Jazz Corner: The History of Jazz

The history of jazz is actually the story of jazz.

It is a long and impressive story of the growth of one of the most exciting “live performance” music forms ever created.

Jazz is approximately as old as cinema, both having their beginnings in 1900 or thereabouts, making them around 120 or so years old.

It is an African-American music form and its origins are in the American South, mainly in and around the city of New Orleans. It is important to note that jazz has emerged from the original sound of the blues and to this date, the blues play a crucial role in the sound of jazz.

The steps of the development of jazz may be summarized in this capsule:

• Early 1900s: Blues wails, church sounds of gospel and spirituals.
• 1915 onwards: New Orleans birthed multiple instrument funeral bands, leading to a jazz form known as Dixieland.
• About 1920: Less exuberant smaller bands playing in New Orleans in particular. Earliest popular band was that of trumpet player King Oliver. Louis Armstrong was part of this band. Armstrong then branched out with his notable bands the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens.
• Jazz traveled up the Mississippi River, arriving in Chicago via a few ports, sowing seeds of the sound of jazz. Each of these regions has a unique approach to the music, each slightly different from the other. In later years, jazz from the American West had a laidback sound, still referred to as West Coast jazz.
• 1930s across the U.S.: With the period of The Great Depression, poverty and prohibition, dance halls became a common person’s form of inexpensive entertainment. Big band jazz was the driving force in these dance halls. Major bands like those of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Glen Miller, Tommy Dorsey and others were at the helm of this big band phenomenon. Each had at least one singer fronting the band. Jazz was the popular (pop) music of the time and soon found its way to the radio to reach the length and breadth of the U.S. Several of the great singers in jazz, such as Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday have emerged from this era. It is interesting to note that one American band leader, Terry Wetherford traveled to India and around 1935 set up his big band for the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay, starting a jazz movement in India.
• Following World War Two, the sound of jazz changed dramatically. Bebop was the new sound. Led by saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie, this was fast-paced jazz played essentially by small groups. In the 1950s this had offshoots such as Hardbop, which accentuated melody, and a movement called Cool jazz, evolving into the sound of modern or mainstream jazz.
• A new concept of sound, based largely on the new possibilities offered by electronic instruments was ushered in, mainly by Miles Davis, Joe Zawinul, Wayne Shorter and a few others. This music was popular with several followers of the rock sound.
• Mainstream jazz returned with a bang with Wynton Marsalis restoring the “New Orleans” sound.
• Today we have a mix of all these sounds with their audiences, all thriving in their own spheres.

In this fabric of music created through the decades, there have been progressive steps and often each tier of progress has become a standalone style or genre in its own right.

As we look back at these 100-plus years of the emergence of jazz from the raw blues stock, let us do away with the borders we have created to demarcate the steps in the progress of this music.

We concur with the likes of Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock — both long serving musicians, each of whose careers have spanned over 6 decades; Each has said that lines differentiating various phases in the growth of African American music (originating from the earliest blues) should be treated as just one music. Thus the blues, R&B, soul, Motown, rap and hip-hop and rock and roll is all one music, say Hancock and Jones.

The problem with categories that exist is that they are based on commercial or logistical considerations and not necessarily because of the approach to the sound. Record companies, music stores and even magazines and awards groups need to have a “handle” for categorizing the music. Thus, for example, we would have separate bins in a record store for “R&B”, “Mainstream jazz”, “Soul”, “Smooth/ Easy listening jazz” etc. The Grammys and other awards are given in specific categories and magazines have different sections for these categories.

In reality, Jazz is a difficult subject to define.

Thus, is Etta James a jazz singer? Do we consider the music of Frank Sinatra to be jazz……or is it pop (popular) music?

It is a much more comfortable journey as a listener to not bother too much about these categories! Enjoy Michael Jackson or Steely Dan or Billy Joel as jazz. B.B. King, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and several others need not be categorized.

An amusing tale emerges from this. The Newport Jazz Festival is a long-standing annual event held each summer in Newport, Rhode Island in the U.S. For the 1956 edition, a young Ray Charles was invited to perform with his big band. His concert was a great success and the Atlantic record company released the album Ray Charles at the NJF.

There was some objection saying that Ray Charles was not a jazz musician! The company hurriedly reissued the album as Do the Twist with Ray Charles. It was exactly the same music, just retitled to please some folks. We would not call them purists; just nitpicking bureaucrats!

Jazz is really a large umbrella under which the full history of African-American music fits, quite nicely.

Let’s just listen and enjoy!