Sound Science Music Thread: Pass it on!

[Steve999]

Latin Jazz! (1915) About the music: https://narrativesculptures.wordpre...easure-of-blues-jazz-music-and-dance-history/

 

[bigshot]

I've been doing some googling too. I think the song La Paloma may be the origin of the worldwide popularity of the habanera, that was picked up by ragtime and jazz musicians. In fact, the Chicago World's fair might be where it hit big, and Joplin was there. La Paloma has the syncopated "tearing up" of the melody like early ragtime.

 

[Steve999]

Very cool! After I read your post I read about La Paloma and that history is completely fascinating, maybe the first really international and intercontinental hit, I guess published in the late 1850s and then taking root, before recorded music, and through the present time. Also reading about the 1898 World's Fair is fascinating and seeing how Scott Joplin was a featured musician there. So in 1905 there was of course (of course!) a Mexican marching band playing La Paloma, a habanera tune--you can hear everything percolating, this concoction, it's getting close, it's perhaps just a matter of fine gradation as to who you think got to "jazz" first--wow I wish there were more recordings from this time. There must have been so much other wild stuff going on. You can't put into sheet music what a wild brew this is.

You can hear the same pattern in the left hand of Scott Joplin's 1909 "Solace" as you hear as the rhythmic foundation in this version of "La Paloma." Of course Joplin's version is softer and slower but it's the same pattern. As compared to the habanera background pattern in Solace or this version of La Paloma, you will hear in Joplin's 1902 "The Entertainer" just a standard one note or chord per beat background in the left hand (bass), which you could consider more European or march-like than Spanish-African-Cuban. In the Entertainer the Spanish-African-Cuban influence is just about entirely in the right hand only. Joplin's Solace and this version of La Paloma take the next step. It's interesting that the Habanera aria of Bizet's Carmen (1875) has the same habanera pulse to the music also.

About La Paloma--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Paloma

1905, LaBanda de Zapadores de Mexico, La Paloma--

 

[Steve999]

Sorry to be hijacking this thread for a bit (along with @bigshot , but I am more culpable)--

Here is the first published blues (1914), sounds like it's being played mechanically from sheet music, St. Louis Blues, by W.C. Handy. You could also view it as ragtime or jazz. It's harmonically and structurally too complex to call it a simple 12-bar blues in the modern sense. From what I am reading the blues may have in the long run gotten dumbed down for the benefit of recording companies (sound familiar?). The categories blur here.

Any way, if you listen to the left hand, and you have gotten the hang of the habanera rhythm, you can hear he starts out with the habanera rhythms, and then alternates through the piece between a habanera rhythm and march rhythms and what to modern ears might sound like an R&B rhythm--this is concentrating on the left hand. In the right hand he is throwing off early jazz & blues riffs. Fascinating!

 

[bigshot]

I think the habanera was an inspiration for ragtime, and ragtime was an inspiration for jazz, along with the blues, military band music and tin pan alley. Spain was a cousin to jazz, not so much the immediate family. Ragtime and the blues would be things picked up from other musician and would have been regional. Military band music and tin pan alley from sheet music, vaudeville and recordings... basically the turn of the century equivalent of pop culture.

 

[Steve999]

Here is Jelly Roll Morton, perhaps one of the inventors of jazz, playing New Orleans Blues, a song he says he wrote in his teens (1902-1905) (the latter part of which he was playing in brothels in New Orleans), while, IIRC giving an episodic 20-hour interview to the Library of Congress in 1937. He is in the process of explaining "the Spanish tinge." So by his account this is the first jazz tune, full stop, written by him when he was a teenager. It has the pattern of the habanera rhythm in the left hand, but altered just so, so that it gives off a very different feeling. It's probably accessible to the modern ear as being purely American music.

 

[Steve999]

Jelly Roll Morton, 1924--Habanera all over the place.

 

[Steve999]

Jelly Roll Morton, some time before 1931. This one's closer to ragtime than jazz, to my ear. No Habanera in the left hand.

 

[Steve999]

Jelly Roll Morton and his Red Hot Peppers, 1926.

 

[bigshot]

From what I've found, I don't believe that jazz was invented by one person or sprung forth from one city. It was the first art form to be developed through popular media distribution (sheet music, recordings, films) and was a combination of a lot of different creators and regional styles. It was American music first. Later it spread further through media and became part of the whole world.

There were a few parts of the US that were important to giving birth to jazz... the South and New Orleans was just one. The Midwest (up and down the Mississippi River trade route), the North East (particularly New York)... these all contributed to jazz. The music showed up in Vaudeville, minstrel shows, cake walks, and roadhouses long before it was even called jazz. It was a combination of the torn up rhythms of ragtime, the arrangement of military band music like Sousa, the lyrics and popular music construction of tin pan alley, and the blues, which had its origins in the work songs in the fields in the South. Different strains of jazz had different proportions of these four elements, but it was all jazz.

It's pretty easy to pin a date on when jazz started. It's the exact same time that recorded music started... around the early 1890s. I think that isn't just a coincidence. The rapid growth of jazz was directly related to recording, the same way minstrelsy and vaudeville was directly related to the publication of sheet music. The medium drove the art forward.

Today, people don't want to acknowledge parts of the roots of jazz. They want to make jazz a racial thing. It was the opposite of that. It was American music. It belonged to everyone. Everyone contributed their part. But we don't talk about minstrelsy, hotel bands, hot vs sweet, vaudeville and Broadway and their contributions to jazz any more. Instead, scholars make up stories about the devil at the crossroads and documentary film makers make films depicting jazz as being all about one specific place and one specific race.

Jazz was American Popular Music from the 1890s through the beginnings of Rock n Roll in the late 40s. Rock n Roll itself was created from jump blues, a type of jazz which was a populist reaction to the over academic bent of modern jazz. Everything led to jazz, everything led from it. Jazz is the single greatest contribution of America to the arts, rivaled only by moviemaking. Nothing could kill jazz. Rock music didn't kill jazz Jazz had to commit suicide to get replaced, which it did in the 60s / early 70s. It did that by abandoning the popular audience. Rock music was just there to pick up the slack.

 

[Steve999]

From what I've found, I don't believe that jazz was invented by one person or sprung forth from one city. It was the first art form to be developed through popular media distribution (sheet music, recordings, films) and was a combination of a lot of different creators and regional styles. It was American music first. Later it spread further through media and became part of the whole world.

There were a few parts of the US that were important to giving birth to jazz... the South and New Orleans was just one. The Midwest (up and down the Mississippi River trade route), the North East (particularly New York)... these all contributed to jazz. The music showed up in Vaudeville, minstrel shows, cake walks, and roadhouses long before it was even called jazz. It was a combination of the torn up rhythms of ragtime, the arrangement of military band music like Sousa, the lyrics and popular music construction of tin pan alley, and the blues, which had its origins in the work songs in the fields in the South. Different strains of jazz had different proportions of these four elements, but it was all jazz.

It's pretty easy to pin a date on when jazz started. It's the exact same time that recorded music started... around the early 1890s. I think that isn't just a coincidence. The rapid growth of jazz was directly related to recording, the same way minstrelsy and vaudeville was directly related to the publication of sheet music. The medium drove the art forward.

Today, people don't want to acknowledge parts of the roots of jazz. They want to make jazz a racial thing. It was the opposite of that. It was American music. It belonged to everyone. Everyone contributed their part. But we don't talk about minstrelsy, hotel bands, hot vs sweet, vaudeville and Broadway and their contributions to jazz any more. Instead, scholars make up stories about the devil at the crossroads and documentary film makers make films depicting jazz as being all about one specific place and one specific race.

Jazz was American Popular Music from the 1890s through the beginnings of Rock n Roll in the late 40s. Rock n Roll itself was created from jump blues, a type of jazz which was a populist reaction to the over academic bent of modern jazz. Everything led to jazz, everything led from it. Jazz is the single greatest contribution of America to the arts, rivaled only by moviemaking. Nothing could kill jazz. Rock music didn't kill jazz Jazz had to commit suicide to get replaced, which it did in the 60s / early 70s. It did that by abandoning the popular audience. Rock music was just there to pick up the slack.

That’s what I am seeing, is just total cross-currents. I can’t make a linear story out of it, but looking at all of the cross currents for the first time in this way for that formative time period I am like a kid in a candy store.

I have loved jazz since I was a teenager so as far as its artistic merits and worldwide influence you are preaching to the choir. I guess when I was a kid we didn’t have the inter webs so I couldn’t do a google search and just say, I’ll be darned would you look at that, and learn so much so quickly. I’ll be interested to see your friend’s documentation and recordings as to the less publicized side to the story.

 

[bigshot]

Unfortunately and surprisingly, the internet isn't the best source for information on this stuff. It just provides the "general consensus" that has pretty much paved over the truth. The Ken Burns documentary had a lot to do with that. It had a narrow focus that it set out to prove and it cherry picked to fit the narrative. If you want a good source for a more interdisciplinary approach to the history of American music, I'd recommend Allen Lowe, particularly his book, "That Devilin' Tune" which shows how all kinds of American music contributed to jazz. http://allenlowe.com/books

Lowe recently sent out an email saying that he is publishing a new book called "How to Listen to American Music". The book comes with 36 CDs illustrating the music discussed in the book. He did a similar series of CDs to accompany "That Devilin' Tune". They are all transfers from original recordings in his own collection. Everything this guy does is impeccably researched and backed up. The American Music book and CDs is $125. If you are interested, contact him.

 

[sonitus mirus]

I don't know if Jelly Roll stones me, but he sure did have an influence on some of my personal favorites.

 

[GearMe]

Sorry to be hijacking this thread for a bit (along with @bigshot , but I am more culpable)--

Here is the first published blues (1914), sounds like it's being played mechanically from sheet music, St. Louis Blues, by W.C. Handy. You could also view it as ragtime or jazz. It's harmonically and structurally too complex to call it a simple 12-bar blues in the modern sense. From what I am reading the blues may have in the long run gotten dumbed down for the benefit of recording companies (sound familiar?). The categories blur here.

Any way, if you listen to the left hand, and you have gotten the hang of the habanera rhythm, you can hear he starts out with the habanera rhythms, and then alternates through the piece between a habanera rhythm and march rhythms and what to modern ears might sound like an R&B rhythm--this is concentrating on the left hand. In the right hand he is throwing off early jazz & blues riffs. Fascinating!

Great tune...like this version as well

 

[gregorio]

[1] It was the first art form to be developed through popular media distribution (sheet music, recordings, films) and was a combination of a lot of different creators and regional styles.
[2] Everything led to jazz, everything led from it.
[2a] Jazz is the single greatest contribution of America to the arts, rivaled only by moviemaking.
[3] Nothing could kill jazz. Rock music didn't kill jazz Jazz had to commit suicide to get replaced, which it did in the 60s / early 70s. It did that by abandoning the popular audience.

1. Not really, you're out by about 300 years or so! Even going back as far as the 1600's there were solo/"in camera" forms of popular classical music developed through the distribution of sheet music, something that became even more common in the 1700s with the industrial revolution and the rise of a much larger demographic of people with leisure time and disposable income. Obviously there wasn't other forms of mass distribution like recordings or films back then but I would say jazz was more of an evolution than "the first art form" in this regard.

2. Not everything, either to or from, but certainly numerous things. That statement is perhaps more applicable to classical music than jazz.
2a. It's certainly a great contribution, maybe even the greatest but I would say that's arguable rather than an absolute statement of fact. Moviemaking is also problematic for somewhat different reasons; firstly, it wasn't an American invention and although America was easily the most dominant contributor, it wasn't the only contributor.

3. Which is inevitable in every art form. There comes a point with all art forms where further evolution/innovation is impossible, where the limits of "pleasant"/"pleasing" have been reached and then the choice is to either not evolve/innovate (and just essentially repeat what's already been done) or change the limit of "pleasing"/"pleasant" and cast the net wider. For example, be "unpleasant" or be "pleasing" in terms of intellectual stimulation rather than just superficially "nice to listen to". The consequence of this is that you're going to loose a lot of the popular audience. Classical music started down that road half a century or so before jazz and some other art forms even earlier. The problem with the first option is that it eventually becomes impossible. For example, once Beethoven died, later composers had the choice of evolving further or just writing more Beethoven music (for which there was a great demand). Many composers chose the latter and failed because they just weren't as good as Beethoven but one or two did succeed, Brahms being a prime example, but then what? The next composer along now has to compete with both Beethoven and Brahms (+ others), it's an increasingly impossible task.

G