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Jazz TodayApril 20, 2023
Jazz Today• Paradigms lost and found• 1990s new term – post-historical = intended to
support the idea that history is somehow over• Applied to evert aspect of modern life.• Intended to liberate illusions t fosters; – Our generation is perched atop the hitorical
mountain looking down at the past– History’s afterlife is a clean slate upon which we are
free to scrawl our own blueprints
Jazz Today
• Post-historical perspective may provide a helpful way of sorting through the three narratives previously examined in 21st century jazz.– Art-for-art’s sake in which jazz is seen to have
evolved in a vacuum of inspired innovations from Buddy Bolden’s slow blues to Ornette Coleman’s free jazz
Jazz Today
• After the avant-garde era musicians freely mined jazz’s past for new material
• Fusion attempts to combine the preactices of jazz with rock, soul, hip-hop and other kinds of pop music
• Historicist model is alive as jazz musicians continue to measure themselves against previous achievements without copying them.
• Fails to describe the overall state of jazz
Jazz Today
• Four phases of jazz development1890’s-1920s – Genesis. Primary breeding ground
was black South (New Orleans). Mixture of musical and cultural influences combined to create freewheeling, improvised blues-based music
1920-1950s – Jazz was transformed from community-based phenomenon to authentic art of unlimited potential spreading around the world
Jazz Today
1950s-1970s – defined by limits of modernism which increased artistic possibilities while alienating the general public. Becoming the listeners music
1970’s – moved so far from center stage that its survival is largely dependent on an infrastructure of academic study and institutional support including public and private grants.
Jazz Today
• Lingua Franca – 17th century European term to describe the bybrid language that developed between different nationalities that interacted in Mediterranean seaports.
• Today’s jazz musicians all speak the same language – a consequence of jazz education: a musical patois grounded in bebop with respect for previous jazz schools and knowledge.
Jazz Today
• Jason Moran – student of Jaki Byard, Andrew Hill, and Muhal Richard Abrams.
• Self-sufficient approach to piano playing solo piano is different from working with a trio.
• You’ve Got To Be Modernistic is basically a ragtime work of three 16 bar strains.
Jazz Today
• *Esperanza Spalding, Short and Sweet • Esperanza Spalding was born on October 18,
1984 in Portland, Oregon. Raised by her mom, Spalding was homeschooled for much of her childhood and, inspired by Yo-Yo Ma, taught herself how to play violin. She joined her home state’s Chamber Music Society as a youth, reaching a concertmaster position by her teens.
Jazz Today
• In high school, Spalding also began to learn how to play the double bass, opening the way to jazz forms and performing with the group Noise for Pretend. She earned her GED and attended Portland State University before making her way to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, earning her degree in three years and becoming part of the faculty at the age of 20.
Cecile McLorin Salvant, John Henry
• Vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant is an adept jazz singer who came to the public's attention after winning the 2010 Thelonious Monk Jazz Vocal Competition. Born in Miami, Florida to a French mother and Haitian father, Salvant was interested in music from a young age. She began piano lessons at age five and by age eight was singing with the Miami Choral Society
Abdullah Ibrahim, Calypso Mino
• The melodic sounds of South Africa are fused with the improvisation of jazz and the technical proficiency of classical music by South Africa-born pianist Dollar Brand or, as he's called himself since converting to Islam in 1968, Abdullah Ibrahim. Since attracting international acclaim as a member of the Jazz Epistles, one of South Africa's first jazz bands, Ibrahim has continued to explore new ground with his imaginative playing. Exposed to a variety of music as a youngster, including traditional African music, religious songs, and jazz, Ibrahim began studying piano at the age of seven.
Jazz Essential Listening
Final Review
Musical Elements
– Melody– Rhythm– Harmony
Instruments
• Trumpet• Trombone• Piano• Drums• Saxophone• Clarinet• Flute• Oboe• Bassoon• F-Horn• Voice
2. Jazz Form and Improvisation
• PART 2. EARLY JAZZ (1900-1930)• 3. The Roots of Jazz• Georgia Sea Island Singers, “The Buzzard Lope”• Bessie Smith, “Reckless Blues”• Wilbur Sweatman, “Down Home Rag”• 4. New Orleans• Original Dixieland Jazz Band, “Dixie Jass Band One-Step”• Jelly Roll Morton, “Dead Man Blues”• King Oliver, “Snake Rag”• Red Onion Jazz Babies / Sidney Bechet, “Cake Walking Babies
(from Home)”
PART 2. EARLY JAZZ (1900-1930)3. The Roots of Jazz
• Georgia Sea Island Singers, “The Buzzard Lope”• The Georgia Frankie Sullivan Quimby• Sea Island Singers are a group of African Americans who travel the
world to share the songs, stories, dances, games, and language of their Gullah heritage. Started sometime in the early 1900s and composed of many individuals over time, the current generation of singers includes Frankie Sullivan Quimby; her husband, Doug Quimby; and Tony Merrell. Together they have presented educational programs that testify about the history of enslaved Africans from coastal Georgia and celebrate the rich language, culture, and traditions that developed on and near the Sea Islands of the Georgia coast —in relative isolation from the rest of the South—for more than 200 years.
PART 2. EARLY JAZZ (1900-1930)3. The Roots of Jazz
• Wilbur Sweatman, “Down Home Rag”• Wilbur C. Sweatman was born in Brunswick, MO, on February 7, 1882. His early
training with his sister was on violin, but he later switched to clarinet. It has been suggested that Sweatman was largely self-taught, but that seems unlikely since he had a legitimate technique and would later direct orchestras, compose, and orchestrate music. Sweatman's early experience in the late 1890s was with circus bands. He soon afterward joined Mahara's Minstrels, where trumpeter Crickett Smith was also a member. In 1901, Sweatman led the Forepaugh and Sells Circus Band, being the youngest orchestra leader on the road. 1902 found Sweatman in Minneapolis, where he organized an orchestra that featured some of the musicians from the circus band. About 1903 or 1904, Sweatman, while in Minneapolis, allegedly recorded at least one and maybe two cylinder records, "Maple Leaf Rag" and "Peaceful Henry," for the Metropolitan Music Store. Many experts have questioned this story, but jazz historian Len Kunstadt once reported having seen the shattered remains of a wax cylinder of "Peaceful Henry."
PART 2. EARLY JAZZ (1900-1930)4. New Orleans
• Original Dixieland Jazz Band, “Dixie Jazz Band One-Step”• First called the Original Dixieland "Jass" Band in 1916/1917 and
known as the ODJB. By the end of 1917, jass was replaced with the first introduction of jazz in recorded music and to the world.
• The Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded all of the most popular and influential "Jazz" recordings from 1917 until April 1923. In August 1922 the New Orleans Rhythm Kings had hit recordings and in April 1923 King Oliver began his huge success. For over six years the ODJB recordings were heard around the world and hundreds, if not thousands, of future jazz musicians were influenced by their unique sound and original compositions.
PART 2. EARLY JAZZ (1900-1930)4. New Orleans
• Jelly Roll Morton, “Dead Man Blues”• Born on October 20, 1890 (some sources say 1885), in New
Orleans, Louisiana, Jelly Roll Morton cut his teeth as a pianist in his hometown's bordellos. An early innovator in the jazz genre, he rose to fame as the leader of Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers in the 1920s. A series of interviews for the Library of Congress rekindled interest in his music shortly before his death, on July 10, 1941, in Los Angeles, California. Morton learned to play piano at age 10, and within a few years he was playing in the red-light district bordellos, where he earned the nickname "Jelly Roll." Blending the styles of ragtime and minstrelsy with dance rhythms, he was at the forefront of a movement that would soon be known as "jazz."
PART 2. EARLY JAZZ (1900-1930)4. New Orleans
• King Oliver, “Snake Rag”• Cornetist Joe Oliver blew the blues through brass, and helped
bring bottom-up swing to New Orleans at the turn of the century. He played a key part in turning that city's band music into what we now call jazz.
• Like many early Louisiana musicians who came off the plantation, which Oliver almost certainly did, he had little formal musical education, nor did he show great musical promise in his youth. Yet the inchoate blasts of his cornet brought a new sound to the horn: a vocal quality, with his wa-was, growls, cries, and groans. Rock guitarists use electronics to achieve his effects - without ever knowing where they got the idea.
PART 2. EARLY JAZZ (1900-1930)4. New Orleans
• Red Onion Jazz Babies / Sidney Bechet, “Cake Walking Babies (from Home)”
• The Red Onion Jazz Babies was an early supergroup of the Jazz Age. Among its members were Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Lil Hardin and others in the early 1920s. Wikipedia
• Active from: 1924• Active until: 1925• Albums: Louis Armstrong and King Oliver,
Santa Claus Blues, The Way I Feel, Cake Walkin' Babies, Terrible Blues
Fletcher Henderson, “Blue Lou”
• 1897-1952• Looked to Whitman for inspiration• Studied classical music with his mother• Traveled to New York in 1920 for post graduate study in
chemistry• Recorded with Ethel Waters and Bnessie Smioth• Black musician working in midtown for exclusively white
clienteles offering polished and conventional dance music
• Upset by new man on the scene – Duke Ellington
Benny Goodman, “Dinah”
• Benny Goodman, "The King of Swing", was the clarinetist composer responsible for multiple hit singles as a band leader before World War II. Clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman was born Benjamin David Goodman on May 30, 1909, in Chicago, Illinois. As an extraordinary clarinetist and bandleader, Goodman helped usher in the swing era in the 1930s—earning him the nickname "the King of Swing." The son of Russian immigrants, he was the ninth child born into the family and eventually he would have a total of 11 siblings. His father worked as a tailor to try to provide for the large family, but money was always tight for the Goodmans. Two years later, Goodman moved to Los Angeles to join Ben Pollack's band. He stayed with the band for several years, eventually becoming one of its leading soloists. In 1928, Goodman released his first album, A Jazz Holiday. He then left the band and moved to New York City the following year.
Artie Shaw, “Star Dust”
• Artie Shaw was known for his role as a 1930's and 1940's jazz bandleader and clarinetist, known as the "King of the Clarinet". Shaw was one of the first bandleaders to integrate, hiring Billie Holiday as his vocalist. Although Shaw was notorious for his dislike of his fans, he continued to produce hits rivaling his main competitor, Benny Goodman. Bandleader, clarinetist, composer, writer. Born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky on May 23, 1910, in New York, New York. Sometimes referred to as the King of the Clarinet, Artie Shaw was one of the leading jazz performers and bandleaders of the swing era of the 1930s and 1940s. Born on New York’s Lower East Side, he was the only child of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Austria.
8. Count Basie and Duke Ellington
Pete Johnson / Big Joe Turner, “It’s All Right, Baby”
Count Basie, “One O’Clock Jump”
• Count Basie was born on August 21, 1904, in Red Bank, New Jersey. A pianist, he played vaudeville before eventually forming his own big band and helping to define the era of swing with hits like "One O'Clock Jump" and "Blue Skies." In 1958, Basie became the first African-American male recipient of a Grammy Award. One of jazz music's all-time greats, he won many other Grammys throughout his career and worked with a plethora of artists, including Joe Williams and Ella Fitzgerald. Basie died in Florida on April 26, 1984.
Duke Ellington• “Conga Brava”• “Blood Count”• Simply put, Ellington transcends boundaries and fills the world with a treasure trove
of music that renews itself through every generation of fans and music-lovers. His legacy continues to live onand will endure for generations to come. Winton Marsalis said it best when he said "His music sounds like America." Because of the unmatched artistic heights to which he soared, no one deserved the phrase “beyond category” more than Ellington, for it aptly describes his life as well. He was most certainly one of a kind that maintained a lifestyle with universal appeal which transcended countless boundaries.
• Duke Ellington is best remembered for the over 3000 songs that he composed during his lifetime. His best known titles include; "It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got That Swing", "Sophisticated Lady", "Mood Indigo", “Solitude", "In a Mellotone",and "Satin Doll". The most amazing part about Ellington was the most creative while he was on the road. It was during this time when he wrote his most famous piece, "Mood Indigo"which brought him world wide fame.
Count Basie / Lester Young, “Oh! Lady Be Good”
Billie Holiday, “A Sailboat in the Moonlight”
• Coleman Hawkins, “Body and Soul”
• Born in St. Joseph, Missouri, on November 21, 1904, Coleman Hawkins learned how to play the piano at age 5, the cello at 7, and the tenor sax at age 9. Chiefly known for his association with swing music and the big band era, Hawkins toured the world with various bands and had a role in the development of bebop, recording what is considered the first record of the genre in 1944.
Ella Fitzgerald, “Blue Skies”
Following a troubled childhood, Ella Fitzgerald turned to singing and debuted at the Apollo Theater in 1934. Discovered in an amateur contest, she went on to became the top female jazz singer for decades. In 1958, Fitzgerald made history as the first African-American woman to win a Grammy Award. Due in no small part to her vocal quality, with lucid intonation and a broad range, the singer would go on to win 13 Grammys in total and sell more than 40 million albums. Her multi-volume "songbooks" on Verve Records are among America's recording treasures. Fitzgerald died in California in 1996.
Fats Waller, “Christopher Columbus”
• Born on May 21, 1904, in New York City, Fats Waller was influenced as a teenager by jazz great James P. Johnson. He proved a gifted piano player and songwriter, delivering such jazz standards as "Ain't Misbehavin'." In the 1930s, Waller's fame reached new heights following his performances on radio and in film. He died from bronchial pneumonia on December 15, 1943, in Kansas City, Missouri
Art Tatum, “Over the Rainbow”
• Born on October 13, 1909, in Toledo, Ohio, Art Tatum was largely self-taught as a pianist despite being legally blind. He became a star in New York City in the 1930s, winning fans with his versions of pop favorites and wowing peers with his technique. After cutting a series of solo and group recordings late in his career, Tatum died from kidney disease in Los Angeles, California, on November 5, 1956.
Charlie Christian, “Swing to Bop” (“Topsy”)
• Born on July 20, 1916, in Texas, Charlie Christian grew up in a family of musicians and played piano and the amplified guitar. His guitar skills were such that in 1939 he earned a spot playing with Benny Goodman’s band and alongside greats like Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie. Christian died at 25 on March 2, 1942 from tuberculosis, yet became a pioneer of electric guitar playing.
12. The 1950s: Cool Jazz and Hard Bop
10. Rhythm in Transition
Thelonious Monk, “Rhythm-a-ning”
• Thelonious Monk Facts• Along with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk (1917-1982) was a
vital member of the jazz revolution which took place in the early 1940s. Monk's unique piano style and his talent as a composer made him a leader in the development of modern jazz.
• When Thelonious Monk began performing his music in the early 1940s, only a small circle of New York's brightest jazz musicians could appreciate its uniqueness. His melodies were angular, his harmonies full of jarring clusters, and he used both notes and the absence of notes in unexpected ways. He flattened his fingers when he played the piano and used his elbows from time to time to get the sound he wanted. Critics and peers took these as signs of incompetency, giving his music "puzzled dismissal as deliberately eccentric," as Jazz Journal noted. "To them, Monk apparently had ideas, but it took fleshier players like pianist Bud Powell to execute them properly." The debate over his talent and skill continued as the years passed, but Monk eventually found himself with a strong following. By the time of his death in 1982 he was widely acknowledged as a founding father of modern jazz.
• Thelonious Sphere Monk was born October 10, 1917, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The first musical sounds he heard were from a player piano that his family owned. At the age of five or six he began picking out melodies on the piano and taught himself to read music by looking over his sister's shoulder as she took lessons. About a year later the family moved to the San Juan Hill section of New York City, near the Hudson River. His father became ill soon afterward and returned to the South, leaving Thelonious's mother, Barbara, to raise him and his brother and sister by herself. Mrs. Monk did all she could to encourage her young son's interest in music. Though the family budget was tight, she managed to buy a baby grand Steinway piano, and when Thelonious turned 11 she began paying for his weekly piano lessons. Even at that young age it was clear that the instrument was part of his destiny. "If anybody sat down and played the piano," he recalled in Crescendo International, "I would just stand there and watch 'em all the time."
• As a boy Thelonious received rigorous training in the gospel music style, accompanying the Baptist choir in which his mother sang and playing piano and organ during church services. At the same time he was becoming initiated into the world of jazz; near his home were several jazz clubs as well as the home of the great Harlem stride pianist James P. Johnson, from whom Thelonious picked up a great deal. By the age of 13 he was playing in a local bar and grill with a trio.
PART 5. THE AVANT-GARDE, FUSION, HISTORICISM, AND NOW
• Avant-garde originated in the French army to designate troops sent in advance to scout unknown territory. In English it was adapted to describe innovative composers, writers, painters, and other artists who were ahead of their time. It represented a movement to liberate artists from the restraints of tradition. Two avant garde movements – 1920s and 1950s-1960s.
1920s avant garde
• A response to the devastation of WWI, Expansion of women’s rights and advances in technology
• Included surrealism, cubism, and imagism as well as 12 tone music
1950s-1960s avant garde
• Similar to 1920s• Rebuilding Europe and Asia after WWII• Colonial wars and occupations• Cold War• Technology• Civil Rights Act of 1964 • Demand for women’s professional, social, and sexual
parity• New Wave cinemas• Narrative Jazz
Ornette Coleman
• Ornette Coleman was born on March 9, 1930, in Fort Worth, Texas. He began playing music as a teenager and eventually became a working musician. In the 1950s, Coleman developed a style of improvising called “free jazz.” The non-harmonic style was controversial, but he successfully recorded albums like Free Jazz and The Shape of Jazz to Come. In 2007, he received a Pulitzer Prize for his music. In June 2015, at the age of 85, Coleman died of cardiac arrest.
Ornette Coleman
• 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Sound Grammar• 1959 most disruptive figure in jazz• Formed the American Jazz Quintet in 1956• His compositions possessed strong melodic,
emotional character suggesting the solemnity of dirges
• Microtonal pitches which challenged the familiarity of the tempered or conventional scale.
PART 5. THE AVANT-GARDE, FUSION, HISTORICISM, AND NOW
• Ornette Coleman, “Lonely Woman” 1954• Discussed on 311-312
Free Jazz and Harmolodics
• Harmolodic – a contraction of harmony, movement, and melody and a catch phrase to characterize his take on ensemble music.
Cecil Taylor, “Bulbs”
• Soon after he first emerged in the mid-'50s, pianist Cecil Taylor was the most advanced improviser in jazz; five decades later he is still the most radical. Although in his early days he used some standards as vehicles for improvisation, since the early '60s Taylor has stuck exclusively to originals. To simplify describing his style, one could say that Taylor's intense atonal percussive approach involves playing the piano as if it were a set of drums. He generally emphasizes dense clusters of sound played with remarkable technique and endurance, often during marathon performances. Suffice it to say that Cecil Taylor's music is not for everyone.
• Taylor preferred an arcane system of sketches, fragments, codes, and arrows.
• He used no scores. Played episodes on the piano and musicians picked up by ear and developed by way of improvisation.
• Unit Structures described his method on modules or units and the group worked through each unit.
18. Historicism: Jazz on Jazz 373
• Sugar Foot Stomp (1926)• Dippermouth Blues(1923)• Embraced as Swing Era anthem.• Two ideas– Jazz as art – for – art’s-sake• Masters move the music along with radical leaps of
creativity
– Jazz as fusion tradition in which jazz evolves in response to contemporary pop culture.
Historicism
• Originated in 19th century as alternative theory to the notion that great men and women and their words arise independently of history
• It connects each new undertakintg to its predecessors, emphasizing historical evolution over individual genius, position an exchange between past and present called dialectic by Friedrich Hegel.
1980s
• New Historicism says that work of art must be viewed within the context of the place and time of its creation
• Rejects the New Criticism which analyzes works of art as sufficient unto themselves.
• Hew Historicists look beyond a work to the historical and social conditions that conditioned it.
Reclaiming and defining the Past: From Bunk to the Academy
• First movement to counter prevailing musical tastes in favor of an older neglected jazz style did not take place until the height of the Swing Era
• 1939 publication of Jazzman by Frederick Ramsey and Charles Edward Smith
• Argued that true jazz was an essentially New Orleans derived, African American, blues-based music
Lenox School of Jazz• 1950s offered nonstop parade of new styles – cool,
hard bob, Third Stream, soul, and avant-garde - along with ingenious improvisers and innovative composers.
• 1958 critic Stanley Dance coined mainstream to describe giant swath of jazz situated between reactionary traditionalism and radical modernity
• Musicians from Armstrong and Ellington to Goodman and Lester Young.
• Dance hated bebop
• Jazz made inroads in to academia and arts establishment but very slowly.
• Much of the historical and educational activity stimulated in area rarely singled out in jazz histories: eastern Boston, Massachusetts
• First jazz curriculum at Lenox School of Jazz in 1957 (Berkshires near Tanglewood).
• Under direction of John Lewis.• Faculty included Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar
Peterson, Ray Brown, Jimmy Giuffre, George Russell, Max Roach, Gunther Schuller, J.J. Johnson, and Ornette Coleman.
• Newport Jazz Festival – founded by George Wein (owner of Storyville and Mahogany Hall)
Avant-Garde Historicism and Neoclassicism
• Highly criticized for not swinging, ignoring chord progressions and titling pieces with drawings that resembled circuit diagrams.
• Eventually found home in academia as a professor of music.
• Created Tri-Centric Foundation in 1994
Loft Era
• Borrowed from old styles as resources– Swing– Funk, – Free rhythms to create independent music
