History of Jazz

- Jazz Academie Leuven -

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Index
Index 2
I. The BIues 4
ts Origins 4
As a Musical Form 6
Timeline of the Blues 8
II. Bebop and beyond 9
A musical revolution 9
As a musical style 11
nfluences 13
III. BibIiography 14
"
- 'Perhaps the most far-reaching changes in the early Afro-American's way of life occurred in
religion and music ; but even here, (...), it was not a matter simply of adopting the white man's
conventions, but rather of infiltrating these, wherever possible, with features preserved from the
Negro's own milieu.'
- (Schuller,1968)
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I. The BIues
'The blues with its pulsing rhythms, melodic hooks, aching harmonies, vivid images, timeless stories, and
exciting performance practices is America's basic musical language.' (TMIoJ)
ts Origins
American blues represents the spirit of America. For a hundred years, at least since
the sheet music publication of W.C. Handy's St. Louis Blues, it has swept through the
nation and encircled the globe inspiring popular music throughout the world. The story of
how it came to be, and what the blues signifies in American culture, goes back further than
a century. By examining the history of the blues it is apparent that it is a clear reflection of
this nation's story, both its highs and lows. t has become a foundation for many forms of
popular art and entertainment besides music, in the United States and abroad.
As from the 16th Century on, Africans (mainly West-Africans) were enslaved and
brought to the new world. Separated from their languages and history, African Americans
somehow managed to preserve something of their culture through the only medium
available to them: music. Originally it was limited to voice and rhythm (with an assist from
the banjo, derived from African instruments) only and closely associated with dance. The
history of this blending and changing of the various cultures of Africa in an utterly new
context is obscured by time and a lack of records.
For European Americans, the music of the slaves and later of the freed slaves was
seen as primitive, as nonmusical. According to Burnim & Maultsby: 'Equating slave
practices with 'uncivilized' African rituals, Europeans most typically interpreted the music-
making of Blacks with such pejorative terms as 'barbaric,' 'wild,' and 'nonsensical'' . Yet
many European Americans found this unfamiliar music compelling and over the centuries
it began to be accepted and recognized, stepping beyond the boarders of entertainment
and developing little by little into serious music.
Music, throughout the history of the United States, has been one of the primary
methods by which people representing so many diverse ethnic and ancestral backgrounds
have built a common culture. We can see in jazz, America's original art form, a blending of
the musical traditions of Africa and Europe. The blues is unique to the way African-
Americans arrived, survived, and finally thrived in the U.S.
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The blues originally evolved in the southern states out of slaves' work songs, field
hollers, and plantation dances. As it became popular with the paying public, the blues was
quickly recognized and transformed from a back porch and picnic pastime to an income-
producing profession. Crazy Blues, Mamie Smith's hit record of 1920 that was reported to
have sold 75,000 copies in the first month of its release, is proof of its popularity. Blues
women like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith who sang the classic blues of the '20s, and
bluesmen like Charlie Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson, traveling singing guitarists in the
Mississippi Delta and American southwest, became popular throughout the nation.
Specialty record labels, music venues, and tour circuits were the result of Americans'
appetite for the blues.
Records and radio afforded blues musicians a much broader notoriety than
otherwise possible and established a pattern embraced by all subsequent folk-rooted
American music. Jazz improvisation, gospel vocalizing, country and western favorites,
R&B, and rock 'n' roll for sock hops, street-corner soul serenades, deejay mixing, and
poetry slams have followed the blues' model of starting as homegrown crafts and
becoming extremely popular commercial forms. Audiences today enjoy the specific
musical and lyrical bits, chorus formations, and stage styles that were born of the blues.
t's not farfetched to propose that the blues is the keynote of the American soundtrack, the
dominant pitch of the country's popular music history.
Etymologically the word 'Blues' might be derived on one hand from mysticism
involving blue indigo, which was used by many West African cultures in death and
mourning ceremonies where all the mourner's garments would have been dyed blue to
indicate suffering. This mystical association towards the indigo plant, grown in many
southern US slave plantations, combined with the West African slaves who sang of their
suffering as they worked on the cotton fields that the indigo dyed eventually resulted in
these expressed songs being known as 'the Blues'.
On the other hand the term may also have come from the expression 'blue devils'
meaning melancholy and sadness. An early use of the term in this sense is found
in George Colman's one-act farce Blue Devils (1798). Though the use of the phrase
in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to the the year 1912,
when Hart Wand's Dallas Blues became the first copyrighted blues composition. n lyrics
the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood.
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As a musical Form
African American work songs were an important precursor to the modern blues;
these included the songs sung by laborers like stevedores
1
and roustabouts
2
, and the field
hollers and shouts of slaves. There are few characteristics common to all blues, as the
genre takes its shape from the peculiarities of each individual performance. Some
characteristics, however, were present prior to the creation of the modern blues, and are
common to most styles of African American music. The earliest blues-like music was a
'functional expression, rendered in a call-and-response style without accompaniment or
harmony and unbounded by the formality of any particular musical structure'. This pre-
blues music was adapted from the field shouts and hollers performed during slave times,
expanded into 'simple solo songs loaded with emotional content'. Many of these blues
elements, such as the call-and-response format can be traced back to the music of Africa.
The use of melisma
3
and a wavy, nasal intonation suggest furthermore this connection to
the DNA of the blues.
The blues form is a cyclic musical form in which a repeating progression of chords
mirrors the call and response scheme commonly found in African and African-American
music. During the first decades of the 20th century blues music was not clearly defined in
terms of a particular chord progression. With the popularity of early performers, such as
Bessie Smith, use of the twelve-bar blues spread across the music industry during the
1920s and 30s. Other chord progressions, such as 8-bar forms, are still considered blues;
examples include How Long Blues, Trouble in Mind and Big Bill Broonzy's Key to the
Highway. There are also 16-bar blues, as in Ray Charles's instrumental Sweet 16 Bars
and in Herbie Hancock's Watermelon Man. diosyncratic numbers of bars are also
encountered occasionally, as with the 9-bar progression in Sitting on Top of the World by
Walter Vinson.
The basic 12-bar lyric framework of a blues composition is reflected by a standard
harmonic progression of 12 bars in a 4/4 time signature. The blues chords associated to a
twelve-bar blues are typically a set of three different chords played over a 12-bar scheme.
They are labeled by Roman numbers referring to the degrees of the progression. For
instance, for a blues in the key of C, C is the tonic chord () and F is the subdominant (V).
! s a synonym for dockworker or any job related to a waterfront.
" Stands for a broad-based, non-qualified worker in any industry.
# Keeping one syllable while changing pitch.
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The last chord is the dominant (V) turnaround marking the transition to the beginning of the
next progression.
C7 () | C7 () or F7 (V) | C7 | C7 |
F7 (V) | F7 | C7 | C7 |
G7 (V) | F7 (V) | C7 F7 | C7 G7 ||
The lyrics generally end on the last beat of the tenth bar or the first beat of the 11th
bar and the final two bars are given to the instrumentalist as a break, the so-called
turnaround. Much of the time, some or all of these chords are played in the harmonic
seventh (7th) form. The use of the harmonic seventh interval is characteristic of blues and
is popularly called the blues seven.
n melody, blues is distinguished by the use of the flattened third, fifth and seventh
of the associated major scale. These notes are called the blue or bent notes. They may
replace the natural scale tones or be added to the scale, as in the case of the minor blues
scale, in which the flattened third replaces the natural third, the flattened seventh replaces
the natural seventh and the flattened fifth is added between the natural fourth and natural
fifth. While the 12-bar harmonic progression had been intermittently used for centuries, the
revolutionary aspect of blues was the frequent use of the flattened third, flattened seventh,
and even flattened fifth in the melody, together with crushing - playing directly adjacent
notes at the same time (i.e., minor second) - and sliding, similar to using grace notes. The
blue notes allow for key moments of expression during the cadences, melodies, and
embellishments of the blues - response and they form a repetitive effect called a groove.
n rhythm, the shuffle played an important role and leads us straight to West-
Africa's ternary and binary rhythmic traditions. t is often vocalized as "dow, da dow, da
dow, da" or "dump, da dump, da dump, da": it consists of uneven or swung eighth notes
(eight notes become triplets).
'
Timeline of the Blues
4

$ Based on : Brooks L., Koda C, Baker Brooks W., Akroyd D., BIues for Dummies, For Dummies Publ., August 1998
(
Birth of the BIues
CIassic FemaIe BIues
EarIy Country BIues
EarIy EIectric BIues
OriginaI BIues Heyday
FoIk BIues RevivaI
Contemporary BIues
1912
1920
1925
1941
1969
1923
W.C. Handy publishes 'The Memphis Blues', the first song with the word 'blues' in the
title.
Mamie Smith records 'Crazy Blues' for the Okeh Label. The record goes on to sell a
million copies and becomes the first blues music hit record.
Vaudeville star Ma Rainey signs a contract to record the blues for the Paramount
label.
Bessie Smith records her first session for Columbia Records in New York.
1926 Texas Blues Legend Blind Lemon Jefferson records first session for Paramount.
1929 Charlie Patton cuts 'Pony Blues' for the Paramount label in Grafton, Winsconsin.
1936 At his first recording session at a Dallas studio, Robert Johnson performs 'Crossroad
Blues.
Son House is recorded for the Library of Congress.
1943 Muddy Waters leaves Stovall's Plantation in Mississippi and moves to Chicago.
1947 T-Bone Walker records his immortal 'Call it Stormy Monday' for Black & White
Records in Los Angeles.
1950
Leonard & Phil Chess assume control of Chicago record label Aristocrat and change
its name to Chess Records.
1951
B.B. King scores his first national hit 'Three O'Clock Blues' for RPM Records.
1951
Elmore James & Sonny Boy Williamson record an amplified version of Robert
Johnson's 'Dust My Broom'. The song becomes a top-ten hit on the R&B charts.
1953
After recording in Memphis for Sam Phillips and releasing records on two different
labels. Howlin' Wolf sings to Chess Records and moves to Chicago.
1954
Sam Phillips releases the first recording by a young hillbilly singer named Elvis
Presley on his Sun label. The song 'That's All Right Mama' is a blues tune originally
recorded by Arthur 'Big Boy' Cradup.
1958
Muddy Waters travels to England to play a series of concerts. Expecting to hear
sedate folk-style blues, audiences are instead stunned at the decibel level of
Muddy's electric guitar sound.
1965
The Rolling Stones invite Howlin' Wolf to appear with them on the ABC TV show
Shinding.
1966
Albert King records 'Crosscut Saw' for Stax Records in Memphis with Booker T. &
the MG's as his backing band.
B.B. King's 'The Thrill is gone' hits the pop charts.
1970 Bruce glauer records Hound Dog Taylor and forms Alligator Records.
1986 Robert Cray wins a Grammy Award for his album Strong Persuader
1990 Stevie Ray Vaughn dies in a helicopter crash after playing a concert in Wisconsin.
1991 Buddy Guy wins his first Grammy Award for Damn Right, I've Got The Blues !
Text
II. Bebop and Beyond
'Bebop was a label that certain journalists later gave it, but we never labeled the music. It was just modern
music, we would call it. We wouldn't call it anything, really, just music.'
- Kenny Clarke
A musical revolution
The 1939 recording of Body and Soul by Coleman Hawkins is an important
antecedent of bebop. Hawkins' willingness to stray - even briefly - from the ordinary
resolution of musical themes and his playful jumps to double-time signaled a departure
from existing jazz. The recording was popular, but more importantly, Hawkins became an
inspiration to a younger generation of jazz musicians, most notably Charlie Parker, in
Kansas City.
n the 1940s, the younger generation of jazz musicians created a new style that
came out of the 1930s' swing music. They partially strove to counter the popularization of
swing with non-danceable music that demanded listening. Youngsters like Dizzy Gillespie,
Charlie Parker, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk were influenced by the preceding
generation's adventurous soloists, such as pianists Art Tatum and Earl Hines; tenor
saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young; and trumpeter Roy Eldridge.
Gillespie and Parker, both out of the Earl Hines Band in Chicago had traveled with
some of the pre-bop masters, including Jack Teagarden, Earl Hines, and Jay McShann.
While Gillespie was with Cab Calloway, he practiced with bassist Milt Hinton and
developed some of the key harmonic and chordal innovations that would be the
cornerstones of the new music; Charlie Parker did the same with bassist Gene Ramey
while with McShann's group. These forerunners of the new music (which would later be
termed bebop or bopalthough Parker himself never used the term, feeling it demeaned
the music) began exploring advanced harmonies, complex syncopation, altered chords,
and chord substitutions. The bop musicians advanced these techniques with a more
freewheeling, intricate and often arcane approach.
Minton's Playhouse in New York served as an incubator and experimental theater
for early bebop players, including Don Byas, Thelonious Monk, and Charlie Christian, who
had already hinted at the bop style in innovative solos with Benny Goodman's band. Part
of the atmosphere created at jams like the ones found at Minton's Playhouse was an air of
)
exclusivity: the 'regular' musicians would often change the chord progressions to
Broadway songs (standards) in order to exclude those whom they considered outsiders or
simply weaker players.
Another key innovator was Benny Goodman's guitarist: Charlie Christian. His major
influence was in the realm of rhythmic phrasing. Christian commonly emphasized weak
beats and off beats, and often ended his phrases on the second half of the fourth beat.
Christian experimented with asymmetrical phrasing, which was to become a core element
of the new bop style. Swing improvisation was commonly constructed in two or four bar
phrases that corresponded to the harmonic cadences of the underlying song form. Bop
improvisers would often deploy phrases over an odd number of bars, and overlap their
phrases across bar lines and across major harmonic cadences. Christian and the other
early boppers would also begin to anticipate a harmonic progression in their improvised
line before it appeared in the song form being outlined by the rhythm section. This
momentary dissonance creates a strong sense of forward motion in the improvisation.
Swing improvisers commonly emphasized the first and third beats of a measure. But in a
bebop composition such as Dizzy Gillespie's Salt Peanuts or Miles Davis' Donna Lee, the
rhythmic emphasis switches to the second and fourth beats of the measure. Such new
phrasing techniques give the typical bop solo a feeling of floating free over the underlying
song form, rather than being tied into the song form.
Swing drummers had kept up a steady four-to-the-bar pulse
5
on the bass drum. Bop
drummers, led by Kenny Clarke, moved the drumset's time-keeping function to the ride or
hi-hat cymbal, reserving the bass drum for accents. Bass drum accents were colloquially
termed dropping bombs. This added transparency to the music, since the double bass
created a four-to-the-bar feel with its walking bass line, whereas the drummer stepped
beyond his purely time keeping role and started connecting with the soloist by following
and coloring his rhythmic flow.
Notable bop drummers such as Max Roach, Shadow Wilson, Philly Joe Jones, Roy
Haynes, and Kenny Clarke began to support and respond to soloists, almost like a shifting
call and response.
This change increased the importance of the string bass. Now, the bass not only
maintained the music's harmonic foundation, but also became responsible for establishing
a metronomic rhythmic foundation by playing a walking bass line of four quarter notes to
% s created by playing each quarter note of the bar on the bass drum.
!*
the bar. While small swing ensembles commonly functioned without a bassist, the new bop
style required a bass in every small ensemble.
By 1950, a second wave of bebop musicians - such as Clifford Brown and Sonny
Stitt - began to smooth out the rhythmic eccentricities of early bebop. nstead of using
jagged phrasing to create rhythmic interest, as the early boppers had, these musicians
constructed their improvised lines out of long strings of eighth notes, and simply accented
certain notes in the line to create rhythmic variety.
As a musical style
Bebop differed drastically from the straightforward compositions of the swing era
and was instead characterized by fast tempos, asymmetrical phrasing, intricate melodies,
and rhythm sections that expanded on their role as tempo-keepers. The music itself
seemed jarringly different to the ears of the public, who were used to the bouncy,
organized, danceable tunes of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller during the swing era.
nstead, bebop appeared to sound racing, nervous, erratic, and often fragmented.
While swing music tended to feature orchestrated big band arrangements, bebop
music highlighted improvisation. Typically, a theme melody would be presented together at
the beginning and the end of each piece, with improvisational solos based on the chords of
the tune. Thus, the majority of a song in bebop style would be improvisation, the only
threads holding the work together being the underlying harmonies played by the rhythm
section. Sometimes improvisation included references to the original melody or to other
well-known melodic lines ('quotes' or 'riffs'). Sometimes they were entirely original,
spontaneous melodies from start to finish.
Chord progressions for bebop tunes were often taken directly from popular swing-
era songs and reused with a new and more complex melody, forming new compositions.
This practice was already well-established in earlier jazz, but came to be central to the
bebop style. The style made use of several relatively common chord progressions, such as
blues (at base, -V-V, but infused with -V motion) and 'rhythm changes' (-V--V, the
chords to the 1930s pop standard ' Got Rhythm'). Late bop also moved towards extended
forms that represented a departure from pop and show tunes.
Bebop musicians also employed several harmonic devices not typical of previous
!!
jazz. Complicated harmonic substitutions for more basic chords became commonplace.
These substitutions often emphasized certain dissonant intervals such as the flat ninth,
sharp ninth or the sharp eleventh/tritone. This unprecedented harmonic development
which took place in bebop is often traced back to a transcendent moment experienced by
Charlie Parker while performing 'Cherokee' at Clark Monroe's Uptown House, New York, in
early 1942.
As described by Parker:
''I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used, ... and I kept
thinking there's bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes. I couldn't play it.... I
was working over "Cherokee," and, as I did, I found that by using the higher intervals of a
chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play
the thing I'd been hearing. It came alive.'' (Kubik, 2005)
n his book ''Bebop: a case in point. The African Matrix in Jazz Harmonic Practices
(2005)", Gerhard Kubik postulates that the harmonic development in bebop sprung from
the blues and other African-related tonal sensibilities, rather than twentieth century
Western art music, as some have suggested.
Kubik states:
"Auditory inclinations were the African legacy in [Parker's] life, reconfirmed by the
experience of the blues tonal system, a sound world at odds with the Western diatonic
chord categories. Bebop musicians eliminated Western-style functional harmony in their
music while retaining the strong central tonality of the blues as a basis for drawing upon
various African matrices."
Three new main developments can be extracted:
! A new harmonic conception, using extended chord structures that led to
unprecedented harmonic and melodic variety.
! A developed and even more highly syncopated, linear rhythmic complexity and a
melodic angularity in which the blue note of the fifth degree was established as an
important melodic-harmonic device.
! The reestablishment of the blues as the music's primary organizing and functional
principle.
!"
deologically, bebop was a strong statement of rejection of any kind of eclecticism,
propelled by a desire to activate something deeply buried in self. Bebop then revived tonal-
harmonic ideas transmitted through the blues and reconstructed and expanded others in a
basically non-Western harmonic approach. The ultimate significance of all this is that the
experiments in jazz during the 1940s brought back to African-American music several
structural principles and techniques rooted in African traditions.
nfluences
By the mid-1950s musicians (Miles Davis and John Coltrane among others) began
to explore directions beyond the standard bebop vocabulary. Simultaneously, other players
expanded on the bold steps of bebop: Cool jazz or West Coast jazz, Hard Bop, Modal
Jazz as well as Free Jazz and avant-garde forms of development from the likes of George
Russell.
Bebop style also influenced the Beat Generation whose spoken-word style drew on
African-American "jive" dialog, jazz rhythms, and whose poets often employed jazz
musicians to accompany them. The bebop influence also shows in rock and roll, which
contains solos employing a form similar to bop solos, and hippies of the 1960s and 1970s,
like the boppers had a unique, non-conformist style of dress, a vocabulary incoherent to
outsiders, and a communion through music.
More recently, hip-hop artists (A Tribe Called Quest, Guru) have cited bebop as an
influence on their rapping and rhythmic style. As early as 1983, Shawn Brown rapped the
phrase "Rebop, bebop, Scooby-Doo" toward the end of the hit "Rappin' Duke". Bassist
Ron Carter even collaborated with A Tribe Called Quest on 1991's The Low End Theory,
and vibraphonist Roy Ayers and trumpeter Donald Byrd were featured on Guru's
Jazzmatazz, Vol. 1 in 1993. Bebop samples, especially bass lines, ride cymbal swing clips,
and horn and piano riffs are found throughout the hip-hop compendium.
!#
III. BiobIiography
Books
Baillie, Harold, Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition of Jazz in the 1940s,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987
Barlow, W., Looking Up at Down, 1989
Berendt, Joachim E, The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond, Lawrence Hill
& Co., 1975
Curiel, Jonathan, Muslim Roots of the Blues, SFGate. Retrieved August 24, 2005
Deveaux, Scott, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999
Ewen, David, Panorama of American Popular Music, Prentice Hall, 1957
Ferris, Jean, America's Musical Landscape, Brown & Benchmark, 1993
Garofalo, Reebee, Rockin' Out: Popular Music in the USA, Allyn & Bacon, 1997
Giddins, Gary, Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker, New York City: Morrow,
1987
Gioia, Ted, The History of Jazz, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997
Guralnick, Peter., Sweet Soul Music, 1986
Lomax, Alan, The Land Where Blues Began, 1993
Rosenthal, David, Hard bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955-1965, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992
Schuller, Gunther, Early Jazz It's roots and musical development, Oxford University
Press nc., 1968
Scaruffi, Piero, A History of Jazz Music, 1900-2000, Chapter on Bebop, 2007
Sonnier, A., A Guide to the Blues, 1994
Southern, Eileen, The Music of Black Americans, W. W. Norton & Company, nc., 1997
Websites
http://www.pbs.org/theblues/
http://www.alan-lomax.com/home.html
http://www.rhythmandtheblues.org.uk/pdhist.shtml
http://www.thebluehighway.com/history.html
!$
Videos
Martin Scorsese presents The Blues/A Musical Journey
contains seven feature length films:
! Feel Like Going Home by Martin Scorsese
! The Soul of a Man by Wim Wenders
! The Road to Memphis by Richard Pearce
! Warming by the Devil's Fire by Charles Burnett
! Godfathers and Sons by Marc Levin
! Red, White & Blues by Mike Figgis
! Piano Blues by Clint Eastwood
Bluesland A Portrait n American Music
ArticIes
Thelonious Monk nstitute of Jazz, The Blues in American Culture,
http://www.jazzinamerica.org/pdf/1/Blues%20in%20American%20Culture.pdf
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