[granodemostasa]

Hello,
I was originally going to write about the history of civil rights legislation, but i figured i might do something more Head-fish. I took on this project for a small class assignment, sorry it took so long to post this.
This is the original Thread:

http://www6.head-fi.org/forums/showt...t=jazz+history

Quote:

[size=medium]The early history of jazz is a story about African Americans during the great migration. Jazz at its inception was a southern phenomenon, with its own patrons, institutions, culture and traditions. Nevertheless, like African Americans in the Jim Crow south, jazz makers would seek opportunity in the north, jumping first to the nearest cities or on river boats and then making the journey north. Like those who would migrate North, jazz musicians would have to learn new styles, new skills and adapt to new technologies once they reached the north. And like other African Americans, they too would learn that their blackness did not disappear on the other side of the Mason Dixon line. It was the social atmosphere of New Orleans that made it the birthplace of jazz. At every legitimate social gathering in New Orleans, music was the main attraction. Fess Manuel Manetta recalled how “Pinky, a lady friend of mine” would gather a number of local musicians for her large parties, hiring practically anyone whom she thought played well, saying “bring him up.” Similarly George Murphey, known as “Pops Foster,” recollected that “there was all kind of work for musicians from birthday parties to funerals,” which to him explained why so many band emerged in New Orleans. Thus, at the start of the twentieth century, there was great demand for jazz performers; the rich would even hire them for their children’s dance parties, at golf clubs, restaurants and country clubs. It was not only the rich who hired jazz musicians, there were many band and single musicians who played for local saloons, dance halls, and lawn parties-which were local events and attended by African Americans. Yet the New Orleans jazz scene was most indebt to another type of industry: the Red Light District of New Orleans. The district and the musicians had a symbiotic relationship; as Armstrong put it, “if it wasn’t for all those good musicians…the district wouldn’t have been anything. Music lovers from all parts of the city came to hear them play Genuine Jazz.” In the eyes of many who lived through it, there was a moment of perfection before it was closed down. Armstrong, in particular, remembers that the “district never closed. There were actions going on at all times, somewhere or other.” Nevertheless, this party would not go on forever. During World War I two soldiers were killed in the Red light district, prompting the navy to close it down. To some the closing of the Red Light district was a watershed moment in New Orleans jazz history. Louis Armstrong wrote that, despite the changing styles of playing, most good musicians still had work “as far as 1917, the year that they closed the District down for good.” After that, on the other hand, many musicians “turned to drinking on and off their jobs.” More importantly, all of the people who had worked in the district lost their jobs, including waiters, maids, cooks, and pimps; thus hurting the African American community. Nevertheless, by many accounts New Orleans jazz was starting to fizzle before 1917. Before the closing of the Red Light District, many musicians had already started moving out of New Orleans. Pops Foster, for example, recalled that “ a lot of musicians left New Orleans before the District closed,” citing Laurence Duhe, Bill Johnson, Nookie Johnson, Sugar Johnny, Manuel Perez, Arnold Metoyer and Freddie Keppard as examples of players who left before 1910. In fact, the exodus was well underway before the closings. For instance, Willie Hightower’s band left in 1915 and, most notably, Jelly Roll Morton left in 1913. It was Jelly Roll Morton’s travels across the country, starting in 1913, that foreshadowed the nomadic fate of many Jazz musicians. According to Morton’s own accounts, he was in California by 1917. The Chicago Defender chronicled his travels, placing him in Los Angeles in 1918, San Francisco in 1919, San Diego in 1921, and Louisville in 1926, finally setting in Chicago by 1927. Yet, Morton was somewhat unique in that he went to the west coast. Most musicians would go on to serve as part-time musicians on riverboats before making the leap to the North. Riverboat music started around 1916; as Danny Barker recalled it, it was “one of the most beautiful sounds in the city of New Orleans.” The boats employed musicians of surprisingly high caliber; Fare Marable performed with both of his bands on riverboats, Jelly Roll Morton, Armstrong, and King Oliver all played on them before moving on to other cities. These boats set up a pattern; they “would spend the winter in New Orleans and then, around April, go up to St. Louis, stoppin’ at Natchez and other places for a night or two.” Pops Foster recalled the boats stopping at a different town every night, advertising entertainment, dances, soda, and a place to sleep. Ultimately, beyond just providing a onetime job opportunity, these riverboats served to adapt southern musicians to life outside of New Orleans and to some, like Buster Bailey, helped them adapt to New Orleans musicians before playing with them. By the late twenties most musicians had advanced from their riverboat gigs and went on to another city, Chicago. As Foster found out, after returning from a riverboat job in 1919, “the Streckfus people hired another bunch of guys for Fate’s band. I think the only guys that were left were Louis Armstrong and Baby Dodds. Baby Left soon after that,” and Armstrong would leave in 1922. Pops Foster pointed out that from 1920 to 1925 “the big music field was Chicago.” Indeed, Foster was not wrong in this assessment; by 1925 practically every notable jazz musician had made his way, along with hundreds of thousands of other African Americans, from the Deep South to Chicago. Jelly Roll Morton was one of the first to make the trek, working at a number of Chicago nightclubs from 1915 until 1917. Others took a bit longer before making it to Chicago, yet once they did, the New Orleans musicians continued to create music together. Louis Armstrong, for example, continued to play with his fellow New Orleans musicians. Yet, for Armstrong it was never a sure move; he recollected that “if it wasn’t for Joe Oliver I probably never would have left home. I was always afraid to leave home because so many of the boys from home had gone up North and come back in such bad shape.” Nevertheless, Chicago would turn out to be a nourishing place for young musicians, as Armstrong would later write that “us kids who turned out to be good musicians migrated from New Orleans to Chicago when times were real good. There were plenty of work, lots of dough flying around, all kinds of beautiful women at your service. A musician in Chicago in the early twenties were treated and respected just like some kind of a God.” Armstrong found these conditions so hospitable that he would buy his mother an apartment in Chicago. Ironically, this atmosphere contributed to the dismantling of one of the greatest jazz bands of all time: King Joe Oliver’s Jazz Band fell apart when Oliver accepted a contract that would have required his players to leave Chicago. Even then, if bands departed, many nightclub owners would simply import more players from New Orleans, thus increasing the musical migration. Nevertheless, the great jazz age in Chicago began to decline. As Hilt Hinton recalls, “in the Early thirties in Chicago, there was a decline of popular interest in Jazz. Chicago just went down. It was a meager period and it was pretty bad for musicians.” As Chicago declined, a new stage took its place in the jazz world: New York. Pops Foster commented on Chicago’s dominance in the early twenties only in passing, for him the “big music field” in 1925 was New York. Foster depicted New York as a musician’s paradise: “there were a million nickel dance halls that all had bands. When you’d go to work on the train, it would be loaded with people and when you’d come backk in the morning, there’d be nothing but musicians on it.” The earliest bands in New York were those of Fess Williams, Wilbur Sweatman, Jack Hatton, and Johnny Dunn. Yet even for these early musicians work never did seem as abundant as it did in Chicago. Duke Ellington said of New York, “there wasn’t near enough work for everybody that could blow horns, and what musicians didn’t have steady jobs would spend their days standing out on the street gambling.” Nevertheless, the stream continued; Armstrong wrote that “my manager and agent sent for me to come to New York.” Like Armstrong, others such as Joe Tuner, Charlie Johnson, Willie Smith, Kid Punch Miller would ultimately make the trip to Harlem, find success and begin a new era in jazz. In the previous ten years Jazz had made four migrations; from New Orleans and the Deep South, to the rivers of the South, to Chicago and then to New York. These migrations, and other changes along the way, changed the art form dramatically. The simple experience of music making changed throughout this period. Jack Weber recalled how “the trumpeter would more or less make up a tune” in the pre-war New Orleans bands. He went on to say that “they (the melodies) were played differently than they were written… Many of these tunes were (later) published and copyrighted.” In part, this rather open conception of jazz explains why so many of the early musicians did not read music during their New Orleans days; both Clarence Williams and Pops Foster noted that they learned to read music after heading north. Beyond this, New Orleans Jazz was characterized by its unique rhythmic patterns. In describing New Orleans Jazz Edward Garland noted that “the music is built up around rhythm. If it hasn’t got that rhythm, there aint nothing to it. The rhythm, that’s what makes the horns play.” Paul Howard calls the style “swinging syncopation” and recalled that “Jelly Roll had that syncopation… Louis Armstrong can do it too. It was unique to New Orleans musicians. Now days they play too many notes; they play too fancy and don’t syncopate the music.” Syncopation was not the only change to jazz as a result of the migration. Edward Garland said that the typical New Orleans band “was only seven pieces, ain’t no saxs or nothing like that, just clarinet.” What emerged out of Chicago were larger jazz orchestras, like that of Ray Millar in the late twenties. Indeed, photographs taken of New Orleans jazz bands in the late teens and Chicago bands in the mid twenties reveal an enormous growth in the size of the typical orchestra. Another notable change, Ed Garland points out, was the introduction of the saxophone. According to both Foster and Pee Wee Russell, the saxophone was introduced in the early twenties outside of New Orleans. Recordings started appearing in 1926 with Joe Oliver discs, which were made in Chicago. By this time, not only had the composition of the typical Jazz band changed, but recordings had spread throughout the genre and changed the way jazz bands performed. Jazz and jazz musicians were major beneficiaries from the invention of the phonograph. As Zutty Singleton recalled, when Louis Armstrong traveled his way to New York, in “every big town…we’d hear Louis’ records being played on loudspeakers and stuff. Louis was surprised; he didn’t know he was so popular.” Pops Foster attributes Joe Oliver’s enormous popularity to the fact that he was one of the first to go up to Chicago and start making records. George Johnson, similarly, attributes Bix Biederbecke’s success to the popularity of his records, and Pee Wee Russell notes that he had become familiar with Biederbecke’s music before he arrived in Chicago due to the recordings. In this way, records enhanced the popularity of jazz musicians and the genre. Other musicians simply note the uniqueness of making a recording. Frank Walker said:[/size] [size=x-small] “I’ll never forget one of the first electrical recording sessions we ever had on Columbia, back in 1926. It was quite a procedure. We built an enormous tent in the studio on the theory that the conical shape would keep the sound in…there were four or five people and a piano in that thing. Then the wire broke. Down came the sides of the tent and, I’m gelling you, it was the wildest scramble you ever saw.”[/size] [size=medium]Others recall a smoother process. Pops Foster remembered that “when we used to make records in St. Louis, they’d hire a loft in one of the downtown buildings. The band would practice…They had big megaphones going into the wall. We’d stand up to the megaphone and play.” Some simply remembered the money they made from recording. Clarence Williams remembered the fallout of his first recording as a shock when he received a check “from the Columbia Record people for sixteen hundred dollars!...I looked at the check and actually thought it was for sixteen dollars… the Columbia people had sent a representative down and they recorded it on a Dictaphone and sent it up to New York. A band recorded it there and next thing I knew, I got this check.” Such success would not be uncommon among jazz musicians, most of which grew up in poverty, and demonstrated the type of success that risks, like moving to a different city, could bring. Nevertheless, despite this success, black jazz musicians still had to deal with the reality of Jim Crow. In explaining a recording delay, Willie Bunk Johnson wrote to a friend in Chicago “I’m pretty sure that you know just how everything is down South with the poor colored man. The service here is really poor for colored people. We have no colored studios…in these little country towns, you don’t have a chance like the white man, so you just have to stand back and wait till your turn come.” Pops Foster later recalled that in New Orleans “they didn’t have any colored bands playing in the parade. Some of the colored guys played in the bands but they passed for whites.” Louis Armstrong would go on to tell how “the Negroes were only allowed to work in the Red Light District. They were paid good salaries and had a long time job. Just stay in your place where you belonged.” He also noted that “Jelly Roll Morton with lighter skin than the average piano players got the job (at a prestigious house) because they did not want a black piano player for the job.” Escape to the North or to riverboats did not always mean escape from segregation. Zutty Singleton notes that “the way it worked on the boats was Monday night dances were for the colored,” while all other nights were for whites. Likewise, in Chicago, most clubs were segregated. Although this did not bother Louis Armstrong when he noticed “white musicians playing all of that good jump music, making those colored people swing like mad,” and said “I had never seen such a beautiful picture before. I had just come up from the South, where there weren’t anything near as beautiful happening.” Louis Armstrong’s reflection provides insight on the African-American experience in this era. While segregation did exist in the north and on riverboats, race relations and financial opportunities were never as bad as they were in the Deep South. This is why Louis Armstrong moved his mother up north; “I wanted her to have an apartment, maybe she would like Chicago better,” he would later say. “I wanted her to have every comfort…we were so poor, all our lives, until we were very glad to get any place to sleep, most of the years, let alone an apartment with all the trimming…Gosh!” This move away from need, in search of better opportunities, is what drove African Americans to the north. Like the transition cities of Memphis and Birmingham, the riverboats served jazz musicians as a stepping stone to the North. When they finally reached the North they too had to adjust to the demands of the new society; many learned to read music, work within set styles, and play in larger orchestras. Like other African Americans, they too lived in the Chicago’s black ghetto. Once the era of Chicago ended, jazz musicians went to that other black mecca: Harlem. When Willie Smith first arrived in Manhattan in 1912, he recalled that “most of the joints were downtown. San Juan Hill, on the west side of midtown NY; it was called The Jungle. That’s where Jimmy Johnson and I used to hang out.” Yet, when Louis Armstrong, Kid Miller, Joe Tuner, and Duke Ellington arrived on the New York scene, it was Harlem, not Midtown, where the clubs and dance halls were located. This development is closely tied with the African-American experience in New York; it was during the 1920s that Harlem came to be populated by African Americans and rose as a black city within a city. The history of jazz migration is a history of African American migration. While hundreds of thousands of African Americans sought new opportunities, traveled to intermediary cities, encountered new challenges and different forms of racism, Jazz musicians from the south, likewise, hoped for a new future in the North, jumped on the riverboats, learned to read music, meet with interesting new technologies, and encountered Northern racism. Nevertheless, like the African American community as a whole, they would not go back to the south; jazz musicians continued to put their hope in the North, and take opportunities as they came. [/size]

some notes:

Note I-Someone brought up that I did not explain Pop Foster's influence. The basic problem I had was that all the first hand accounts I got were from musicians that clearly did not like him. I think another, secondary resource, did make the arguement that his real contribution had to do with the way he wrote Jazz- (and the pieces of music i looked at confirmed this). Apparently, he was the first to start writing jazz phrases differently from rag time or blues.

Note II- I would have loved to explain the end of the Chicago Jazz era- except that none of the first hand accounts I read actually give a real reason why it ended. Most people would suggest that the Great Depression killed it, but that explanation fails to explain why most of the great Chicago musicians moved to NY before 1929 and why the musicians didn't mention it. What I get is that the simple rise of Harlem as an entertainment destination drove the musicians to Harlem. Whereas Chicago's musicans performed on the South Side, where white audiences usually stayed away, New York's jazz was played in Harlem, a place that was seen almost as a white backyard to come and see black entertainers. What drove the musicians was the simple money that white sponsored musicians made over black musicians.

Note III- the quote I used for the title was written by Ted Jones and referred to Albert Nicholas, "a Black Jazzman that blue blew what he knew was true of black me and white you."