I.
JAZZ PREHISTORY
“Jazz” is a term
irrevocably tied to the brothels of old in New Orleans, but it since has
acquired several new meanings. In the
1920s, it referred generally to popular music, as opposed to “classical”
European art music. In the 1930s came
the distinction between “hot” and “sweet jazz,” and after the Second World War
“bebop” came along to challenge the hegemony of “mainstream” jazz. Since that time, jazz has moved in so many
different directions that some find it difficult to gather all of them into the
same category. In our own times, the
term denotes commercial music that doesn’t sell very well, rather an endangered
species of music.
First having come into prominence around the
First World War, it has served as a banner for the buying and selling of music
deemed outside the pale of “serious” or “classical” European concert music. At the same time, a mystique has grown around
both the music and its label, in the public mind at least, connoting something
different from, and more difficult and inaccessible than that marketed as
“popular” music.
This fact and the
sheer diversity of the music as it has evolved over more than a century, have
caused no end of involved theoretical debates among critics over what jazz is,
exactly. Some of these critics, notably LeRoi
Jones in the 1960s, have sought to resolve the issue by simply obliterating the
word altogether, either by replacing it with a vague term like “Black music” or
by arguing that music needs no label to be enjoyed or appreciated. More recently, writers like Stanley Crouch
have argued for a definition so stringent—and so subjective—that they exclude
any music that violates their criteria.
The truth of the
matter is that the term will continue to be used, even as its definition
changes from generation to generation.
It is the most descriptive term we have to distinguish itself from other
music of African American origins, like field holler, ragtime,
and blues. The roots of this
musicological distinction are in reality social, and they have a history of
some importance. More than forty years
ago the music critic Henry Pleasants noted that
Not until our own
time have the differences in how we approach music, and in what we expect from
First having come into prominence around the First World
War, it has served as a banner for the buying and selling of music deemed
outside the pale of “serious” or “classical” European concert music. At the same time, a mystique has grown around
both the music and its label, in the public mind at least, connoting something
different from, and more difficult and inaccessible than that marketed as
“popular” music. Undoubtedly, the term
will continue to be used, even as its definition changes from generation to generation. It is the most descriptive term we have to
distinguish itself from other music of African American origins, like field
holler, ragtime, and blues.
The roots of this musicological distinction are in reality social, and
they have a history of some importance.
More than forty years ago the music critic Henry Pleasants noted that
Not until our own time have
the differences in how we approach music, and in what we expect from it, been
reflected in separate, distinct, and mutually exclusive musical idioms… Time was—and it was no more than fifty years
ago—within the confines of the Western world, universal.[1]
The reasons for this cultural bifurcation, it should be
recalled, are twofold. The first is that
the market exerts an economic pressure to create two cultures, one for the masses
and the other for a cultural elite. The
other, as Pleasants remarks further, is the result of a peculiar set of
historic circumstances:
In music, … and in music
alone, our understanding of what has happened in our century is confused by the
injection of an alien culture and by the arrival of an art form from an
improbable quarter… Neither in the
graphic arts, nor in literature, is there a vital so-called sub-culture to
disturb the assumptions of an Establishment.[2]
This “alien culture” is the African American folk
tradition, whose origins have been traced back through three centuries of
slavery to the various cultures of West Africa.
Our concern here, however, is the origin of genres of Black music which
arose as commercial entities, eventually to challenge the hegemony of European
music in the time of its decline. It is
here that, by degrees, Black music ceases to be purely “folk culture” and
begins to be perceived by the cultural establishment as a mortal threat.
The story of this music might properly be said to have
begun in the 1840s, with its vogue among whites for the music of Black slaves;
white “nigger minstrels” of this period took the entertainment world by
storm. America’s popular songs in this
decade included “Old Zip Coon” (later reincarnated as “Turkey in the Straw”)
and “Jump Jim Crow,” both performed in black-face shows by Dan Emmett and the
Virginia Minstrels. Other shows of the
same type were performed by the Ethiopian Serenaders, who established their
success in England under the direction of Edwin P. Christy.[3] What all
of these white troupes presented was essentially a parody of Black
music, with the intention of holding its original creators up to the ridicule
of respectable society. The dedication
written by “Gumbo Chaff” for Elias Howe’s Ethiopian Glee Book, published
in 1849, serves admirably as an example of the white entertainment world’s
sense of humor. The volume is dedicated
to
Antislabery ‘Cieties trout de
World… De ‘Scriber am pressed wid de
vast ‘sponsibility ob presentin’ to de whole… Popalation ob dis world de genus
ob de colored professors ob de ‘vine art.[4]
Giles Oakley notes that “while the burnt cork
entertainers may have paved the way for blacks to appear in their own right,
they also defined the terms in which they could do so.”[5] Thius for many decades, and in some respects
even now, the role of the Black performing artist became that of a clown,
either a shuffling “coon” simpleton or a ridiculous dandy in fine clothes,
aping the manners of white folks. This
degrading image of the Black man was interrupted by a brief hiatus in the
1870s, during the period of pro-Black sentiment following Emancipation when the
Negro Spirituals (popularized internationally by the Fisk Jubilee Singers)
arose as the “symbol of a noble people just freed.” However, with the return of social and
political reaction in the South, the old stereotype was resurrected by the
Redemption propaganda, perfectly illustrated by the songs of Stephen Foster,
which offered a sentimental, romantic view of life on the old plantation.[6]
The Black minstrel shows which became prominent in the
1880s included such names as the Georgia popular among Blacks in that locale,
and son of a middle-class Alabama family.[7] (Handy later achieved fame as one of the
first to see the commercial possibilities of the blues. In 1903, as the director of a Knights of
Pythias ban from Clarksdale, Mississippi, he toured locally to play dances and
community socials. Trained in European
music, Handy had absorbed some of the materials of Black folk music from his
youth. At any rate, as the story is
told, in Cleveland, Mississippi, Handy’s organization was “cut” one night by a
rustic trio playing “primitive” music, and Handy learned his lesson well. Soon he started orchestrating the tunes
popular among Blacks in that locale, and by the appearance of “Memphis Blues”
in 1912 established himself in the white world as a composer and publisher of
blues tunes based on authentic folk strains.[8]) All 0f these Black organizations contained
trained musicians who could perform the standard “classical” pieces of the day
(the William Tell overture, The Mikado, the latest show-tunes
from Broadway, etc.), but most of them did so in a way that derived from the
traditions of Black folk music.
In the late nineteenth century, it was not unusual for
such “classically-trained” musicians to aspire to careers in the tradition of
European concert or symphonic music. Maud
Cuney Hare’s Negro Musicians and Their Music surveys the works of
composers Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Harry T. Burleigh Nathaniel Dett, Edmund
Jenkins, Clarence Cameron White, John Work, and Florence Price;
instrumentalists Frank Drye, Joe Douglas, Louia Von Jones, and Hazel Harrison;
and singers Sissieretta Jones (“the Black Patti”), Roland Hayes, and Marian
Anderson.
Some of these careers, which continues into the twentieth
century, also made an important impact in the
area of white show music, most notably the work of Will Vodery, who was
for many years the orchestrator and conductor for the Ziegfeld Follies.[9] The composer William Grant Still is generally
credited with being the first African American to conduct a major symphony
orchestra in the United States, the first to do so in the Deep South, the first
to write a symphony which was performed, the first to have an opera produced by
a major American company, and the first to conduct a white radio orchestra in
New York.[10]
However considerable the accomplishments of these
musicians may have been, their names have become obscure, in part because of
the general decline of European art music over the past century. Of far more interest and significance is the
“classically”-oriented career of the composer Scott Joplin. At least one authority cites Joplin’s
Treemonisha (1911) as “the first
demonstrably great American opera”:
Integration of music, drama,
and dance gives this opera its obvious quality of Americanness, since it
borrows this concept of integration of the arts from the world of American
minstrelsy and vaudeville…[11]
Treemonisha, then, is unique as an opera, in that
it
Strikes a balance between the
essential nonrealism of the opera form and the demands of an American audience
for an entertainment which is concrete and not fantastic… Passages are set within the real world of
rural black American workers somewhere in the state of Arkansas. Realism is sought in the vernacular dialogue
of the soloists and chorus through the use of the language of southern Blacks,
musical styles known to American audiencces, and a direct and comprehensible
plot.[12]
We can thus see in Joplin’s opera a musical parallel to
the efforts of Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Stephen Crane to
“Americanize” fiction at about the same time.
Treemonisha, however, was not Joplin’s first
venture into “classical” music. The
overwhelming commercial success of his piano rags, which were the musical
sensation of the 1890s and upon which style the American popular music industry
enriched itself for the next thirty years, was indeed ironic, because Joplin
intended them as a permanent contribution to Western culture. The publication of his “Maple Leaf Rag” in
1899 by the white publisher John Stark of Sedalia, Missouri, brought him a
great measure of wealth and fame, yet it also initiated the process of outright
imitation and commercial dilution of Black music by the publishing industry
which has plagued the careers of Black musicians ever since.
Before the enactment and enforcement of the American
copyright laws of 1870,1897, and 1909, popular songwriters usually sold the
performance rights to their songs, often very cheaply, or they traveled as
singers themselves. These laws, coupled
with the consolidation of the Tin Pan Alley music business in New York,
established sheet music publishing as the center of the popular entertainment
industry. Originally, the designation
“Tin Pan Alley” referred to publishing firms on or near Union Square in New York
City, but in time it came to denote the entire pattern of American popular
songwriting and marketing, along with its various success formulas over the
years. Tin Pan Alley was born as early
as the 1880s, along with the fashionableness of home pianos. Its first big boom period occurred between
1900 and 1910, when nearly a hundred songs, in the form of published sheet
music, sold over a million copies each. Soon
the publishers had the means to “plug” their songs by paying standard kickbacks
to popular singers, bandleaders, and vaudeville revues. Professional song-pluggers at this time could
be seen energetically selling their wares in department stores, railroad
stations, public parks, or anywhere else a crowd might gather.[13] By the first decade of the twentieth century,
increased production costs had eliminated most of the smaller publishing
outfits and combined the rest into powerful monopolies based in New York.
John Stark, whose
early success with piano rags by Scott Joplin and others enabled him to expand
his publishing operation to St. Louis and later to New York, was typical of the
smaller competitors (who had at least some measure of concern for the integrity
of their product) who fell victim to the industry’s control by the Tin Pan
Alley monopolies. By 1916, Stark was
composing and distributing advertisements to music dealers, which read:
As Pike’s Peak to a molehill,
so are our rag classics to the slush that fills the jobber’s bulletins.
As the language of the
college graduate, howe in thought and expression to the gibberage of the alley
Toot, so are the Stark rags to the Molly crawl-bottom stuff that is posing
under rag names.
This old world rolled around
on its axis many long, long years before people learned that it was not
flat. Then they wanted to kill the man
that discovered it.
St. Louis is the Galileo of
classic rags. It is a pity that they did
not originate in New York or Paree so that the under-study musicians and camp
followers could tip toe and rave about them.
However they still have those
Eastern gems of wit and virtue “Somebody
Else Is Getting’ It Now”—“It Will Never Get Well If You Pick It,” etc.
etc. Such as these they play over and
over ad nauseum—and a bunch of French adjectives.
The brightest minds of all
civilized countries, however, have seen the light and are now grading many of
thee
Stark Rags with the finest musical creations of all time.
They cannot be Interpreted at
sight. They must be studied and
practiced slowly, and never played fast at any time.
They are stimulating, and
when the player begins to get the notes freely the temptation to increase the
tempo is almost irresistible. This must
be kept in mind continuously. Slow march
time or 100 quarter notes to the minute is about right.
When played properly the
Stark Rags are the musical advanced thought of this age and America’s only
creation.[14]
Stark eventually lost his fight to stop the banalization
of music by Tin Pan Alley, and his appeals to the conscience of retail
sheet-music dealers fell on deaf ears. His trade circulars to these dealers revealed
how the Whitney-Warren Company (which later became Remick) of Detroit and New
York bought up the sheet-music outlet of large department store chains. This practice, soon followed by Sol Bloom of
Chicago and others, led to a series of retail price wars. Leo Feist (New York) gained control of outlets
in the Woolworth chain, while the S.H. Knox five-and-ten chain was taken over
by the New York Music Company (Albert Von Tilzer) and the firm of Charles K.
Harris of Milwaukee and New York. It was
not long before most other publishers were priced out of the market.[15]
Discouraged by the fate of ragtime at the hands of the
big commercial publishers, Joplin set his mind to more ambitious projects. The financial success of “Maple Leaf Rag”
enabled him to complete the opera A Guest of Honor (1903), which has
never been produced and which presently is not known to exist in manuscript
form. Treemonisha, which occupied
the last decade of Joplin’s life, was given only one semipublic performance in
1915; it was not produced again until 1976.
The composer, ruined financially, died a broken and disillusioned man in
1917. Significantly, a career as a
composer of commercial ragtime ditties, which could have been very lucrative,
did not tempt him:
His resentment of the
“low-class” implications of the word “ragtime,” which he declared “scurrilous,”
apparently moved him to develop new and larger variants of the small syncopated
tunes he wrote and which made his reputation.
Joplin seemed driven to prove himself through the production of larger
works, explorations of extended forms, and through musical forms immediately
acceptable as “genteel” idioms… He was
caught in a paradoxical situation: the
very material he knew best, his unique contribution to American music, was
intrinsically “unrespectable,” blindly identified as “sinful” or “low-down by
insensitive listeners. Joplin’s
apprenticeship as an itinerant barroom-bordello “professor” undoubtedly left
him with a drive for musical respectability and acceptance.[16]
Remarkably, this same description could be applied, some
thirty years later, to Duke Ellington, who would respond the same way to an
identical situation. Joplin’s career, in
fact, can be considered a paradigm for the next generation of Black
musicians. It is also remarkable that
Treeemonisha, with its theme of “the question of black life,
self-determination, and leadership, the quest for self-understanding and
self-government for black people in America,”[17]
was to be paralleled in content by the concert works composed by Ellington in
the 1940s.
The early 1900s saw the proliferation of Black talent
nationally through the establishment of white-owned tour circuits. In the South, these generally took the form
of traveling tent shows that, along with the “nigger minstrels” featured in the
Ringling Bros. and other circuses, made their way through the small towns. Some of the more famous were Tolliver’s
Circus and Musical Extravaganza, the King and Bush Wide-Mouth Minstrels, the
Georgia Smart Set, Pet Werley’s Cotton Blossoms Show, and especially Silas
Green’s from New Orleans (1910), in which Ethel Waters began her show-business
career, and the rival Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels, organized by F. S. Wolcott of
Port Gibson, Mississippi. These tent
shows, playing to all-Black audiences, reproduced in the Black entertainment
world a “star system” similar to that found in white show business. Nearly all of the female blues singers who
achieved “star” status in the 1920s apprenticed in these traveling tent shows.[18]
The big cities in the North and elsewhere, however, began
to feature Black entertainers in theaters.
At first, Blacks were permitted to perform in such segregated white
theaters as those of the Western Vaudeville and the B.F. Keith-Orpheum
circuits. Black audiences could watch
these shows sitting in segregated “peanut galleries” in the balconies. Later, white theater entrepreneurs, noting
the expansion of Black talent and Black audiences, began to realize there was a
fortune to be made from establishment of the Theater Owners’ Booking Agency
(known variously as TOBA, Toby Time, and, due to its squalid working
conditions, Tough On Black Asses). The
circuit included the Palace Theatre on Beale Street in Memphis, the Monogram
Theatre in Chicago, the Capitol Theatre in New York, The Lyric in New Orleans,
the Lyceum in Cincinnati, the Dream in Columbus, Georgia, the Koppin in
Detroit, the Bijou in Nashville, the Booker T. Washington in St. Louis, and
others in Florida, Arkansas, Missouri, and Alabama. Not all of these theaters were owned by TOBA;
some of them, in New York, Washington, acts and complete companies. Typically, TOBA shows would run about a week
in one city before moving on to the next.[19]
The career of the Black man in show business was
profoundly determined by the onset of World War I and the consequent migration
of African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North. As LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) points out, the
city represented a wider sociological and psychological “spread” for Black
people. The pre-migration urban middle
class, which formed a closed social caste, had become markedly acclimated to
European standards of culture; by and large, culture to this class was simply a question of “getting in” and
“making it.” This tendency toward
European cultural values was the basis of their music, which was a step removed
from ragtime by way of its diluted white show-music counterpart. The great migration created a certain tension
in the Black music of the 1920s by reintroducing the blues (i.e., Southern
Black folk culture, in Jones’s expression a “purer” Negro culture than the
consciously diluted music that had prevailed in the North). As the pre-migration Black community in the
North often resented the large-scale arrival of their “uncivilized” kinsmen
from the South, perceiving in them a threat to their position in the white
world, so too did they resist the influence of the blues.
The pre-war Black musician in the North generally
functioned within the idiom of white show-music or brass-band styles if he was
not attempting to enter the world of “serious” music. Of that music, Garvin Bushell, a clarinetist
with some of the pre-blues Northern Negro groups, explained,
[The playing of] New York
musicians of the time was different than the playing of men in Chicago, St.
Louis, Texas and New Orleans. New York
“jazz” then was nearer the ragtime style and had less blues. There wasn’t an Eastern performer who could
really play the blues. We later absorbed
how from the Southern musicians we heard, but it wasn’t original with us. We didn’t put that quarter-tone pitch in the
music the way the Southerners did. Up
North we learned the ragtime conception—a lot of notes… You could only hear the blues and real jazz
in the gutbucket cabarets where the lower class went.[20]
We have already seen how ragtime originated as a
combination of African American folk materials and European musical form with
this music’s subsequent metamorphosis in the East, we can isolate as a key
factor in its evolution, first, the contemporary set of relations between white
and Black, and secondly, the class division in the Black community. From Emancipation onward, and perhaps even
before then, American popular music Ha bee inextricably woven racially. Jones uses the metaphor of
the picture within a picture
within a picture, and so on, on the cereal package. Ragtime was a Negro music, resulting from the
Negro’s appropriation of white piano techniques used in show music. Popularized ragtime, which flooded the
country with songsheets in the first decade of this century, were a dilution of
the Negro style. And finally, the show
and “society” music the Negroes in the pre-blues North made was a kind of
bouncy, essentially vapid appropriation of the popularized imitations of Negro
imitations of white minstrel music, which… came from white parodies of Negro
life and music. And then we can go back
even further to the initial “steal” American Negro music is based on, that is,
those initial uses Euro-American music was put to by the Afro-American.[21]
The infusion of blues into the Black musical style of the
Eastern cities after the war created a cultural synthesis very comparable to
that which had occurred twenty years earlier in New Orleans. That instance, which popular folklore has
since dubbed the birth of jazz, resulted when Jim Crow laws at the turn of the
century forced the downtown mulatto community into a closer social and economic
relationship with the more “primitive” uptown Black community.
It was the connections
engendered by this forced merger that produced a primitive jazz. The black rhythmic and vocal tradition was
translated into an instrumental music which utilized some of the formal
techniques of European dance and march music.
Later the merging of the
Southern blues tradition with the musical traditions of the Northern Negro
produced an instrumental music similar in intent to the early jazz of New
Orleans. And when the instrumental
innovators themselves began to be heard in the North, the music, jazz, had
already developed further, aided by the architectonic and technical ideas of
ragtime, into a more completely autonomous music. The important idea here, the, is that the
first jazzmen were from both sides of the fence—from the darker blues tradition
and a fixed socio-cultural, and most of the time economic, stratum, and also
from the “white” Creole tradition and its worship of what were certainly the
ideals of a Franco-American middle class[22].
It is precisely because these innovations in Black
musical forms proliferated in so direct a fashion from rapid and abrupt changes
in social conditions in Black society that musicological terminology fails to
come to grips with them. Again, Jones
explains:
The emergence of classic
blues [i.e., the 1920s city blues tradition, which usually featured female
singers performing for an exclusively Black audience] and the popularization
of jazz occurred around the same time. Both
are the results of social and psychological changes within the Negro group as
it moved toward the mainstream of American society, a movement that tended to
have very significant results. The
Nego’s idea of America as the place where he lived and would spend his life was
broadened; there was a realization by Negroes (in varying degrees, depending
upon their particular socio-economic status) of a more human hypothesis on
which to base their lives. Negro culture
was affected: jazz is easily the most
cosmopolitan of any Negro music, able to utilize almost any foreign influence
within its broader spectrum. And blues
benefitted: it was richer, more
universal, and itself became a strong influence of the culture it had depended
upon for its growth.
Ragtime, dixieland, jazz, are
all American terms. When they are
mentioned anywhere in the world they relate to America and an American
experience. But the term blues
relates directly to the Negro, and his personal involvement in
America. And even though ragtime,
dixieland, and jazz are all dependent upon blues for their existence in any
degree of authenticity, the terms themselves relate to a broader reference than
blues. Blues means a Negro
experience, it is the one music the Negro made that could not be transferred
into a more general significance than the one the Negro gave it initially. Classic blues differs a great deal from older
blues forms in the content of its lyrics, its musical accompaniment, and in the
fact it was a music that moved into its most beautiful form as a
public entertainment, but is still a form of blues, and it is still a music
that relates directly to the Negro experience.
Bessie Smith was not an American, though the experience she relates
could hardly have existed outside America; she was a Negro. Her music still remained outside the
mainstream of American thought, but it was much closer than any Negro music
before it.[23]
The fact that the difference between jazz and blues is
primarily social, and not musical, is borne out by the contemporary blues
scene. Although at the present time
Black blues enjoys a much greater degree of acceptance by whites than it did a
hundred years ago, it is still obvious that people from foreign countries are
more aware of it than the people of Chicago, the blues capital of the
world. Jazz, in general, is marketed
much more widely than blues. Because its
audiences tend to be more integrated racially, jazz has a “safer” reputation
among whites. Under most circumstances,
Black blues receives very little white patronage, and those few whites who do
venture into the Black ghetto to hear authentic blues performances often
request “guides” from record companies, etc.
As a result, , any reliable schedule to Chicago blues performances.[24]
The late musicologist Gunther Schuller describes early
jazz in the East as “rather a functional music, geared specifically to social
dancing and theater shows, and much of its drive and inspiration seemed to
originate in Baltimore and Washington and was based largely on ragtime.”[25] The bands of the region thrived on the
popularity of ragtime and the foxtrot, and they embodied in their arrangements
“the spirit, if not the style, of the leading ragtime pianists.” By 1900 the tradition laid down by these
pianists was already well-established.
Still surviving in memory are the names of Walter “One-Leg Shadow” Gould
(born 1875), Old Man Sam Moore, “No Legs” Cagey, and Bud Minor (all born in the
1850s).
The following decade witnessed the emergence of Jess
Pickett, Sam Gordon, and Jack the Bear, who was later immortalized in the title
of an Ellington composition. These New
York pianists played in the pre-Harlem Black districts, from the upper 20s to
the lower 30s, west of Sixth Avenue on West Fifty-third Street, the San Juan
Hill area (between West Sixty-first and Sixty-third Streets and Tenth and
Eleventh Avenues), and on the fringes of this district, then known as the
Jungle.
After the war, with the consolidation of New York’s Black
community in Harlem, a younger generation of pianists came to the fore. One of the best-known was Willie “The Lion”
Smith (born William Bertholff, in Goshen, New York, in 1897), who made his
reputation playing shouts and atmospheric pieces at local rent-parties.
James Herbert “Eubie” Blake, born in Baltimore in 1883,
played piano in New York’s “tenderloin” district in his teens, and, despite the
disapproval of his parents, entered the theatrical world. He achieved a certain fame under the guidance
of his first publisher, Joseph W. Stern, having composed “Chevy Chase” and
“Fizz Water Blake” in 1914, the evergreen “Bugle Call Rag” in 1916, as well as
scores of unpublished compositions. But
it was Blake’s partnership with Noble Sissle (from Indianapolis) in 1915 that
brought him musical immortality. In 1921
the Sissle and Blake Revue Shuffle Along, published by Witmark in New
York, opened at the Sixty-third Street Theatre, starring Lottie Gee, Florence
Mills, the comedy team of Miller and Lyles, Noble Sissle, and featuring an
all-Black cast. The show made Broadway
history, running for eighteen months, although it cost only $700 to produce.
In 1924 the team wrote the score for Chocolate Dandies,
published by Harms, which ran for eight months on Broadway and on tour. When, in 1927, Sissle went to Europe, Blake
went on to other successful partnerships, the most notable being Lew Leslie’s
Blackbirds of 1930 (with Andy Razaf).
Blake remained the creative genius of the Black musical theater until
the motion-picture industry put an end to its era.
Charles Luckeyeth Roberts was, in the 1920s, one of the
very few Black entertainers to enter the domain of New York’s “high
society.” His orchestras played for the
Astors, Warburtons, Wanmakers, Vanderbilts, and Goulds at Newport, Nantucket
and Narragansett, on Fifth Avenue and in Palm Beach. Black entertainers had worked before for the
white upper crust: James Reese Europe
had been the pioneer in this area before the war; Alberta Simmons and Eubie
Blake had been in demand at times, but entertaining the super-rich became a
Roberts specialty. He even became a
favorite of the Prince of Wales. Having
been featured in stage productions from 1911 .
to1923, Roberts appeared in concert performances in New York, at
Carnegie Hall (1939) and Town Hall (1941).
The man generally considered to have been the epitome of
New York piano style was James Price Johnson, born in New Brunswick, New
Jersey, in 1894. As did all the other
pianists cited here, the “classically”-trained Johnson entered ragtime over the
objections of his middle-class family.
Strongly influenced by the music of Scott Joplin, he composed a great
number of piano rags and shouts, along with scores for large orchestras. In 1932 Johnson composed his Harlem
Symphony, which has been performed at Carnegie Hall, the Brooklyn Academy
of Music, and in Germany, Peru, and Brazil.
The Jasmine (Jazz-o-Mine) Concerto (1935) was played at the
Heckscher Foundation in Manhattan in 1943, and also by the Brooklyn, Boston,
and Philadelphia Symphony Orchestras.
Yamecraw, Johnson’s long choral work, was made
into a movie short in the 1930s, before Blacks were crowded out of the
sound-movie field by whites. With
Fluornoy Miller he produced Sugar Hill, a musical comedy, which opened
with an all-Negro cast and production at the Las Palmas Theater in Hollywood in
June, 1949. Despite favorable reviews
locally, in Variety and Billboard, the show attracted no big
financial backing and was forced to close after a run of three months. Usually recognized as Johnson’s greatest stylistic
disciple was Thomas (Fats) Waller (1904-1943).[26]
Despite the presence of such keyboard geniuses, in the
early 1920s New York was far more conservative musically than cities like
Chicago and St. Louis. This may be
explained by thee slowness with which the Black music of the South reached New
York, as compared with the other cities; then, too, when this music did arrive
in New York, it generally did so indirectly by way of touring musicians from
Chicago. In addition, as has already
been noted, Black musicians in New York were deeply involved in the musical
tastes of the white public. Such large
Black orchestras as Wilbur Sweatman’s and Sam Wooding’s made their livings by
emulating the “symphonic jazz” of the big white dance orchestras (while,
ironically, the whites did their best to affect more of a Black inflection
which had drifted into New York with the popularity of the New Orleans style).[27] Schuller characterizes most New York bands of
the period as “showy, ‘dicty’ outfits that catered primarily to white audiences
and were slow to shake off the trappings of ragtime and equally slow to adopt
elements of the New Orleans style.
Paradoxically, such elements were effectively incorporated only after
the New Orleans tradition was in decline.”[28]
Another very significant factor in the evolution of Black
music after the war was the role played by the recording industry, by that time
no longer in its infancy. The Columbia
Phonograph Company, which began in 1889 as the American Graphophone Company,
was by 1891 leading the field in recording “entertainment cylinders” for
coin-operated phonograph machines. In
the early years, record catalogues and labels did not usually list performers
by name; the titles were listed under headings like “sentimental,” “topical,”
comic,” “Irish,” or “Negro.” Later, when
a “star” system became established on the Columbia label, George W. Johnson
became its first Black star with a hit titled, typically for the time, “The
Whistling Coon.”[29]
Columbia, organized originally by a Washington,
D.C.-based syndicate of businessmen and manufacturers, was able to acquire
basic recording patents and successfully eliminate most of its competitors with
legal suits until the turn of the century.
In 1901, after fending off a legal challenge from Columbia, the Victor
Talking Machine Company arose—from a merger between Emile Berliner’s U.S.
Gramaphone Company and a corporation headed by the manufacturer Eldridge P.
Johnson. Victor rapidly cornered the
market for recording European “classical” celebrities, especially in opera, and
its success in this field helped to establish New York as the world center of
the recording industry.[30]
In 1917 Victor took an uncharacteristic gamble by
entering the jazz (or “jass,” as it was then spelled) recording field, by
issuing “Livery Stable Blues” by the Original Dixieland Jass Band of New
Orleans, a white band imitating the style of King Oliver. It is a curious fact that because the ODJB
was responsible for recording the first jazz heard by most Americans, they,
rather than the music’s Black originators, became the first models for jazzmen
nationally. By 1924, the recording of
jazz on major labels with wide distribution was the exclusive privilege of
white orchestras, the most popular being those of Paul Whiteman, Ted Lewis,
Fred Waring, and Vincent Lopez. Whiteman,
crowned “the king of jazz” by his own publicity, devoted his career to “making
a lady out of jazz,” and made millions.
With such displays as
Whiteman’s Aeolian Hall concert, complete with “European Style” orchestra and
Heifetz and Rachmaninoff in the audience, jazz
had rushed into the mainstream without so much as one black face. Whiteman’s only reference to the earlier,
less lucrative days of this “new” music (“symphonized syncopation”) was the
first selection of his concert, which was Livery Stable Blues done a la
minstrel show jazz to demonstrate, as Whiteman said, “… the crude jazz of the
past.[31]
In addition to records, jazz was projected nationally
over the radio, to which the recording industry fell victim in the
mid-20s. In 1921, a year in which
Americans spent more money on phonograph records than any other form of
entertainment, the industry produced over 100,000 records, a level it did not
again achieve until World War II. Columbia,
ruined in 1923 both by radio and the postwar recession, went into receivership
and long years as a corporate football until it was bought by CBS in 1938. Victor was able to stave off collapse by
merging, in 1936, with Wall Street-controlled RCA, the leading radio
manufacturers.[32]
During the 1920s, three-fourths of all radio programming
was music; since the medium was then considered beneath the dignity of academic
musicians, the music that dominated the air-waves was mostly “commercial jazz”
of the Whiteman stripe.[33] Radio, moreover, was a key factor in the
accelerating concentration of the whole entertainment industry under the
control of huge corporations: in 1926,
when there some 694 stations in the United States, the NBC and (a year later)
CBS networks had grown to a total of 248 stations. During the same period, the Hollywood film
industry bought out much of what was left of the recording industry not already
under the control of the radio networks. Along with the major music publishing
houses in New York (Warner Bros. bought out Harms, Witmark, Remick and De
Sylva, Brown & Henderson; RKO controlled Leo Feist and Carl Fischer;
Robbins became a subsidiary of MGM; Paramount owned the Famous Music Company,
and Fox incorporated the Red Star Publishing Company.)
Small wonder, then, that “jass” (which, according to
Whiteman, “sprang into existence about ten years ago from nowhere in
particular”), bleached beyond recognition, became a cultural staple in white
America before most of Black America even saw it as having once been its own.[34]
It was only after there had been a few
recordings sufficiently distributed through the Black Northern and urban
Southern neighborhoods, made by Negro bands like King Oliver’s, Fletcher
Henderson’s, and two Kansas City bands—Benny Moten’s and Clarence Williams’,
that the masses of Negroes became familiar with jazz.[35]
Added to this anomaly, which must rank as one of the most
bizarre instances of “cultural lag” in American history, is the odd fact that
the age of recorded jazz began three years before the first blues
recording. During its early-1920s
prosperity, the recording industry initiated, as a subsidiary operation, the
institution of the “race record,” which in effect guaranteed the prosperity of
white show-business artists distributed on the major labels by restricting the
supply of Black talent to labels which, while white-owned, were marketed
exclusively to the Black community.
Between 1927 and 1930 virtually all Black music on record was issued by
five leading “race” companies on seven different labels: Columbia and its Okeh subsidiary; Paramount
(the market leaders); Vocalion and Brunswick (both absorbed in the 130s by the
American Record Company, whose catalogue was eventually divided between
Columbia and Decca); Gennett (headquartered in Richmond, Indiana); and Victor.
The Okeh label, founded during the was as a subsidiary of
the German Lindstrom cartel, became a race label chiefly through the efforts of
the Black composer-bandleader-pianist-singer Perry Bradford, who “pestered and
badgered executives from the white phonograph industry, determined to get a
black singer on disc with one of his songs.”
Said Bradford, “There’s fourteen million Negroes in our great country
and they will buy records if recorded by one of their own, because we are the
only folks that can sing and interpret hot jazz songs just off the griddle
correctly.”[36] Bradford persuaded Fred Hagar of Okeh to
record Mamie Smith’s “That Thing Called Love” and “You Can’t Keep a Good Man
Down” at her first recording session on February 14, 1920. That session, backed by white studio
musicians, made little impact on the Negro market, but Okeh was immediately
threatened by both Northern and Southern white boycott groups. Bradford recalled:
I’d schemed and used up all my bag of
tricks to get that date; had greased my neck with goose grease every morning,
so it would be easy to bow and scrape to some recording managers. But none of them would listen to my tale o’
woe, even though I displayed my teeth to them with a perpetual-lasting
watermelon grin.[37]
He needn’t have
worried. Mamie Smith’s next session, on
August 10, backed by the Jazz Hounds (Johnny Dunn and Willie “The Lion” Smith),
made recording history; “Crazy Blues,” a Bradford composition, sold 75,000 copies
at a dollar each during its first month of release.
Even more responsible for Okeh’s success in the race
field was Clarence Williams (1893-1965), the New Orleans pianist who, with
A.J. Piron, formed a successful
publishing company in Chicago and New York to promote his own
compositions. Williams became “race”
manager for Okeh and in this capacity “made, directed and arranged literally
hundreds of record dates, employing nearly all the great names in jazz.”[38]Among
these, the most outstanding were Bessie Smith, Sara Martin, Sippie Wallace,
Victoria Spivey and scores of other classic blues singers; Louis Armstrong,
Charlie Green, Buster Bailey, Don Redman, Tommy Ladnier and Coleman Hawkins,
from the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra; from Joe Jordan’s band, he recorded Ed
Allen, Ben Whittet and Benny Moten, while Cyrus St. Clair came to him from
Charlie Johnson’s organization. Many
visiting musicians from out of town, including King Oliver and Lorenzo Tio,
also recorded for Williams. This
incredible array of recorded talent on the Okeh label found its peak in
Williams’s 1923 series of recordings featuring Armstrong and Sidney Bechet.
The only Black-owned label of those years was the
short-lived Black Swan Records, whose history is and advertise its products
as:
One of the funniest and most cruelly absurd
situations to develop because of the growth and influence of a definable black
middle class in America is the case of Black Swan Records. Black Swan was founded and run by a Negro,
Harry Pace, during the early twenties.
It was the first Negro-owned record company in the country, and it
quickly grew into a money-maker, its success based to a large extend on the
popularity of its star performer, a young girl named Ethel Waters. Black Swan also recorded numerous other blues
performers, and advertised its products as:
“The Only Genuine Colored Record.
Others are only passing for colored.”
(a wild turnabout!) But many
Negroes, especially those in business, brought pressure on Pace to change his
position, since they thought the job of a Negro recording company would be to
show how dignified Negroes really were… and, of course, blues were not
dignified. Pace tried to use all kinds
of other material that was not strictly blues (for this reason with her torchy
“pop” style was a godsend), but the popularity of the company waned because the
audience to which the records were largely aimed did not care as much about the
dignity of its musical tastes as the Negro business community.[39]
As a result, Pace’s enterprise folded within q
year-and-a-half and was sold to the New York Furniture Company of Grafton,
Wisconsin, which issued records on the Paramount label. Paramount had no qualms at all about
recording the more “undignified” varieties of Black music.
The company, which did a large-scale mail-order business
through ads placed in Black newspapers, had as its biggest star in the early
1920s Gertrude “Ma” Rainey. The label,
having had on its roster dozens of the best-known recording stars of the
Northern cities, was justifiably recalled by critic and producer John Hammond
“a tremendous means for the employment of Black musicians.”[40] Yet Paramount had no Black ownership or
control. With the demise of Black Swan,
Blacks were to be excluded from the business end of the recording industry for
over thirty years, until the post-World War II rhythm and blues boom.
Between 1927 and 1930, “race” records were issued at the
rate of ten new titles a week, including jazz, blues, and gospel releases. All the leading companies had both white and
Black talent scouts in the field, musicians and record-store proprietors, who
recommended new singers, some of whom were
brought North to record, although later the trend became one of going
South with portable “
The first Blacks to have recorded had been the urban
classic blues singers, who came to public attention years before the country
blues singers of the South. Together
with the traveling vaudeville troupes on the TOBA circuit, “race” records
succeeded somewhat in breaking down the strictly local forms of Black music and
provided models for a new national Black culture, influencing especially
the younger Black generation. Their influence pervaded all Black
communities, rural and urban, wherever there existed even one Victrola on which
to play a record. In addition, “race”
records produced a “star” system among blues personalities. The influence of Bessie Smith and Sarah
Martin, for example, affected styles of blues singers for many years
afterwards. The classic blues, then, as
a separate element out of African American folk tradition, at the same time came to redefine that tradition in
contemporary terms.[41]
The image of the African American contained in the
advertising of the “race” record industry is of Black music as an art; their
records were promoted as “red hot,” “guaranteed to put you in that The comp
000dollars a side, with ten dollars paid to the
leader. There was never any concern over
the payment of royalties, nor were there any lavish promotional campaigns. Black musicians existed, by and large, as
hostages in the show-business equivalent of the Southern share-cropping system,
as is still the case today in certain
sectors of the recording industry. Yet,
while it lasted, the “race”-record era generated considerable profits for the
record companies. “Crazy Blues,” Mamie
Smith’s 1920 hit, sold for months at the rate of 8,000 records a week. Victoria Spivey’s first record, “Black Snake
Blues,” sold 150,000 copies in 1926.
Between 1923 and 1928, Bessie Smith’s record sales totaled upwards of
six million copies, a phenomenal figure in those days.[42] Such statistics indicate somewhat the profit
potential in the commercial exploitation of Black audiences in the 1920s.
There were no altruistic or
artistic motive behind thee record companies’ decision to continue to enlarge
the race category. Racee records swiftly
became big business. The companies also
began to hire Negroes as talent scouts and agents so they would be able to get
the best Negro talent available for their new race categories…
The Negro as consumer
was a new and highly lucrative slant, an unexpected addition to the strange
portrait of the Negro the white American carried around in his head. It was an unexpected addition for the Negro
as well.The big urban centers, like thee new “black cities” of Harlem,
Chicago’s South Side, Detroit’s fast-growing Negro section, as well as the
larger cities of the South were immediate witnesses to this phenomenon. Friday nights after work in those cold gray
Jordans of the North, Negro workingmen lined up outside record stores to buy
the new, blues.[43]
The embryonic musical revolution heralded by the “race”
record took place with scarcelyh any attention by, or even knowledge of, the
white public. Hammond remembers,
When I got back to America [from a first
encounter with Black music in London stage shows], I started looking around
record shops for Negro jazz and I found to my horror that the places I went,
the record stores in downtown New York, didn’t stock them because in those days
records were made by markets. There was
a popular market and in 1920 the record business found out there was a Negro
market… You couldn’t get [“race”
records] in downtown New York. You to go
up to Harlem or the various Black ghettos in other boroughs of New York before
you could even listen to such a record…[44]
The impact of Black music upon the white public was also
restricted, to a degree, by new patterns of racial segregation that emerged
after the war in the Northern cities.
Areas of employment which had customarily been the preserve of Black
musicians were now increasingly being taken over by whites. During the First World War, according to
Hammond,
[T]he Negro musician was
actually better off than after 1920 because the Negro musicians in New York had
their own club, the Clef Club, in which James P. Johnson, Clarence Williams and
other old timers were the guiding forces.
These musicians had a lot of work, although they may have worked for
very little, but I know that all the society parties given around World War I
were played by what even the square society folks thought were the best
musicians, and those best musicians were always Black. When the American Federation of Musicians
formed Local 802, the situation changed.
I don’t know if it was conscious or not, but the White musicians got a
lot of the jobs the Blacks held before, and it was very hard for the Black
musicians to get back into that market.[45]
The big breakthrough of jazz to the white public, when it
finally arrived, came as the result of white commercial exploitation of the
cabarets and theatrical productions of Harlem, which after the war became a
cultural Mecca for Blacks across the country.
One hundred-tenth Street had formed a sort of Mason-Dixon Line isolating
Harlem, and Black culture generally, from white New York. White writers of the 1920s considered Marcus
Garvey a comical figure. A. Philip
Randolph was then unknown to them, and Black music and dance was more or less a
secret world. White publishers were
uninterested in Black writers.
This ignorance on
the part of whites concealed a burgeoning cultural ferment in Harlem. Harlem’s theater activity particularly, in
existence since about 1910, had boomed during the war years. The Lafayette and Lincoln Theaters, as well
as many smaller theater groups, enjoyed the patronage of the Black middle class
in staging productions for all-Black audiences.
During the same period, however, Black shows had ceased to play on
Broadway; it was the reintroductions of Black theater downtown in 1921 which
spearheaded the “Harlem Renaissance”:
White interest and, more important, white
money, would help bring Harlem downtown and white downtowners uptown, would
spur greater creativity and would give birth to the Harlem Renaissance, as
future generations would know it. While
many would prefer to believe that this renaissance would have occurred in spite
of whites, evidence suggests that without them it would not have assumed the
major proportions it eventually reached.[46]
Before the war Black shows had already achieved some
important landmark productions on Broadway.
Through the tradition of Black minstrel shows there and elsewhere, as we
have seen, Black theater had long been a significant ingredient of the young
American entertainment industry. Until
the production of The Creole Show (1891), Black shows had been strictly
of the minstrel variety. That show,
which opened originally in Chicago, glorified Black women. It contained minstrel elements but also
showed signs of evolution in the direction of the Black style of comedy
typified by the teams of Cole and Johnson, and Williams and Walker. After playing at the Standard Theatre in
Greeley Square at the edge of the Broadway district, The Creole Show was
widely imitated, but most of its successors retained the minstrel format, which
consisted of a variety of musical acts connected by a male interlocutor.
One of these, A Trip to Coontown (1898), was the
first African American show to break with the minstrel tradition. It was conceived as a continuous whole, with
its cast of characters working out a complete story. In 1902 In Dahomey became Broadway’s
first all-Black show. With a musical
score by Will Marion Cook and lyrics by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, it was produced
by the Williams and Walker team for a 1903 Royal Command performance on
Broadway. The same team went on to
create Broadway productions of In Abyssinia (1906) and Bandana Land
(1907), both very popular and successful shows.
In 1909 George Walker’s illness forced his retirement,
while Bert Williams joined the Ziegfeld Follies. The deaths of Walker, Ernest Hogan, and Bob
Cole that year helped to end this era of Black theater on Broadway and hastened
its retreat to Harlem, where, between 1910 and 1917, it enjoyed great support
and creativity. The 1913 production of
Darktown Follies at the Lafayette Theatre, written and staged by Leubrie
Hul (formerly of the Williams and Walker company), brought white people up to
Harlem in significant numbers. A sort of
forerunner to the “Harlem Renaissance” was thus established, but the vogue for
Harlem among whites was curtailed by the war.[47]
The postwar revival of Black shows on Broadway actually
began in Philadelphia in 1920. There the
musical vaudeville team of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake combined with the
comedy team of Fluornoy E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles in a venture to put Blacks
back on Broadway. The result was
Shuffle Along, whose cast, along with the two duos which produced the show,
included Florence Mills and Josephine Baker (in the chorus), with William Grant
Still and Hall Johnson in the orchestra.
Shuffle Along introduced a style of music and
choreography that was wholly unexpected by the white theater-going public. More than anything else, this production
legitimized ragtime music and jazz dancing among whites. Its tunes, “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” “Love
Will Find a Way,” and “In Honeysuckle Time,” became gigantic hits, providing
white society “the first real opportunity to hear, see, and enjoy this first
distinctly American music.[48] The show created among whites a jazz-dancing
craze that still remains; almost overnight, studios of “colored dance” sprang
up all over New York to teach “snake hips” dancing to whites.
Another result of the renewed Black success on Broadway
was the attraction of whites to Harlem.
Appealing to the war-weariness and social disaffection of white
intellectuals, Carl Van Vechten and others portrayed Harlem as a symbol of
America’s lost innocence and spontaneity.
In time, whites came to perceive a trip to Harlem as a thrilling and
exotic adventure. In The Big Sea
Langston Hughes wrote of what became an invasion of white downtowners,
Flooding the little cabarets
and bars where formerly only colored people laughed and sang, and where now the
strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro
customers—like amusing animals in a zoo.[49]
By degrees the Harlem cabarets became oriented toward
entertaining whites. Many responded to
the white tide by introducing outlandish floor-shows and featuring dancing
waiters. It was not long before the
best-known of these establishments began to lose most or all of their Black
patronage, a situation that sometimes became official when certain clubs (most
notably the Cotton Club) instituted “whites-only” admission policies. Other major Harlem nightclubs of the 1920s
included Broadway Jone’s Supper Club on West 129th Street
(subsequently the Bamville Club), which hosted Florence Mill’s homecoming from
Europe. Barron’s Exclusive Club,
established in 1915, featured entertainment by Willie “The Lion” Smiith, Ada
“Bricktop” Smith, and in 1923 Elmer Snowden’s Washingtonians with the young
Duke Ellington. The Clam House on West
133rd Street offered a Gladys Bentley drag show, while Small’s
Paradise, opened in 1925 on Seventh Avenue, became second in notoriety to the
Cotton Club by admitting Blacks only when they had big money
Connie’s Inn
(formerly the Shuffle Inn, an obvious attempt to cash in on the success of the
Broadway play), after its move to Harlem became one of the three most popular
nightclubs. In 1929 it hosted Waller and
Razaf’s Hot Chocolates revue, featuring Louis Armstrong in the songs
“Ain’t Misbehavin” and “Can’t We Get Together.”
Other popular clubs included the Nest Club, Pod’s and Jerry’s, the
Silver Dollar Café, the Breakfast Club, Connor’s, and the Hollywood Cabaret
(later, the Kentucky Club). Along with
the seven major nightclubs and eighteen dance halls of mixed patronage, Harlem
was so replete with speakeasies and bars that a self-appointed Committee of
Fourteen felt called upon to brand the entire district a menace to the city’s
morals.[50]
What was occurring, in effect, was the redrawing of
America’s lines of racial discrimination, the creation of segregated white
islands in a Black sea. Beyond their
boundaries, there was very little contact between Blacks and whites in New York, as John Hammond recalled:
When I first became
interested in jazz, there was no such thing as integration. There were very few places where the White
public went, where Negro musicians could be heard. We had a completely segregated NeSouth.
Once in a while these bars were broken.
There was a hall in New York called the Roseland Ballroom which would
bring in bands like McKinney’s Cotton Pickers for the White dancing public, but
it was strictly a White public. Negroes
were barred as customers. Even the very
posh Harlem nightclubs and those in Chicago discouraged Negro patronage, even
in the heart of the ghetto. The Cotton
Club in New York, where Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Jimmie Lunceford and the
Blue Rhythm Band made their fame, had an exclusively White audience, although
everyone else but the owners were Black.[51]
The first wave of whites who patronized the Harlem
Renaissance constituted a new sort of bohemia which was sustained by a
fashionable cult of the Negro. Gilbert
Osofsky described them as rebels who
Saw Negroes not as people but
as symbols of everything white America was not.
The concept of the existence of a “New Negro” and the publicity given to
it in the 1920’s was primarily the result of this new awareness and interest in
Negro society by what one writer called the “New White Man.” The generation that discovered “newness” all
around itself—New Humanism, New Thought, New Women, New Criticism, New
Psychology, New Masses, New Poetry, New Science, New Era, New Words, New
Morality and so on—also found a “New Negro.”[52]
The adoption of this bohemian stance by young whites
quickly alarmed the professional moralizers of white society. Clergymen and professors banded together to
claim that jazz was simply not music, or
that it lacked the “spirit substance” of traditional music. H.O. Osgood, editor of The Musical Courier,
described the Ted Lewis Band as a kind of savage rite with “all the players
jolting up and down and writhing about in simulated ecstasy, in the manner of
Negroes at a Southern camp-meeting afflicted with religious frenzy.” The sensual appeal of such music was held to
belong to the amoral society of inferior races.
The National Association of Masters of Dancing, in The Catholic
Telegraph of Cincinnati, told the public that jazz led to illegitimate
births and ruined women. The Illinois
Vigilance Association reported that in 1921 and 1922, jazz had caused the
downfall, in Chicago alone, of a thousand girls. A 1921 letter from Mrs. Marx Obendorfer, the
national music chairman of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, was titled,
“Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?”[53]
Since 1917, the popular music industry generally had
ignored complaints about jazz as long as its profits were not threatened, but
by the late twenties it grew sensitive to widespread racist criticism and
decided to impose self-censorship. In
1921 the Music Publishers’ Protective Association had been formed by a group of
Tin Pan Alley publishers to censor popular songs. E.C.
Mills, the chairman of its executive board and also chairman of the
administrative committee of ASCAP, enlisted in this effort the cooperation of
vaudeville producers, sheet-music jobbers, phonograph and piano-roll companies
and interested laymen.
By 1927 there resulted an organized movement to “clean
up” popular songs. The New York Piano
Merchants’ Association, at a convention of its fifty member-firms that year,
resolved not to sell any sheet music, records or piano rolls with “lewd,
lascivious, salacious, or suggestive” titles or lyrics. The same year, the National Association of
Orchestra Directors appointed a “czar” and committee to investigate hotels, night clubs and dance
halls to determine “the kind of jazz that tends to create indecent dancing.” The National Association of Music Merchants
passed a resolution to combat ”smut words” in American music and called on
Congress to permit censorship of songs.
The government responded with the U.S. Radio Act off 1927.[54]
Hence jazz, except as a diluted and censored prisoner of
the popular music industry, was not allowed to become a truly popular music in
America. Despite the fact that its elements might easily have been assimilated
to revitalize traditional European music, the white cultural establishment
dismissed it . altogether. Paul Rosenfeld, an American music critic,
wrote in 1929:
American music
is not jazz. Jazz is not music. Jazz remains a striking indigenous product, a
small-sounding folk-chaos, counterpart of other national developments. seductive with woodwind sounding
folk-chaos, counterpart of other national developments. What we call music, however, is a
force, adjusted to the stream of the world in which materials float and
elements play, and active like (New
York: Da Capo, 1975them upon the human
situation; and, bold and debonair as it is, seductive with woodwind in minor
thirds and fuller of bells than a bayadere, our characteristic “dance-music” is
cheerfully quiescent…
The typical jazz composition offers mere beat;
mechanic iteration, duplication, conformation to pre-established pattern. Its alternation of bats of three and four and
five units, the so-called jazz polyrhythm, is sheer willful contrast and
change. The chief excitement in it
proceeds from a series of jerks, systematic anticipations and retardations of
the arbitrary, regular, unfailing beat…
We have here to do with an extraordinary popular drug-like use of the
materials of sound… It is smart; superficially alert, good humoured, and
cynical. Essentially, nonetheless, it is
just another means of escape…[55]
In spite of the music’s widespread popular appeal and the
huge profits it generated for the entertainment industry, jazz has been a label
of ignominy from its infancy in the 1920s.
Confined to illegal gin-mills and speakeasies, banned from the concert
stage and the airwaves, it was effectively off-limits to whites. To the Black middle class attempting to enter
the white mainstream, it carried the stigma of Southern cotton fields and
Northern cabarets. It was an unlikely
milieu for a person like Duke Ellington.
[1] Henry
Pleasants, Serious Music—And All That Jazz! (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969), p. 30.
[2] Ibid.,
pp. 42-43.
[3]
Giles Oakley, The Devil’s Music: A
History of the Blues (New York:
Taplinger, 1976), p. 20.
[4]
Rudy Blesh and Harriet Janis, They All Played Ragtime: The True History of an American Music (New York:
Knopf, 1950), p. 85.
[5]
Oakley, op.cit., p. 21.
[6]
William J. Schafer and Johannes Reidel, The Art oof Ragtime: Form and Meaning of an Original Black
American Art (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1973), pp. 170-175.
[7]
Oakley, op. cit., pp. 28 ff.
[8] Ibid.,
p. 44.
[9]
William Grant Still, “A Composer’s Viewpoint,” in Black Music in Our Culture,
ed. Dominique-Rene de Lerma (Kent State U, 1970), pp. 98-99.
[10] Ibid.,
p. 99.
[11]
Shafer and Reidel, op. cit., p. 205.
[12] Ibid.,
p. 99;
[13]
Richard A. Peterson and David G. Berger, “Three Eras in the Manufacture of
Popular Music Lyrics,” in The Sounds of Social Change, pp. 284-286.
[14]
Shafer and Reidel, op. cit, frontispiece..
[15]
Blesh and Janis, op. cit., p. 241.
[16]
Schafer and Reidel, op .cit, pp. 216ff..Some
[17] Ibid.,
p. 218.
[18]
Giles Oakley, The Devil’s Music, pp. 97-104.
[19]
Ibid., p. 104.
[20]
LeRoi Jones, Blues People (New York, William Morrow, 1963), p. 109.
[21] Ibid.,
p. 110.
[22] Ibid
.pp. 138-139.
[23] Ibid.
p. 93.
[24]
Interview with Robert Koester, Steve Tomashefsky (Delmark Records), and Leon
Kelert (Antares Distributors), Chicago,
August 4, 1978.
[25]
Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its
Roots and Musical Development (New York:
Oxford, 1968), pp. 319-320., the
[26]
Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, They All Played Ragtime, pp. 184-209.
[27]
Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz, p.
324.
[28] Ibid.,
p. 325.
[29] Ibid.,
p. 325.
[30] C.A.
Schicke, Revolution in Sound: A
Biography of the Recording Industry (Boston, Little, Brown, 1974), pp. 23
ff.
[31] Ibid.,
pp. 57 ff.
[32]
Neil Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans:
The Acceptance of a New Art Form (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1962), p. 91, and C.A. Schicke,
Revolution in Sound, pp. 80 ff.
[33] Ibid.,
pp. 92 ff.
[34]
John S. Wilson, Jazz: The Transition
Years, 1940-1960 (New York:
Appleton-
Century-Crofts, 1966), [p. 73.
[35]
LeRoi Jones, Blues People, p. 144.
[36]
Giles Oakley, The Devil’s Music, p. 92.
[37] Ibid.,
p. 92.
[38]
Laurie Wright, “Clarence Williams,” in Jazz on Record: A Critical Guide to the First 50 Years,
1917-1967 (London: Hanover, 1968),
pp. 307-308.
[40]
John Hammond, “An Experience in Jazz History,” in Black Music in Our Culture,
p. 48.
[41]
LeRoi Jones, Blues People, pp. 101-102.
[42]
John Hammond, “An Experience in Jazz History,” p. 59; LeRoi Jones, Blues
People, pp. 100-101.
[43]
LeRoi Jones, Blues People, pp. 100-101.
[44]
“An Experience in Jazz History,” p. 44.
[45] Ibid.,
p. 46.
[46] James
Haskins, The Cotton Club (New York:
Random House, 1977), p. 15
[47] Ibid.,
pp. 16-18.
[48] Ibid.
pp. 16-18.boundaries
[49]
Cited ibid., p. 21.
[50] Ibid.,
p. 38.
[51]
John Hammond, “An Experience in Jazz History,” p. 45.
[52] Harlem:
The Making of a Ghetto; cited in James Haskins, The Cotton Club, p.
40.
[53]
Neil Leonard, Jazz and the White Americans, pp. 29 ff.
[54] Ibid.
pp. 97 ff.
[55]
Barry Ulanov, Duke Ellington (New York:
Da Capo, 1975), p. 71.
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