The History of Jazz
The History of Jazz
SECOND EDITION
Ted Gioia
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Copyright © 2011 by Ted Gioia
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gioia, Ted.
The history of jazz / Ted Gioia. — 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-539970-7
1. Jazz—History and criticism. I. Title.
ML3506.G54 2011
781.6509—dc22 2010023182
All photographs in this book are courtesy of The Frank Driggs Collection.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
for my wife, Tara
Contents
1. The Prehistory of Jazz
2. New Orleans Jazz
3. The Jazz Age
4. Harlem
5. The Swing Era
6. Modern Jazz
7. The Fragmentation of Jazz Styles
8. Freedom and Fusion
9. Traditionalists and Postmodernists
10. Jazz in the New Millennium
The History of Jazz
1 The Prehistory of Jazz
An elderly black man sits astride a large cylindrical drum. Using his fingers and the edge of his hand, he jabs repeatedly at the drumhead—which is around a foot in diameter and probably made from an animal skin—evoking a throbbing pulsation with rapid, sharp strokes. A second drummer, holding his instrument between his knees, joins in, playing with the same staccato attack. A third black man, seated on the ground, plucks at a stringed instrument, the body of which is roughly fashioned from a calabash. Another calabash has been made into a drum, and a woman beats at it with two short sticks. One voice, then other voices join in. A dance of seeming contradictions accompanies this musical give-and-take, a moving hieroglyph that appears, on the one hand, informal and spontaneous yet, on closer inspection, ritualized and precise. It is a dance of massive proportions. A dense crowd of dark bodies forms into circular groups—perhaps five or six hundred individuals moving in time to the pulsations of the music, some swaying gently, others aggressively stomping their feet. A number of women in the group begin chanting.
The scene could be Africa. In fact, it is nineteenth-century New Orleans. Scattered firsthand accounts provide us with tantalizing details of the slave dances that took place in the open area then known as Congo Square—today Louis Armstrong Park stands on roughly the same ground—and there are perhaps no more intriguing documents in the history of African American music. Benjamin Latrobe, the noted architect, witnessed one of these collective dances on February 21, 1819, and not only left us a vivid written account of the event but made several sketches of the instruments used. These drawings confirm that the musicians of Congo Square, circa 1819, were playing percussion and stringed instruments virtually identical to those characteristic of indigenous African music.
Later documents add to our knowledge of the public slave dances in New Orleans but still leave us with many open questions—some of which, in time, historical research may be able to elucidate, while others might never be answered. One thing, however, is clear. Although we are inclined these days to view the intersection of black and white musical currents as a theoretical, almost symbolic issue, these storied accounts of the Congo Square dances provide us with a real time and place, an actual transfer of totally African ritual to the native soil of the New World. “Congo Square may have looked like it was nothing but a party,” music historian Ned Sublette has written, “but to play a hand drum in 1819 in the United States, where overt manifestations of Africanness had elsewhere been so thoroughly, deliberately erased, was a tremendous act of will, memory and resistance.”
1
The dances in Congo Square were a nexus where opposites collided. The ingrained Western division between performer and audience was eradicated—a distinction so fundamental to us, but of such little importance in traditional African cultures. The separation of song from dance, also pervasive among Western thinkers who deal with the arts, was equally nullified, replaced with a more intrinsically African congruence of sound and movement. These gatherings, a mixture of the ceremonial and social, further broke down barriers between secular and spiritual impulses—a firsthand account from 1808 even uses the word
worship
to describe them.
The dances themselves, marked by clusters of individuals moving in a circular pattern—the largest less than ten feet in diameter—harken back to one of the most pervasive ritual ceremonies of Africa. This rotating, counterclockwise movement has been noted by ethnographers under many guises in various parts of the continent. In the Americas, the dance became known as the ring shout, a ritual that, in the words of scholar Sterling Stuckey, served as “the main context in which Africans recognized values common to them.”
2
The appearance of this African carryover in New Orleans is only one of many documented instances in the New World. This tradition persisted well into the twentieth century: John and Alan Lomax recorded a ring shout in Louisiana for the Library of Congress in 1934 and attended others in Texas, Georgia, and the Bahamas. As late as the 1950s, jazz scholar Marshall Stearns witnessed unmistakable examples of the ring shout in South Carolina.
The Congo Square dances were hardly so long-lived. Traditional accounts indicate that they continued, except for an interruption during the Civil War, until around 1885. Such a chronology implies that their disappearance almost coincided with the emergence of the first jazz bands in New Orleans. More recent research argues convincingly for an earlier cutoff date for the practice, probably before 1870, although the dances may have continued for some time in private settings.
3
But even after the public gatherings came to halt, the tradition of the ring shout lived on in many ways. Samuel Floyd has gone so far as to contend that the ring later “straightened itself to become the Second Line of jazz funerals.” Here, he writes, “the movements of the participants were identical to those of the participants in the ring—even to the point of individual counterclockwise movements by Second Line participants.” Only the ring itself was missing, since the participants had a set destination, and needed to direct their movements back to town from the cemetery.
4
Above all, this transplanted African ritual loomed large in the collective memory and oral history of the city’s black community, even among those too young to have participated in it. These memories shaped, in turn, the jazz performers’ self-image, their sense of what it meant to be an African American musician. “My grandfather, that’s about the furthest I can remember back,” wrote the renowned New Orleans reed player Sidney Bechet in his autobiography,
Treat It Gentle
. “Sundays when the slaves would meet— that was their free day—he beat out rhythms on the drums at the square—Congo Square they called it. … He was a musician. No one had to explain notes or feeling or rhythm to him. It was all there inside him, something he was always sure of.”
5
Within eyesight of Congo Square, Buddy Bolden—who legend and scattered first-person accounts credit as the earliest jazz musician—performed with his pioneering band at Globe Hall. The geographical proximity is misleading. The cultural gap between these two types of music is dauntingly wide. By the time Bolden and Bechet began playing jazz, the Americanization of African music had already begun, and with it came the Africanization of American music—a synergistic process that we will study repeatedly and at close quarters in the pages that follow. Anthropologists call this process
syncretism
—the blending together of cultural elements that previously existed separately. This dynamic, so essential to the history of jazz, remains powerful even in the present day, when African American styles of performance blend seamlessly with other musics of other cultures, European, Asian, Latin, and, coming full circle, African.
The mixture of African and European culture began, of course, long before the slave dances in Congo Square—in fact, at least one thousand years prior to the founding of New Orleans in 1718. The question of African influence on ancient Western culture has become a matter of heated debate in recent years—with much of the dispute centering on arcane methodological and theoretical issues. But once again, careful students of history need not rely on abstract analysis to discover early cultural mergings of African and European currents. The North African conquest of the Iberian peninsula in the eighth century left a tangible impact on Europe—evident even today in the distinctive qualities of Spanish architecture, painting, and music. Had not Charles Martel repelled the Moorish forces in the south of France at the Battle of Tours in 732
A.D
., this stylized cultural syncretism might have become a pan-European force. If not for “the genius and fortune” of this one man, historian Gibbon would declare in
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, the Moorish fleet “might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames” and “the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford.”
6
As it turned out, the spread of African currents into the broader streams of Western culture took far longer to unfold, spurred in large part by defeat rather than conquest—not by triumphant naval fleets toppling the continental powers, but by the dismal commerce of slave ships headed for the New World. Yet the traces of the early Moorish incursion may have laid the groundwork for the blossoming of African American jazz more than a millennium later. Can it be mere coincidence that this same commingling of Spanish, French, and African influences was present in New Orleans at the birth of jazz? Perhaps because of this marked Moorish legacy, Latin cultures have always seemed receptive to fresh influences from Africa. Indeed, in the area of music alone, the number of successful African and Latin hybrids (including salsa, calypso, samba, tango, and cumbia, to name only a few) is so great that one can only speculate that these two cultures retain a residual magnetic attraction, a lingering affinity due to this original cross-fertilization. Perhaps this convoluted chapter of Western history also provides us with the key for unlocking that enigmatic claim by Jelly Roll Morton, the pioneering New Orleans jazz musician, who asserted, “if you can’t manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz.”
7
The Latin tinge was already a long-established fact of New Orleans music well before the arrival of jazz on the scene—perhaps not surprising for a city that was still only around one-eighth Anglo-American in the years following the Louisiana Purchase. Around the time of Morton’s birth, a massive Mexican cavalry band performed daily in free concerts at the Mexican Pavilion as part of the 1884–85 World’s Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans. A little-known and undated work, titled “Los Campanillas,” by black New Orleans composer Basile Barès (1845–1902), effectively employs a Cuban habanera rhythm long before W. C. Handy relied on it to make “St. Louis Blues” into a hit, or Morton himself adopted it for his composition “The Crave.” Even earlier, Louis Moreau Gottschalk enjoyed a transatlantic success with his composition
Bamboula
. As these examples attest, the “tinge” entered the parlors of the city’s many amateur pianists long before the appearance of jazz music. Responding to this demand, Hart’s music store on Canal Street published over eighty Mexican compositions during the late nineteenth century, influencing local instrumentalists and providing one more link in the complex history of interlocking Latin and African American musical styles.
