Unit 3 – Jazz and Tin
Pan Alley
(The Early 20th
Century, ca. 1900-1930)
Now we move
into the 20th Century. Two genres will be of central concern to us
in the first few decades of the century—jazz
and Tin Pan Alley. First,
however, let’s consider some important factors influencing the course of music
at the beginning of the 1900s—new music technologies and the song and dance
crazes inspired by the popularity of ragtime music.
New Technologies
New
technologies began to change the way music was composed, performed, recorded
and disseminated in the 20th century. First was the phonograph, invented in the 19th
century by the Thomas Edison and others. In the early days, phonographs were
used to record music and other sound performances on wax cylinders—these
eventually were replaced by the disc-shaped records we are more familiar with
today. Many middle class homes had phonographs by the early 20th
century. Now, in addition to sheet music which could be played on the parlor piano,
recordings of professional musicians could be enjoyed by anyone in the home.
The early phonographs were rudimentary in their recording technology. The
development of electronic microphones a bit later improved the sound quality
and also made possible radio broadcasts, which really helped to spread a
variety of music to listeners across the country.
A wax cylinder grammophone from the Columbia Grammophone
Company. The cannisters shown were used to store the wax
cylindars on which the sound was recorded.
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The Ragtime Craze,
Popular Songs, and Syncopated Dances (1900-1910)
Published in 1899, "Hello
Ma Baby" was a big hit at the
turn of the century.
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Unfortunately, this "coon song"
was also hugely popular.
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After the
success of ragtime piano music, like Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag, which broke records for sheet music sales at the
turn of the century and became an international hit, the whole country was
crazy for ragtime during the decade between about 1900 and 1910. White
Americans became fascinated with the syncopated rhythms of ragtime. Syncopation
was still a novelty to many people who were more accustomed to European style
music with its straightforward, steady rhythms. Many popular songs of the day
incorporated the common types of syncopation from ragtime piano music. These songs could
be written by either black or white composers. Many of them were known as coon songs, and played up the African
American roots of the ragtime style, using many of the same offensive images
(in both the lyrics and sheet music art) that had been employed in the 19th
century minstrel show. This practice demonstrates the ongoing influence of
minstrelsy and its attitudes.
The new
fascination with syncopation also led to the popularity of a variety of new
popular dances in the first decade of the century. The waltz, which had been
popular as both a song and dance style was replaced by ragtime inspired dance
crazes like the fox-trot. The syncopation in these dances is mild to us today,
as it also was to most African Americans at the time, but to many, dancing
these new-fangled dances to syncopated music made them feel wild and free, and
a little bit risqué! All of this
excitement paved the wave for the popularity of the next style of music that would
take the country by storm. It was a music that African Americas had already
been cultivating—jazz.
Early Jazz
(1910s-1920s)
Jazz refers to a variety of musical
styles and genres that grew out of the African American community by the second
decade of the twentieth century. Jazz may be vocal or instrumental, and it may
be played by a soloist or a jazz band. A Precise definition of jazz is elusive,
but like ragtime, it is a synthesis of African American syncopation with
European American instruments, forms and harmonic practices.
Jazz
developed out of a rich melting pot of people, culture, and music in New
Orleans. Because of this, the early style of jazz is often referred to as the
New Orleans style. New Orleans was a unique place. Having originated as a
French colony and also belonging to the Spanish for a time, Louisiana was a place where
different attitudes and concepts about race were held than in much of the United States where
an English heritage prevailed. African slaves, Afro-Caribbean escaped slaves,
Creoles of mixed European and African ancestry, and free blacks from uptown
mixed relatively freely. The interactions of their various African and European
musical practices led to the development of jazz. Much like ragtime, jazz grew
out of a synthesis of African syncopation with European instruments and song
and dance forms. In the case of jazz, it was the community marching band or
dance band that took on the syncopated, improvised qualities of African
American music to emerge as what we now call jazz.
King Oliver,
Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong are some of the jazz musicians who were
active in New Orleans between about 1914 and 1920. After World War I and the
closing of Storyville—the red light district where jazz musicians got much of
their paid work—many of these jazz pioneers moved north to Chicago. It was here
that their music began to be recorded and jazz was spread to a larger audience.
New York and Kansas City also became important centers of jazz.
Louis Armstrong |
Of these early jazz musicians, Louis Armstrong had the longest and
most varied career. His early work is exemplary of the New Orleans or early
jazz style. He made several recordings as Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five.
Armstrong’s ensemble was a typical early jazz band. Usually there would be a
rhythm section consisting of various combinations of drums, piano, banjo or
guitar. The rhythm section kept the beat while other instruments (usually a
trumpet or cornet, a clarinet, and a slide trombone) improvised on syncopated
melodies. It was typical for a performance to alternate sections of music in
which a solo instrument was featured with section for the whole group to
improvise together. Because all the instrumentalists were basically improvising
independently of each other at the same time, these group improvisations created a
raucous effect that is particularly associated with
the New Orleans style.
Listen for the all of these qualities in the following recording of "Heebie Jeebies" by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five. "Heebie Jeebies" is the name of the tune which serves as the basis for the musicians' improvisations. After a short piano introduction, Armstrong plays a trumpet solo improvising on the tune. This is followed by a clarinet solo improvising its own take on the same melody. Then Armstrong sings the words of "Heebie Jeebies," but also incorporates scat, nonsense syllables common in sung jazz. This is the closest we get to hearing the song in its original form. Finally, the whole group plays together in collective improvisation with the trumpet, clarinet and trombone playing competing melody lines.
Listen for the all of these qualities in the following recording of "Heebie Jeebies" by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five. "Heebie Jeebies" is the name of the tune which serves as the basis for the musicians' improvisations. After a short piano introduction, Armstrong plays a trumpet solo improvising on the tune. This is followed by a clarinet solo improvising its own take on the same melody. Then Armstrong sings the words of "Heebie Jeebies," but also incorporates scat, nonsense syllables common in sung jazz. This is the closest we get to hearing the song in its original form. Finally, the whole group plays together in collective improvisation with the trumpet, clarinet and trombone playing competing melody lines.
Louis Armstrong's Hot Five, a typical early jazz band. |
Read more about Louis Armstrong's life and work here.
People were enthralled by this new music. The 1920s became known as the Jazz Age. In Manhattan, mostly white people from downtown would travel up to Harlem to hear jazz and watch African Americans perform. Jazz became a symbol of everything that was modern and American. Its rise coincided with the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black literature, philosophy and politics in the same decade. Harlem was the capital of African America, and its influence on popular music and entertainment was great.
People were enthralled by this new music. The 1920s became known as the Jazz Age. In Manhattan, mostly white people from downtown would travel up to Harlem to hear jazz and watch African Americans perform. Jazz became a symbol of everything that was modern and American. Its rise coincided with the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black literature, philosophy and politics in the same decade. Harlem was the capital of African America, and its influence on popular music and entertainment was great.
As jazz
styles became popular, many people began to get in on the act, including white
musicians who played and recorded jazz. Ironically, considering that jazz
originated in the black community, the first jazz band to release a recording
was a group of white jazz musicians, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Their
recording of the “Jass Band One-Step” was a big hit in 1917.
In the early
days, the spelling of jazz was not
yet standardized, so one will often encounter spellings like jass or jaz. The word seems to have been an African American slang term for
sex that was applied to the music because of its physically suggestive rhythms.
Indeed, many people were attracted to jazz because of its association with fun,
rebellion and the high life generally. More conservative observers, in both the
white and black communities, criticized jazz as immoral—a music that induced
people to dance, drink, and be naughty. They had said much the same thing about
the ragtime music that preceded jazz, and people would make many of the same
charges against rock and roll a generation later.
Concert Jazz
It wasn’t
long before certain attempts were made to “mainstream” jazz, or make it more acceptable
to more “polite” society. Paul Whiteman was a white concert musician who
presented jazz-inspired music played by large orchestras and somewhat toned
down for conservative audiences.
George Gershwin |
In 1924, on a
concert organized by Paul Whiteman, Gershwin himself gave the premiere
performance of his composition Rhapsody in Blue. This
piece was basically similar in concept to the Romantic piano concerto in
the European classical music tradition, but with a looser structure (rhapsody means a piece in free form). The
piece is composed for orchestra, with the piano as a featured solo instrument.
Gershwin played the piano part at the first performance.
The
following performance of Rhapsody in Blue
features Leonard Bernstein, the great American composer and conductor,
playing the roles of both conductor and soloist. The piece opens with a famous
clarinet solo with a strongly jazz influenced ascending scale (notice how the
pitch bends just as in other examples we’ve heard of African
American and jazz performances with both voices and instruments). Gershwin’s
music combines the syncopated rhythms of jazz with the formal traditions of
European classical music.
Jazz
musicians might note that what Gershwin has written here is not true jazz, and
they would likely be right. A fundamental feature of jazz (according to many)
is that it’s improvised. It’s probably must useful to think of a piece like Rhapsody in Blue as creating an American
style of cultivated music in the classical tradition by incorporating elements inspired by jazz. Gershwin is given a
great deal of credit for combining classical and jazz styles effectively and
for helping to raise the status of jazz as a uniquely American art form worthy
of people’s respect and admiration.
Latin Jazz
The Latin
American influence on American popular music had already been felt during the
dance crazes of the early twentieth century, when the tango was one of the
exotic dance styles, along with ragtime and the fox-trot, that so fascinated
people during the pre-jazz days of early syncopation. Latin influence made
itself felt in the jazz era, too.
As was the
case in North American, African slaves had been brought Latin America during
colonial times, including the islands of the Caribbean. In certain places, like
Cuba, the polyrhythms of West African music were retained more than they had
been in English North America. The result was a dense layering of rhythmic
patterns in different instruments that can be heard in Latin American popular
music and the Latin jazz that is influenced by it.
A distinct
feature of Afro-Cuban music is the clave pattern—a
rhythmic pattern played on an instrument of the same name—the claves. Here’s a person demonstrating
the clave rhythm.
Here's what the clave looks like written out. It comes in two forms--the first has three notes followed by two notes (the 3-2 clave); the other has two notes followed by three notes (the 2-3 clave). In either case it becomes a repeated cycle of five notes in this pattern.
In Cuban
music, the other instruments organize their rhythms around this basic pattern.
One of the
first Latin popular hits in the United States was the song “El Manicero” (“The
Peanut Vendor”) as recorded by the Cuban bandleader Don Azpiazú
and his Havana Casino Orchestra in 1930. This recording shows the influence of
traditional Afro-Cuban music. Listen for the 2-3 clave pattern at the beginning, where you can hear it clearly over
the piano part. Notice that it continues through the whole song. Notice also
the layering of different rhythmic parts in the instruments.
“El
Manicero” became a huge hit in the United States, starting a whole popular
vogue for Latin Jazz and dance music. The term rumba began to be applied, rather loosely, to any style of Latin
music (or Latin-sounding imitations) that were novel to North American
listeners.
Tin Pan Alley
Music publishing offices in Tin Pan Alley |
Tin Pan
Alley songs actually covered a wide variety of types, and followed musical
fashions which changed over time. Many of the most successful songs published
by Tin Pan Alley publishers were ones that had originally appeared in Broadway
or Hollywood musicals. The most popular songs from these musicals sold well as
sheet music. They would then be taken up by jazz musicians, who would record
them in Jazz style. Many of the most popular songs of the 1920s and 1930s
followed this pattern of being written for a show or movie, popularized by jazz
recording artists (like Louis Armstrong), and bought in the form of both
recordings and sheet music for people to enjoy at home. There is thus a close
relationship of Tin Pan Alley to both Broadway and jazz.
Tin Pan
Alley songs were very much the music of the urban middle class, and they dealt
with middle class topics like home and romantic love. Some of the most
successful Tin Pan Alley composers were George Cohan, Jerome Kern, Irving
Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers (who worked with the
lyricist Lorenz Hart in the days before he teamed up with Oscar Hammerstein
II). All of these composers wrote many of their songs for Broadway and
Hollywood, and all but two (Cohan and Porter) were members of New York City’s
Jewish immigrant community (more on this phenomenon below).
Ethel Merman and chorus girls from the original Broadway production of Girl Crazy (1930) |
As you listen to the following recording by Judy Garland, listen for the form (overall organization of the song). After the verse, you will hear a chorus composed of four phrases. The first musical phrase (which we will label A) is repeated (with different words the second time) and then followed by a contrasting phrase, or bridge (which we will label B). Then to round things off, the A phrase is repeated one more time (again with different words). We could outline the whole thing as follows:
Verse (“Days
can be sunny . . .”)
Chorus
A (“I got
rhythm . . .”)
A (“I got
daisies . . .”)
B (“Old man
trouble . . .”)
A (“I got
starlight . . .”)
This AABA form is probably the most common
of all Tin Pan Alley song forms.
Notice that
after Garland gets through the song once, the orchestra takes a turn on the
chorus, and then Garland sings it again with some vocal embellishments. This is
a normal way of handling these songs in performance. Often, performers would
skip the verse and go straight into the chorus, which was the more memorable
part of the song, which people wanted to hear. (It also contains the hook, or part of the song that really
grabs your attention and sticks in your brain; the hook is usually also the
title of the song, in this case, “I got rhythm”).
For
interest, here is Ethel Merman singing the same song, but with a long
instrumental introduction before the verse. Her style of singing is the same
brash, belted, in-your-face style she would have used when she premiered the
song on Broadway, and which was common in the theater, where one had to sing
loudly enough to be heard over the orchestra without a microphone. (This is a
later recording, so although her vocal style gives a good idea of how the song
was originally presented, the orchestral arrangement is influenced by a later,
big band style of jazz).
Finally,
these next two examples might help give you a sense of the life-span of a Tin
Pan Alley song. Irving Berlin composed the words and music of “Blue Skies” for
the 1926 Broadway show Betsy. It was
the hit song from that show, and the sheet music was published for purchase by
the public that same year. Because of its popularity, the filmmakers of the
1927 film The Jazz Singer, decided to
include the song in their movie. (The
Jazz Singer was the first full-length “talkie,” or sound film with dialogue
and music synchronized to the image—an important landmark in both film and
popular music history, since it was a musical.) Here is Al Jolson, the star of The Jazz Singer, performing the song in
a scene from the movie. His vocal performance is very typical of the Vaudeville
and early Broadway singing style in which many Tin Pan Alley songs would have
been sung initially in the theater. Try to identify the AABA form of the song
(following the common convention, Jolson skips the verse Berlin wrote for the
song, launching right into the hook of the chorus on “Blue skies smiling at me
. . .”)
Irving Berlin,a popular Tin Pan
Alley composer-lyricist
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A popular
Tin Pan Alley song like “Blue Skies” would quickly become a jazz standard –one of the standard
songs performed and improvised upon by jazz musicians, both instrumentalists
and singers. Here’s a recording of Ella Fitzgerald singing “Blue Skies” as a
jazz standard in the 1950s. Notice that she also skips the verse, going
straight into the AABA chorus. After the initial statement of the song, she
does a scat improvisation on the tune, in just the same manner that jazz
musicians in the earlier examples of this unit would improvise solos upon
whatever tune formed the basis of their performance.
The late
date of this version indicates the longevity of the most popular Tin Pan Alley
songs. They formed the core of mainstream popular music for several decades in
the early to mid-20th century. Indeed this symbiotic relationship of
musicals (both theater and film), Tin Pan Alley, and jazz was the dominant
practice and model of the popular music industry from at least the 1920s until
somewhat after World War II (whereas after the World War II, musicals styles
influenced by blues and country—most notably rock and roll—came more to the
fore).
The Black-Jewish
Relationship in American Popular Music
It has been
noted that many of the most successful Tin Pan Alley composers were Jewish. The
precise reason for their prominence in this field continues to be debated and
discussed by music historians, but it is clear that the large Jewish immigrant
communities of New York provided a steady stream of aspiring songwriters, and
that songwriting became one road to success for many of the children and
grandchildren of Jewish immigrants seeking to share in the American dream. Some, like Gershwin, came from
affluent families, while others, like Berlin, came from poverty.
These Jewish
songwriters from immigrant families were profoundly committed to assimilating as Americans. The songs they wrote conformed to
dominant images of American life (mostly, they don’t “sound Jewish”), but at
the same time, they helped create the very idea in people’s minds of what “American
music” was—after all, these songs were among the most popular of the time. One of the ways
in which Jewish songwriters and composers created an American-sounding music
was by incorporating the style traits of African American music in their own
work. We can see this, for example, in the jazz influence on Gershwin’s work in
both Rhapsody in Blue and “I Got
Rhythm.”
Jewish songwriters and composers are rightly
given credit for helping to legitimize jazz, blues and other styles of black
music in the minds of non-black Americans. Their status as people who were an
ethnic minority, but could more easily pass for “white,” allowed Jewish
composers to “speak for” African Americans—implicitly making the case that
black Americans were valuable contributors to American music and culture. There
is a flip side to this, however, in which it must acknowledged that Jewish
musicians and composers received the primary benefits from their borrowing of African
American musical styles. It must therefore be acknowledged that the relationship between
black and Jewish musicians has been a complex one. Nonetheless, adoption of
black musical styles by Jewish musicians has generally been seen as positive and ultimately
beneficial to both races, rather than deliberately exploitative. Many fruitful
collaborations between Jews and black arose from this relationship.
For example,
Gershwin’s 1935 opera Porgy and Bess is
based on a novel about a black community in South Carolina. Before he began
work on the opera, Gershwin spent some time living in an actual black community
in South Carolina—getting to know the residents, learning about their musical
traditions, and participating in performances with them as research for the
opera. Although Porgy and Bess has
occasionally been criticized for its stereotyped dialect and depiction of poor
Southern blacks, it was meant to be a sympathetic at the time, and its
continuing success over the years has provided black operatic singers with
important work. The roles in Porgy and
Bess are still considered to be among the best roles (with the best songs)
specifically for black opera singers. During the opera’s first tour in 1936,
the all-black cast was even able to strike an early blow for civil rights when
they refused to perform in the National Theater in Washington, DC, until the
theater agreed to desegregate, allowing black audience members to sit in the
same sections as white audience members.
The
symbiotic relationship between Jewish composer and black performer reaches
full fruition in performances of Gershwin’s songs by black jazz musicians. Like
Tin Pan Alley songs, the songs from Porgy
and Bess became popular with black jazz musicians, and their recordings
have contributed greatly to the continuing popularity of Gershwin’s songs among
many in the African American community. Some of the best-known songs from Porgy and Bess are “Summertime,” “Bess
You Is My Woman Now,” “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’,” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”
Here’s a
performance of “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’” from the opera, followed by a jazz
performance of the same song by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.