The History of Jazz (6 page)

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the “Maple Leaf Rag” only hinted at the full extent of Joplin’s talent. It lacks the melodic subtlety, compositional ingenuity, and emotional depth that would eventually separate Joplin from other rag composers. But in rhythmic intensity the “Maple Leaf Rag” stands out even today. Put simply, it is the most intoxicatingly syncopated of any of Joplin’s rags. If the essence of ragtime’s popularity was, as Irving Berlin later suggested, its ability to capture the “speed and snap” of modern American life, then no piece of music evoked this emerging sensibility better than the “Maple Leaf Rag.”

Later Joplin pieces revealed the wide range of compositional techniques that this ambitious African American composer had mastered: the parlor waltz refinement of “Bethena” (1905), the coy interludes that temper the syncopations of “The Ragtime Dance” (1906), the boogie-woogie-inflected third section of “Pine Apple Rag” (1908), the languid habanera rhythms of “Solace” (1909), the almost self-parodying syncopations of “Stoptime Rag” (1910), the moving minor key sections of “Magnetic Rag” (1914). With the Brahmsian darkness of “Scott Joplin’s New Rag” (1912) and, especially, his “Magnetic Rag,” the last piece he completed, Joplin had pushed his compositions far beyond the boisterous beer hall ambiance that characterized, for many listeners and players, the rag idiom. This was music on a large scale that was now being squeezed into the narrow confines of rag form—so much so that the songs seemed almost consciously designed to defy the commercial expections that Joplin’s earlier successes had engendered.

These genre-breaking excursions into other styles were defining qualities of Joplin’s music. Accounts that stress his role in uplifting and refining the rag idiom mostly miss the point. True, Joplin set high goals for himself, but his relationship to ragtime was more one of fighting against its constraints and stylistic dead ends rather than battling for its honor and glory. “Joplin’s ambition is to shine in other spheres,” a 1903 newspaper article about him recounts. “He affirms that it is only a pastime for him to compose syncopated music and he longs for more arduous works.”
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Joplin was also ambivalent, at times even hostile, toward the pyrotechnics of most rag pianists, which emphasized speed and showmanship at the expense of melodic beauty. Hence the well-known admonition that graces many of his published compositions: “note: Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play Ragtime fast.”

The most controversial result of Joplin’s high-flung aspirations was his opera
Treemonisha
, often misleadingly referred to as a “ragtime opera,” but which has very little ragtime in it. Instead it probes deeply into the pre-rag folk roots of black American music, as well as taps the full range of European operatic devices—the work comes complete with orchestration, overture, recitatives, arias, and ensembles. The last years of Joplin’s life found him increasingly preoccupied with this project. It made enormous demands on the composer, not only because of the massive scale of the work, but perhaps even more from the considerable challenge of finding financial and public support for the undertaking. Around 1903, Joplin had written a first opera, now lost, titled
A Guest of Honor
, which apparently kept fairly close to the ragtime style.
Treemonisha
proved to be a far more expansive and consuming musical project.

As early as 1907, Joplin may have discussed the new opera with Eubie Blake, and the following year he played parts of it for Joseph Lamb. John Stark turned down the work, sensing the poor commercial prospects for an African American folk opera, and it was not until 1911 that Joplin, financing the venture himself, was able to publish the 230-page score for piano and eleven voices. His single-minded focus on the opera forced Joplin to ignore more lucrative publishing opportunities—the year before the release of the piano score, only one other Joplin rag appeared in print— causing financial difficulties for the composer and precipitating a break with Stark. Undeterred, Joplin proceeded with the daunting tasks of orchestrating the lengthy work and seeking financial backing for a full-scale production. On completing the orchestration, Joplin began auditioning singers, determined to stage the opera at his own expense to test the public response. A single performance took place, in 1915 in a Harlem hall, with an underrehearsed cast, no scenery or costumes, and without an orchestra—merely the composer playing the piano score. The work, staged in such an austere manner, generated little enthusiasm at the time among a Harlem audience more interested in assimilating established artistic traditions than in celebrating the roots of African American culture.

In the fall of 1916, a year after the disastrous performance of
Treemonisha
, Joplin was committed to the Manhattan State Hospital. On April 1, 1917, Joplin died from “dementia paralytica-cerebral,” brought on by syphilis. Although he had not yet reached his fiftieth birthday, Joplin had already outlived his fame. The ragtime craze in America had passed, and Joplin’s popularity had waned to such an extent that a number of his unpublished compositions remained hidden away in the Stark company files and were eventually destroyed when the operation moved in 1935. Other compositions—which may have included a piano concerto—came into the hands of Wilbur Sweatman, who was executor of Joplin’s widow’s estate, but they too have disappeared. The various books on African American music written in the decades following the composer’s death devoted little or no space to Joplin, and it was not until Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis published their seminal work
They All Played Ragtime
in 1950 that Joplin’s extraordinary career began to be understood in any degree of perspective. And it took the surprising and unprecedented ragtime resurgence of the 1970s before Joplin’s works took the next step and moved beyond the confines of scholars and specialists to reenter the mainstream of American culture. In the mid-1970s, Joplin’s popularity, and the sales of recordings of his music, matched rock-star levels; one piece, “The Entertainer,” even became the basis for a hit single. But most gratifying to Joplin would have been the eventual success of his opera
Treemonisha
. Some sixty-odd years after its failed debut, the work was successfully revived and recorded, and its composer posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

Joplin’s single-minded determination to merge vernacular African American music with the mainstream traditions of Western composition prefigured, in many regards, the later development of jazz. By straddling the borders of highbrow and lowbrow culture, art music and popular music, African polyrhythm and European formalism, Joplin anticipated the fecund efforts of later artists such as Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, Benny Goodman, Charles Mingus, Stan Kenton, Art Tatum, and Wynton Marsalis, among others. In his own day, Joplin’s audience—both white and black— was ill prepared to understand the nature of such hybrid efforts; we can easily imagine them harboring a preconception that these different traditions were too radically opposed to allow a seamless merging. The idea of a ragtime ballet or opera must have seemed an oxymoron to most of those on both sides of the great racial divide that characterized turn-of-the-century American society. It required the development of a different aesthetic before such works could be appreciated on their own terms.

In our own day, we have embraced just such a new aesthetic, one that allows audiences not only to accept, but often rush to praise, willy-nilly, various transformations of popular styles of entertainment into serious art. This tendency is evident not only—or even primarily—in jazz but in virtually every contemporary genre and style of creative human expression. But even in tolerant, liberal-minded times, the tension between these two streams of activity continues to seethe under the surface. This dynamic interaction, the clash and fusion—of African and European, composition and improvisation, spontaneity and deliberation, the popular and the serious, high and low—will follow us at virtually every turn as we unfold the complex history of jazz music.

2 New Orleans Jazz

THE CELEBRATIONS OF A CITY IN DECLINE

With the lifting of trade restrictions on the Mississippi River following the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the New Orleans economy entered a period of unprecedented prosperity that would last over half a century. The population of the city had already doubled by the time, less than a decade later, that the first steamboat—aptly named the
New Orleans
—was put into service on the Mississippi, facilitating upstream navigation and further enhancing New Orleans’s position as a major hub of commerce. The effect of this shift can be measured by the staggering growth in downriver cargo received at the port: between 1801 and 1807, an average of $5 million worth of goods came downstream each year, but in 1851 alone almost $200 million worth of freight was measured. Shipments of cotton constituted almost half of these receipts, but many other goods—grain, sugar, molasses, tobacco, manufactured items, and much more—as well as people passed through this New Orleans hub, creating a prosperous, cosmopolitan environment that few cities in the New World could match.
¹

This localized economic boom, built on the contingencies of geography, began to subside in the years following the Civil War. The city’s position on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line was only one small part of the problem. Even more pressing was an inexorable shift in the nation’s infrastructure. During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the railroad gradually replaced the steamboat as the major transportation industry in America. Trading hubs grew up elsewhere, and New Orleans’s position at the gateway of the major inland water system waned in importance. Economic woes were further aggravated by chronic political corruption. The result: by 1874, the state of Louisiana was insolvent, unable to pay either principal or the accumulated interest on its $53 million debt.
²
Investment capital, to the extent that it stayed within the region, gravitated to natural resources and oil fields, with attendant wealth moving outside New Orleans to other parts of Louisiana and beyond the state line to Texas. The boisterous histories of New Orleans jazz often obscure this underlying truth: by the time of the birth of jazz, New Orleans was already a city in decline.

The city’s population had increased more than fourfold during the half-century from 1825 to 1875, but in 1878, 2 percent of the city’s inhabitants perished in a devastating yellow fever epidemic. The risk of pestilence was always present in nineteenth-century New Orleans, especially during the long, hot summer months. The city sits below sea level, and its damp, warm climate combined with dismal local sanitation—the city had no sewage system until 1892, long after most North American cities had adopted modern methods of fluid waste disposal—made the Crescent City an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes, roaches, and other assorted vermin. New Orleans bassist Pops Foster recalled conditions being so poor that he was required to wear mosquito nets during some performances.
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After the 1878 epidemic, population growth resumed at a sluggish 1 percent annual rate, but the number of foreign-born members of the population actually declined, as new immigrants sought more flourishing economies and healthier surroundings.

The average life span for a black native of New Orleans in 1880 was only thirty-six years; even white inhabitants lived, on average, a mere forty-six years. Black infant mortality was a staggering 45 percent. During that decade, mortality rates for New Orleans as a whole were 56 percent higher than for an average American city. Seen in the context of the time and place, the New Orleans natives’ extreme fascination with celebrations, parades, and parties—an obsession that reaches its highest pitch in the New Orleans parade for the dead, that extraordinary combination of funeral and festival—is reminiscent of the revelers in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” whose merrymaking allowed them to distance themselves from the sufferings and pestilence of the here and now. From one point of view, this exuberance is the utmost decadence; from another, it is a necessary self-defense mechanism of a society living on the brink.

The dictates of commerce made it inevitable that a major city would be established near the base of the Mississippi River. But, in the words of historian Ned Sublette, it was “a terrible place to build a town.”
⁴
New Orleans has the lowest elevation of any major U.S. city, and with 41 percent of the continental United States’s runoff flowing down and through the Mississippi, the Crescent City is to America what plumbing pipes are to your home. Tropical storms are frequent visitors, brushing by or making a direct hit once every three or four years on average, and any resident who lives to middle age will likely confront the ravages of the region’s hurricanes, marauders that periodically force evacuations and leave behind untold damage. And in a land that is gradually sinking lower and lower below sea level—some foresee a day in which New Orleans will be completely surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico—the risk of flooding is ever present. In short, the city’s history of homegrown catastrophes, whether acts of God or merely those of the lower deities known as elected officials, testifies both to the challenges facing the inhabitants as well as to their hardiness and perseverance.