HiFi Stereo Review
John S. Wilson : April, 1959
The Jazz Panorama

John S. Wilson has for more than a dozen years been gradually building up to his present standing as one of the foremost critics and historians of jazz. His byline is well-known from newspaper and magazine work in the hi-fi field. His weekly broadcasts. “The World of Jazz” over AM/FM radio station WQXR, enjoy an enthusiastic following in the New York metropolitan area. They are recorded and thus heard on both sides of the Iron Curtain via the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. A native of Elizabeth, New Jersey, born in 1913, Wilson dates his first important experience in jazz to his grammar school days when he took a shine to the records of Bix Beiderbecke and the young Duke Ellington – though he didn’t quite realize how significant this feeling would become. However, serious follow-up of his early jazz enthusiasm wasn’t possible till after college when he began to earn enough money to become a systematic jazz discophile. Wilson’s writing flair and jazz enthusiasms began working overtime when he got his writing start as Entertainment Editor of the shortlived newspaper PM. After that came a stint as New York editor of Down Beat. The rest is very current history. Thus far, Wilson has authored in book form The Collector’s Jazz, published in two paperbound volumes in Lippincott’s Key Series; Jazz Panorama indicates that this is only the beginning.

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Thirty years alter a nation has passed through a “Jazz Age,” it might seem redundant to bother about the elementary facts of jazz. It would be redundant if words had a secure, precise meaning.

But the Jazz Age was a lexicographical fraud. It was state of mind based on a misconception. The wild, rebellious youth of the post-World War I decade about whom the Jazz Age revolved rarely, if ever, heard any jazz and knew little or nothing about it. The orchestra that was led by the widely heralded “King of Jazz,” Paul Whiteman, played practically no jazz at all while the legitimate king of the idiom, King Oliver, and his successor without titular portfolio, Louis Armstrong, were virtually unknown.

Ever since the word “jazz” has suffered from indefinition. Gradually, through a slow process of attrition, it has become apparent to an increasing number of people that there are certain things that jazz is not.

Jazz is not any and all forms of American popular music. It is not the precisely rehearsed dance music of Lawrence Welk or Guy Lombardo or the pompous orchestrations of Andre Kostelanetz. It is not the calculatedly mannered singing of any of that string of popular vocal heroes from Whispering Jack Smith to Pat Boone. It is not a Tin Pan Alley tune – or, in fact, any tune per se.

But because the idea still persists that jazz not only includes these things but consists primarily of them, the music has been the recipient of undeserved criticisms as well as dubious compliments.

George Santayana once wrote to a friend, “It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theatres, etc., that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness and jazz bands.”

This is a sentiment that certainly speaks well for jazz but the jazz aficionado might accept it more readily if he knew what Santayana meant by “jazz.”

Igor Stravinsky, who should be expected to be more exact about such things, revealed that he wasn’t when he wrote that his Ragtime “is indicative of the passion I felt at that time for jazz, which burst into life so suddenly when the war (World War I) ended. At my request, a whole pile of this music was sent to me, enchanting me by its truly popular appeal, its freshness, and the novel rhythm which so distinctly revealed its Negro origin.”

Again, one wonders what was in this “pile of music” (there can be little doubt that much of it must have been piano rags). But no matter what it was, it could tell Stravinsky very little about jazz. For jazz, in its essence, is a performer’s art. It is a way of playing, a way which stubbornly refuses to submit to completely meaningful notation. It is preserved not, as Stravinsky understandably thought it should be, in published form but on phonograph records.

The Word

The origins of the word itself are cloudy. As so often happens, the term arrived long after the music it referred to had taken shape. There have been speculations that it is derived from a musician named Charles (abbreviated as “Chas.”) and that it comes from the French jaser, to exhilarate. It is likely that it does stem, in a way, from the latter for it apparently came into use for the first time in Chicago in 1915 when it was applied in derision to the music played by Tom Brown’s Band from Dixieland. The spelling then was “jass” and the meaning, as Rex Harris, an English commentator, has put it, was “distinctly copulative.”

Brown, however, had the spirit and imagination to turn the attempted derision to his advantage. He changed his billing to “Brown’s Dixieland Jass Band” and drew larger audiences than he had before. Two years later another group, the Original Dixieland Jass Band, became an overnight sensation at Reisenweber’s in New York and jazz (which was soon phoneticized by substituting z’s for s’s) became one of those fads, like goldfish gulping and chain letters, which periodically convulses this country.

In its faddistic context, “jazz” meant the furious tempos and odd shrieks and squawks (especially suitable for the pastoral settings of Barnyard Blues and Livery Stable Blues) that the Original Dixieland Jass Band had adopted as a means of attracting attention after it left its home grounds in New Orleans. Putting the emphasis squarely on cacophony, the band was billed as “Untuneful Harmonists Playing Peppery Melodics.” For the Jazz Age, this was jazz. And jazz has been trying to live it down ever since. It was no accident that one of the most successful “jazz” bands of the Jazz Age was led by Ted Lewis, no jazz musician but a superb showman who cleverly and deliberately satirized jazz.

Today it ought to be relatively simple to counter these misconceptions about jazz by stating what jazz is. But jazz resists precise, illuminating definition just as staunchly as it resists exact notation. There have been some noble efforts to pin it down. Marshall Stearns, a devoted jazz historian, has demonstrated what this involves as he cautiously sets forth what he calls “a tentative definition”:

“Jazz: a semi improvisational American music distinguished by an immediacy of communication, an expressiveness characteristic of the free use of the human voice, and a complex flowing rhythm; it is the result of a three-hundred-years blending in the United States of the European and West African musical traditions; and its predominant components are European harmony, Euro-African melody and African rhythm.”

Unfortunately, to a great many people, “untuneful harmonists playing peppery melodies” will continue to have more meaning than Stearns’ exercise in egg walking.

There have been other, less all-inclusive attempts at explanation. Viewing the current jazz, scene pianist Dave Brubeck has said, “The Challenge is to improvise on a known theme, using with taste the most advanced ideas of our times, withont losing the drive and rhythmic complexity of early jazz.”

Another current jazz star, trumpeter Miles Davis, emphasizes “swing” as essential to jazz. “What’s swinging in words?” he asks. “If a guy makes you pat your foot and if you feel it down your back, you don’t have to ask anybody if that’s good music or not. You can always feel it.”

Which is another way of saying what Fats Waller put so succinctly when he was asked, “What is jazz?”

“If you don’t know what it is,” roared the ebullient Fats, “don’t mess with it.”

Or, as Charles Edward Smith has astutely remarked, “Knowing how to play jazz consists partly of being in the right environment.”

Sources

Environment is certainly one of the keys to jazz. Jazz is, to begin with, the product of a very special environment – the cosmopolitan cultural crossroads that was New Orleans in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. Here the strains of various shades and developments of African and European music came together to he blended and stirred by men whose leaning to music was instinctive, whose knowledge of its formalities was practically nil and who approached it with unencumbered enthusiasm and direct expressiveness.

Music could be heard everywhere then, Rhythms and tribal chants came to New Orleans directly from Africa and indirectly by way of the West Indies. Formalized European music poured out of the town’s citadel of culture, the French Opera House. European dance music – the polka, the quadrille – flourished. It was a town that heard both the sensuous Creole songs and stark Protestant hymns. Marching bands blared up and down the streets.

African chants formed the basis for the Negroes’ work songs and these in turn split into a religious line (spirituals) and a secular line (blues). For the slaves, the voice was the principal means of musical expression. They made a few crude instruments out of cigar boxes, barrels and brooms (these were still the customary instruments of the “spasm” bands which flourished in the earliest days of jazz some fifty years ago), but they didn’t get a chance to play on real horns until after the Civil War when the Union Army left carloads of band instruments behind. Feeling their way onto these unaccustomed instruments, they instinctively transferred their manner of singing to their playing.

One of the prominent features of this singing was the “blue tonality” which has come to be an outstanding characteristic of jazz. Blue tonality is the result of adding two notes—blue notes: a flattened third and a flattened seventh—to the ordinary diatonic scale, producing a ten-note scale.

Using their home-grown method of playing, the Negro musicians of New Orleans quite naturally drew on all the musical sources they heard around them: the rhythm of the Congo Square rituals, the blues, hymns, polkas, arias, marches, minstrel songs. Late in the century, they began hearing something just a little different: ragtime.

Ragtime was basically a piano music derived from marches and the “cakewalk” music of minstrels. It had its first major success in Sedalia, Missouri, where Scott Joplin, the best known of the ragtime composers (viz. Maple Leaf Rag) played. Later it flourished in St. Louis. It balanced syncopation – the accenting of normally weak beats in the right hand against a steady beat in the left hand. At first this left hand beat was the stolid two-beat of a march but some St. Louis ragtime pianists – primarily such men as Tom Turpin and Louis Chauvin – lightened and brightened it by changing the beat to four even accents to each bar.

New Orleans

When ragtime reached New Orleans, it was further affected By the rolling rhythms of the marching bands there. The tempo became slower, the melodic flow smoother. In turn, ragtime contributed one more basic influence to the nascent jazz band.

The first group of musicians who played what can be distinctly classified as jazz is generally considered to have been a band led by a cornetist, barber, and gossip-sheet publisher named Buddy Bolden around 1898. Descriptions of the Bolden band’s style, given by men who played in the band, suggest that it was actually a transitional band, one which might play a ragtime tune in strict ragtime style but which approached the blues with the three-part polyphonic improvisation which became characteristic of early jazz bands.

The three voices in this polyphony were the cornet (an instrument, favored by brass bands, which gave way in the 1920’s to the brighter, orchestrally-oriented trumpet), clarinet, and trombone, supported by guitar or banjo, bass and drums. No piano, you’ll notice, for these bands led dual existence: Besides playing for dances at night, they marched in daytime parades, played for funerals or rode around town on advertising wagons. There was no place in these daylight activities for the piano, which, consequently, evolved in a parallel but separate ragtime-tinged vein until the Twenties.

The emphasis in early jazz groups was on ensemble playing, a natural carryover from their daytime marching. Solos, as a rule, were confined to “breaks” – brief unaccompanied passages of one or two bars. But the urge to solo burned steadily in the more adventurous jazzmen and the tendency to take off on virtuoso fights grew until, with the full emergence of Louis Armstrong in 1925 and 1926, the soloist took over the dominant role.

For Buddy Bolden’s band, however, and for those which followed him in New Orleans – the Olympia Band, Kid Ory’s Creole Band, and the Eagle Band – the music was an ensemble affair. The cornet took the lead, playing the basic melody line and emphasizing the strong beats. Bolden, a man of many legends, reputedly had enormous lung power and he established the tradition that made the town’s top cornetist the king of New Orleans jazzmen. When he was committed to a madhouse in 1906, his kingdom was taken over by Freddie Keppard, a cornetist who twice managed to escape the possibility of becoming known as the founding father of jazz.

Keppard was offered the opportunity to make the first jazz record but turned it down because he thought this would give other cornetists a chance to steal his stuff. When he finally was recorded, many years later, he was well past his prime and the event passed into history without notice. Again, Keppard’s band played in New York (at Coney Island) two full years before the Original Dixieland Jass Band’s arrival in town made both the ODJB and jazz internationally famous. But Keppard came, played and departed in what amounted to utmost secrecy.

When Keppard left New Orleans, Joe Oliver of Ory’s band inherited his title and took a firm, unyielding grip on it. Even when young Louis Armstrong replaced him as Ory’s cornetist, King Oliver took the title with him to Chicago.

The trombone in the early bands played a role midway between a supporting rhythm instrument and a melodic front line one. It accented the rhythm with huffs and puffs and filled in the bottom part of the polyphonic design with smears and blurbs. It was a role that did not attract attention nor did it demand exceptionally creative musical talent. Today Kid Ory is the best known of the early New Orleans trombonists, both because he led a band which at one time or another included most of the great early jazzmen and because of his latter-day fame as a prominent figure in the New Orleans revival.

Of the three front line voices in the early New Orleans bands, only the clarinet was customarily played with a legitimate technique (“legitimate” as compared to the freehand, self-evolved techniques of the cornetists and trombonists). The clarinetists were mostly Creoles, men of French blood. Many of them were students of Lorenzo Tio, a highly trained and accomplished musician. They brought a decidedly European sound to the New Orleans ensemble—a pure tone, a fingering agility that sometimes became outright flashiness and an ability to move with smooth craft in and out of the brass parts and to provide accents by soaring dramatically above the rest of the ensemble.

Even more than its cornetists, the clarinetists have been the glory of New Orleans jazz. The line starts with Alphonse Picou, who created the traditional clarinet solo in High Society by adapting the piccolo part of the march version of the tune, and continues with “Big Eye” Louis Nelson DeLisle and George Baquet. They were followed by Sidney Bechet, by Jimmy Noone, who provided much of the jazz inspiration for Benny Goodman, by Johnny Dodds and, more recently, by George Lewis and Edmond Hall.

The rhythm section was concerned primarily with providing a supporting beat, a two-beat adapted from both marches and polkas. Like the trombonists, few early New Orleans rhythm men became notable, although Bud Scott is worthy of mention on guitar, Pops Foster on bass and Baby Dodds (younger brother of clarinetist Johnny Dodds) on drums. Dodds, as a matter of fact, is worthy of more than mere mention. He was the first of the influential drum stylists, an inventive man who brought needed variety to the rhythm section by devising various ways of backing up the three frontline instruments.

No early New Orleans jazz found its way into a phonograph record groove. Its sound is preserved only in the memories of those who heard it and played it. Latter day recreations must necessarily be taken with several grains of salt because the men playing them reflect, to some degree, developments in music since those far gone days and because they are consciously re-creating instead of creating. Probably George Lewis’ band comes as close to the sound of early New Orleans jazz as anything the contemporary ear can hear.

Dixieland

The first jazz recording was made, as we have noted, by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, an outgrowth of a secondary line of early New Orleans jazz. Bolden’s band, the Olympia, the Eagle, Ory’s Creole Band were all Negro groups. They were set in the pattern of improvisation by the musical illiteracy of most of the musicians who came into them. And though their repertoires drew on the musical potpourri they heard around them, the heart of their music was the blues. Even when they were playing ragtime tunes or marches, the coloration of the blues was always present.

Quite naturally, some white musicians were fascinated by the music of the Negro bands and set about trying to play it. But to these relatively educated musicians, blue tonality was not the ingrained resource that it was to the Negro musicians. The white musicians tended to concentrate on the appealingly infectious Negro version of ragtime and their concentration produced a form of orchestral ragtime which has found a lasting place in jazz as Dixieland.

“Papa” Jack Laine, who drummed and played alto horn, led a white band at the turn of the century which proved to be the fount of present day Dixieland jazz. Originally, Laine had two bands, a brass band and a ragtime band, with largely interchangeable personnel. All of their numbers, even the ragtime pieces, were completely written out but gradually the Laine bands began producing musicians who could improvise successfully. It was a onetime Laine trombonist, Tom Brown, who took the music to Chicago in 1915 where it was first dubbed “jass.” More Laine musicians followed Brown north, including those who made up the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

But the most significant of the early Dixieland bands from the point of view of jazz development was not the Original Dixieland Jazz Band but a crew which has come down in jazz history as the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. When this band was first heard in Chicago in the early 1920’s it was playing at the Friars Inn and was called the Friars Society Orchestra. It was made up of a front line of New Orleans men—the nominal leader, Paul Mares, on cornet, George Brunies on trombone and Leon Rappolo on clarinet—backed up by a Chicago rhythm section.

Brunies (who has since changed the spelling of his name to Brunis) was a member of a multitudinous New Orleans family which has been prominent in music there for more than fifty years. As a teenager he had played with Jack Laine’s band and he brought to Chicago a trombone style that has proved ideal for the happy-go lucky sound of Dixieland—a mixture of rough, sometimes raucous humor and strategically placed, strongly expressed supporting accents. Now in his late fifties, Brunis is still playing regularly, still holding undeviatingly to this basic style.

The star of the group, however, was Rappolo whose clarinet style followed very closely that of the Creoles who had introduced the clarinet to New Orleans jazz. His playing wis both lyrical and darkly brooding, the most original use of the clarinet since it had been brought into jazz and one that was to prove highly influential on the clarinetists of the next two decades. Rappolo’s personal potential was only partly realized, however. He was committed to a mental institution in 1925 and remained there until he died eighteen years later.

Aside from providing a setting for Brunis and Rappolo, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings helped rouse the creative juices of a group of youngsters in the Windy City who instituted their own explosive variation of Dixieland which is generally identified as “Chicago style.”

Chicago

Chicago, by the early Twenties, had become the focal center of jazz. The success there of Tom Brown in 1915 had been only a slight hint of things to come. Two years later the government closed the New Orleans red light district, Storyville, which had provided employment for the growing clan of jazz musicians. A slow northward migration of the dispossessed began. By 1920 King Oliver was leading his own Creole Band in Chicago. It was viewed locally as the best thing of its kind at that time but this band took on really awesome proportions in 1922 when Oliver sent back home for young Louis Armstrong to join him as second cornetist.

For two years the Royal Garden Cafe (whence the tune beloved of Dixielanders, Royal Garden Blues) exploded nightly with what legend holds to be some of the most fabulous of all jazz performances as two of the music’s greatest cornetists improvised fantastically integrated duets and bit into challenging breaks and solos. The creative white heat of the Oliver-Armstrong performances and the lively but smoothed out Dixieland of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings made an indelible impression on several white youngsters in Chicago. Bix Beiderbecke, a cornetist, came forward with a style that was cleaner, more lyrical than that of either Armstrong or Oliver although it had a fire and drive that came out in his explosive way of making a solo entrance from a logey ensemble or, in his latter years, dragging a full band along on his bright, soaring lead. A younger group of Chicagoans-centered around some students at Austin High School and including cornetists Jimmy McPartland and Muggsy Spanier; Bud Freeman, tenor saxophone; Frank Teschemacher, clarinet; Dave Tough and Gene Krupa, drums; Joe Sullivan, clarinet – listened avidly both to the New Orleans groups and to Beiderbecke and set about trying their own relatively unskilled hands at producing the music that excited them.

Excitement was obviously their key. They played a rugged, rough. boisterous amalgam of everything that they had absorbed. Technique, or lack of it, never got in the way of their single minded goal—a furiously intense series of explosions. To increase the intensity, they moved from the customary two-beat rhythm to a steady four-four drive. Teschemacher, a violinist until he became interested in jazz, knew so much more about what he wanted to play than how to get it out of his clarinet that he squeaked. cracked and was constantly out of tune but he created a clarinet style that has had enough vitality to live on. It can be heard in its most polished form now in the work of Pee Wee Russell sho was in and out of the Chicago jazz scene in Teschemacher’s time.

One of the innovations of the Chicagoans was the addition of a tenor saxophone to the customary front line instrumentation. Despite its public association with jazz – as a symbol of jazz – the saxophone was a relatively late comer to the field. New Orleans jazz groups did not use them (although the clarinetists may have doubled on saxophone in their non-jazz work) and it proved an obdurate jazz instrument until the middle Twenties. Then both Coleman Hawkins in New York and Bud Freeman in Chicago evolved jazz styles on it. Freeman’s was a light, whirling attack which had discernible ties with the brilliant Creole clarinetists of New Orleans. He set the mode for the tenor saxophone in latter-day Dixieland groups but it was a style which was quickly overshadowed by Hawkins’ heavy, hard-breathing, staccato manner.

Hawkins was a product of New York jazz which, by the late Twenties, was drawing the jazzmen away from Chicago just as the Windy City had taken them from New Orleans a decade earlier.

New York

New York began as a piano town. Its earliest jazz stars were ragtime pianists who, by the early 1920’s, had expanded the scope of ragtime to take in the influences of the music that was coming up from New Orleans. These men—Luckey Roberts, James P. Johnson, Willie “The Lion” Smith and their younger followers, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington—were the stellar attractions at “rent parties” in Harlem, playing a propulsive style which has been labeled “stride piano” because of the striding effect produced by the left hand hitting a single note on the first and third beats and a chord of three or four notes on the second and fourth beats. Johnson, a trained pianist with serious ambitions as a composer, was the “king” of the rent party pianists in those days but the stride style which he helped to create was taken to its greatest heights by Fats Waller whose clowning won him a wide audience without completely obscuring his great talents as a pianist.

The split between Negro jazz and white jazz, which had started in New Orleans and was somewhat obscured in Chicago, was perpetuated in New York. The Harlem stride pianists represented early Negro jazz in New York while white New York jazz took its cue from the success of those white New Orleansers, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Phil Napoleon, a trumpeter, organized a group which was usually called the Original Memphis Five, although it recorded under a couple of dozen different names, playing competent but generally uninspired imitations of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The key man in the group was trombonist Miff Mole who brouglit some suggestion of a lyric quality to an instrument which had traditionally been used as a prod and an accent.

Mole soon teamed up with a Biederbecke-influenced trumpet man, Red Nichols, as the nucleus of a group which recorded as prolifically as Napoleon’s band and, drawing on the best white jazzmen in New York, produced more imaginative, less stereotyped discs. Nichols’ Five Pennies included at various times Jimmy Dorsey, the clarinetist in New York jazz in the later Twenties, his tromboning brother, Tommy, violinist Joe Venuti and guitarist Eddie Lang. Toward the end of the decade Nichols began to absorb some of the Chicago men who were drifting into New York—Goodman, Krupa, Russell, Freeman, Tough, Sullivan—and his music began to reflect the rough-and-ready quality of the Chicago school.

Big Bands

Meanwhile a new phenomenon had taken shape—big band jazz. Until the middle Twenties, jazz was, of necessity, viewed as a small ensemble music. Extemporizing polyphonically with more than three—or, at most—four instruments seemed out of the question. There had been efforts to write arranged jazz for larger groups but the results were very unjazzlike until Don Redman started producing orchestrations for Fletcher Henderson’s band in 1923 and 1924 in which the sections—the reeds, the brass, the rhythm—were treated as though they were the individual voices of a small band. Spaces were left open for improvised solos over an arranged background. Redman’s arrangements were actually little better than others of that time until Henderson lured Louis Armstrong away from King Oliver late in 1924. For almost a year Armstrong sat in the Henderson trumpet section and gave these Eastern-bred musicians their first taste of what basic, New Orleans-rooted jazz was like. By the time Armstrong left, his influence had transformed a dance band into a jazz band—the first of the big jazz bands.

For the next three years Roseland Ballroom, where the Henderson band played, was mecca for jazzmen in New York. Hawkins, who had been playing a rather routine tenor saxophone for Henderson for a year before Armstrong’s arrival, began to find his musical voice and evolved the huge tone and muscular attack that were to be the fashion among tenor saxophonists all through the 1930’s. Rex Stewart followed Armstrong into the trumpet section and then came Cootie Williams and Tommy Ladnier. There was Jimmy Harrison, a trombonist with a powerfully swinging attack, the suave clarinetist Buster Bailey, and the even suaver saxophonist Benny Carter.

This was a shouting, battling band—a band which pitted section against section, soloist against soloist, a band which aimed at the startling kaleidoscopic effect of breaks and changing background riffs. This was the jazz band of jazz bands in the late Twenties but, largely through Henderson’s casualness in business matters, it was on its way down even when it was at the height of its capabilities.

Its downward path was spurred by the rising star of Duke Ellington, one of the Harlem pianists who had been leading a small group when he noted Henderson’s success with a large band. Ellington put his band together with deliberation. He had an ear for musicians with individuality and when he found them he built their originality into the over-all texture of his band. Trumpeter Bubber Miley contributed the growl and muted wah-wah effects which became one of the basic Ellington characteristics. Tricky Sam Nanton adapted these effects to the trombone, Barney Bigard added a lush and soaring Creole clarinet, and Johnny Hodges brought in his polished virtuosity on the alto saxophone. But at the root was Ellington’s imaginative use of the materials his men brought him. Out of his feeling for blue-hued tonal patterns and his adventurous use of everything that has been made available to him—from the oddity of Rex Stewart’s half-valve trumpet style exploited in Boy Meets Horn to the haunting quality of Kay Davis’ soaring voice on Transblucency—-he has woven the most striking of all jazz orchestral styles.

The big band seed that Henderson planted in New York spread to other jazz centers. Louis Armstrong returned to Chicago after his Henderson interlude and began making a series of records with his Hot Five and Hot Seven (both groups existed only in the recording studio) which gave him his first opportunity to show off his monumental proportions as a jazz musician. Here, if anywhere, Armstrong’s genius as a creator in jazz terms is made abundantly clear as he pours out solo after solo, relatively unencumbered by surrounding distractions. These discs all but finished the early New Orleans idea of ensemble dominance which had its last fine flower in the King Oliver band with which Armstrong had played. With these Hot Five and Hot Seven performances, Armstrong declared himself a king, a king who believed in the soloist rather than the ensemble.

He continued to record with his small groups for four years but in 1929 he followed the rising fashion and switched to a big band. For almost twenty years after that Armstrong fronted several big bands most of which played in the dispirited fashion of men who know that they are nothing more than an anonymous background. It was a barren period for Armstrong, characterized by theatrical high-note endings. Late in the 1940’s he reverted to a small group once more and for several years he was leading a genuinely exciting jazz group again until be fell into a repetitious programming rut which has latterly produced jazz by rote.

Even before Armstrong joined the ranks of big band leaders, the pianist in his Hot Seven, Earl Hines, had formed a band which was to be a Chicago jazz landmark for ten years. As a pianist, Hines has had an amazingly wide and durable influence. When he arrived in Chicago from Pittsburgh in the early Twenties, ragtime was still the dominant piano style. In New Orleans, “Jelly Roll” Morton had removed some of the mechanical feeling of ragtime and fused it with the blues-based idiom of early jazz. In New York, James P. Johnson and Fats Waller were loosening it up with their stride attack. Hines viewed the two approaches and, seemingly siding with Jelly Roll, stripped what was left of ragtime from jazz piano, relying instead on a technique which has been termed “phrasing like a horn.” The horn that Hines followed was the trumpet, specifically the influential trumpet of Armstrong. The bright brassiness of his piano tone and his soaring horn-like figures have caused his playing to be called “trumpet style.” Hines represented a turning point in the development of the jazz piano and his influence can be heard directly in the playing of Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson. Erroll Garner, and Mary Lou Williams and in the theoretical approach of almost every post-Swing pianist.

West of Chicago big bands were brewing, too. In Kansas Cily there was a small backwater formed by the journey of jazz up the Mississippi to Chicago. At first the jazz in Kansas City was the traditional New Orleans polyphony. Hard driving, beat-heavy boogie-woogie pianists with their repelitious walking bass drifted in from Chicago and St. Louis and gave the town a taste for strong rhythms. Then some of the early big bands—Henderson’s, McKinney’s Cotton Pickers—came through with riff-studded arrangements over a four-four beat and the pattern was set for the Kansas City bands.

Benny Moten led the big band there, a driving juggernaut which, over the years, developed from a stolid, pounding attack to relative rhythmic subtlety. There was Andy Kirk’s band, too, with Mary Lou Williams playing highly educated boogie-woogie piano and writing remarkably advanced arrangements for the band. But the Moten band was the significant one. Out of it came the Count Basie band of the Swing Era and out of the Basie band came much of the jazz that has followed swing.

Swing

Properly speaking, the Swing Era didn’t begin until 1936 when Benny Goodman’s orchestra became the most popular jazz group that had yet appeared. Goodman was a much more legitimate “King of Swing” than Paul Whiteman had been a “King of Jazz” in the Twenties but Goodman’s band was actually a johnny-come-lately so far as “swing” was concerned. Swing was nothing new, nothing that Goodman created. The word had been used for years as a verb to denote that a hand was playing good jazz. Its use as a noun goes back at least to 1931 when Duke Ellington used it in the title of his tune, It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)—as concise an explanation of jazz as anyone has ever conceived.

Big jazz bands had been swinging since the mid-Twenties—Henderson, Ellington, Moten, Jimmy Lunceford, and many others, all of them, significantly, Negro bands. A few white bands had tried to swing. In 1926 and 1927 Jean Goldkette had a band spiced with such jazzmen as Beiderbecke, Venuti, Lang and saxophonist Danny Polo which swung on those occasions when Bix was given his head. Ben Pollack, a drummer, came close with a band he led late in the Twenties which included Benny Goodman (then sixteen years old), trombonists Jack Teagarden and Glenn Miller, and trumpeter Jimmy McPartland. This was a band that wanted to swing and could swing. But since it proved to be economically injudicious to do this very often, they kept their talents under wraps. When Pollack dropped the band in 1934, it stayed together as a cooperative group, brought in Bob Crosby as its new leader and went on to a very successful career playing big band Dixieland in the Goodman induced swing period.

The white band which is now viewed as the first harbinger of Swing was another Goldkette unit. Originally known as the Orange Blossoms, it played a long engagement at a Canadian club, the Casa Loma, and when it took to the road again it was billed as the Casa Loma Orchestra. The Casa Lomans played arrangements based on staccato riffs but except for Clarence Hutchinrider, a clarinetist in the white Chicago tradition, the band had no soloists of consequence. Once they had gained attention through the relative novelty of their jazz-like pieces, they settled down to great popularity as a sweet band. However, the Casa Loma style obviously had appeal and when Benny Goodman decided to organize a big band his arrangements were patterned on the Casa Loma formula. By the time Fate beckoned Goodman, however, he had taken on Fletcher Henderson as his chief arranger, the Casa Loma style had been jettisoned, and his band was playing some of the same arrangements that had once been used by the first of the big jazz bands.

In Goodman’s hands these arrangements came out differently than they had when the Henderson band had played them. Goodman demanded precision and polish in his ensemble playing. The Henderson hand had been notorious for the sloppy way its numbers began—half the men in the band were usually looking for their music all through the first chorus. The Henderson band’s strength was its soloists—great individualists who could “cut”‘ anybody in Goodman’s band with the possible exception of pianist Jess Stacy and Goodman himself. So while Goodman produced music that was smooth and swinging, it lacked fire and excitement that had characterized Henderson’s band. However, Goodman’s music was much more palatable to the mass ear and when he started giving pop tunes of the moment this same smoothly swinging approach he briefly achieved the rapprochement between popular music and jazz which had supposedly been made by Whiteman ten years before.

Goodman’s success was so overwhelming that in short order the most routine dance bands were attempting to swing up their beat and to copy the smooth voicing of the Goodman reed section. What jazz feeling the Goodman band had was soon drained from the style and the return of dance bands to a non-jazz basis was signalized when Glenn Miller’s orchestra ascended to the popularity throne once held by Goodman.

There were a few other big white bands that found places for themselves in the Swing Era that Goodman had created. The most noteworthy—and the only ones which deviated markedly from Goodman’s pattern—were those led by Bob Crosby and Woody Herman. Both concentrated heavily on blues and a much arranged form of Dixieland.

In retrospect it would seem that Goodman’s main contribution to jazz development was his creation of the Goodman small groups—first a trio with pianist Teddy Wilson and drummer Gene Krupa, then a quartet with the addition of Lionel Hampton on vibraphone and, later, varied groups ranging in size to a septet. The Goodman combos introduced a new form of small group jazz. Until the Goodman trio made its debut in 1935, small jazz groups had usually played either the blues, Dixieland or the traditional New Orleans polyphony. The Goodman small groups occasionally dipped into the blues but its fare was popular tunes, music from Broadway shows and the expansion of simple riffs. [Riff—as defined in Feather’s The Encyclopedia of Jazz: “n. Repeated two- or four-bar phrase.” As exemplified in practice, Count Basie’s One O’Clock Jump on Decca DL 8049 provides a classic instance. Such two- or four-bar phrases are often built up by way of repetition, crescendo, or call-and-response as the basis of an entire improvisation or improvised episode.—Ed.] It played in the four-four swing style of Goodman’s big band and the result—particularly in the work of the trio and quartet—was such an intimate cameo of the big band’s work that it became known as chamber jazz, setting a tone that was picked up some fifteen years later by the intimately voiced small groups of modern jazz.

During Goodman’s period of eminence, the Negro bands continued to swing as they always had—Ellington, Lunceford, Hines, the rediscovered Henderson and one very important new band led by Count Basie.

Basie, the pianist in Bennie Moten’s Kansas City band, had formed a group of his own when Moten died in 1935. He was working for peanuts in Kansas City when Goodman and John Hammond, the jazz enthusiast who helped Goodman launch his band, urged Basie to expand and come East. Basie and his small group had been contentedly playing the blues in Kansas City and they were so unprepared for their widened horizons that when they were booked into the Grand Terrace in Chicago they had to borrow the arrangements of the band they were replacing, Fletcher Henderson, in order to play the date. But by the time Basie reached New York in 1937 he had a free swinging band, playing mostly head arrangements, which proved to be the ultimate swing band of the Swing Era. More than that, even while Swing was still the thing, the Basic band was pointing in the direction of things to come.

The most important trail blazer among the Basieites was tenor saxophonist Lester Young whose light, flowing playing flew squarely in the face of the accepted tenor style of the day—Coleman Hawkins’ robust, swaggering, charging attack. (When Hawkins left Fletcher Henderson’s band in 1934, Henderson’s choice for & replacement was Young—later blackballed by Henderson’s sidemen who said he sounded as though he was playing alto.)

Young’s musical antecedents were Bud Freeman of the Chicagoans and Frankie Trumbauer who played C-melody saxophone in the Goldkette and Whiteman bands and appeared on many of Bix Beiderbecke’s small group recordings. Young has attributed his relatively light sound to his efforts to get the sound of Trumbauer’s C-melody saxophone. From both Trumbauer and Freeman he picked up suggestions for the leaps and swoops and sudden flights that are part of his style, a style that is marked by a shift in rhythmic patterns so that the strong beats are not always accented.

Behind him drummer Jo Jones was also working changes in rhythmic emphasis. Most big bands drummers in those days emphasized the four beats in each measure by hitting out each beat on the bass with his foot pedal. In the Basie rhythm section, however, the bass and guitar stroked out the steady four beats, accented here and there by chords from the piano, while the drummer reduced his steady four-beat activities to a cymbal. With his bass drum foot freed of a timekeeper’s shackles, Jones was able to use it as a prod or accent which subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—altered the rhythmic direction of a soloist.

This device was expanded by Kenny Clarke, the house drummer in a Harlem spot, Minton’s Playhouse. His after-hours colleagues there in the early 1940’s included pianist Thelonious Monk, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and the guitarist in Benny Goodman’s band, Charlie Christian. These were the musical adventurers who created the variant of jazz which became known as bop.

Bop

Christian, who died at the age of 22 alter only two years of major jazz activity, changed the guitar from a chording, accompanying instrument to a source of solos that flowed as though they came from a horn. In the process he made the hitherto awkward electric guitar de rigeur for the fashionable jazzman. He worked out his single-line solos over an unerring, driving beat with constantly shifting accents.

These men at Minton’s found a common core around which to build in their mutual curiosity about harmonic concepts that were new to jazz (Monk contributed some of the most alarmingly unorthodox) and their leaning toward shifting accents. Parker and Gillespie both found themselves at home in this atmosphere. Parker’s seemingly erratic stops and starts, his furious dives into long, overflowing passages were the outward expression of his own arrival at the same conclusions that had been brewing in other minds. Parker had reached his conclusions through dogged instinct. Dizzy Gillespie, a much more articulate man, theorized his way to much the same point and then helped to synthesize the ferment that came out of Minton’s.

What came to be called bop was nurtured in the Earl Hines band of 1943, a band which included both Parker and Gillespie. Because of a recording ban in effect that year there are no discs to document this stage in the growth of bop. Later Billy Eckstine, who had been the vocalist in his band (along with Sarah Vaughan), formed a big bop band of his own, again with Parker and Gillespie, but it broke up after a little more than a year. A subsequent effort by Gillespie to head a big bop band also fell on barren ground, but by then bop was losing momentum and big bands of all kinds were finding the going hard.

Bop’s halcyon days occurred in the middle Forties on New York’s 52nd Street. There it excited almost all the younger and would-be musicians and an occasional older one. Coleman Hawkins, saxophonist Benny Carter, Mary Lou Williams and Dave Tough were among the few stars of earlier jazz who found fresh inspiration in the new music. A wider public began to perk up its ears when publicity was given to such fringe phenomena as Gillespie’s capers and the ubiquitousness of goatees, berets and dark glasses among bop fanciers. But this public never took to the music itself in any depth and, as an increasing number of inept musicians passed off their fumbling efforts as bop, the music lost what small audience it had acquired.

In its wake bop left a shaken if not exactly revitalized jazz picture. It had planted the seeds of revitalization, however. They first became evident in the Woody Herman band of 1944 and 1945 which is now identified as the “First Herd.” The tone for this band was set by arrangements provided by trumpeter Neal Hefti, an early admirer of Parker and Gillespie, and it was amplifed and carried forward by Ralph Burns, one of the new crop of conservatory trained musicians whose presence in jazz was to be felt more and more strongly during the coming years. Herman’s First Herd was a virtuoso ensemble which was completely at home in the new directions provided by bop and it breezed through arrangements that would have choked any other band.

With its brilliant assimilation of bop, the Herman Herd became one of the two big bands which managed to be in the ascendant when most of the established big bands were going down the skids, skids which had been greased by their own tired, uncreative repetitiveness and by an economic situation which left no operating margin for a big band. The other ascendant band of this moment, Stan Kenton’s, started out in a promising flurry of adventurousness but soon bogged down in a swamp of blaring pretention.

The appearance of bop in the Forties was almost inevitable. Something—bop or not—was bound to happen to jazz at the beginning of World War Il. At that point jazz seemed to be heading straight for a dead end. The swing bands were growing more and more tired, swinging less and less. The small Dixieland groups were dead on their feet, playing the same old tunes in the same old way. Only Duke Ellington, plowing his own personal furrow, was brightening the jazz scene with the greatest band of his illustrious career. But Duke was an original. He was, as he always has been, himself—inimitable and the breaker of paths that only he can follow.

So something had to give. It gave—and it gave in two opposite directions. One was off into the unknown—bop. The other was back to the all but forgotten—traditional New Orleans jazz.

The traditional revival began with trumpeter Lu Watters whose Yerba Buena Jazz Band in San Francisco brought back the musical styles of King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton in 1939 and 1940. Then Bunk Johnson, a New Orleans trumpeter of the generation before Louis Armstrong, was dredged out of a Louisiana rice field, fitted with new teeth and a new trumpet and became the petted Enoch Arden of jazz during the Forties. Kid Ory was lured out of retirement on a California chicken ranch to front a new Creole Jazz Band. The interest in old, old jazz leaped the seas to England, to France, and to Australia. It swooped down on the colleges. Lines of seething fury were drawn between the traditionalists and the boppers who viewed each other as “moldy figs,” on one hand, and players of “all them wrong notes,” on the other.

As the 1950s approached, tempers settled down and reactions set in on both sides. Mere leaden lumpiness was dismissed as not being the only qualification for a traditional band. George Lewis, the clarinetist in the band which had been organized for Bunk Johnson, emerged as a worthy advocate of the old ensemble New Orleans style. Similarly the excesses of bop led to an introverted, understated style which has been aptly described as “cool” jazz.

Cool Jazz

Cool jazz has served as a means of bringing into jazz many instruments which had never found a proper place there before—the French horn, the flute—and to reinstate such a long forgotten jazz instrument as the tuba. The two instrumentalists whose playing bears the particular hallmarks of cool jazz are the tenor saxophonist Stan Getz and trumpeter Miles Davis. It was Davis who led a short-lived group in 1949 which is held to be the keystone of cool jazz. This group, playing arrangements by Gil Evans, John Lewis, Gerry Mulligan, and Davis, was made up of trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba, alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, piano, bass and drums. Its sonorous quality, its dreamy, legato attack had a slightly familiar ring to those who had heard Claude Thornhill’s orchestra a few years before. And well it might for it was in Thornhill’s essentially sweet dance band that the rudiments of cool jazz were worked out through the arrangements of Evans and Mulligan and in the relaxed, vibratoless alto saxophone of Lee Konitz. Getz applied this same tone to the tenor, exemplified in his performance of Early Autumn with Woody Herman in which it becomes apparent that the cool idea goes back well beyond the Thornhill band to Lester Young and, through Young, to Trumbauer and Beiderbecke.

The cool idea caught on quickly on the West Coast where a Davis-tempered trumpeter, Chet Baker, acquired swift fame as a member of Gerry Mulligan’s Quartet (Mulligan has since reacted from his cool period by reverting to a guttier, earthier style, a change which was helped through the replacement of Baker by a sensitively rugged valve trombonist, Bob Brookmeyer). As the cool elements on the West Coast mingled with the tightly-voiced bop-based ideas of Shorty Rogers, a onetime Herman trumpeter who amounts to a school in himself in the Los Angeles area, there appeared in California a succession of slick, emotionless jazzmen who could rattle off an endless line of glittering, machine-made performances.

What might be termed “a warm school of cool”—a cool surface with inner heat—has been devised by pianist John Lewis for his Modern Jazz Quartet, a highly proper group with a strong feeling for form, tempered by the equally strong blues roots of Lewis and vibraphonist Milt Jackson. Much the same effect is achieved by Paul Desmond, the alto saxophonist in Dave Brubeck’s Quartet, who is basically a follower of Lee Konitz’s limpid style, even while he beefs it up in the course of performance.to a temperature that is straight out of the hot jazz era.

But, as must happen to any drive toward an extreme, cool jazz produced its own reaction—two reactions, in fact. One was the rediscovery of (or, at least the revival of interest in) the vital roots of jazz, which had been largely scorned by the boppers. This rediscovery took two directions—the passionate, blues drenched earthiness of the so-called “funky” school exemplified in the minor-keyed ideas of pianist Horace Silver and the more academicized examination of the folk roots of jazz in the work of Jimmy Giuffre or Mose Allison.

The other reaction, “hard bop,” a fierce, at times overpowering extension of bop lines, lodged most firmly in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and in the bursting-at-the-seams saxophone styles of John Coltrane and Johnny Griffin. For awhile saxophonist Sonny Rollins could be counted among the hard boppers but this proved to be merely a step in his development into one of the most individual jazz musicians of the Fifties. Rollins soon left the harsh qualities of hard bop behind to work in a warmer, more melodic fashion that projected such strong implications of a swinging accompaniment that he has been able to make effective use of what has previously been only a novelty gimmick—-the unaccompanied saxophone solo.

Rollins’ emergence as a musician of importance is also a milestone in the development of jazz, for he is the first tenor saxophonist of consequence in the past twenty years to have been obviously influenced by Coleman Hawkins rather than Lester Young. His arrival on the scene at this particular juncture suggests that jazz has now achieved what amounts to a self-reviving cycle, with each turn of the wheel bringing back worthwhile elements of the old to be blended with worthier parts of the new.

At the same time jazz has become so established as a listening music rather than the dancing music it once was that the concept of extended “jazz composition” has ceased to be a novelty. Much of this “composition” has been little more than trivial sketching, particularly when it has been produced on commission for a jazz festival. Even more of it draws on European musical traditions rather than on jazz and is, in effect, a latter-day extension of those misconceptions of the Twenties which threatened to make jazz “respectable.” But there are signs that extended jazz composition may have sone validity, signs that are most noticeable in the work of Charlie Mingus, who has created his own form and style, and of John Benson Brooks, who bases his work on the folk roots of jazz. Jazz, however, is such a personal creation, so much a performer’s art, that extended jazz compositions have, by and large, received more than one performance only when they have become part of the repertory of a featured performer (as a rule, a performer-composer) for whom they were written.

Today, jazz is, as it was in the first place, primarily a music for small ensembles. There have been big jazz bands, as we have noted. The solo piano line ran more or less separately until the middle Twenties. Since then there have been three piano soloists of note: Art Tatum, a virtuoso performer with a rococo imagination and superb technique; Erroll Garner, a master of splashily dramatic contrasts; and Bud Powell who succeeded more than any other pianist in transferring the ideas of Charlie Parker to the keyboard.

Blues Singers

In another separate but related line are the blues singers. Blues grew out of the early Negro work songs which split in two directions: (1) mixing with English hymns to become spirituals and (2) drawing from the warm Creole songs to become blues. The blues is a precise or (as Leonard Bernstein has said) “a classical form, just as classical as the sonata form.” The form is a twelve-bar chorus made up of three four-bar lines of which the second line is largely a repetition of the first. In its lyric form, Richard Wright has compared the blues to a man walking around a chair clock wise (the first line), then walking around it again counterclockwise (the second line) and then standing aside and giving a full judgment on it (the last line) .

Jazz musicians from the earliest times have drawn heavily on the blues for their melodic and harmonic ideas but until the 1920’s blues singers remained more a part of American folk music than of relatively more sophisticated jazz. Then, after Mamie Smith had made the first blues recording, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith established an interplay between jazz musicians and blues singers in a series of discs on which they used top-ranking jazzmen as their accompanists. Louis Armstrong made the conjunction even closer when he added singing to his established talent on the horn. Ethel Waters widened the field by applying the blues singer’s technique to popular songs (she introduced Dinah in a night club show), opening the door for Mildred Bailey, Lee Wiley, and Ella Fitzgerald, all of them basically ballad singers who leaned toward jazz phrasing. The blues-oriented line of singers was carried on by Billie Holiday in the middle Thirties and later by Anita O’Day and Sarah Vaughan.

But singers, solo pianists and big bands are only marginal contributors to the over-all jazz picture. The heart of jazz still beats strongest in the intimate confines of the small group where extemporaneous interplay can flourish and the deep well of the blues continues to be the important source of jazz inspiration that it has been since Buddy Bolden’s cornet was rocking the rafters of Tin Type Hall and Paul Dominguez, a legitimately trained Creole violinist, was shaking his head in wonder and muttering, “I don’t know how they do it. But, goddam, they’ll do it. Can’t tell you what’s there on the paper, but just play the hell out of it.”