Unit 3 -- Jazz and Tin Pan Alley

 

Unit 3 – Jazz and Tin Pan Alley

(The Early 20^th Century, ca. 1900-1930)

Now we move into the 20^th 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



 

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.

New technologies began to change the way music was composed, performed, recorded and disseminated in the 20^th century.  First was the phonograph, invented in the 19^th 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 20^th 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.

 

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.

Unfortunately, this "coon song"

was also hugely popular.

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 19^th 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.
 

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.

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

George Gershwin did much to raise the profile of jazz as a serious and uniquely American art form in which Americans of all races could and should take pride. Like Whiteman, Gershwin was not African American—he was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Primarily a composer of popular songs in Tin Pan Alley style (discussed below), Gershwin, in spite of his own lack of formal education in classical music, had high ambitions to prove that jazz, this new music invented by black Americans, could be successfully combined with the European classical tradition. He was one of a whole generation of American composers in the early 20^th Century who were actively preoccupied with creating a new, truly American version of the classical music inherited from Europe.

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.

You can read more about the life and work of George Gershwin here.

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 refers broadly to the kind of music published by the American sheet music industry from the late 19^th to mid-20^th century. It gets its name from a section of Manhattan in New York City where many of the popular music publishers had their offices. On these blocks, there were buildings filled with tiny offices, and each office had a piano in it. During the day, in each little office, people called song-pluggers would be demonstrating songs on all of these pianos – sometimes it would be a composer trying to get a publisher to accept a new song for publication; other times, a representative of the publisher trying to get performers to sing the song in public or record it. The noise of all of these pianos going at once sounded like the banging of tin pans from the street, especially when the windows were open in the summer.

 

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)

Tin Pan Alley songs tended to follow certain forms (one might even say formulas). The most common was a freely composed verse followed by a more memorable refrain (commonly called a chorus).  “I Got Rhythm” by George Gershwin is a typical example of a Tin Pan Alley song. He composed it in 1930 for the Broadway musical Girl Crazy. The lyrics are by his brother, Ira Gershwin, with whom he usually collaborated, and it was sung initially by Ethel Merman in the show.

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).

 



Irving Berlin,a popular Tin Pan

Alley composer-lyricist

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 . . .”)


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-20^th 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.