No other city holds a place in jazz history comparable to that of New Orleans. The reason is that New Orleans jazz itself was more than the music of a city. It was the concentrated music of the entire lower Mississippi valley, Texas and the Gulf Coast. It was a people’s music, predominantly created by the Negro people. After its movement out of New Orleans, jazz became a music of all America, loved and performed by all peoples; a music that could no longer be called characteristic of the life in a single city or locality, or characteristic solely of the Negro people.
Even in the New Orleans period, jazz had become a music of white people as well as Negro. A language of dance, poetry and song with such realistic, evocative power found a response in all who came in contact with it. Even those attached to hidebound ways of music were slowly changed in their musical thinking. The Negro people created such a language because they themselves were meeting the world on the sharpest, most harsh and demanding terms, as the laboring people in the front line of man’s struggle against nature. Their art reflected this struggle; showed the lines it engraved in the human mind and body. It was an art of powerful, realistic human images and concentrated emotional strength.
And this culture entered the mind of the Southern white people, although many would be shocked at the thought of such an influence and debt. This influence had earlier taken place with the spirituals, which drew much of their material from prevalent hymns and mountain tunes, transformed it and gave back a new art to white people. The blues were even more widely influenced by the general body of American folk music, and in turn adopted by the white people.
The influence became overwhelming with jazz. The first jazz band to make a nationwide success was the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, made up of five white musicians. The music they played was their own invention, put together with fine taste. Yet it was a music wholly drawn in material from the Negro contributions. As jazz became increasingly popular, its idiom permeated the rising music industry; thousands of pieces of diluted New Orleans music in the form of blues, torch songs, ragtime songs, one-steps, two-steps and fox-trots were produced. Tin-pan-alley in the 1910’s and ‘20’s was open to genuinely new ideas, unlike the music factory it has become today, part of the Hollywood, radio and phonograph record network. Sons of immigrant families who had brought a love of music with them from Europe to New York eagerly amalgamated this tradition with the wealth of new forms and ideas brought by jazz. The stream of music thus produced had many weaknesses, but also real quality. The beloved American popular music of song and dance is a creation first of the Negro people, and then of Jewish, Irish, Italian and other “minority” peoples. It has become part of the consciousness even of snobs who would shudder at the idea of rubbing elbows with the people who gave them this music.
New Orleans music itself brought about conditions which forced it out of the confines of Southern life. A communal and collectively created music, it produced musicians of such developing powers that they themselves began to seek a home where they could expand their ideas, spread themselves in their music, learn the full art of music, handle all its resources, and get for themselves some of the decencies of life. Because the music had such great appeal to all people, it sought a place where the collaboration between Negro and white musicians, the exchange of ideas, could go on openly and unreservedly, instead of through the subterranean channels available to it in the South.
It was such a role that Chicago, New York and the other cities of the North played in the development of jazz. It was sometimes thought that Chicago had contributed an important new style to jazz, “Chicago Style” as opposed to “New Orleans” style. This theory disappeared with the realization that jazz is a music more than a “style,” and Chicago jazz was mainly a refinement of New Orleans music. Yet Chicago and New York are important names in the history of jazz. In both a great Negro community lived under conditions of comparative freedom. The Negro community in the North was and is segregated; its housing conditions continue the most backward, and its rents the highest. Its people are forced into the lowest paid jobs and are the first to be unemployed. Yet their range of freedom was a good step beyond that of New Orleans, and the struggle for new stages was made possible.
The music reflected both the changed status of the musician and the changed temper of the audience. It showed in new technique, in more massive sound, in the handling of new harmonic materials, in more elaborate, individual contributions. The collaboration in music making between Negro and white musicians became more open, with an increasingly frank acknowledgement of the debt owed by the white American people to the Negro. A new jazz began to take shape.
These steps forward did not settle the problems of jazz. In Chicago, however, it may be said that the battle against jim-crow, and segregation, was taken up consciously and militantly by jazz musicians. It was a forward step for young white musicians in Chicago to listen with admiration to King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Jimmy Noone, Fletcher Henderson’s great aggregation of players; to be proud to sit on the stand with them; to adopt their music, and openly acknowledging their debt.
A new step was the making of records together, in which Eddie Condon pioneered. At first there was no public acknowledgement of the collaboration. What often happened was that the white musicians joined in the making of “race” records, as blues jazz recordings were chauvinistically known. With the rise of small hot jazz recording outfits, such as HRS and Commodore, the names of the players were listed and the collaboration was made public. It was a great further achievement when Benny Goodman added the Negro players, Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton to his band. The practise was taken up by Artie Shaw and Gene Krupa. But the fact that musical organizations should be made up of people whose ability is measured by their musicianship, not their skin color or ancestry, is still not accepted by radio stations, the moving picture industry, most band managements. The Negro musician is still the lowest paid—jim-crowed out of a vast number of jobs he has the abilities to fill. Meanwhile the music he invents and creates draws enormous money returns—mainly for others.
In this new environment a great deal of fresh and exciting music has been produced, along with an even greater amount of unsuccessful, or semi-successful work. It is far from having achieved its full goals. The intricate problems being tackled by jazz musicians today have to be mastered under adverse conditions. It is a herculean task to create as a thinking and creative musician working long, nightclub hours in a liquor-laden atmosphere, suffering more unemployment than employment, doing one-night stands, getting poor pay, being under constant pressure from managers for quick novelties and from publicity agents for sensations. Mozart and Beethoven could not have done much under such conditions.
But music, like history, has a movement which can be checked but not turned backward. It was inevitable that in the change from a folk and a communal music to a highly individual music, qualities should be lost as well as gained. Silly theories have been spun out of the loss, with anguished outcries of “decadence,” “degeneration,” “European influences,” “commercialization”; the latter term being loosely used to characterize not only the music truly commercial, but all jazz music using new musical materials. It is true that modern jazz is lacking in many memorable qualities of New Orleans music; but it is also true that modern jazz has made rich additions to our musical culture. It has provided a musical expression for feelings which could not be encompassed within New Orleans music. The life that produced New Orleans music was now a thing of the past; to repeat this music could only be an academic exercise, adding little to the music we already know. To keep this music alive, to keep performing it, is an important task, for it has too many great qualities to be forgotten. But such performances can be only one part of a living musical culture.
We can find an analogy in the development of nineteenth century music in Europe. Academic scholars complained that the “new” music of Berlioz, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner and Mussorgsky was inferior in form to that of Bach, Handel and Mozart in the previous century. Our present day tastes may confirm this complaint. But attempts to recreate music in the old forms only resulted in the comparatively sweet symphonies and oratorios of Mendelssohn, and Saint-Saens, and much altogether poor music produced in great quantities and quickly forgotten. The new music had to take the path of Schumann, Berlioz and Wagner. And if this music proved to be one-sided, or insufficient to meet all of people’s needs, the remedy lay in going still further forward, not backward; in studying the past, but only to recreate the social qualities of the past on a higher level, including the new discoveries in musical techniques and expression of human emotions. This is the great problem facing composed music today. It is also the problem being worked out in jazz.
Even the music we now know as New Orleans could only have been made known to us by the movement North. We study New Orleans music today largely from the records of Joe Oliver, Ferdinand Morton, Louis Armstrong of the Hot Five and Seven days, Bessie Smith, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. These records were made in and around New York and Chicago. It may be said that this music is a New Orleans music, but a reservation is necessary.
The Negro community for whom Oliver played in Chicago was different from the Negro community in New Orleans. The music that Oliver played was still New Orleans in its march tempo, its rag, blues and stomp content, its collective music making and self-absorption in the music on the part of the players; but it also reflected the new Chicago audience. The opportunity to make records, as well, induced a greater attention to technical detail and formal organization, making the music a rounded out unity with beginning, middle and end.
In Bessie Smith’s records there is, likewise, a new spirit expressed in old materials. Along with the rich folk qualities of her performances, there is a sense of conflict and freedom, an assertion of individual independence, a fine and subtle artistry and musical organization, which bespeaks a comparative freedom of movement and speech on the part of the musician.
The same is true of Morton’s records, which show him to be a fine, individual artist and composer as well as a master of folk materials. His records are still an invaluable source of study of New Orleans music, for it is of New Orleans city life that they speak. They combine the “educated” piano rags and the deep blues, the marches and stomps, the breaks and riffs, the fine individual improvisations in solo and ensemble. He could make his composed pieces sound improvised. He was an arranger who carefully calculated the position of every break, the interweaving of harmonic, chordal passages with free improvisation, the interplay of sweet melodies with blues, the duets between one instrument, notably his own fine piano, and clarinet or guitar, in a performance that sounded like improvisation. The perfection of the best Morton records, like “Jungle Blues,” “Black Bottom Stomp,” “The Pearls,” “The Chant,” “Beale St. Blues,” “Wild Man Blues,” “Blue Blood Blues,” the trio records, is never an accident; nor is it entirely typical except in its material, of the music customarily heard in New Orleans. It is a composed music.
The Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Seven records, made with Johnny Dodds, Edward Ory, Johnny St. Cyr, Lillian Armstrong, and, at times, Baby Dodds, Lonnie Johnson, Pete Briggs and Ed Garland, are New Orleans in style and material. It took a whole people to bring into being a music like “Willie the Weeper,” “Savoy Blues,” “Muskat Ramble,” “Twelfth St. Rag,” “Yes, I’m in the Barrel,” “Potato Head Blues,” “Skid-dat-de-dat,” “Cornet Chop Suey,” “Gully Low Blues,” “Lonesome Blues,” “King of the Zulus,” with their rich evocations of march, of celebration, of bitter humor, of poignant lament and masked protest. But, within the general New Orleans style of perfect collaboration and interchange among the soloists, there is a great expansion of the solo voice. Armstrong and Dodds play solos of a magnitude and scope not found in the Oliver band performances. It is at once New Orleans music and a new creation.
Oliver, Morton, Bessie Smith, advanced on no easy road. Oliver died in poverty. Morton never fulfilled his great creative talents. Bessie Smith was sometimes penniless, and died of jim-crow. She was hurt in an automobile accident near Memphis, and the story has it that either through being refused admittance by one hospital after another, or being left to be treated late, she died from loss of blood.
Louis Armstrong achieved financial success, by using his phenomenal talent to meet, head on, the new conditions of musical life. These were the conditions generally described as commercialism. The term commercialism should not be applied, however, to the desire of the musician to be paid for his work, and paid commensurate with his talents. Neither should it be applied to the desire of the jazz musician to use the prevailing musical language of his period and audience. The step from the amateur or semi-amateur status of most of the New Orleans musicians, to the status of a musician paid for his work and making a profession of it, was a progressive step.
Commercialism should be restricted, as a term, to what is really destructive in culture; the taking over of an art, in this case popular music, by business, and the rise of business to so powerful a force in the making of music that there was no longer a free market for the musicians. Instead of distribution serving the musician, distribution, where the money was invested, became the dominating force, dictating both the form and content of the music. It tended to force the musician into the status of a hired craftsman whose work was not supposed to bear his own individuality, free thought and exploration of the art, but was to be made to order, to a standardized pattern.
The free market that existed when the industry was small had been a benefit to jazz, enabling musicians like W. C. Handy, Clarence Williams, Oliver, Armstrong, Morton and others to break out of the confines of New Orleans life. As the music industry became more monopolized, as radio, sound pictures, and the electric phonograph record made the music producing industry a center of large capital investment, the tendency was to avoid the interplay of artist and audience that makes for active entertainment and great art, and to substitute a pseudo-entertainment depending largely on shallow novelty offered to a passive, undemanding audience. Music was keyed down to the minimum that would be acceptable to everybody, and consequently had little meaning for anybody. Tune producers no longer depended on public approval. Tie-ups were made with singers, bands and song-pluggers, with radio and Hollywood, controlling songs before they were written, and song writers had to turn out the tunes according to specifications as if they were producing frankfurters. Radio and juke-box destroyed the economic base for the small band. The factory-produced popular tunes overwhelmed the blues, rags, and folk song germs with a harmonic idiom taken from nineteenth century concert music.
Armstrong’s going over to the large band and the popular tune has been criticized by some whose predilection for New Orleans music blinds them to hard facts. The most extreme statement of the case is that made by Rudi Blesh, in “Shining Trumpets.” He laments that Armstrong did not integrate his “genius” with the “music, and thus ultimately the destiny, of his race,” thereby failing in his task of filling “the overwhelming and immemorial need of his own race to find a Moses to lead it out of Egypt.” Such statements betray ignorance.
First, “race” itself is an unscientific and meaningless term. The Negro people of America, in ancestry and physiology, are not a race. There is no special and limited “music” of the Negro people. They have a right to know and use all music, making it their own, as they took over whatever music they needed in the past. The Negro people are not waiting for a “Moses” to lead them out of “Egypt.” They are putting up a collective struggle, for the right to live as free human beings on equal terms with anybody else. Lastly, the causes of discrimination and the special exploitation Negroes suffer, are not such as could have been changed by Armstrong playing New Orleans music instead of popular songs with large bands. Certainly his early records are among the most beautiful pieces of music-making in which he ever took part. But had he continued playing “Dippermouth” and “Gully Low” for the rest of his life, with small combinations, it is hard to see how this would have abolished jim-crow, segregation, lynching, or the poll-tax. The end of such a course would probably have been starvation.
Those New Orleans musicians such as Sidney Bechet and Johnny Dodds, who continued to perform small band blues, produced a great deal of beautiful music, although this music did not appreciably change the status of the Negro people in America. It is also true that there are some aspects of Armstrong’s career which one may regret. Occasionally he had to succumb to the pressure exerted upon every member of a minority group, Negro, Jewish, Italian or any other, who rises in the entertainment world, to clown and to mock his own people. This savage form of prejudice, disguised as humor, is none the less powerful because it is never openly expressed. It becomes a matter of unwritten law that the “straight” role in any production be played by someone disguised as an Anglo-Saxon stereotype, while the “comic” is reserved for a member of the minority group. Nor does this comedy have any relation to the great traditions of joyousness and satire in comedy. Some of Armstrong’s records, such as “You Rascal You,” “Shine” and “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” would not be made today, when our resentment of such insults directed against the peoples who together made America, is much sharper.
Armstrong’s career is not one of great and unbroken growth. But progress in musical, as in social life, is made by coping with realities, not ignoring them. He made the best he could out of the conditions he found in the new entertainment world. He played with large bands such as Fletcher Henderson’s, and then organized his own. He performed the general run of sweetened blues and popular songs. A master virtuoso on his instrument, a restless mind in search of new musical ideas, a creative musician always seeking to make music a fresh and personal experience, he stood this material on its head.
It was inevitable that the style should change, and the point of concentration should fall upon the solo instrument and the solo chorus. It may seem to be a contradiction, but it is almost inevitable that, as more instruments are added to a group, the music must become increasingly individual; based either on the solo instrument and solo chorus, or, as in the case of bands such as Ellington’s, on the arranger and composer. We can see this change take place even in the small-band records that Armstrong made after he had been playing with large bands. Records such as “Basin St. Blues,” “West End Blues,” “Tight Like This,” “Knocking a Jug,” are no longer an ensemble music, although Earl Hines plays on the first three and an array of fine performers, including Jack Teagarden, play on the fourth. Sweet chords are very much in evidence, although the material is still basically the blues. The greatness of these records lies in the series of Armstrong choruses that end them. These are magnificent integrated and climactic musical constructions, the trumpet piling phrase upon phrase, adorning its melodic line with its own broken chords, rising to a compelling climax and resolution. A new kind of jazz emerges, and a new Armstrong, who can be called, even though he still improvises, a full-fledged composer of music.
It is at this point that we can say that things might have been different and better. Had a genuine, musical culture existed in America, one capable of cherishing its talents and giving them a chance to properly learn and grow, instead of destroying them, Armstrong might have been encouraged to produce a great American music. There was no such opportunity, however; instead, the continual pressure to produce novelties, to plug new songs, or the same songs under new names. That Armstrong had the powers to produce a much greater music than he actually did is true. This however is different from saying that the musical “genius” of a people requires them to be limited to a folk culture and folk status; a culture, furthermore, that the conditions of life themselves had done away with.
As a sign of the change brought by the new form, the records of this period that attempt to preserve the old collective methods are comparatively weaker. A form in which one performer after another takes a solo chorus is weak to start with. Records like “Save it Pretty Mama,” “Squeeze Me,” “No One Else But You,” are poor in allover impact, although Armstrong’s solos are little gems, and Hines does most inventive and pleasing work.
The great problem of the new jazz was a new musical form; a replacement for the form of New Orleans music which had been the creation of the community. Now the creation of form came from the individual. Armstrong, fronting a large band, recorded some magnificent pieces of single-handed musical construction. “Mahogany Hall Stomp” and “St. Louis Blues” (in the first versions made for Okeh), are such works. In both he builds up a stunning series of choruses, made up of riff figures within the harmonies set by the band, changing the riff with each chorus, simplifying it down to a single, long-drawn note and then expanding it into two and three note figures. Armstrong also created a kind of three-part form to deal with the popular tune. He begins with a solo chorus in which he plays close to the tune, but with a hot intonation and delayed attack that begins to give the tune a greater distinction than its composer had dreamed of. Then he sings a chorus, in which the song is kidded in both words and music, satirized and shown up for the nonsense it generally is. Last, the tune is transformed completely into a lyrical trumpet improvisation. The most famous example is “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” Other fine examples are “Stardust,” “The Peanut Vendor,” “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams,” “That’s My Home,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” Then there are some records in which Louis gives his trumpet virtuosity and sense of humor a wild ride, as “Tiger Rag” and “Dinah,” throwing in snatches of blues, other popular tunes, marches and opera; such performances hint at the coming bebop.
Such performances are no “decadence” but a genuine musical triumph, an addition to permanent American musical literature. Yet they rise as music out of a fierce struggle, between the performer and his material, a struggle to give the material a distinction it lacks in the original. This is the opposite situation to that of New Orleans music, where the material lent itself so easily to improvisation and musical construction. The struggle shows itself in the music. Even at its best, it is not relaxed, as the best of New Orleans is. The strain on the performer is a heavy one, precisely because he is working against his material. When to this strain is added the constant drive for novelty, made necessary by the position of a successful entertainer in the big-time musical world; the lack of time for the serious musical thinking which this new material and its problems require; the insecurity of a bandsman’s career, and the unwholesome conditions surrounding the jazz performer’s life; the night clubs, long hours, liquor and narcotics that became occupational diseases of jazz; the demands of agents and managers for repetition of successful mannerisms; it is obvious that the strain must soon become overpowering.
Armstrong was always, as he is today, a master of the instrument. There is hardly an Armstrong performance without some touch of musical distinction and interest. But solos inevitably begin to sound much like previous ones, the tunes they are based on being in themselves so poor and uninspiring. The performer begins to lead a double musical life, and it is especially the least creative that is put on records. Armstrong might have become a much greater musician than he now is. The fault however lies with the entertainment world in which he had to operate one in which there was no living response between the artist and his audience, little real entertainment, little chance to grow.
Entertainment is a word with many meanings. In its truest sense, it means great art. The greatest art is the most entertaining. It gives an audience the unforgettable excitement of unfolding a new idea and experience, a fresh revelation of a human personality. Such entertainment is possible, however, only when an audience, itself, knows something of creation, or is willing to use its mind, to think, to enter into active collaboration with the artist. Commercially created entertainment, in its monopoly stage, is something quite different. It is the product of a factory system which saps the people of their creative powers, deprives them of their opportunity to produce a cultural life of their own. It offers them a “bought” entertainment, which they are to absorb passively. That this entertainment is never entertaining is seen in the frantic search of its producers, radio, moving picture or music publishing, for “novelty,” combined with a fear and hatred of the true novelty of honest art production. Fresh creative figures who makes their way into this entertainment world are not encouraged to grow, but rather to be “typed,” to repeat themselves. Such demands make growth itself a struggle against overwhelming obstacles.
Armstrong’s music represents not a passive acceptance of this world of superficial entertainment, but a struggle against the conditions it imposed, an attack upon its material. He did not consciously plan his music as such an attack, but being a musician of taste and independence, he transformed everything he played. He did not take over a ready-made commercial style, but created a new style of performing popular tunes. His kidding vocals became taken up by many other singers, some of them not knowing why they were doing what they did, but only feeling that the audience responded better to a less cloying sentiment. He explored the full powers of the trumpet, so that players like Henry Allen, Roy Eldridge, Joe Guy, John Gillespie, Howard McGhee may be said to have walked in his tracks, technically.
He built up a new kind of solo, using the popular tune as a bass line and creating a new counter melody, bolstered by broken chords. This style had a powerful effect not only upon trumpet performance but upon other instruments as well. Higginbotham adapted similar ideas to the trombone, Hines to the piano. It is wrong to speak glibly of direct “influences,” since it is possible for different musicians to work out the same ideas independently. But Armstrong’s solo work parallels much of modern saxophone ‘solo style. His chords did not move into the harmonic extremes of bebop, but the method he used was basic to bebop and modern jazz. His work underlined and carried to a high level of solution the major new problem that faced the creative jazz musician from the late twenties onward; that of making good music out of the popular ballad and diatonic, major-minor harmonic system.
Many other jazzmen of great talent coped with this problem; Thomas “Fats” Waller, James P. Johnson, Frank Newton, Earl Hines, Jimmie Noone; all of them men with a complete grounding in blues and rag music, and with great technical and inventive powers. Waller was the most prolific recorder among them and the consistently high level of his work is remarkable. As a pianist he was not as brilliant in his suspended rhythms and right hand figurations as Hines. I doubt whether any of his solo piano performances will live as the best of Hines’ will. He had a powerful, left hand however, capable of providing, in itself, the full rhythm needed by a small band. With an engaging melodic invention as well, he managed to give all of his performances a richly personal flavor. As Armstrong did, but even more boisterously, he kidded the songs that came his way, and made up his own witty pieces of word and music. And, although his records have many fine solos and instrumental spots contributed by his band members, his personality dominates. The material he works with being what it is, the personality has to rise in spite of and in struggle against it. The result is that, while the Waller records are a joy to hear, and the music-making is on a consistently high level, it is hard to choose some above others, or select any that are really impressive and lasting contributions to American music, as the finest of jazz is. The best that can be said is that they entertain without insult to the intelligence, and loom up high above the common run of commercial musical tripe.
A great mass of hot jazz falls into a narrow, light-entertainment category, making an authoritative selection of better or lasting works almost impossible. The line between good music and bad becomes difficult to trace. The commercial music begins to take on qualities of hot jazz, and even includes performers of great talent. The hot music begins to take on something of the character of the commercial, due to the conditions under which it has to work, the language it must use, the weak forms and passive audiences. A great mass of jazz music is partly good, partly bad. Clichés which sound hot are mixed with passages of genuine hot invention. And this situation is found not only in the large “swing” bands but in the new small groups that take shape for recording or nightclub performances.
This situation was not wholly bad. If hot jazz was apparently merging with much of what was loosely termed “commercial,” the level of commercial music was immeasurably raised. Due to the irrepressible efforts of jazz players, most of them Negro, they made a creative music out of popular song idiom, the great American public was hearing a music more interesting and distinctive in instrumental texture, cleaner in melodic profile; a music of stimulation and surprises that began to teach audiences how to listen to music. And some of the groups that played it, both large bands like Lunceford’s and Berigan’s, and small groups like those formed about Teddy Wilson, Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, Art Tatum, John Kirby, “Red” Norvo, Lionel Hampton, were a kind of experimental laboratory of the new hot jazz. The results of this experimentation may be seen in the jazz taking shape today.
Roughly parallel to the time when Armstrong was wrestling with the solo style and the popular tune, the same problem was being tackled by Leon “Bix” Beiderbecke. Bix did not get his trumpet or cornet style out of thin air. He studied Oliver, Armstrong, Joe Smith, Bessie Smith, Nick La Rocca of the Original Dixieland Five and Paul Mares of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, both from records and in live performances. But his solo choruses on popular songs are most individual and personal creations. His solution, like that of Armstrong, shows that the next step for creative jazz, because of the conditions under which it now operated, had to be the greater emergence of the individual.
This is not to say that Bix was an individualist. Nobody in jazz history had more of a belief than he in collective and group creation. In fact, listening to the small-band Dixieland or semi-Dixieland records he made, we may regret the fact that Bix was so self-effacing. There is more Bix music on records than is actually played by him, and it is generally his music that we are hearing in the melodic figurations and breaks of a Miff Mole, Bill Rank, Don Murray, Frankie Trumbauer, Lennie Hayton and others who played with him. Bix played one of the most perfect, stimulating, Dixieland style, melodic leads. Even in his performances on popular songs, Bix will often end a record with a drive to give the entire ensemble a lift, as in “Sorry,” “Singing the Blues,” “Thou Swell,” “Royal Garden Blues,” “Louisiana,” “Old Man River.” It is only with such large groups as Paul Whiteman’s that influencing the entire performance becomes impossible, and Bix handles only his own solo chorus or half chorus.
The individual sound of Bix’s music has given rise to arguments as to whether he played “real” jazz. Such discussions must always be fruitless, because they attempt to cut a living art down to a mechanical formula. What formula can define “real” jazz? If jazz is “pure blues,” then the music that Bunk Johnson and Kid Rena play on their records is often not “real jazz.” If jazz is to adhere strictly to what Bunk Johnson, Kid Rena and Joe Oliver do, then the later Armstrong, Lester Young, Ellington are not jazz performers. But theirs is a music that grew out of jazz, and resembles exactly no other music heard or written. Jazz can be defined, but only in terms of a flexible, growing art, which changes as the conditions under which it is performed change, and because thinking individuals arise who, responding to new needs, add something new to something old. The “something new” is to be judged not by whether it is simply new or old, but by whether it is a genuine addition to the music, an addition to its human content, technique and expressive breadth. When it is such an addition, it is “real jazz,” precisely because it is different, and because experiment and change are in the essence of jazz.
Beiderbecke, as an individual creative mind, has about the same relationship to the Original Dixieland Five music, out of which he grew, as Armstrong has to New Orleans music and Teschemacher to the Chicago version of Dixieland. And he stands for a most important historical step in jazz; the emergence of a creative, white man’s jazz. This is not to say that jazz was thereby improved, or in any respect “taken away” from the Negro people. It is rather a testimony to the power of jazz music, and the great debt that Americans of all national origins owe to their Negro fellow citizens. Music is both a universal and national language. It takes on many national differences, which in turn develop and grow by learning from one another. And so it is one of the great achievements of jazz that it gave so many people, other than the Negro musicians, a chance to develop as musical creators. From Chicago days onward, the Negro musicians have learned a great deal from white musicians, as they have learned by beginning to assimilate the world body of composed music. The main influence, of course, is still in the other direction. The leaders in jazz progress have been mainly the Negro musicians, and the white musicians have learned far more than they have taught. Yet this give and take is a healthy approach to the national musical question in America; an approach that has yet to be made in other aspects of our lives.
Bix was hampered as a jazz musician, as many of the Chicago players were, by not knowing the blues as a living, flexible language. What he knew of the blues was generally taken from records, and some live performances. Thus many effects in his music, like those in later Chicago performances, the jumpy rhythmic pattern and off-beat flare-ups, are mannerisms, their reason for being not seen in the music itself. And yet his place is in the continuity of jazz and the blues. The rhythmic patterns of his solos are those of rag music, with their delayed attack, off-beat accents, slow phrases and sustained notes against a fast-moving beat. His breaks are beautiful and blue, concentrated sometimes down to a single “surprise” note, taking off from the preceding chord. He uses the blue note, although the off-pitch feeling is achieved almost imperceptibly, by delicate tonal shading. His solos derive from the blues style, often hitting an interval of a fourth when the ear expects a third, delighting the ear with its strangeness and rightness, accenting the surprise note as if to hint at a temporary transition to a distant key.
His language is not of the deep blues, as the Negro people of the South sang them. He brought to jazz music a partly fresh language of his own. “Davenport Blues” (his record of which is not particularly good), is an example of his melodic invention; a tender lyricism just skirting the edge of sentimentality. One misses the anger, bitterness, lament and proclamation of independence of the basic blues, but his feeling is still genuine, very much like the mid-West folk song that may also be heard in jazz through some of the Kansas City and Ellington blues.
Bix made many records but is not well represented on them. We get an idea of his powers by piecing sections of them together, and imagining the music multiplied. But there is still much fine music on them. His performances of Dixieland compositions, such as “Clarinet Marmalade” and “At the Jazz Band Ball” are among the most beautiful in existence, although the tailgate trombone is absent, as is a first-class clarinet line. His solos on popular tunes are almost wholly on the “chorus,” as in the new manner. The live verse-chorus relationship, a product of the rags which gave New Orleans music so many interesting structural possibilities, has disappeared, as it disappeared in the tin-pan-alley songs originally inspired by rags. But these solos are beautiful pieces of original, creative music, tearing up the old melody to create out of its fragments a music of infinitely greater distinction. These solos, like those on “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,” “I’m Coming Virginia,” “Singing the Blues,” “Crying all Day,” are full of strange touches and mix tender with strong, soft with staccato timbres. They are compact and rounded-out musical designs.
Bix’s piano writing is a further stage of his development, outlining another path that has become important to jazz. Handling the popular tunes meant handling the diatonic major-minor chords and key relationships implicit in them. These could not be ignored, and so, to give his music freshness, the musician began playing about with the chords themselves, expending them into sevenths and ninths, adding chromatic notes, raising or lowering the tones of traditional “sweet” chords, with the eventual result that the popular tunes themselves vanished from the scene, the musician creating an original music out of their harmonic idiom. The blues re-enter, although greatly transformed. This is the character of “In a Mist” and some of the other Bix piano fragments. It hints at the piano playing of Theolonius Monk, Errol Garner, and in fact much of bebop.
A charge frequently made about this music is that it derives from Debussy, or other “European borrowings.” Similar charges have been aimed at Ellington. This is another example of narrow and illogical thinking. The easiest kind of criticism is to find resemblances and transform them into “influences.” Actually there are plenty of “Europeanisms” even in New Orleans music. There is no musical purity. If some hot jazz seems to resemble Debussy, it is because jazzmen were dealing with the same musical problems with which Debussy was dealing, and arrived at similar conclusions. Debussy, breaking away from strict diatonic music, trying to introduce exotic and folk scales into his textures, evolved fresh harmonic practises and fresh uses of instrumental timbre. If jazz, in its own development and its own language, begins to parallel the musical invention of a genius like Debussy, that is a great compliment to jazz and testimony to its musical vitality. The music, for all its real or fancied resemblance, is based on a language that is unique to jazz.
Bix was another example of a musician who may have had the genius to become a fine composer. He died of the occupational disease of the jazz entertainment world, the unsettled life, unhealthy hours, almost irrepressible need for stimulants; stimulants used not for musical needs, as some loose thinking puts it, but to make up temporarily for other lacks in a jazz performer’s life. Stimulants, when they actually affect the music, always hurt it. Bix’s music, however fragmentary, outlines as Armstrong does in a fuller way many of the problems raised by jazz from its Chicago days to the present.
The new music created by Louis and then Bix gives us a perspective from which to view the achievements and limitations of the “Chicago Style” musicians. A group of young players, gathering about the nucleus of the “Austin High School Boys,” they studied the great jazz being played in Chicago by the New Orleans bands and worked out, collectively, a jazz of their own based on these models. This “Chicago” jazz is not, as was once thought, in any way comparable to New Orleans, for it did not produce a new music of its own. It was, however, an important step forward in jazz. It produced some remarkable and sensitive craftsmen of jazz, who made almost an analytic science of their art; the trumpet of Jimmy McPartland, Bobby Hackett, Max Kaminsky, “Wild” Bill Davison and Billy Butterfield, the clarinet of Rod Cless, “Mezz” Mezzrow, and Benny Goodman; the piano of Joe Sullivan and Jess Stacy; the drums of Dave Tough and George Wettling; the valve trombone of Brad Gowans, the guitar of Eddie Condon and Carmen Mastren, the tenor sax of Bud Freeman, the string bass of Jim Lannigan, Artie Shapiro, and Artie Bernstein. Although it tended towards a precise, “on the beat” and harmonically sweet jazz, it also produced some who offered a “gutty,” rough-timbred, succinct and deeply felt jazz based on a genuine feeling for blues line and timbre; the trumpet of Francis “Muggsy” Spanier, the clarinet of Frank Teschemacher and “Pee Wee” Russell, the trombone of Floyd O’Brien, the piano of Art Hodes.
We have to look at this “Chicago” jazz not as one thing but many. First, it was a focal point of jazz history, representing the open meeting between Negro musicians and white musicians eager to learn. Out of this meeting came a couple of experimental offshoots towards new jazz, notably those of Teschemacher and Goodman. And out of this meeting came the development of what may be called a jazz scholarship, an almost scientific preservation of New Orleans and Dixieland qualities which the general forward movement of jazz had seemed to leave high and dry.
This monastic devotion to “pure” jazz gave rise to a cultist atmosphere among jazz followers which did little good to jazz and much harm. Musicians however, are not to be blamed for their disciples, critics and self-appointed theorizers. It was something admirable for a group of players to rise who played a jazz so consistently musical, clean-cut and self-effacing, and gained adherents for hot as against commercial jazz.
These players also made progress, although in a specialized way. Except for Tesch they explored no new paths and created no new music of jazz. They saw great and important new developments arrive without taking part or showing much interest. But they moved towards a gradual recovery of forgotten qualities of the past. At first the music they played, after Teschemacher’s death, tended to be excessively sweet. The solos and ensemble improvisations were bound within a handful of simple chords. They had the erroneous idea that the “Dixieland” style could be applied to any popular tunes, such as Gershwin’s, by the simple expedient of ignoring the tune and improvising Dixieland solos over its chords; a practise which resulted in a still more saccharine music. They did not see that the handling of the pop tune really required, for musical value, the groundbreaking and imaginative approach of an Armstrong, Beiderbecke and Teschemacher. They did not even understand Dixieland, or New Orleans music; its interplay of solo and full band, its quality that I have described as “duet” or “concerto” style, its antiphonal and blues character. An example of the misreading of Dixieland music, although within its own limits it has some good spots, is Jimmy McPartland’s performance of “Eccentric.” A comparison to Spanier’s masterly performance, with Cless and Brunis, is a lesson in true Dixieland style.
They learned, however. Joe Sullivan embarked on a broadening study of blues and rag piano, and evolved a brilliant, concentrated solo chorus style of real distinction. Kaminsky increased his expressive range so that, in latter years, he has been playing an outstandingly vibrant and powerful trumpet. Jack Teagarden’s effortless outpouring of liquid blues melody was a great accession. Miff Mole plays today a much more blue and expressive trombone than in his Red Nichols recordings. The reappearance of Spanier after a spell of illness, with a band including Cless on clarinet and Brunis’ genuine blues and tailgate trombone, during the late thirties, was a revelation of the true character of Dixieland music. Brunis, of course, was a New Orleans native and had been a member of the famous New Orleans Rhythm Kings, with Paul Mares and Leon Rappolo.
The change in style can be traced by comparing the first batch of records made by Condon’s “Summa Cum Laude” band for Decca and Commodore, mostly a dull music, to the more recent, remarkable series on Commodore, built around Davison and Brunis, with Condon, Russell and Wettling of the old group. This is not mentioned to decry the talents of the older group, but to point up the general, all around improvement in understanding of the music. Another fine series was recorded by Blue Note with Art Hodes, Cless and Kaminsky, including some beautiful slow blues. A great advance was made in bringing Negro and white musicians together for performance. There has, as yet, not been a permanent group of Negro and white, however, the collaboration taking place in jam sessions and recording groups. This provided a more imaginative, humorous and poignant music. HRS made a notable series of records with “Pee Wee” Russell, Max Kaminsky, Zutty Singleton, Dickie Wells and James P. Johnson, and another fine series featuring Sidney Bechet, Muggsy Spanier, Carmen Mastren on guitar and Wellman Braud on bass. Kaminsky, Bechet and Vic Dickenson produced some remarkable performances together. Edmond Hall, Cecil Scott and Albert Nicholas on clarinet, Sid Catlett on drums, were notable additions to many “Chicago,” or what are now more properly described as “Dixieland” performances. Mezzrow and Bechet made a worthwhile series of records together.
“Chicago-Dixieland” music lacks the firm base in a broad audience, the excitement of fresh emotional experiences, that other modern jazz has attained. It is a music produced mostly for record collectors, and heard in a few night clubs, such as Nick’s in New York, which have made a specialty of Chicago-style small bands. Yet it has a basis for life in the fact that the “new” jazz, for all its exciting advances, tends to be one-sided. It gained depth of emotional expression, a fine probing of subtle and personal moods, a biting irony, a breathtaking brilliance and surprise, but lost in relaxation, in breadth and solidity of form. This is not a commentary on the musicians who produced the music, but on the society which forced new creation to take place within such personal terms; which forced jazz, by the very pressures put upon it, into numerous, semi-private specializations. The harm comes when the problem is not seen correctly, and each path is advanced as the “whole” of jazz, or of the musical art. Chicago-Dixieland jazz offers nothing new, but preserves qualities of a past music that deserve to be remembered and cherished. It points the way to a time when our musical life will again provide, on a much broader scale than existed in New Orleans, opportunities for jazz to enter into people’s lives; to take on broad and solid forms, with all the new richness of emotional expression modern jazz has made possible.
Teschemacher was the most original musical thinker produced by the Chicago group. Like Bix, he played a self-effacing, small-band, collective jazz, but made his great contribution as an individual personality, which impressed itself upon all the groups with which he worked. He rarely played a slow blues. Yet, as in the case of Bix, his style would have been impossible without New Orleans music and the blues. His clarinet timbre was reedy, with a deliberate avoidance of vibrato or any hint of sweetness. He developed the “blue” note into a solo and ensemble style, leaning heavily upon off-pitch notes. These are not handled in the tantalizing New Orleans manner of sliding on and off the pitch, or worrying a single note, but are struck solidly. In the ensembles he does not spin a line of decorative figures over a trumpet lead but, instead, strikes a blue note on the beat to give each chord a blue feeling, or else spins a series of short, staccato phrases which give a feeling of being in another key from the melodic lead. His solo melodic line wanders into strange keys without preparing the listener’s ear. Instead they tantalize the ear with a feeling of being harmonically lost, but always return “home” in a satisfying way. These solos, entirely different from those of Bix in their brilliant and sardonic quality, are like Bix’s tight, original, finely-constructed, musical organisms, built up to a fine climax in which he provides his own driving percussive lead and answering phrases.
There is an unrelaxed quality to Teschemacher’s performances, and an unsatisfying all-over form. This is not due to any musical failure on his part, but rather to the fact that the other players were not thinking along his lines. The task he was coping with, like Beiderbecke and Armstrong, was that of making a creative music out of the popular tune, and his solos were triumphant strides in this direction, negating the over-sweetness of the pop tune with his soaring into the harmonic stratosphere.
Some commentators “explain” Tesch by claiming that he was simply a bad clarinet player, and couldn’t play in tune. This is as foolish as the claim that Cezanne painted the way he did because he was near-sighted. Tesch used off-pitch notes as some modern composers use quarter-tones, to give the melodic line itself a plangent, strange and insecure quality. His solos, such as those on “There’ll Be Some Changes Made,” “Shim-me-sha-wobble,” “Nobody’s Sweetheart,” “I Found a New Baby,” “Oh Baby” (the latter employing alto sax and suffering from bad drumming), “Wailing Blues”; his surprise entrances and brilliant ensembles such as those in “China Boy”; all are the product of a calculating musical intelligence.
Much of the falling-off in admiration for Tesch was due to the unfruitful influence he had on others. This came about, however, only because, after his death, “Chicago Style” was built around his work without understanding it. Tunes like “Nobody’s Sweetheart,” “Changes,” “China Boy,” were played as “Chicago” classics simply because Tesch had used them. Without his creative thinking the clarinet style modelled after Tesch produced neither good Dixieland nor good popular tune music. The blues were avoided because Tesch never seemed to use them directly. Solos became predominantly “on the beat” because that had been part of Tesch style. And so it was a great improvement for small Chicago-style outfits to rediscover the blues and real Dixieland, with the entrance of men like Hodes and Teagarden. We can see in the clarinet work of Cless and Russell a gradual return to Dixieland line. It was actually not towards a clarinet style but towards a tenor sax style that Teschemacher’s work pointed. Bud Freeman, of all the Chicago boys, kept closest to the Tesch tradition, although he never produced as original a music. “Wailing Blues” and “Barrelhouse Stomp” show the Tesch influence, both on Bud and on the roughness of Wingy Mannone’s fine trumpet. There is a close parallel between Tesch’s work, as in “Shim-me-sha-wobble,” and Coleman Hawkins’ as in “Hello, Lola,” and many solos in the Fletcher Henderson band. It is this writer’s belief that, had Tesch and Bix both lived and continued to advance, they would have been playing music much like bebop. This is of course sheer speculation. The fact remains however that Tesch’s music, although small in quantity and formal structure, is one of the contributions of jazz to permanent music.
Fletcher Henderson arrived at a musical compromise, similar to that of the Chicago groups, but from an opposite direction. Where the Chicago groups remained loyal to the small band, Henderson built a large-band style. Where the Chicago groups tended to minimize the actual musical content of Dixieland and New Orleans jazz, Henderson built up a repertory of rags, blues and stomps. His music remained, however, like that of the Chicago boys, weak in all-over form. It rested for its chief interest on the solos. Henderson, in his arrangements for large band, encountered a fundamental law that one change in any element of a musical texture, whether melody, harmony or instrumental timbre, requires a change in all. If a piano work or song is orchestrated, the music sounds worse rather than better, unless the orchestrator is daring enough to reconstruct the entire work in terms of the new musical sound, which makes the work almost a new composition. If a folk song is harmonized, something of its melodic character is lost, unless the musician really recreates the song into something new and fresh. If work for a single piano is played by two, four or six pianos, the resulting music is less rather than more effective.
Similarly, when we hear a blues line in Henderson’s music played by two or three trumpets in unison instead of one, or by four reeds in harmony, the spontaneity is lost and nothing of importance, musically, is gained. The perfect economy of sound that makes the great New Orleans performance so complete and exciting a music in every detail is missing. Much of the character of the blues is lost. The two-line, antiphonal music dwindles down to one melodic line, often over-controlled and sweetened by the accompanying harmonies. The solos, even though, individually, each one is very fine, do not vary enough from one another and tend to neutralize each other’s effect. The gathering monotony of a series of solos is intensified by the unchanging rhythmic pattern. The final climactic ensemble and ride-out is replaced by the band stating the theme in unison, or by a drivingly repeated riff.
High quality remains. Henderson did not choose the big band in order to impress anybody, nor did he in any way “commercialize” jazz music, a term sometimes loosely thrown about as if it were a crime for a musician to seek a fair return for his work. Henderson built a large band because such a band fitted the musical needs of the times. In his band he gave a host of fine musicians a chance to continue to play, to explore their instruments and the art of music, to make a living as musicians. His changing roster included such sterling instrumentalists as Tommy Ladnier, Joe Smith, Rex Stewart, Bobby Stark, Coleman Hawkins, Buster Bailey, Charley Green, Jimmy Harrisson, J. C. Higginbotham, Claude Jones, Dickie Wells, Keg Johnson, Roy Eldridge, Henry Allen, Leon “Chu” Berry, John Kirby. Many of them are playing a beautiful, small-band jazz today, as are other “graduates” of Basie, Lunceford and Luis Russell. And Henderson began as well to explore the exciting new possibilities of the large band as a collective musical instrument.
He had a powerful influence on jazz, and for good. He brought the blues, rags and stomps, even in less than perfect form, to the attention of a public that had never heard this music before. He influenced the creation of large swing bands, such as Benny Goodman’s, Bunny Berigan’s, Tommy Dorsey’s, Harry James’, Charlie Barnett’s and Woody Herman’s, which also often played a blues and stomp music. The music of none of these makes a new contribution and has real permanence. But it is often forgotten, in criticizing the swing bands, that the public which listened to them would otherwise have been listening to Whiteman, Grofé, Kostelanetz and Kyser. The better swing bands introduced a new public to a music honestly orchestral, compelling in its sound, based on living folk material. “King Porter Stomp,” “Sugar-foot Stomp,” “One O’Clock Jump,” “In the Mood,” “Tuxedo Junction,” were a far better music than the pretentions, imitation-symphony pastry offered by the general run of large dance bands, although they are not impressive to those who know the far better music from which they derive. Goodman’s success sent a new host of listeners off to explore jazz. And he played a Henderson music, just as he, and the other bands, began also to play a Basie, Ellington, and even, in Berigan’s case, an Armstrong and Bix music.
There is, furthermore, some very fine and original music on the Henderson records, although it is a music of fragments, of one or two startling solos in a performance. His great early groups lost their impact on recording because the old acoustic records couldn’t begin to transmit the power of a twelve or fifteen piece band. A performance by a Henderson band, in “the flesh,” was a far more thrilling experience than the records suggest. Yet, on the records, there are remarkable passages to be heard from Ladnier, Smith, Harrisson, Green, Stewart, and always Hawkins’ rolling tenor sax, with its brilliant rhythmic patterns and contrast of long-drawn and staccato phrases.
The large band gave the Negro musician a new collective instrument to handle, with new riches of instrumental color, and dynamic contrasts. It provided the possibility for a new level of emotional expression, suited to the needs of a community that was living and thinking differently from that of New Orleans.
The large band, like the popular tune, brought to the musician a host of new problems; problems of chord sequences, of melody, of instrumental timbre and its relation to harmony, of musical form, of uniting on a higher level the individual contribution with the entire group. These problems had to be slowly and painfully worked out. For this reason Henderson’s music may be called a transitional music. It is in Ellington’s work that we can begin to see these problems solved.