The History of Jazz (20 page)

Only a few years earlier, Harlem had been a white neighborhood, of European immigrants and Lutheran churches, a community where the sound of lieder, not ragtime, was heard coming from the windows of apartment houses. Named after Haarlem, the Netherlands city, by early Dutch settlers, the neighborhood retained its Old World roots well into the early twentieth century. But the years following the start of World War I witnessed a massive demographic shift, as the African American population boomed, with southern migrants joining refugees from the overcrowded midtown tenements of Manhattan. Here they formed a new society: not just as transients, or even residents, but as proprietors—by the late 1920s, 70 percent of Harlem’s real estate was under black control—with all the independence that ownership conveyed.

But another Harlem coexisted alongside this one, reflecting a crueler reality and a less promising future. Historian David Levering Lewis, drawing on “a prism of census tracks, medical data, and socieoeconomic studies,” reaches the conclusion that, even in the midst of this so-called renaissance, “Harlem was becoming a slum.”
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This second Harlem was one of harsh economics, low salaries, and looming rent payments. A 1927 study showed that 48 percent of Harlem renters spent more than twice as much of their income on rent as similarly situated white city dwellers. In this hand-to-mouth environment, a quarter of Harlem families took in at least one lodger—double the rate for white New Yorkers. Sometimes the same mattress was rented out twice, to tenants on different work shifts. Wages for blacks may well have been higher in the North than in the South, but the earning differential between white and black was still an unbridgeable gulf. Black independence, in this setting, came at a price, one meted out daily in the cost of food and shelter.

Jazz was very much a part of this second Harlem—more at home here than in the “other” Harlem of high culture and higher aspirations. True, the Harlem Renaissance created an ideology, a cultural context for jazz. But the Harlem of rent parties and underground economies created music. Even before the onset of the Great Depression, the rent party had become established as an accepted way of paying for the high cost of lodging. Flyers might be circulated up to a month in advance, advertising which entertainers would be performing. Admission on the night of the party might cost anywhere between twenty-five cents and a dollar. The money would pay for both the cost of the party and the next month’s rent. “They would crowd a hundred or more people into a seven room railroad flat, and the walls would bulge,” recalled Willie “The Lion” Smith, one of the greatest of the Harlem pianists. “Some of the parties spread to the halls and all over the building.”
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Such activities, for all their vibrancy and social significance, were a dividing point for the two Harlems. Rent parties were “the special passion of the community,” writes one historian, yet “their very existence was avoided or barely acknowledged by most Harlem writers.”
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The music of this hidden Harlem was also long ignored in most books on the Renaissance, with even seminal figures such as Duke Ellington and Fats Waller playing only the most modest role in many of the histories.
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Although their artistry represented the highest pinnacle of African American culture, their affiliation with jazz relegated them to the submerged Harlem, the lowlife world of speakeasies and slumming. Cab Calloway, recalling Harlem during these years, amplifies on the marginal role of jazz in the context of this cultural outpouring: “Those of us in the music and entertainment business were vaguely aware that something exciting was happening, but we weren’t directly involved.”
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Benny Carter concurs: “We in music knew there was much going on in literature, for example, but our worlds were far apart. We sensed that the black cultural as well as moral leaders looked down on our music as undignified.”
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In 1936, when stride piano master James P. Johnson, in hopes of winning a Guggenheim Fellowship, enlisted the help of Harlem Renaissance litterateur James Weldon Johnson, the deferential tone of the musician’s letter and its acknowledgment that these two respective leaders of their spheres of Harlem had never met personally testified to this still marked separation between their worlds. The Guggenheim judges, for their part, showed their opinion of the hot and swinging side of Harlem culture by turning down Johnson’s request and rejecting his second application in 1942.
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Attitudes, in some spheres of Harlem society, had changed little since Scott Joplin had tried unsuccessfully to interest local patrons in supporting his opera
Treemonisha
back in 1915, and found no encouragement for his exalted vision of the high art potential of vernacular forms of African American music. Middle-class and upper-class black families were, at best, ambivalent about celebrating the cultural contributions of ragtime, jazz, and blues musicians—and often explicitly hostile to these elements in their community. Recalling that “the average Negro family did not allow the blues or even the raggedy music played in their homes,” Willie “The Lion” Smith added that “among those who disliked this form of entertainment the most were the Negroes who had recently come up from the South to seek a better life.”
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And not without reason. “Native or long time Harlemites,” W. O. Smith stresses, “looked down on southern blacks.”
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In an attempt to appear sophisticated and gain acceptance, new arrivals from the Deep South were quick to disavow the telltale signs of their origins, whether culinary, sartorial, linguistic, or cultural. Musical imports from the South—Delta blues, New Orleans jazz, Missouri rags—were often tainted with the same brush. In almost every sphere of day-to-day Harlem life, the desire for assimilation into the ways of the Northeast exerted a powerful motivating force. Is it any surprise that, in such an environment, the two Harlems—the Harlem of literary aspirations and the Harlem of jazz and blues—were, if not at war, at least caught up in an uncomfortable truce?

The piano was often the battleground between these two visions of black artistic achievement. It is not going too far to suggest that the piano was to Harlem what brass bands had been to New Orleans. The instrument represented conflicting possibilities—a pathway for assimilating traditional highbrow culture, a calling card of lowbrow nightlife, a symbol of middle-class prosperity, or, quite simply, a means of making a living. But, with the benefit of hindsight, we tend to view the piano in Harlem of the late 1920s and early 1930s as the center of a new type of music. Harlem stride piano, as it has come to be known, stood as a bridge between the ragtime idiom of the turn of the century and the new jazz piano styles that were in the process of evolution. Almost a half-century after his arrival in New York in 1908, James P. Johnson recalled the musical scene of those years: “There weren’t any jazz bands like they had in New Orleans or on the Mississippi river boats, but the ragtime piano was played all over, in bars, cabarets and sporting houses.”
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Between 1900 and 1914, around one hundred New York companies were involved in publishing ragtime sheet music. Yet commercial interests and artistic values coexisted uneasily in Tin Pan Alley, with scores of mediocre rag songs—most of them bearing little resemblance to the classic ragtime music of Scott Joplin, James Scott, and Joseph Lamb—overshadowing the more sophisticated compositions of the masters. Stride piano players were well aware of the gulf between highbrow and lowbrow that Joplin—perhaps foolishly, perhaps wisely—had refused to recognize back in 1915; and though they sometimes tried to bridge it, they never forgot the importance of their roots in popular music. Understanding that music required an audience, preferably a large one, they mastered a wide range of novelty devices and popular effects. At times the superficial glitter could outshine the jazz content— “When I began my work, jazz was a stunt,” was Duke Ellington’s later critique of some of this music
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—but the slick professionalism of the Harlem stride style also served to expand the audience for African American music in the face of discrimination from the cultural elite, both within and without the black community, and despite a severe economic downturn. For better or worse, the stride players did not shy away from being entertainers. Indeed, the most famous of them, Fats Waller, displayed a knack for captivating audiences unsurpassed by any jazz musician, past or present, with the possible exception of Louis Armstrong.

But stride piano was more than mass entertainment. In the years following the decline of ragtime, the New York players kept true to the basic ethos of that music, especially its rhythms and syncopations, while incorporating a broad range of other devices, borrowed both from jazz players such as Jelly Roll Morton and Earl Hines, as well as from classical pianists. The result was a virtuosic, orchestral style of performance. James P. Johnson noted the origins of this style in the competitive musical environment of New York:

The other sections of the country never developed the piano as far as the New York boys did. Only lately have they caught up. The reason the New York boys became such high class musicians was because the New York piano was developed by the European method, system and style. The people in New York were used to hearing good piano played in concerts and cafes. The ragtime player had to live up to that standard. They had to get orchestral effects, sound harmonies, chords and all the techniques of European concert pianists who were playing their music all over the city.
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Johnson’s own music epitomized this approach; it represents a critical link between the ragtime of Joplin and the jazz of Waller and Tatum. His early efforts remain true to the rag style, with his composition “Carolina Shout” gaining particular favor among his peers. The work was widely imitated by other players even before the sheet music was published, and eventually replaced the “Maple Leaf Rag” as the ultimate test piece for aspiring rag pianists. Johnson’s works may have lacked the melodic inspiration and compositional balance that characterized Joplin’s pieces, but he made up for it in the sheer breadth of his musical aspirations. His popular songs were great successes, with “If I Could Be with You (One Hour Tonight),” “Old Fashioned Love,” and “Charleston” reaching a mass audience that was only vaguely familiar with the composer’s jazz credentials. Yet Johnson also attacked the citadels of concert music with a determination akin to Joplin’s: his legacy includes
Harlem
Symphony
,
American Symphonic Suite
(based on W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues”),
Concerto Jazz a Mine
, a piano rhapsody
Yamekraw
(performed at Carnegie Hall with Fats Waller as soloist), and the opera
De Organizer
(boasting a libretto by Langston Hughes). Johnson received little encouragement during his lifetime for these efforts, and a posthumous search through his personal archives revealed numerous rejection letters from conductors and potential benefactors. Only sporadic performances in the years following Johnson’s death in 1955 have saved these works from total obscurity. But Johnson’s high aspirations for African American music were a harbinger of later developments. In particular, Duke Ellington’s more visionary projects, most notably
Black, Brown and Beige
and
Harlem
, are an outgrowth of—and may have been directly influenced by—the efforts of this ambitious predecessor.

Even when he kept true to the stride idiom, Johnson was an inveterate experimenter who was willing to look outside the jazz and rag idiom for techniques he could apply to his compositions. These devices included classical interpolations (his repertoire included hot versions of the
William Tell Overture
and
Peer Gynt
), counterpoint exercises using national anthems (the final theme of his “Imitators’ Rag” mixes “Dixie” in the right hand with the “Star-Spangled Banner” in the left), and much else besides. In later years, Johnson even adapted to the demands of jazz-combo work, recording with the Blue Note Jazzmen and on a number of sides by prominent Chicago players. There may have been greater jazz musicians than James P. Johnson, but few artists of his day sensed so clearly the latent potential of African American music or worked so vigorously to bring it into reality.

Under the inspiration of Johnson and others, the world of stride piano developed a macho, competitive ethos that has since come to permeate the jazz world as a whole. This overlay of artistry and combat remains an important—and often overlooked— tradition in African American culture. Duke Ellington, recalling his own schooling in the Harlem stride piano tradition, explained: “Anybody who had a reputation as a piano player had to prove it right there and then by sitting down to the piano and displaying his artistic wares.”
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In later years, the cutting contest—a jam session in which outplaying the other participants (“cutting” them, in jazz jargon)—became an important part of jazz pedagogy and practice, and the most crucial rite of passage for a young player. Its overtones now hover over even the friendliest of jazz encounters. In an age in which other art forms have come to eschew demonstrations of virtuosity, the jazz world continues to embrace one-upmanship and displays of technique as an integral part of its culture. To a great extent, the hothouse environment of Harlem helped to produce this new image of the jazz musician as half artist, half warrior.

Willie “The Lion” Smith epitomized this new breed of jazz player. His reputation in the jazz world was made not in concert halls or clubs, but in backrooms and private gatherings. Asserting his supremacy among the assembled piano players was the core value of his musicality. Ellington called him “a gladiator at heart.” Smith’s attitude to lesser talents was anything but tolerant. Ellington describes the Lion’s typical response to these ill-suited aspirants to his throne: