Spreading the Word
Jazz advances at home and abroad.
Sonic Soldiers
The Fifteenth New York Regiment hit the beaches in France on New Year’s Day 1918. While the unit’s military activities were admirable, it was its musical performances that made it one of the best-known regiments on the continent. The all-black unit’s marching band, the wildly popular Hellfighters, jazzed up things everywhere it went, playing orchestrated ragtime renditions of military standards that introduced soldiers of all nationalities to the new music.
Jazz Goes Overseas
Americans have seemingly always traveled with their music. When World War I sent our soldiers overseas, they arrived with the sound of jazz, something new and exciting to Europeans’ ears. The raw energy and unpredictable nature of jazz was unlike that of any music heard before in Europe, and its appeal was so intense and immediate that pockets of popularity spontaneously sprang up thousands of miles from the music’s Crescent City cradle.
In war-weary England, the first appearance of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band was a major sensation. Critics, missing the point completely, ridiculed the music as primitive, but fans went away humming the tunes and imitating the onstage antics. However, the members of the ODJB weren’t the only ones proudly flying the flag of New Orleans jazz in post-war Great Britain.
Bechet’s Brilliance
Sidney Bechet, whom we first met as one of the founding fathers of jazz, was also one of the music’s first international ambassadors. Bechet arrived in England in 1919 as part of the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, an elaborate touring production staged by a 40-member troupe of musicians and dancers. The orchestra’s music was tightly controlled by its leader, Will Marion Cook, a former classical violinist and Broadway producer who demanded that each note be played exactly as it was written on the page. But there was one conspicuous exception: Bechet was allowed to indulge in a series of clarinet improvisations during the show’s finale. These flights of fancy were quintessential expressions of the essence of jazz and Bechet’s brilliance in performing them solidly established both the musician and the music as European favorites.
The Empress from Chattanooga
Female blues singers were the rage in the 1920s, and the scene was crowded with legendary blues ladies. Few doubted that big-voiced Bessie Smith, a no-nonsense singer who was the epitome of tough-woman blues, was the queen of the scene. She sold millions of records before the first blues boom faded. Then just as she was making a comeback at the age of 43, Smith died in an automobile accident.
Preserving the Magic: The First Recordings
It’s hard for us to imagine a world where you couldn’t hear the music you wanted when you wanted to hear it. But the jazz revolution was, amazingly enough, one initiated and originally popularized without the benefit of recordings.
In the spring of 1917, however, all that changed, and the popularity of jazz took an exponential jump as a result. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band entered the recording studio, and, after overcoming a multitude of artistic and technical obstacles, the group had successfully transferred the excitement of the live music onto vinyl. This process made it possible for fans thousands of miles from nightclubs and concert halls to hear the music on demand. And that demand would prove considerable.
Animal Magnetism
The record was “Livery Stable Blues,” a song that featured the musicians imitating barnyard animal noises. It was actually more of a novelty number than a true jazz tune. But that didn’t matter to infatuated fans. It was a million-seller that easily eclipsed the successes of the reigning kings of the Victrola — Enrico Caruso and John Phillip Sousa — serving notice in the process that the commercial potentials of this new “jass” sound were seemingly unlimited.
Combined with “Dixieland Jass Band One-Step,” a lively dance tune whose title further displayed the initial confusion regarding the name of the new music form, the first recordings raised the profile of jazz to its highest point yet. The ODJB was rushed back into the studio and obligingly turned out another half dozen or so hits, all the while playing along with the publicity campaign that described the carefully composed and impeccably performed music as something wild and primitive that was made up on the spot.
“Original” Band Imitated
The impact of the stunning success of the first recordings was felt far from the East Coast studios. Jazz bands in New Orleans and elsewhere immediately reconfigured themselves in the image of the ODJB to fully capitalize on the widespread fascination with the band’s sound. Everyone figured the popularity wouldn’t last, and few realized the fad was only the beginning of a long-term public romance with jazz that would carry over into the 21st century.
The Ticklers
The Harlem jazz scene developed its own homegrown heroes. Some of the most noteworthy were pianists, especially a group of talented keyboardists who had invented what they called “Eastern ragtime.” These piano pioneers, led by James P. Johnson and Willie “The Lion” Smith, were dubbed “ticklers,” but their fiercely competitive performances, frequently in head-to-head duels, were serious affairs that drew crowds and reactions more like sporting events than concerts.
Bix Beiderbecke: Unlikely Legend
No development better illustrated the unexpected universal appeal of early jazz than the career of Bix Beiderbecke. As the son of a prosperous, white middle-class family in Davenport, Iowa, Beiderbecke didn’t seem to be a likely candidate to become one of the prime purveyors of a music created by former New Orleans slaves.
But the young Beiderbecke, who heard Louis Armstrong (of course) playing on a riverboat, was totally captivated by jazz and, despite strenuous parental objection, devoted his life and career to it. In doing so, he encountered reverse racism from many musicians and the scorn of his own social group.
Rounding Out the Edge
Beiderbecke, just 28 when he died, was probably the most influential white musician of his era, but he’s not remembered just because of his skin color. Bix, as he was known to the jazz world, was a legitimate jazz innovator with a beautiful, rounded tone on cornet, and the influence of his stylistic advances still resounded a half century later. Beiderbecke took the strident military tone out of his sound, playing lyrical passages with subtle impressionistic harmonies. His approach broadened the stylistic range of jazz, opening up new possibilities for performing, which, in turn, broadened the music’s fan base.
Although his legend, preserved on a series of seminal recordings, grew considerably after his early death, Beiderbecke was a conspicuous presence on the ever-expanding jazz scene of his time. His original fame came as a member of the rambunctious Wolverines in Chicago, but Beiderbecke worked with big-name bandleaders Frank Trumbauer in St. Louis and Paul Whiteman in New York. Once established, he occasionally revisited Chicago, where he regularly jammed with the music’s pioneers, even performing with his original jazz inspiration Louis Armstrong, as well as with Armstrong’s mentor, King Oliver.
The Sun Also Rises
The Fletcher Henderson Orchestra was one of the most successful and significant big bands of its day, but its fame soon faded. Decades later an arranger who had worked with the band formed his own group in tribute to Henderson’s futuristic musical approach. The Sun Ra Arkestra, whose leader, Sun Ra, claimed to be from Saturn, modernized the Henderson approach while embellishing it with elaborate showmanship that featured science fiction settings and costumes from ancient Egypt.
Satchmo Blows Into the Windy City
Chicago was the second city of jazz, and it was also the end of the rainbow for many New Orleans musicians. Life was fine in the Big Easy, but it was a constant scuffle, unlike Chicago, where well-paying gigs were plentiful. The Windy City was already a primary destination for African-Americans leaving the South, as a steady flow of immigrants — the Great Migration — served to redistribute their population. Jazz musicians, able to make the equivalent of a week’s wages in New Orleans in a single night in Chicago, were in the vanguard of the relocation. Many of the most able and ambitious made it their goal to get there, creating a massive talent exodus that was re-enacted years later during post-World War II blues migration to the Windy City.
Figure 3-1: A young Louis Armstrong (standing) with his mentor, King Oliver, shortly after they were reunited in Chicago.
So, it was natural that Louis Armstrong would eventually take his horn to Chicago. That’s exactly what happened in the summer of 1922, when he took a train to the Windy City to join King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, one of the music’s best-known and most important groups. And, as usual, Satchmo set about making musical history. This time, though, there was a personal angle too, as he met his future wife, the band’s pianist, Lil Hardin.
Behind Every Successful Man . . .
Armstrong was initially dazzled by the big-city excitement of Chicago, but he quickly adapted to the faster pace and soon carved out a reputation for himself. The headstrong Hardin had even grander aspirations for her new husband, and, after a couple of years of persistent persuasion, she convinced him to split with his mentor Oliver. Armstrong signed on with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. In the summer of 1924, he took New York City by storm, while still finding time to participate in a little blues history by backing Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Alberta Hunter in the recording studio.
Assignment: Spreading the Word
Reading
- Read Chapter 3 of Jazz: A History of America’s Music, and observe how jazz moved beyond its original demographics in the span of only a few years.
- Compare and contrast the background and musical development of Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke. Notice the way both, despite their socio-cultural differences, were similarly obsessed with playing jazz.
