SWINGING FROM THE RAFTERS: A SHORT HISTORY OF JAZZ, PART ONE
Between 1920 and 1925, jazz went from craving to craze. This medley celebrates that turbo-propped evolution.
By WW1, ragtime was a fixture of American music--both out doors while marching bands like those of John Phillip Sousa were still dominant and then indoors as society dance orchestras like those of Joseph Smith gained the public's favor. The role of Paul Whiteman in this transformative porcess cannot be underestimated or overstated. Whiteman was adept at every form of music and served it with supreme class and comprehensiveness. I have learned more about the multiculturalism and diversity of the 1920s from him than anyone else. And I see him as mentoring musicologist. He loved all music and was loyal to each genre with astonishing purity and reverence. He improved music by playing it was exemplary taste. No wonder he was the most pipular band leader of his time. Of course, credit must be given to another RCA superstar ensemble, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, two of shoe 1918 hits are here.
Of course, America's quick-step march to jazz owes much to composers like Scott Joplin and Joseph Lamb. Their perfection of ragtime helped it become a stand-alone genre like the sonata but also helped music morph into jazz. Whether listening to a marching band in a Sunday park pavilion or a hotel ballroom, toes started tapping and fingers started drumming. Jazz was an essential spice of musical life--globally.
By 1925, the year of the Charleston, jazz was totally emergent as an independent art form. This sovereignty owes much to the northward diaspora of New Orleans greats like Bunk Johnson, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet. As I listen to more and moe early 20's jazz and jazz-inflected music, I see Chicago as the jazz capital of the world at the decade's beginning, gradually replaced in impotance and influence in the late 1920s by New York's Harlem. The evolution of this music seems to travel at warp speed. But it is always part of a cultural integration, even as America remained stubbornly racist and xenophobic. Only in recording studios did the races greet and meet each other with open arms. Just listen to the four or five records white society band leader Leo Reisman made with black jazz trumpet great Bubber Miley.
And here's where I must pay homage to a kind of reverse transmigration of my soul to a rebirth in a past 40 years before I was born. I needed reincarnation in the past to make the present as rich, artistically speaking, as it has become for me in the last few decades. The truth is this: It was only going back in time to 1900 that I could break the sound barrier that seems to have severed the 21st century from all preceding musical epochs. I see it as a kind of in vitro fertilization performed in a time machine. I don’t know if time machines are often used for test-tube reincarnations. But mine was.
It doesn’t help that so often, tributes to the 1920s and 30s are pastiche that caricature rather than characterize the music being performed. Thankfully, there are a bunch a fervent and talented revivalists. If there weren't, I would have no hope at all for a recovery of American music and the possibility of a second Goldne Age. Sadly, Ithe new traditionalists are working the tailings of what was once a mother lode. So most of them are in mid and later life. Don't get me wrong. There are accomplished young 'uns and I intend to start using more of their recordings to exemplify excellence of interpretation of standards and even duty old glories that do not deserve to be treated as relcis and antiquities.
So I am going to treat you to some of fruits of my time-machine in vitro fertilization.
Part One: Overture—Something in the Air
Billy Murray, Take Me to the Land of Jazz, 1919
Marion Harris, I’m a Jazz Vampire, 1920 (this says it all; America was going jazz crazy and Marion Harris was one of the first great jazz singers))
Part Two: Picking Up Steam 1920-1925
Part A: Transition times 1918-1919
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Tiger Rag, 1918
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Fidgety Feet, 1918
Joseph C, Smith, Hindustan, 1918
Joseph C Smith, Yellow Dog Blues, 1919 *featuring trombonist Harry Rwswen)
Part B: Trubute to Paul Whiteman
Paul Whiteman, Whispering, 1920 (Whiteman’s first release for RCA and a million-seller)
Paul Whiteman, Wang-Wang Blues, 1920 (recorded at his first RCA session and, like so many of his ecords of the time, a huge hit)
Paul Whiteman, I Never Knew, 1920 (Arranger: Ferde Grofe, a key ingedient in Whiteman’s mixed-genre recipe book)
Part C: The Jazz Begins 1920-1925
Isham Jones Rainbo Orchestra, Jinga-Bula-Jing-Jing, 1920
Lanin’s Roseland Orchestra, Oh! By Jingo, 1920
Mike Markel’s Orchestra, Right or wrong, 1921 (a showcase for pioneering saxist, Loren McMurray)
The Benson Orchestra of Chicago, Toot, Toot Tootsie Goodbye, 1921
New Orleans Rhythm Kings, Farewell Blues, 1922
Bennie Moten, Elephant’s Wobble, 1923
Fletcher Henderson, The Dicty Blues, 1923 (tenor sax giant Coleman Hawkins takes his first recorded solo here)
King Oliver, Dipper Mouth Blues, 1923
The Texas Blue Destroyers (featuring Bubber Miley), Down In the Mouth Blues, 1924 (accompanied only by harmonium, this is a kind of blues hymn)
The Benson Orchestra of Chicago, Riverboat Shuffle, 1924
The Varsity Eight, Tea for Two, 1924 (one of the most popular songs in American history and still a staple)
Fred Hamm, Sugar Foot Stamp, 1925 (recorded in Chiacgo)
The Knickerbockers, The Charleston, 1925
Edwin J. McEnelly’s Orchestra, Spanish Shawl, 1925