Jazz

• 1. A Word You Could Not Say

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  In a 1912 article in the Los Angeles Times, a minor league baseball pitcher described a pitch he called a 'jazz ball'. It wobbled, he said, and you simply could not do anything with it. The word would soon attach itself to music born in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana. Decades later the musician Eubie Blake told National Public Radio that the word once carried a meaning no one would say in front of ladies. When Broadway picked it up, he recalled, they spelled it J-A-Z-Z. Before that it was J-A-S-S, and it was dirty. The American Dialect Society would name this word the Word of the 20th Century. How did a slang term from a baseball diamond become attached to one of the major forms of musical expression? Why did a music rooted in blues, ragtime, spirituals, marches and African rhythm prove so hard to define? Duke Ellington, one of the most famous figures the form ever produced, gave the shortest answer anyone has offered. He said simply, 'It's all music.'

• 2. The Performer Over The Page

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  Classical music is judged by fidelity to the score, the performer aiming to play a composition exactly as it was written. Jazz reversed that priority. It placed less value on the composer, if there was one, and more on the performer, who interprets a tune in individual ways and never plays the same composition twice. Improvisation became the defining element of the form. The jazz performer may change melodies, harmonies and time signatures depending on mood, experience and the response of band members and the audience. This centrality is traced to blues, a folk music that arose partly from the work songs and field hollers of African-American slaves on plantations. Those work songs were built around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, and early blues was itself improvisational. The shape of improvisation changed with each era of jazz. In early Dixieland, performers took turns playing melodies and improvising countermelodies together. By the bebop years of the 1940s, small groups stated a melody briefly at the start and improvised through most of the piece. Modal jazz went furthest, abandoning chord progressions so musicians could improvise even more freely. A soloist is typically supported by a rhythm section of chordal instruments, double bass and drums, which outlines the structure and complements the player. In avant-garde and free jazz, even that division between soloist and band dissolves, with license, or a requirement, to abandon chords, scales and meters entirely.

• 3. The Spanish Tinge

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  By the 18th century, slaves in the New Orleans area gathered at a market in an area later known as Congo Square, famous for its African dances. By 1866 the Atlantic slave trade had brought nearly 400,000 Africans to North America, largely from West Africa and the greater Congo River basin. The Black Codes outlawed drumming by slaves, so African drumming traditions were not preserved here as they were in Cuba and Haiti. African rhythmic patterns survived instead through body rhythms such as stomping, clapping and patting juba dancing. A three-stroke pattern known in Cuban music as tresillo became a fundamental figure in this story. Tresillo is the most basic duple-pulse rhythmic cell in sub-Saharan African music and the music of the African Diaspora, and it is heard prominently in New Orleans second line music. Musicians from Havana and New Orleans took the twice-daily ferry between both cities to perform, carrying the habanera into the Crescent City. John Storm Roberts noted that the habanera reached the United States twenty years before the first rag was published. The pianist Jelly Roll Morton gave this rhythmic feeling its most famous name. He called it the Spanish tinge and considered it an essential ingredient of jazz. In one of his earliest tunes, 'New Orleans Blues', he said you can notice the Spanish tinge, and that without it you would never get the right seasoning for jazz.

• 4. From Ragtime To Storyville

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  The abolition of slavery in 1865 opened new opportunities in entertainment, even as strict segregation limited other work. Black pianists played in bars, clubs and brothels as ragtime developed. The entertainer Ernest Hogan saw hit songs appear in 1895, and in 1899 the classically trained Scott Joplin had an international hit with 'Maple Leaf Rag', a multi-strain march in four parts with recurring themes. W. C. Handy carried the blues toward print. He grew interested in folk blues while traveling through the Mississippi Delta, hearing singers bear down on the third and seventh tones of the scale, slurring between major and minor. He introduced those flat thirds and sevenths, now called blue notes, into his own songs. The publication of his 'Memphis Blues' sheet music in 1912 introduced the 12-bar blues to the world. New Orleans gave the music its cradle. Many early players worked in the bars and brothels of the red-light district around Basin Street called Storyville. Cornetist Buddy Bolden played in New Orleans from 1895 to 1906, leaving no recordings, yet credited with creating the big four, the first syncopated bass drum pattern to break from the standard on-the-beat march. Storyville drew tourists to the port city and spread the music wider, until the United States government shut it down in 1917.

• 5. Swing And The Jazz Age

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  From 1920 to 1933, Prohibition banned the sale of alcoholic drinks, and the illicit speakeasies that followed became lively venues of the Jazz Age. The music gained a reputation as immoral. Henry van Dyke of Princeton University wrote that it was not music at all, but an irritation of the nerves of hearing and a sensual teasing of the strings of physical passion. Despite its Southern black origins, a larger market existed for jazzy dance music played by white orchestras. Paul Whiteman signed with Victor and became the top bandleader of the 1920s, and in 1924 he commissioned George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, premiered by his orchestra. His success, in the account of Mario Dunkel, rested on a rhetoric of domestication that rendered a previously inchoate kind of music valuable. Louis Armstrong changed what a soloist could be. He joined the Fletcher Henderson dance band in 1924 as featured soloist, already a trailblazer whose solos extemporized on chords rather than melodies. The 1930s belonged to popular swing big bands, where virtuoso soloists grew as famous as their leaders. Over time social strictures around racial segregation began to relax, as white bandleaders recruited black musicians and black bandleaders recruited white ones. In Washington, D.C., Duke Ellington abandoned the conventions of swing to experiment with orchestral sound and form. He composed for the specific skills of his players, writing 'Concerto for Cootie' for Cootie Williams, and he preferred to call his music American Music rather than jazz.

• 6. The Musician's Music

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  In the early 1940s, bebop-style performers began shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging musician's music. The most influential included saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianists Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown, and drummer Max Roach. Divorced from dance, bebop established itself as an art form and lessened its commercial appeal. Charlie Parker described the moment the new harmony came alive for him. Working over 'Cherokee' at Clark Monroe's Uptown House in New York in early 1942, he had grown bored with the stereotyped changes in use. By using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with related changes, he found he could play the thing he had been hearing. Gerhard Kubik argued these innovations sprang from blues and African-related tonal sensibilities rather than Western classical music. Bebop, he wrote, eliminated Western-style functional harmony while retaining the strong central tonality of the blues. These divergences met a divided, sometimes hostile response, especially from swing players who bristled at the new sounds. To hostile critics, bebop seemed filled with racing, nervous phrases. By the 1950s, despite the friction, bebop had become an accepted part of the jazz vocabulary.

• 7. Scales, Clave And Open Space

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  Cuban-born Mario Bauza composed 'Tanga' in 1943, recorded by Machito and his Afro-Cubans in New York City. The general consensus is that it was the first original jazz piece overtly based in clave, and it marked the birth of Afro-Cuban jazz. Bauza introduced Dizzy Gillespie to the conga drummer and composer Chano Pozo, whose brief collaboration produced 'Manteca' in 1947, the first jazz standard rhythmically based on clave. Modal jazz pulled in a different direction. Beginning in the later 1950s, it took the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of structure and improvisation, shifting the emphasis from harmony to melody. Miles Davis introduced the concept with Kind of Blue in 1959, which became the best selling jazz album of all time. He did not write out the music, he recalled, but brought in sketches because he wanted a lot of spontaneity. Free jazz broke into open space where meter, beat and formal symmetry all disappeared. Ornette Coleman's 1960 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation coined the term, alongside the early work of Cecil Taylor. John Coltrane carried the music further still. In November 1961 he played the Village Vanguard, resulting in Chasin' the 'Trane, which DownBeat magazine panned as anti-jazz. In June 1965 he and ten other musicians recorded Ascension, a 40-minute piece without breaks that Dave Liebman later called the torch that lit the free jazz thing.