Jazz: A quick-and-dirty summary - what to look for as you read Vera Lee's 'Black and White'

Jazz is another form of American music that went from folk beginnings, a lot of them in New Orleans, to a very popular art form and eventually crossed over into bebop and modern jazz, art forms that have a lot in common with classical or art music ... including very complex music, highly trained musicians and a limited audience. Vera Lee's "Black and White of American Popular Music" traces this progression. In the introduction to the book, Lee says:

... I trace the interactions of black and white music since the time of slavery until World War II and the rise of bebop. And rather than concerntrate on one particular area, such as jazz, I demonstrate how certain patterns recur in a variety of fields, such as show business, blues recording, music composing, publishing, and dance. (xi)

The pattern we'll be looking for is that progression from folk to popular to art music. At each step, black and white performers and audiences have contributed to - or stepped back from - what jazzman and educator Wynton Marsalis calls "this strange dance that we've been doing with each other since, really, the beginning of our relationship in America" (quoted in Lee, ibid). As we read about it, I want to refresh your a sense of what it sounded like.

We don't have time to do more today than watch a few video clips, but we need to do at least that because I think they'll help you know what to look for as you read Vera Lee. Terms in CAPS and boldface you should know, because you'll want to be slinging them around as you write your papers.

The big thing about jazz is it's IMPROVISED, like folk music is. It started in a "bounded community," the African American community of New Orleans in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It went worldwide, but it always kept that focus on improvisation -- it's not played note-for-note from sheet music, so players can vary they way they play a song and build on each other's interpretations during a performance.

One of the first roots of jazz was brass band music of the Civil War. Hundreds of infantry and cavalry regiments were organized, and most of them had bands. The YouTube clip shows vintage photos with the Federal City Brass Band playing in the background (playing a Confederate anthem derived from an Irish fiddle tune called "The Jaunting Car"). Louisiana raised at least 30 regiments for the Confederate Army, and 11 regiments of African American troops for the union. That meant a lot of surplus musical instruments after the war, and more than a few of them found their way to street bands in New Orleans.

Marches were very popular everywhere. North and south, local bands played them in gazeboes. The tradition lingers to the present, when Springfield's Muni Band performs at gazeboes in the city parks. Here's a very early movie (1889) for the Thomas A. Edison Music Video Co. showing a regimental band. Recognize the tunes? I hear children's songs ... even an old camp meeting hymn called "Sweet Affliction" that I've also been hearing lately on an ice cream truck on the near west side of Springfield. The band numbers have essentially the same musical structure as fiddle tunes, polkas, ragtime and early Dixieland jazz.

Jazz has always been, and continues to be even now, band music. Religion, not surprisingly, was another deep root of jazz.

STREET BANDS combined the two. They grew up in New Orleans' black community in the late 1800s, and they developed a tradition that combined church processions with street dancing, Mardi Gras and what in time came to be called "dixieland" jazz. The band would play a solemn, dignified tune in the first line on the way to the cemetery. Often it was the old spiritual, "Just a Closer Walk with Thee." Afterward, on the SECOND LINE or way back from the graveyard to a celebration of the person's life very similar to a wake, the band would play upbeat numbers like "When the Saints Go Marching In."

We can't go back in time, but we can get a little sense of what the music might have been like in the early days from seeing what the tradition has evolved into in New Orleans, where roots musicians still maintain something like a bounded community. Many of them are professionals, and music is undeniably hyped for the benefit of New Orleans' tourism industry. Here's a link to a history on a funeral directors' website that explains the tradition, acknowledging its commercial vibes but concluding, "A symbol of life, a symbol of death and a symbol of re-birth, the New Orleans jazz funeral salutes a life well lived and the passage of a departed soul into a better world."

But the traditions survive not only in the tourist sections but also in the neighborhoods. We'll watch amateur video of a traditional jazz funeral for New Orleans tuba player Kerwin James, who died in Oct. 2007.



These brief shots in a tribute to Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown show both first- and second-line playing at his funeral. Brown was a gifted bluesman and standout performer at the Chicago Blues Festival who died, some believed of a broken heart, shortly after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. Another YouTube clip shows a second line from New Orleans' St. Augustine Church in June 2007.

Louis Armstrong was one performer whose career spanned the popularity of jazz. He started out in street bands like those linked above, and evolved into a polished "big band" performer during the 1930s and 1940s. His career lasted into the period of "modern jazz," which was more classical in tone, but he was uniquely himself. And his music remained popular with mass audiences. Here he plays "When the Saints Go Marching In" with what looks like a 1950s television studio band. And here he sings his trademark song "Wonderful World" on BBC-TV in 1968. Backing him are Tyree Glenn on trombone, Joe Murany, clarinet; Marty Napoleon, piano; Buddy Catlett, bass; and Danny Barcelona, drums. The BBC show was one of Armstrong's last public appearances.



Jazz evolved into what some consider a form of ART MUSIC with the advent of players like Charles "Bird" Parker, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Here the John Coltrane Quartet plays an arrangment of "Alabama" in 1963. McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones rounded out the quartet. Their playing is improvised, but very subtle, intricate and formal like art music. It came to be known as "modern jazz," and it still has a strong market niche mostly in college towns and major metro areas. You can even hear it Saturday nights on WUIS-FM in Springfield.



As you listen to Coltrane, ask yourself the infamous three questions we ask in HUM 223: (1) What stands out as you listen? Does it have features of folk, popular or art music? Does it hold your attention? (2) What in your background, taste, experience, etc., influences the way you feel about it? Does it transcend boundaries and appeal to if it's unfamiliar? Or is it just too far removed from the music you like? (3) What, specifically, about the music and the performance do you respond to? Post your answers as comments to this post.