0.8 Chapter 7: jazz  (Page 3/4)

Brief history

The great sweep of jazz’s first century is usually loosely divided into five general periods: (1) the music’s origins and the emergence of its early masters; (2) the so-called “Swing Era” when the music was the popular music of the United States (and much of the world as well); (3) the emergence of bebop in the early 1940s; (4) the avant-garde movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s; and (5) the “fusion” movement of the 1970s and beyond, in which jazz absorbed influences from a variety of other musical traditions, including rock. Yet, though some categorization is necessary to make sense of this music’s unique and fascinating path through history, such classifications must be used with care, for a newer style does not necessarily replace an older one. It is possible, in fact, to hear virtually any style of jazz being played in the 21st century; some musicians look back to the work of earlier performers, while others continue to push the music into new realms, often absorbing elements of other genres (including world music and hip-hop) along the way.

I. early jazz

Although New Orleans is often touted as “The Birthplace of Jazz,” it is actually impossible to limit the music’s emergence to a single geographic location. It is clear that vernacular music traditions that would feed into emerging jazz were developing throughout the country at the turn of the 19th century. Yet, New Orleans did supply a distinctive style of jazz, and most of the greatest early practitioners of the music (Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, and others) came from this vibrant cultural melting pot, where blues, classical music, ragtime, church music, and other traditions combined to help create the irresistible, largely improvised music that took the country by storm in the 1920s. The first recordings of jazz were actually made in in New York in 1917 by a white group, The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, an ensemble made up of Italian Americans from New Orleans, but the true birth of jazz recording is usually traced to the magnificent recordings made in 1923 by King Oliver and His Creole Jazz Band, in which Armstrong played second cornet to Oliver’s lead. Joining the migration of many African Americans to northern cities during the so-called “Great Migration” from the South in the late teens and early 1920s, Oliver, Armstrong, Morton, and many other musicians built careers in Chicago, where the music flourished and some of the early masterpieces by Armstrong and Morton were recorded. Many of these performances include what has become known as “collective improvisation”—everyone appearing to improvise simultaneously in a densely polyphonic texture—though we now know that a considerable amount of planning went into these “improvisations.” Armstrong, however, partly with the encouragement of his wife Lillian Hardin Armstrong, soon emerged as one of the greatest musicians in the country, and since his ground-breaking recordings of the mid and late 1920s, jazz has been largely considered (rightly or wrongly) an art that celebrates the virtuoso soloist.