Early Jazz History

The Origin Of Jazz

@ All That Jazz
All that Jazz Trumpet Jazz was the first American music style to influence music worldwide. Most music scholars agree, the early Jazz influences came from the post Civil War and Emancipation era, a time when former slaves were now free to travel about spreading their African Heritage of rhythm and tonality with them. They could now make a living for the family by entertaining in hotels, restaurants, clubs, brothels, and dance halls. This was also a time when instruments from the bands of Civil War Armies became available to the African Americans.

Jazz developed from a mixture of;
sprituals Spirituals and field hollers of the plantation slave workers
rags The beat of ragtime syncopation
brass bands The driving marches and sounds of brass bands
blues The deep down growl of the blues

Spirituals And Field Hollers
While working in the fields, railroads, seaport docks, and on the plantations, many of the slaves, and later the freed blacks, used work songs as a rhythm for their labors. Overseers did not often interfere with the work songs because it improved the output and the mood of the captive laborers. This also served to take ones thoughts away from their plight. These songs consisted chiefly of, spirituals or gospel songs, field hollers, call-and-response type songs, and modified sea chanteys, which accounts for the presents of these song types in early jazz music.

According to "A Study in Jazz Historiography: The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz." by Eileen Southern, the plantation music of anti-bellum days was one of the forbears of Jazz. A three piece group, Fiddle, Banjo and Drum, was the basic instrumentation. By the 1890's, the plantation combo had grown to include: Fiddle, Banjo, Drum, Upright Bass or Cello, and Cornet. By the early 1900's, the Fiddle disappeared and the Trombone and Clarinet were added, sometimes with a 'brass Bass' the Tuba. This is often attributed to the availability of used instruments of this type in pawn shops following the Civil War.

The Rags
Ragtime is a style of American popular music that flourished from about 1890 to World War I. The term"ragged time" came to be used in the late 19the century to describe the syncopation characteristic of a particular style of popular music, predominantly for the piano, that emanated from the South and Midwest. This practice of syncopation was described as "ragging," in which the melody, and often the chordal progressions, were syncopated over a rhythmically straightforward bass line. Although ragtime was primarily a written form of music, ragtime tunes were influential in shaping the direction of early jazz. In the early 1900's the term "ragtime" was used instead of "jazz" by New Orleans performers.

During the 1890s traveling black pianist such as Scott Joplin, living in and around Sedalia, Missouri, composed and notated works that formalized Ragtime Music. Early published rags resembled cakewalks, a dance originating among plantation slaves in the 1840s as a strutting promenade mocking the owner's manners, but adopted the word "rag" in their titles, for example Joplin's Original Rags and Maple Leaf Rag.

From the late 1890s, when the first ragtime pieces were published, arrangements of the more popular pieces were made available for dance or theater orchestras, whose instrumentation's predated that of the earliest jazz bands. Accompanying parts were taken by piano, guitar, upright bass, and drums, and the melodic parts were assigned to violins, cornets, flute, clarinet, trombone, and cello.

"Barrelhouse" piano, similar to ragtime piano, was also called "Fast Western" to denote the fact that it came from the West side of the Mississippi river, from Kansas City, St. Louis, and Sedalia Missouri, and elsewhere. The name "Barrelhouse" refers to a type of saloon where liquor was served straight out of a wooden barrel perched on top of the bar. This fast style of piano playing may have originated in the crude saloons of the west and midwest, that catered to the workers of mining camps and cattle drives. It probably then traveled to the low saloons of the larger western cities. It was a 'staple' of San Francisco's Barbary Coast, and certainly a predecessor of the 'stride' piano style used by early Jazz pianist.

Brass Bands
About the time of the Civil War, most towns had a bandstand or gazebo, where on weekends and special occasions, a small brass band would entertain the townsfolk. Many dressed in uniforms, and must have been an impressive sight. These bands, most likely, were the prototype for the brass bands of New Orleans and other towns. In the late 1800's many of the instruments used in the Civil War bands began showing up in pawn shops and second hand stores, making them available to the poorer classes of people.

In New Orleans the large marching groups were usually used for funeral processions and large Mardi Gras celebrations. The instrumentation of these bands were usually cornets, clarinets, trombones, tubas, banjos and drums. Also, numerous society dances required skilled musical ensembles.

At the turn of the century, Jack "Papa" Laine's Brass Band was one of the most popular. These were the men who paraded by day, or rode through town, in a horse drawn wagon advertising a dance, and then worked in the Storyville brothels, saloons, and dance halls, at night. In New Orleans, even to this day, one can see street parades with a brass band leading the way, and funeral processions, with the band playing a dirge or Just a Closer Walk With Thee out to the cemetery, and songs such as Mahogany Hall Stomp, When The Saints Go Marching In, and Didn't He Ramble on the way back.

The Blues
The origin of "The Blues" is not well documented, probably dating back to the end of the Civil War. The slaves had been freed physically, but not financially. Not being equipped to enter the 'free' world, they would often moan or sing of their problems with love, money, and life, usually without any instruments. Before 1900 a traveling musician with a guitar or banjo would try to create a unique sound, using the sliding, emotional, swerving, and soaring pitch, of the falsetto cry, or 'field holler', a type of plantation greeting. In the early 1900's a more orderly, written form of blues became popular hits. W.C. Handy's St. Louis Blues was one of the most famous of these. With the passing of time, a pattern emerged, which we refer to as the 'twelve bar blues'. In this form the words are placed into three stanzas, four measures to a stanza. The first stanza states the particular problem, the second stanza repeats the problem, and the final stanza carries the thought to a conclusion. (Musically speaking, the whole operation takes 12 bars.)

One of the oldest blues songs, according to Jelly Roll Morton, is Mamie's Blues which begins,

Two nineteen done took my baby away,
Two nineteen took my babe away,
Two seventeen gonna bring her back some day.

As 'The Blues' began to influence Jazz, the words were not so important. They would very simply let the trumpet state what departure means, and the clarinet would describe what being alone means. The trombone might tell how long it is between departure and return, and then all three, supported by string bass, drums, guitar, or banjo, could state that hope exists and can survive the agony of separation.

The music called Jazz was born sometime around 1895 in New Orleans. It combined elements of Ragtime, marching band music, and Blues. What made Jazz different from these earlier styles was the use of improvisation, often by more than one player at a time. Jazz represented a break from Western musical traditions, where the composer wrote a piece of music on paper and the musicians then tried their best to play exactly what was in the score. In Jazz, the song is often just a starting point or frame of reference for the musicians to improvise around. The song might have been a popular ditty or blues that they didn't compose, but by the time they were finished with it they had composed a new piece that often bore little resemblance to the original song. Many of these musicians could not read music at all, never the less their playing thrilled audiences, and the spontaneous music they created captured a sense of joy and adventure. That, was an exciting departure from other music of the time. =>>>>>>>>>>>

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