America’s Original Art Form
Louis Armstrong sparked jazz, a fusion of sounds popular in New Orleans

Jazz music was the anthem for the first well-defined American youth culture. Rebelling against the horrors of mechanized warfare and the straitlaced morality of the 19th century, millions of college-age Americans adopted jazz as a way to mark their difference from their parents’ generation.

Admittedly, the ability of youth to indulge in the sorts of up-to-date pastimes portrayed in Hollywood films and novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was strongly affected by their position in society – after all, not everyone could afford luxury automobiles, champagne, and top-flight dance orchestras. However, jazz’s attraction as a symbol of sensuality, freedom, and fun does appear to have transcended the boundaries of region, ethnicity, and class, creating a precedent for phenomena such as the swing era, rhythm & blues, and rock ’n’ roll.

“America’s classical music” is inextricably linked to the African American experience.Jazz, one of America’s original art forms, emerged in New Orleans, Louisiana, around 1900. New Orleans’s position as a gateway between the United States and the Caribbean, its socially stratified population, and its strong residues of colonial French culture, encouraged the formation of a hybrid musical culture unlike that in any other American city. Jazz emerged from the confluence of New Orleans’s diverse musical traditions, including ragtime, marching bands, the rhythms used in Mardi Gras and funerary processions, French and Italian opera, Caribbean and Mexican music, Tin Pan Alley songs, and African-American song traditions, both sacred (the spirituals) and secular (the blues).

The New Orleans-born cornetist and singer Louis Armstrong is commonly credited with establishing certain core features of jazz – particularly its rhythmic drive or swing and its emphasis on solo instrumental virtuosity. Armstrong also profoundly influenced the development of mainstream popular singing during the 1920s and 1930s. Armstrong emerged as an influential musician on the local scene in the years following World War I, and subsequently migrated to Chicago to join the band of his mentor King (Joe) Oliver, playing on what are regarded by many critics as the first real jazz records.

In 1924 Armstrong joined Fletcher Henderson’s band in New York City, pushing the band in the direction of a hotter, more improvisatory style that helped to create the synthesis of jazz and ballroom dance music that would later be called swing. By the 1930s Armstrong was the best–known black musician in the world, as a result of his recordings and film and radio appearances. Armstrong’s approach was shaped by the aesthetics of early New Orleans jazz, in which the cornet or trumpet player usually held the responsibility of stating the melody of the song being played. Throughout his career Armstrong often spoke of the importance of maintaining a balance between improvisation (or “routining,” as he called it) and straightforward treatment of the melody. “Ain’t no sense in playing a hundred notes if one will do,” Armstrong is reported to have said on his 70th birthday.
 

Jazz stars have become national icons, even depicted on postage stamps.
 

Dance Music in the “Jazz Age”
Early jazz grew popular among a young, urban subculture

Although jazz was initially regarded by the music industry as a passing fad, its impact on the popular music mainstream represented an important cultural shift. A new subculture emerged from the white upper and middle classes, symbolized by the “jazz babies” or “flappers” (emancipated young women with short skirts and bobbed hair) and “jazzbos” or “sheiks” (young men whose cool yet sensual comportment was modeled on the film star Rudolph Valentino). This movement involved a blend of elements from “high culture” – the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the paintings of Pablo Picasso, the plays of Eugene O’Neill – and from popular culture, particularly styles of music, dance, and speech modeled on black American prototypes. The idea of the jazz age was promoted by the mass media, especially by Hollywood.

Following on the heels of ragtime, the jazz craze represented the intensification of African-American influence on the musical tastes and buying habits of white Americans. While it did increase opportunities for some black musicians, the world of dance orchestras remained strictly segregated. African-American musicians appeared with increasing frequency in fancy downtown cabarets and hotel ballrooms (although they could enter these places only as employees, not customers). During the late 1920s white jazz fans began to frequent nightclubs in African-American neighborhoods. In New York’s Harlem and the South Side of Chicago, these “black and tan” cabarets offered their predominantly white clientele an array of jazz music. Performing at Harlem’s famous Cotton Club, the great jazz pianist and composer Duke Ellington developed a style that he called “jungle music,” featuring dense textures and dark, growling timbres.
 

Jazz composer, pianist, and bandleader Duke Ellington.
 

The King of Jazz
Paul Whiteman led the most successful 1920s dance band
 

The most successful dance band of the 1920s was the Ambassador Orchestra, led by Paul Whiteman. Whiteman’s role in the history of jazz is ambiguous. On the one hand, he promoted a watered-down, “safe” version of jazz to the public. On the other hand, Whiteman did make some important contributions, widening the market for jazz-based dance music (and paving the way for the Swing Era), hiring brilliant young jazz players and arrangers, and establishing a level of professionalism that was widely imitated by dance bands on both sides of the color line. He also defended jazz against its moral critics (whom he called “jazz-klanners”) and carried on aspects of the brilliant African-American musician Jim Europe’s vision of a symphonic version of jazz. (The 1924 debut of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue featured Whiteman’s band.)

The Ambassador Orchestra, which comprised only 10 players in 1920, had expanded to 19 by the end of the decade (five brass instruments, five reed instruments, four violins, and a five-piece rhythm section). In 1927 Whiteman began to hire some of the leading white jazz musicians of the time, including the brilliant cornetist Bix Beiderbecke and the Dorsey brothers (Jimmy and Tommy), who would later achieve success as bandleaders in the Swing Era. At concerts and dances he used a small “band-within-a-band,” made up of the best jazz musicians in his orchestra, to play “hot” music. Whiteman hired pioneering dance band arrangers – Ferde Grofé and Bill Challis – to craft his band’s “book” (library of music), and he helped to promote jazz-influenced crooners such as Bing Crosby.

The King of Swing
The fluid swing jazz of Benny Goodman and others, proved hugely popular
 

Beginning in 1935, a new style of jazz-inspired music called “swing,” initially developed in the late 1920s by black dance bands in New York, Chicago, and Kansas City, transformed American popular music. The word “swing” (like “jazz,” “blues,” and “rock ’n’ roll”) derives from African-American English. First used as a verb for the fluid, “rocking” rhythmic momentum created by well-played music, the term was used by extension to refer to an emotional state characterized by a sense of freedom, vitality, and enjoyment. References to “swing” and “swinging” are common in the titles and lyrics of jazz records made during the 1920s and early 1930s.

Swing music provides us with a window onto the cultural values and social changes of the New Deal era. The basic ethos of swing music was one of unfettered enjoyment, “swinging,” “having a ball.” The audience for swing spanned the social boundaries that separated ethnic groups, natives and immigrants, southerners and northerners, city dwellers and country folk, the working class, the expanding middle class, and progressive members of the educated elite.

For the swing era, the mythic “founding moment” occurred in the summer of 1935, when a dance band led by a young jazz clarinetist named Benny Goodman (1909-1986) embarked on a tour of California. Goodman was not only a skilled jazz improviser but also a strict disciplinarian, insisting that his musicians play their parts with perfect precision. The Goodman band’s appearances on the national Let’s Dance radio broadcasts and its hot syncopated style built a sizable following.

In a seeming echo of the hype surrounding Paul Whiteman’s public image, the press crowned Benny Goodman the “King of Swing.” However, there are several big differences between the so-called kings of jazz and swing. While Whiteman remained a classical musician all his life, Goodman was in fact a fine (if often under-rated) improviser who studied jazz closely. While Whiteman’s band played syncopated ballroom dance music in a style that borrowed its name from jazz, Goodman’s really was a jazz band, performing music closely modeled on the innovations of African-American musicians, composers, and arrangers. And while Paul Whiteman’s dance orchestras of the 1920s never included musicians of color, Goodman was the first prominent white bandleader to hire black players, beginning with the pianist Teddy Wilson in 1936 and followed by the brilliant young electric guitarist Charlie Christian, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, and trumpeter Cootie Williams.

Although big bands relied heavily on arrangements of popular Tin Pan Alley songs, the blues – with its 12-bar structure, three-chord pattern, blue notes, and call-and-response patterns – also remained a mainstay of swing music. Of all the big bands, the one most closely associated with the blues tradition was led by the jazz pianist William “Count” Basie (1904-84). Basie, born in New Jersey, gained much of his early experience as a player and bandleader in Kansas City, Missouri. During the 1920s and early 1930s black dance bands in Kansas City had developed their own distinctive approach to playing hot dance music. Kansas City-style was more closely linked to the country blues tradition than the style of the New York bands, and it relied more heavily upon riffs (repeated patterns). One important influence on the rhythmic conception of the K.C. bands was the boogie-woogie blues piano tradition, in which the pianist typically plays a repeated pattern with his left hand, down in the low range of the piano, while improvising polyrhythmic patterns in his right hand.

Another prominent swing era band was the Duke Ellington Orchestra, led by Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899-1974), widely regarded as one of the most important American musicians of the 20th century. Ellington was an experimenter. He devised unusual musical forms, combined instruments in unusual ways, and created complex, distinctive tone colors.

A third leading swing band was that of Glenn Miller (1904-1944). From 1939 until 1942 the Miller Orchestra was the most popular dance band in the world, breaking record sales and concert attendance records. Miller developed a peppy, clean-sounding style that appealed to small-town midwestern people as well as to the big-city, East and West Coast constituency that had previously sustained swing music. In terms of sheer popular success, the Miller band marked the apex of the swing era, racking up 23 Number-One recordings in a little under four years.

Neither jazz nor its far-reaching influence on American music and culture ended in the 1930s, however. Swing, also known as big band music, grew out of and was strongly influenced by jazz. Beyond swing, every succeeding generation of musicians has defined its own style of jazz, responding to and challenging the aural legacy that began in New Orleans. Bebop, cool jazz, fusion jazz, soul jazz, and acid jazz are just a few of the varieties that have grown from the original tree of sound.