JAZZ

Of all the great American musical forms--blues, rock 'n' roll, country, and jazz--jazz has proven to be the most subtle, the most flexible, the most capable of growth and change, the one which has developed from folk art and popular art to fine art. Due partly to the extraordinary talents and innovators who have dotted the history of jazz, the wide range of artistic possibilities available to jazz are inherent in the form itself: a music which is structured enough to permit intricate compositions for ensemble play, but loose enough to allow for individual improvisation, individual style and voicing, and considerable virtuosity.

Jazz developed around the turn of the twentieth century in the South and Southwest, particularly New Orleans. It built on a number of earlier African American musical forms, including blues and ragtime, and European-influenced popular music and dances. The first great New Orleans jazz innovators, such as Buddy Bolden (who never recorded), Louis Armstrong, Bunk Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton, Freddie Keppard, King Oliver, and Sidney Bechet, added a number of key African American musical techniques to conventional popular and dance music styles. The two most important were the blue note, a microtonal variation on conventional pitch, and the complex rhythmic variations developed from the polyrhythmic heritage of African drumming. These additions gave jazz the rhythmic flexibility that came to be called "swing"--an almost indefinable quality which has been summed up best in the Duke Ellington song, "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing."

Although there are reports of jazz being played in the first few years of the twentieth century, the early musicians were not recorded. The first recorded jazz album came in 1917 when a white group, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, recorded for both Columbia and RCA Victor, with million-selling results. It took longer for record companies to take a chance on black jazz musicians. Mamie Smith's recording of "Crazy Blues," in 1920, began a blues craze, and many of the early appearances on record by the great African American jazz masters, like Armstrong, were as accompanists to blues singers.

Meanwhile, as the recording industry grew throughout the 1920s, the post-World War I generation found itself restless, dissatisfied, and looking for expressions of his own identity. The era was called the Jazz Age, but the Jazz Age was basically a white, middle-class phenomenon, and the music which became popular was mostly by white groups like the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Some of them were excellent musicians--in particular Iowa-born cornetist Bix Beiderbecke.

The African American musicians of New Orleans continued to be the artistic vanguard of jazz, although the scene had shifted. King Oliver was one of many who moved to Chicago. Arriving in 1918, he formed his first band in 1920, and was joined by Louis Armstrong in 1922. Oliver's New Orleans-style ensemble jazz influenced many musicians, both black and white, but it was Armstrong who became jazz's seminal influence. He left Oliver in 1924 to join Fletcher Henderson's orchestra in New York, then returned to Chicago to record with his own groups, the Hot Five and the Hot Seven. Armstrong's extraordinary technique and his artistic intensity and innovation dominated jazz, and as a result, the role of the soloist became predominant. Armstrong in the 1920s not only created one of the greatest artistic legacies of any American artist, he also established the importance of individual creativity in jazz.

During this same era, however, ensemble jazz was developing into orchestral jazz--the big bands, featuring section arrangements and tight organization. Armstrong, through his work with Henderson, was important here too, in integrating the concept of fiery, original jazz solo work into the large ensemble framework. Equally important in Henderson's band was the work of Coleman Hawkins, a great soloist who, more than any other musician, introduced the tenor saxophone as an important jazz solo instrument.

Just as jazz experienced its first great wave of popularity in the 1920s, the era of the phonograph record, Prohibition, and the speakeasy, big-band jazz was also a product of its time. As newly-legal nightclubs closed and musical groups disbanded due to the hardships incurred by the Great Depression, jazz continued to find audiences in major supper clubs, such as the Cotton Club (located in New York's Harlem, but open only to white audiences), and ventured into the increasingly important medium of radio. With fewer venues, the bigger, richer sound of big-band jazz become more popular. At the same time, the glut on the market of talented musicians drove salaries down, and made it cheaper for a successful bandleader to hire a large group.

The single most successful band of the big band, or Swing Era, was led by Benny Goodman. Goodman's success was due to his brilliant musicianship and his organizational and promotional skills, but it was also due to the fact that he was white. Goodman used his preeminence to advance the mainstream acceptance of black jazz musicians. He not only hired Fletcher Henderson as an arranger, which was a behind-the-scenes job, he integrated his band, hiring great black musicians like Teddy Wilson (piano), Lionel Hampton, and Charlie Christian. There had been a few other integrated jazz groups before, but none as successful as Goodman's group.

Artistically, the Duke Ellington and Count Basie bands represented the pinnacle of the big-band style. Ellington, who began as a bandleader in the mid-1920s, and continued to lead a band far beyond the Swing Era, until his death in 1974, may have been the first jazz musician to gain an international reputation as a serious artist--the first to draw attention to jazz as a serious art form, although this battle was not to be won for a long time. By the end of the 1970s, jazz was being taught in universities, and major grants and awards were going to jazz musicians and composers. But in 1965, Ellington was passed over for the Pulitzer Prize for music because of a stubborn insistence by older conservatives on the committee that jazz was not really art.

Count Basie, who came from the Kansas City tradition of blues-influenced jazz, was arguably the most important figure in developing the concept of "swing" in the big-band idiom. J. Bradford Robinson, in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, says that his rhythm section "altered the ideal of jazz accompaniment, making it more supple and responsive to the wind instruments." Basie's approach to rhythm, and the musical innovations of his leading soloists, particularly tenor saxophonist Lester Young, provided an important basis for the revolutionary changes that were to come.

Throughout the 1930s, jazz was primarily popular music.

Goodman, Ellington, and Basie played for dances, just like the "sweet" big bands led by Sammy Kaye, the Dorsey Brothers, and others. But in the 1940s, jazz enjoyed the fruits of the steady growth of the previous decade. After the end of Prohibition, a new generation of jazz clubs had begun to grow throughout the 1930s. They tended to be small, which meant they created a demand for small group jazz, generally a rhythm section and two lead instruments. The most important of these clubs were on 52nd Street, in New York, making New York more than ever before the center of jazz creativity.

New jazz musicians, primarily black, gravitated to New York, where they represented an urban, sophisticated generation. Impatient with what they perceived as the "Uncle Tom" image of many black showmen, like Armstrong and Cab Calloway, they presented themselves as cool, cerebral, and introspective. They were artists, more than entertainers.

These new musicians investigated the possibilities of improvisational music, trying more complex rhythms and harmonies and improvisations built on melodic and chordal substitutions which went way beyond conventional melodies. The two most important figures in the modern jazz, or bebop, movement were alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Their experiments galvanized an entire generation of musicians, who began to hear music in a whole new way. Experimentation became the new wave of jazz. In 1941 Minton's, a small club in Harlem, became the center for a series of after-hours jam sessions which soon attracted all the best players who were interested in the new music.

Modern jazz attracted a fiercely dedicated audience, though it was never as large as the audience for the big bands. It created a style: the hipster, who wore a beret, sunglasses, and a goatee, and listened to unintelligible music and spoke in an unintelligible slang. Jazz, and the jazz subculture, filled an important role in the post-World War II era, as mainstream America plunged headlong into the conformity of prosperity, and a small vanguard was left to search for more elusive artistic and social values.

The artistic legacy of the bebop and cool jazz years, the 1940s and 1950s, is extraordinary. Besides Parker and Gillespie, other important figures include Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, Gerry Mulligan, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Sonny Rollins, Dave Brubeck, and Miles Davis, who was to play an increasingly important role in the next decades of jazz.

In addition to the achievements of individual musicians, the modern jazz era also drew attention to the aesthetic importance of jazz. It began to be described, for the first time, as "America's classical music." Widespread acceptance of jazz as an art form was slow in coming to America, however; European intellectuals embraced it much more quickly.

During the 1950s, the jazz audience became more communal.

The 1940s prototype had been the night-owl, club-hopping hipster; in the 1950s, the jazz festival became a fixture. The first jazz festival was held in Nice, France, in 1948; the first in America was the Newport (Rhode Island) Jazz Festival in 1954. By the 1990s, there were estimated to be close to 1000 significant jazz festivals held annually around the world.

As the experimental sounds of modern jazz entered the mainstream, and became accepted by mass audiences (TV shows like Peter Gunn used jazz soundtracks), young jazz musicians were finding a new avant-garde. An historic 1959 engagement at New York's Five Spot Cafe by alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman was a milestone in the emergence of free jazz. While bebop had explored unusual possibilities and inversions in conventional chord and harmonic structures, free jazz virtually dispensed with them.

Coleman, Don Cherry, and Cecil Taylor were among the young iconoclasts who pioneered free jazz. At first rejected by the 1950s jazzmen, they proved impossible to ignore, and soon major jazz figures like John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, and even Miles Davis were exploring its possibilities.

Free jazz was the artistic vanguard of the anti-establishment 1960s. Like bebop before it, it made previous styles sound tired and a little formulaic. Unlike bebop, though, it never established itself beyond a small, avant-garde audience. Nevertheless, it remained an important alternative musical direction.

The indigenous music of the 1960s was rock, and by the end of the decade, some jazz musicians were becoming intrigued by the artistic possibilities of this phenomenally popular form--most importantly, Miles Davis. Davis had been listening to Jimi Hendrix and other rock innovators, and he realized there was musical promise in a fusion between the improvisational freedom of jazz and the simple beat of rock. At the same time, rock musicians like John McLaughlin and Jack Bruce were being drawn to the creative possibilities of jazz.

Purists refused to accept jazz-rock fusion as real jazz. Its rhythmic regularity deadened the swing of jazz. But many noted jazz musicians, particularly Davis alumni Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, embraced the new form. A number of young musicians, like the members of the group Spiro Gyra, made their entire careers playing fusion. None of them were very good.

Fusion was essentially an artistic dead end. The next generation of jazz musicians was not much interested in pursuing its leads. Jazz in the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s became in many ways a retro music. With no new dominant style, many young musicians looked to the past--all eras of the past.

The most dominant young musician of the 1980s and 1990s, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, showed on his early albums that he could play in all styles, from the free jazz of Ornette Coleman to the classic jazz of Louis Armstrong.

A salient symbol of this era is the jazz repertory company, a jazz orchestra made up of young musicians, devoted to playing the jazz classics. The National Jazz Ensemble, founded by bassist Chuck Israels, was the first of these, and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, led by Marsalis, was probably the best known. This was the era during which jazz studies courses entered the universities, when the Smithsonian Institution issued its Classic Jazz collection, when grants for jazz studies, composition, and performance burgeoned in both the government and private sectors. Equally important to this period was the CD explosion, which created a new listener interest in the jazz of all periods.

The 1980s and 1990s, even without developing a new sound, have their own importance in the history of jazz for precisely this recombinant quality. Jazz developed so fast--no other art form in human history has moved from folk to popular to fine art in such a short amount of time--that its revolutionary vanguard frequently eclipsed earlier styles. Players not in the vanguard were too often dismissed as "moldy figs," in the slang of the beboppers. That changed in the 1980s and 1990s. The artistry--and the modernity and innovation--of artists like Armstrong, Hawkins, and Basie became fully recognized.

Jazz will probably never again be the popular music it was in the 1930s. But it remains something other than an art music to be put alongside classical music in the concert halls and the academy. It retains that mystique of something hip, something adventurous, a music for the vanguard of young audiences to graduate to, after rock begins to lose its immediate appeal.