2. LEARN ABOUT EARLY JAZZ MOVEMENTS

Ragtime

Back in the mists of time before everyone had MP3 players, music was lost after a performance. You couldn't record it. Of course, you could write musical notation, and the earliest evidence we have of jazz comes in this form in the 1890s. So the earliest recorded Jazz we know about is known as Ragtime.

Ragtime is really easy to write down. It's the style of jazz that's closest to European music, so it easily fits into European notation. Ragtime was also put onto piano rolls for player pianos (think Cowboy Westerns-the music that stops when Black Bart saunters into the saloon).

Ragtime is in 2-beat meter, which means it goes "boom-chick, boom-chick." It stays on this steady pulse most of the time, but the melody is often dancing around with a lot of syncopation. This is important, since the unusual rhythmic tension is really the only thing about Ragtime that makes it jazz. There is no improvisation, there are no tambral effects (the piano being the main instrument) and there is no use of the blues scale.

It is worthless to talk about Ragtime without talking about Scott Joplin (no relation to Janis). Without a doubt, his style gave voice to the jazz of that era (extending from the 1890s-1920s). If someone puts on a bit of Ragtime music, 9 times out of 10 it's either "The Entertainer" or "Maple Leaf Rag," both Joplin titles. If your browser has the capabilities, listen to "The Entertainer" for an example.

Joplin wanted Ragtime to gain recognition as serious art, something that would show that Blacks were as capable of as much as the European composers of classical music. Although jazz would eventually go in an entirely different direction, it was Joplin who first earned the music its respectability.

Classic Jazz

Around the same time as Joplin, another type of jazz was emerging. It came to be known as Classic Jazz, and it grew out of New Orleans Storyville, to be exact. Storyville was the section of town filled with legal prostitutes and the clubs they worked in. The clubs all needed entertainment, so they hired musicians who would sometimes play out the back of a car covered in advertisements for the house they performed in. These bands were made up of back lines (drums, bass or tuba, piano or guitar) and front lines (trumpet, clarinet, trombone), and these guys really cooked. Not only did they have solo improv, they had ensemble improv too. What's that? That's when everyone in the band-not just one instrument-makes up his/her part as the group goes along. Also, the beat broke free of the oom-pah feel of Ragtime and started becoming more variable. Ensemble improv is a joy to listen to, but is fairly unique to the Classic Jazz period.

One of the early players of Classic Jazz was Jelly Roll Morton, originally a Ragtime pianist who was among the first to start playing the new style. Other important names to drop at cocktail parties are King Oliver, Kid Ory, and Fletcher Henderson (no relation to Florence).

But the biggest name of all is a guy who picked up the trumpet in reformatory school, Louis Armstrong. Armstrong was a young kid when the first jazz album came out in 1917, but once he got playing, he took over. Because of Armstrong, the trumpet became the premiere instrument of jazz (before that it had been the clarinet). It was Armstrong who first gave a modern solo, based on the fundamental chord progression rather than on the melody. Oh, and he also sang ("What a Wonderful World," for one).

Swing

The biggest culprit for the reduction of improv, though, was jazz's own growing popularity. Throughout the 1920s, jazz became more and more popular with all audiences; soon it became a dance music: Swing. (Gap commercials, anyone?) The beat became steady again, and the experimentation with sound slowed; people didn't want new musical ideas, they wanted something to move their feet to. Consequently, Swing Jazz is simple jazz, played in large bands of 10 or 12 people, though sometimes some core musicians of a band would play a song. This is also when jazz vocalists came into prominence, most notably Billie Holiday (a.k.a. "Lady Day") and Ella Fitzgerald, known for her unmatched scat abilities.

Swing jazz fell into three unique styles:

  • The Kansas City-style Bands were usually country folk that couldn't read music but had taught themselves to play. They were best known for solo-heavy music with easy, repetitive, memorable riffs underneath. The best Kansas City Band belonged to Count Basie. To get a feel for Kansas City-style bands, listen to Basie's "Flight of the Foo Birds."

  • The National Bands came out of the city and featured slicker musicians that were often classically trained, and almost all were able to read music. They tended to have more complex written parts and less improvisation. A good National style of play can be heard in the Benny Goodman Band. Listen to "Moonglow," for example.

  • Duke Ellington was one of those rare musicians who fell outside the boundaries of his time, not limiting himself to either the Kansas City or National forms. Ellington surrounded himself with good musicians and gave them a lot of room to play around in, so they enjoyed working with him. Arguably the best arranger in the history of jazz, Ellington would write pieces specifically to highlight his players. For instance, he once wrote a song called "Concerto for Cootie," which gave his trumpeter Cootie Williams three styles in which to show off his chops. He also used more exotic and complex harmonies than had been used before, taking advantage of his 10-piece band. Furthermore, he experimented with cross-voicing, the use of unusual combinations of instruments to create new sounds.

While swing was often looked down upon by jazz fans from the 1950s on, it is now making something of a comeback. Classic swing bands like Duke Ellington's, Count Basie's, and Woody Herman's.