is a restoration to music of a necessary quality, temporarily abandoned in our “classical” musical atmosphere.
Jazz improvisation, far from being opposed to “form,” is inseparable from jazz form. And jazz form is inseparable from the role of jazz as a social art.
In describing the hot solo, I have already indicated the entrance in jazz of an element of form, comparable to composed music. Other aspects of form as well are found in jazz.
One aspect of form in music is the general construction, or layout of a work, fitting it to a definite use, a setting and an audience. Another aspect is the unity and coherence of a work of music, its organization so that it has a recognizable beginning, middle and end, and the entire work makes a single impact. Both of these elements of form are found in jazz, although not to the same degree of expansion and complexity found in the more ambitious composed music. However, many jazz blues and song forms are as perfect pieces of musical structure as art songs by Schubert or Mussorgsky, and many instrumental blues, rags and stomps are as perfectly organized as dances and marches by Handel, Bach, Mozart, Schubert or other masters.
The folk twelve-bar blues is a perfect art form. It may seem to repeat the same musical phrases over and over again, but this is because variety of the form is provided in the words, the poetry. The blues singer, like the ancient troubadour, was often a wandering ballad singer, and his song told a story, frequently in language of great beauty, wit and imagination. Contrary to the beliefs of some aesthetes, who blame the “masses” for the idiocy prevalent in manufactured popular art, it is natural for people to prefer words and music that have meaning to them, that have realistic images, laughter and sadness, satire and serious story. A verse like the following is fine poetry, in its honesty, and joyous feeling for reality.
Work-day—day’s a breaking
Peas in the pot and hoe-cake’s baking
Green corn, come along Charlie...
The sung blues often attained as well a fine, if still simple, musical form. The second line would repeat the first but the melody would change; the third line of words would be different, but the melody would end up as in the beginning. This provided a fine unity and variety, built on an interplay of words and music. The instrumental accompaniment added a formal element of variation and repetition, and a three-voice melody, obbligato and bass texture, similar to, if far simpler than, the “trio” linear texture of the Bach arias and instrumental sonatas.
With the rise of instrumental jazz, the accompaniment to the blues became increasingly subtle and elaborate, creating a powerfully organized musical form. Louis Armstrong’s blues accompaniments are fine examples, often starting with a simple phrase, like the mocking repetition of a single note in “Cold in Hand” and “You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon”; then flowering out in increasingly broad phrases, rising to a climax in a full solo chorus, closing with a sweet cadence, “tag” or break. Joe Smith also beautifully organized his blues accompaniments to Bessie Smith’s performances, supporting the voice harmonically more than Louis. In “Hard Driving Papa” he creates a most beautiful piece of music, against Bessie’s fine, straight twelve-bar blues, by a series of breaks throughout the record, each starting on the same note.
Blues piano, popularly known as “boogie-woogie,” provides examples of perfectly organized musical form. It is a genuine three voice music. Vocal records, such as “Roll ‘em Pete” by Pete Johnson and Joe Turner, “Head Rag Hop” by Romeo Nelson, Pinetop Smith’s “Pinetop Blues,” Montana Taylor’s “In the Bottom,” Meade Lux Lewis’ “Blues Whistle” show clearly the relation of the sung blues to the upper and lower piano lines, and enable us to hear more clearly the beautiful recreation of these three voices in terms of the piano alone. An important element of the formal organization of blues piano was the use of a kind of registration, the adroit contrasting of tone colors between the lower, middle and upper registers of the instrument, often using the brilliant upper register for a climax. The left hand provides not only a rhythm and simple harmony, as in rag piano, but a rolling, blues figure, which gives the music a solid foundation, produces the most interesting dissonances between right and left hand blues lines. The right hand provides the blues statement and answer; the melody and the decorative, answering and pictorially illustrative figures. One of the finest blues piano works, in simple folk style, is Pine-top Smith’s “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie.” Jim Yancey shows a similar poignant simplicity, as in “Boodlin’” (“Slow and Easy Blues”), but also builds up magnificent, complex compositions by varying his left hand as well as the right, and making the music move through a subtle, off-beat interplay of right and left hand. “Eternal Blues,” “Yancey Stomp” and “How Long, How Long Blues” are among his masterpieces. Meade Lux Lewis is a master of intricate right hand work, mixing blues figures, riffs, trills, tremolos and guitar-like arpeggios in the colorful railroad music of “Honky-Tonk Train,” and “Chicago Flyer.” He also plays a subtle and harmonically inventive slow blues. Pete Johnson is fine in the engaging lightness of his right hand figures, and in the tender, singing character of his sweeter Kansas-City style blues, which he always develops through sharp dynamic contrasts between one phrase and the next. Albert Ammons uses driving, riff-like figures in the right hand as well as the left, building up a powerfully intense and sonorous music. “Cripple” Clarence Lofton uses, by contrast, a simple, jump-like left hand and brilliant, dancing off-beat right hand figures.
All of this music translates into piano timbres the fullness of blues jazz; voice, orchestra, solo instrument, answering accompaniment, musical illustration and rhythm. Blues piano has given us a body of musical composition which stands up, in its own right, as music, with or without the “folk” label. No composer’s art could improve on the repeated, rolling figures with which Lewis closes out “Honky-Tonk Train,” the break climax of “Yancey Stomp” and the riffing with which it ends, the passacaglia-like variations of “How Long, How Long,” the subtle variations and repetitions of “Eternal Blues” and Art Hodes’ “A Melody From the Gutter”; the bitter sweet contrasts of Pete Johnson’s “Pete’s Blues” and Lewis’ “Blues, Part Two.”
Blues piano form did not rise in the privacy of a composer’s room. It was a product of the social use to which the music was put. The piano, played in poor man’s saloons and dances, or in Chicago rent parties, had to carry in itself the full burden of dance and song. This burden gave the blues pianist a musical problem to solve, and out of his solution, exploiting for the purpose the full resources of the instrument, the massive forms of boogie-woogie piano took shape.
New Orleans jazz was prolific in musical forms because music filled so many social and communal roles in the city’s life. Some of these forms were the “honky-tonk” piano rags; the slow dances and fast dances, or stomps, arranged out of the blues; the marching jazz; the sixteen-bar, popular ragtime song; the combination of all the above, used for funerals, weddings, celebrations, and almost every aspect of the city life of the Negro people. It was truly a people’s music, in form and content. In fact the form and content, the social role the music played and the human feelings within it, are indistinguishable. It was also the music of an exploited, poverty-stricken and jim-crowed people. These are the two contrasting truths that must be remembered. It was a social, communal, people’s music, and it was a ghetto music. These contradictions known, we can understand why the music had such power, and why the musicians eventually felt dissatisfied with its limitations.
The piano rags touched the two extremes of New Orleans life. As an “educated” music, often produced by pianists who had taken lessons, they have a content of minuet, quadrille and other forms of taught music. At the same time, they were heard in the brothels, which were a subtle form of exploitation and discrimination against the Negro people, since it was only by that sort of entertainment of white people that many Negroes could make a living.
The brothel background has given rise to lurid versions of New Orleans jazz, and some fanciful theories. Its influence on the music, however, is negligible, except in that here was a place where a rag pianist could earn a few dollars. Far more deep-rooted influences on New Orleans music were the parades, river-boats and social dances. The rags were a great influence on New Orleans music, but largely for their “educated” background. From the piano rags, jazz got an instrumental virtuosity that had been lacking in the folk blues. It is not hard to see a translation of the glittering runs and decorative figures of the ragtime piano in the dancing clarinet decorations of New Orleans band music. Another gift of the piano rags was a more complex and organized musical design. They contributed a sixteen-bar theme, contrasting to and enriching the twelve-bar blues theme. They provided a music built upon the contrast of two distinct themes, one serving as a refrain, the other for development and variation; a form similar to the “rondo” of classical music, which also, incidentally, originated in old European folk dance. They provided a recognition of key, or a diatonic music, with an accompanying ability to modulate, or change key. Almost every piece of New Orleans marching jazz has such a modulation. The simple harmonies of ragtime piano provided a base for standardizing the instrumental ensembles of band music, and thus making possible the interplay of solo and ensemble, of diatonic and non-diatonic language, that is an essential quality of New Orleans music. Contrary to those theories which hold that New Orleans music came wholly from the “unconscious,” is the fact that arrangements, the skeleton outline of harmonies and ensembles, played a prominent role in this music. Examples are the work of Lil Armstrong for King Oliver’s band, and that of Ferdinand Morton for all the groups with which he recorded.
Thus it was largely out of the marriage of rags and blues that the great New Orleans music flowered, with the additional fertilization of hymns, spirituals, folk songs of every origin, marches, cake-walks and other folk dances. The blues provided the wonderfully poignant melodies; the non-diatonic musical language, and the soaring freedom that resulted from it. They permeated the musical form and provided the most subtle contrasts of “hot” and “sweet,” of blue and non-blue idiom. The blues provided the riffs and breaks so important to the new jazz forms. They provided finally the essential antiphonal character, the statement and answer, the forward movement through a constant series of contrasts and surprises, the “heart-beat,” which is so moving and human a quality of the music. The rags provided the impulse towards a greater technical mastery of the instrument, the brilliant runs and decorative figures, the interplay and contrast of themes, the use of “key.” Out of the two, blues and rags, rose a music of the most finely organized form.
This form made an adroit use of instrumental timbre. The clarinet, trumpet and trombone were a perfect combination, each different in range and in its musical role so that simply by each following out its natural kind of movement, a most rich ensemble and contrast of solo could be created. This was a phenomenon similar to the rise of polyphonic music in European folk music, where the contrasting voices of tenor, alto and bass, each starting with the same melody but following its own natural line of movement, brought into being a beautiful, if rough, polyphonic music. One of the most enjoyable aspects of New Orleans music is the use of contrasting of timbres of the instruments, for variation and climax, not only in ensembles but in the manner with which a driving, full ensemble is followed by the voice of the solo clarinet, the clarinet by the rough, staccato voice of the trumpet or trombone, and so on to the final, climactic ensemble or ride-out. A fine use is also made of the blues language; solos often start relatively sweet, and then become progressively hotter, more blue, wider in their instrumental range. Kid Rena’s “Lowdown Blues” is a fine example of such construction.
A most important principle of form in New Orleans music, as preserved on records, is that the music is organized not about the “hot solo” alone, not the free ensemble alone, but by the interplay of melodic lines, a movement of the music through a constant series of “opposites,” of instrumental contrasts. This may be called the “duet” or “concerto” principle. The latter term may seem inappropriate to many, thinking of the flamboyant and showy, classical concert-hall concerto, or of Gershwin’s Concerto in F.
The concerto was born in European music and flourished, however, exactly out of such an interplay of solo instrument and massed tone as we have in jazz. This duet or concerto style of organization is basic to the music of King Oliver, of Morton, of Johnny Dodds’ small groups, of the Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Seven which collectively make up our best recorded heritage of New Orleans music. Solos in the later swing sense are rare, nor do all the instruments strike out on their own as proclaimed in the free improvisation theory. Rather there is the constant and conscious interplay of musical ideas. This interplay starts within the “cell” of the twelve or sixteen-bar, theme itself, where we may have eight bars of “sweet” music answered by four bars of stop-time and breaks, a statement in harmonized melody, chromatic or in minor key, answered by a free blue ensemble; a half-chorus on a solo instrument answered by a half-chorus from another, a solo instrument answered by the full band.
King Oliver’s records are of this kind, and full chorus solos are rarely found in them. Perhaps their greatest beauty is their use of breaks. Certainly the Oliver records have the finest collection of breaks, and of a music adorned by them, in the history of jazz; the musicians contributing them are Oliver himself, Louis Armstrong, Johnny Dodds and Honore Dutry. And these records exhibit the many varied forms of New Orleans jazz. “High Society” and “Tears” are in parade style, the latter in especially sweet style climaxed by a series of wonderful breaks, some of them by Armstrong and Oliver together. “Weatherbird,” “Froggie Moore” and “Snake Rag” are in piano rag style; “Canal Street Blues” and “Chimes Blues” show a funeral, minor-key influence; “Dippermouth” is a wonderful example of the fast, stomp-style, twelve bar blues. “Jazzing Babies Blues” is a fine example of the use of the riff.
Ferdinand Morton’s records show a similar variety, and are illuminated by wonderful duets and half-choruses, in which his own piano plays a prominent role, as well as the clarinet of Johnny Dodds, Omer Simeon and Albert Nicholas, the trumpet of Lee Collins, George Mitchell and Ward Pinkett, the trombone of Kid Ory and Geechy Fields, the banjo of Johnny St. Cyr, the drumming of Baby Dodds, and Tommy Benford. “Black Bottom Stomp” and “Steamboat Stomp” are in march style; “Wild Man Blues,” “Beale Street Blues,” “Jungle Blues” are beautiful examples of the half-chorus, duet style, and fine interplay of “hot” and “sweet” melodic lines. “The Pearls” and “The Chant” derive from the eccentric piano rag, and are adorned with beautiful breaks.
The Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Seven records use mainly a King Oliver personnel; Louis Armstrong, Johnny Dodds, Lillian Armstrong and Johnny St. Cyr, with Kid Ory instead of Dutry, on trombone, on the “Hot Five.” Baby Dodds and a bass player, Pete Briggs or Ed Garland, are added for the “Hot Seven.” “Skid-Dat-De-Dat” is one of the most beautiful examples on record of a continual interplay of “hot” and “sweet” melodic lines, and is a most perfectly organized piece of music, the harmonized, minor-key, four-bar statement recurring throughout the entire piece, and answered by blues solo, blues “scat-singing” or blues ensemble. “Yes, I’m In the Barrel,” “Gully Low Blues” and “Twelfth Street Rag” are fine examples of a rag and blues mixture, the last-named giving the familiar rag a fine, “slow drag,” blues treatment. “Willie the Weeper” and “Muskat Ramble” are lusty marches. “Oriental Strut,” “Potato Head Blues” and “Cornet Chop Suey” are examples of a sweet, sixteen-bar theme developed through a cumulative series of brilliant stop-time and break choruses. “Savoy Blues” is a fine example of music organized about the riff.
Another product of the rag-blues marriage was the kind of popular song which might be called New Orleans’ gift to tin-pan-alley. These songs consisted, like the rags, of two sets of melodies, a sixteen-bar “verse” and a thirty-two bar “chorus.” Some of these songs were almost straight twelve-bar blues, with an insertion of four bars of stop-time and break. Others were sweet in idiom, but with a hint of the blues break. Such songs make up a great body of the “blues” sung by Bessie Smith. Bessie Smith was not limited, of course, to any rigid type of song. She sang a wonderful twelve-bar blues, as in “Backwater Blues,” “Money Blues,” “Hard Drivin’ Papa,” “Lost Your Head Blues.” With her magnificent voice and personality she could even give a living character to songs that show a tin-pan-alley silliness, especially in their words, like “Muddy Water,” “After You’ve Gone,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” But it was the sixteen-bar rag blues, like “Young Woman’s Blues,” “One and Two Blues,” “I Ain’t Goin’ To Play Second Fiddle,” “Lonesome Desert Blues,” “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” that enabled her to build up her magnificent, fluid and dramatic song forms.
The ragtime songs produced by New Orleans composers had quality. Even in them, however, compared to the folk blues, there begins a deterioration of the words. Printed as sheet music, they were subject to a censorship no less powerful because it was unwritten. This censorship was not one that eliminated dealing with sex. On the contrary, true to the commercial mentality, it emphasized such themes, transforming them, however, from an honest projection of realities of life into a double-meaning lasciviousness. Other themes, depicting life as it is actually lived among the poor and exploited, were banned. As in Hollywood, this trade censorship “cleaned up” the art into something dirtier and more hypocritical.
The growing insipidity of the words of these songs, as well as the music, as they become an industrial product, tells us who is really responsible for the idiocy of our misnamed “popular art.” It proves that when the people really produce art without interference, it has quality. Bogus “popular art” is a reflection of the commercial and publicity mentality. Bessie Smith sings these beautiful and touching words, in “Backwater Blues,”
When it thunders and lightnings and the wind begins to blow,
And thousands of people ain’t got no place to go....
I went and stood up on a high, old, lonesome hill,
And looked down at the house where I used to live.
In “Muddy Water,” however, we hear this nonsense,
Dixie Moonlight, Swanee shore,
Trees are whispering, come on back to me
Muddy Water, hear my plea....
“Jelly-Roll” Morton paints a realistic picture in “Mamie’s Blues,”
She stood on the corner, her feet just soaking wet,
Beggin’ each and every man that she met
If you can’t give a dollar, give me a lousy dime....
Tin-pan-alley invents,
If I could be with you one hour tonight,
If I were free to do the things I might....
Charles Edward Smith, describing Morton’s “Don’t You Leave Me Here,” says, “the tonk world was a world of uncertain tomorrows, in which everyone was on his way somewhere. Figuratively speaking it was Alabama, and a popular saying had it: ‘In places you are going you was supposed to be bound for that place.’ Jelly-Roll told me of this, and added: ‘So in fact I was Alabama bound’.” We need only compare this image to the moronic commercial “Mammy” and “Alabammy Bound” songs to see what power is brought to art by the honesty to see and describe life as people live it, what havoc is wrought by the money mind when it imposes the content of its own conception of life.
New Orleans music was a national music of the Negro people, circumscribed by their impoverished ghetto life in the Southern city. New Orleans became a center for this music, because of its long musical traditions, having been, for more than a century, the most musical city of the South; the slightly freer social life enjoyed by the Negro people in this city; and its situation as a meeting place for folk music of many lands and cultures, combining the deep South, the far West, the Gulf Coast and Caribbean.
It provided the greatest opportunities for improvisation precisely because it possessed the most powerful musical forms, through which music became a social possession. It is through its unity of contrasting elements that we must understand this music; its interplay of “hot” and “sweet,” of the deep blues and the many non-blue, musical languages; its free, sinuous melodic lines, full of freshness and surprise, along with familiar well-loved melodies, played affectionately and “straight”; its blazing breaks and quotable riffs; its single line of melody and its many-voiced ensembles; its strange dissonances and its simple harmonies; its economy of note and line; and its brilliant, intricate figuration. It even brought together Negro and white, on a beginning level, for although such collaboration could not take place openly, it was a music largely created by the Negro people that the white, Dixieland players consciously arranged and popularized. It was a good school for musicians, because music, within the narrow limits that the Negro could possess it, was a way of living as well as a way of making a living. Because it was so richly varied a music, in it may be found all the seeds of later jazz. Because it provided so great an opportunity for the individual musician to grow, it brought forth individual musicians of outstanding powers, who began to seek musical opportunities not permitted them in the exploited and jim-crowed life of the Negro in a Southern city.
Modern jazz is much different from New Orleans. It has to be. Yet we find its germs in New Orleans music. The blues have always been a vital part of jazz, as they are now. The basic beat of New Orleans blues and stomp jazz, the 4/4 beat, is still the basic beat of jazz. The various intensifications of beat that came later can be found hinted at in New Orleans music. We can find the “jump,” beat, the two strongly accented and delayed off-beats to the bar, dominating the melodic line, in such works as Morton’s “Beale St. Blues,” Armstrong’s and Ory’s “Savoy Blues” and “Twelfth Street Rag.” This beat became predominant in later Kansas City and large swing band jazz. The double jump, or “eight-to-the-bar” beat, may be found in the hopscop blues, the walking bass, and several other New Orleans dance patterns. Even the rapid sixteenth note solo, familiar in bebop, may be found in the New Orleans clarinet solo. Forms based on the riff, so important in later large band jazz, may be found in New Orleans music. The play with chromatic figures, the series of dizzy modulations to distant keys and return home, a feature of the most modern jazz, may be found touched upon in New Orleans jazz. An amazing example is Omer Simeon’s solo in the Morton trio record, “Shreveport.”
New Orleans music brought forth a phenomenal group of creative musicians, like Joplin, Morton, Oliver and Armstrong, but it was only outside of New Orleans and the South that they were able to work out and expand the musical powers they had within them. Yet of them, it is possible to say that what they created was only a fraction of the music they could have brought into being. Already in New Orleans music the Negro people were proving that they had the power to give America its great composers, a great music on the highest levels. Our admiration for the creative genius of the outstanding Negro musicians must be tempered with a sense of loss as well; that, phenomenal as their music is, an even greater music was lost to us because of the narrow limitations forced upon them and the few materials with which they had to work. We must remember that, although the Negro people did not spend their time lamenting, but managed to wrest some joy out of their ghetto life, it was a horrible life.
W. C. Handy’s autobiography, “Father of the Blues,” for example, is not written in an uncheerful mood. Yet we can find some gruesome stories in it, such as the lynching of Louis Wright, a member of his group, while touring Missouri, or the time his entire group almost died of small-pox, denied even medicine or medical care, by the callous and selfish white people about them; or the games of fun-loving Texans who riddled their car with bullets as it sped through a town. We must remember that while the power of New Orleans music is a testament to the creative genius of the people who brought it into being, it was a circumscribed music. If we understand this, we can understand why the Negro jazz musician felt the need, and in fact demanded the right, to perfect his technique, to learn all there was to know about music, to study all the idioms, practises, forms and methods available to the rest of the American people.
Jazz had to break out of its New Orleans limitations. The closing down of the Storyville section of New Orleans in 1917, sometimes given in histories as the “turning point,” was only one episode, and not too significant, in a much broader historical movement. The Negro people were demanding, and finding, means to travel, to move more freely, to enter into new jobs, to use their talents in ways denied to them by a jim-crowed life. The movement of jazz musicians North was one aspect of this heightened consciousness of rights which they were denied and opportunities that beckoned for a new maturity.
In breaking out of New Orleans, jazz became a possession of all America; Negro and white, North and South, Eastern seaboard and Pacific coast. It encountered many new problems of idiom, form and style, and of the relation of the jazz musician to American life. Its handling of these problems makes up the story of modern jazz. Its progress is far from over, and its problems far from solution. But its essential character has not changed. It is, today, the free, experimental and unregimented wing of American song and dance music, the battleground on which the musician fights for his independence, his right to create as a thinking and sensitive human being. It carries on now, as before, a constant struggle against standardization, limitation, jim-crow, the windy proclamations of advertisers and publicity, the unchecked hatred of commercial hacks who resent its independent life even as they take over its material.
Its continued life against constant odds points to the day when American popular music, as a whole, will be the honest music, the combination of the familiar and strange, the old and the new, the remembered myth and the fresh human experience, the well-loved language and the new, exciting variation, that will deserve the title of a people’s music. It points to the day when music will again be both a social possession and an individual creation, but without the squalor, the poverty, the destruction of precious human material, that life among the Negro people was condemned to in the South and New Orleans.
