Jazz and the African American Literary Tradition.pdf - Jazz...

Jazz and the African American Literary Tradition
By Gerald Early
For nearly the first half of the twentieth century, from about 1915 to 1955, jazz was the dominant
form of popular dance music in the United States. Dance music and dance bands existed before jazz
and, after the rise of jazz, there were still many dance bands that did not play jazz or used jazz
elements only sparingly. And although for a certain period of its existence, jazz was dance music, jazz
musicians were probably not attracted to this style of music primarily for this reason. From its earliest
days, jazz seemed to have been music that, in part, musicians played for themselves, as a way to free
themselves from the rigidity of standard dance or marching bands or other forms of commercial or
popular music, which they found repetitive and unchallenging to play.
Jazz originated early in the century with small bands of five-to-seven players in a style that became
known as New Orleans, named after the place where the music, in its first iteration, codified itself.
That style is now called Dixieland. Jazz was propelled commercially mostly by 12-to-15 piece big
bands, usually with both a male and female vocalist, in a style that became known as swing during the
1930s. Swing was built around highly rhythmic riffs with strong soloists providing “breaks” or
moments of spirited improvisation against backdrops of arranged composition. With the rise of swing,
band arrangers became as important as band soloists and it was much more necessary for musicians
to know how to read a score than it was in the earlier days of jazz. Some swing bandleaders became
noted celebrities during jazz’s heyday like Duke Ellington , Count Basie , Benny Goodman , Glenn Miller ,
Jimmie Lunceford, the Dorsey Brothers , Stan Kenton , Artie Shaw , and a score of others. Jazz also
produced its share of star soloists by the 1930s including trumpeter Louis Armstrong , saxophonist
Coleman Hawkins , clarinetist and saxophonist Sidney Bechet , saxophonist Lester Young , pianist Art
Tatum , pianist and singer Fats Waller , drummer Gene Krupa , and trumpeters Harry James , Roy
Eldridge , and Bix Beiderbecke . It is clear that despite its humble origins among the lower classes,
immigrants, and African Americans, jazz was never really a folk music; it professionalized and
standardized itself fairly quickly, becoming highly sophisticated show and stage music within a
half-dozen years of its initial arrival on sound recording in 1917. By 1924, bandleader Paul Whiteman
was sponsoring a history of jazz concert that featured the premiere of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody
in Blue,” as an example of symphonic jazz.
Although jazz has made use of many musical structures including blues, tango, African and Indian
music; its most basic form is the 32-bar format of the American pop song, many of which by such
noted composers as Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, the Gershwin Brothers, Rodgers and Hart, Vernon
Duke, and others, constitute the foundational repertoire of jazz. Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” is a
standard example of such a song with its A-A-B-A typology. This song and most of Gershwin’s most
popular tunes are standard fare for jazz musicians even today.