Jazz:  An Overview of Its Evolution

Ragtime

During the "Gay Nineties," ragtime music swept the country and even made a considerable impression in Europe.  It rose rapidly to an immense popularity -- became a sort of craze -- was taken over for commercial exploitation by tin-pan alley -- degenerated into unimaginative manipulation of clichés -- and fizzled out like a wet firecracker about the time the United States went into WWI.

Cakewalks

The cakewalk was originally a plantation dance -- just a happy movement the slaves did to banjo music.  (Cakes were sometimes given by the "master" to the best dancers.)  They called their clog dancing "ragging" and the dance a "rag."  It is a sort of frenzy with frequent yelps of delight from the dancer and spectators and was accompanied by the latter with hand clapping and stomping of feet.  Banjo figuration is very noticeable in ragtime music and the division of one of the beats into two short notes is traceable to the hand clapping.

"Coon songs"

These published songs of the 1880s and 90s were revivals of earlier plantation songs with syncopated melodies which used the banjo as their primary instrument.  Ragtime frequently appeared in a few isolated measures of these songs until in 1897 full-fledged ragtime piano numbers began to be published.

Scott Joplin

• considered by many the "King of Ragtime"
• met some of the early ragtime players in Chicago in 1893
• resided in Missouri, playing piano at the Maple Leaf Club
• his first, and probably most famous, piece was "Maple Leaf Rag"
• classic ragtime syncopation in the right hand
• steady bass rhythm in the left
• Joplin published 39 piano rags, with a number of others left in manuscript form
• wrote two ragtime operas
• A Guest of Honor - 1903
• Treemonisha - 1911

"Jelly Roll" Morton

• helped transform rag into the hot, "stomping" style of New Orleans ragtime
• "King Porter Stomp" - 1906

New Orleans

• the original center of "ragging" street bands
• and ragtime dance bands that helped usher in jazz

The Blues

The spirituals are the manifestation of Afro-American folk music in choral singing.  The blues are the manifestation of Afro-American folk music in solo singing.

• combines realism and fantasy in a straightforward projection of mood and feeling
• three-line stanza
• statement
• repetition
• "response"
• often improvised
• usual structure consists of a twelve-bar pattern
• each line corresponds to four measures of the music
• each line actually occupies three measures
• one extra measure of space lies between each line
• allows the improviser time to formulate the next line
• also allows the singer liberty to "play" with the notes and voice
• or to insert some exclamatory phrase such as "oh, lawdy!"
• many of the folk blues utilize the pentatonic scale
• the characteristic "blue notes" come from flatting the third and seventh scale degrees in a diatonic scale
• the development of the blues branched off is two directions
• the blues as popular song
• the blues as jazz
• both of these eventually converge in the productions of tin-pan alley where the blues were less blue and the jazz less hot

W. C. Handy

• associated with the rise of the blues as popular music
• wrote "St. Louis Blues"
• and "Memphis Blues"

Blues Singers

• "Blind Willie"  Johnson
• "Leadbelly" (Hudie Leadbetter)
• "Muddy Waters" (McKinley Morganfield)
• Gertrude "Ma" Rainey
• Bessie Smith

Piano blues and "boogiewoogie"

• "boogiewoogie" transfers to the piano the twelve-bar pattern of the blues
• characterized by a persistent rhythmic figure in the left hand
• the right hand maintains its own rhythmic / melodic figures
• the resulting cross rhythms are complex and exciting
• style launched by Jimmy Yancey

Jazz

The music that came to be called "jazz" was rooted in the cultural, social, and racial conditions of the South.  No single city -- not even New Orleans -- can legitimately claim to have been its exclusive birthplace.  African survivals in American folk music, the hot rhythms of the camp-meeting spirituals and gospel songs, the form and inflection of the blues, the improvised "washboard" bands, the marching brass bands that played for funerals, parades, and picnics, were common to wide sections of the South and played a role in the development of jazz.

Joseph "King" Oliver

• the greatest and most influential of the early jazz pioneers
• started in New Orleans
• migrated to Chicago after WWI
• a young cornet and trumpet player Louis Armstrong joined this band in 1922
• Oliver's band, The Creole Jazz Band, became the first Negro jazz band (in 1923) to make recordings

"Jelly Roll" Morton

• also moved from New Orleans to Chicago in the 1920s
• recorded with a band called The Red Hot Peppers
• he made a significant contribution to the history of jazz through a series of recorded interviews in 1938

Dixieland

• George "Jack" Laine and his Ragtime Band are credited with initiating the trend that became Dixieland
• after WWI the most important Dixieland band in Chicago was the New Orleans Rhythm Kings

New York and Swing

• James Fletcher Henderson came to New York from Georgia and ended up playing piano with W. C. Handy
• by 1923 Henderson was leading the band which included Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins
• Chick Webb, one of the greatest jazz drummers, led a band in NY which included the singer Ella Fitzgerald
• One of the most creative and influential of all big-band leaders was Edward "Duke" Ellington
• Mood Indigo
• Sophisticated Lady
• In a Sentimental Mood
• It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing

Big Band

• developed in jazz clubs in the 1920s
• Instrumentation
• three wind sections
• trumpets
• trombones
• woodwinds (primarily saxes that double on clarinet and flute)
• rhythm section
• piano
• guitar
• string bass
• drums
• need for arranged, written musical scores
• Duke Ellington was the leading composer / conductor

Bebop

• late 40s
• replaced the genre of the big-band
• two-note (bebop) motive characterized the structural motives which make up the style
• highly virtuosic -- very fast running solo lines
• small group ensemble
• one instrument of each color
• no piano
• characterized by
• "walking" bass lines
• accompaniment "riffs"
• solo line
• Dizzy Gillespie
• Charlie Parker
• Thelonious Monk

Third Stream Jazz

• developed by Gunther Schuller around 1957
• combination of classical (first stream) and jazz (second stream)
• primarily jazz elements with classical instrumentation
• small ensembles

Fusion

• free style
• avant garde jazz
• emerged in the 60s
• combined jazz improv with amplified instruments
• and the rhythmic pulse of rock
• John Coltrane, leading proponent
• Miles Davis