The following contains excerpts from the book, Early Jazz (Its Roots and Musical Development) (Gunther Schuller).
At our music school in Dallas, Texas we believe that music is more than sound, it is relationships. One of the most important relationships a musician can nurture is one with the fabric of history in which he creates.
“Despite the fact that many ‘serious’ composers and performers had indicated their high regard for jazz as early as the 1920s, the academic credentials of jazz were hardly sufficient to produce a serious interest in the analysis of its techniques and actual musical content…In a sense this book is an answer in terms of specific musical detail to a series of interrelated questions: What makes jazz work? What makes jazz different form other music? Why do so many people find jazz exciting? How did it get that way?…In this respect the book is directed particularly to the ‘classically’ trained musician or composer.”
This is quite possibly one of the top five most important books I should know deeply as a musician. It has been regarded in the musical community as of paramount importance in the documentation of the jazz style. It is very dense and goes into a good deal of music theory, so I chose to break it into several sections to ensure that I thoroughly understood what the author was saying.”
I have become aware that many aspects of music that is part of our American culture, which are predominantly Rock-based, originate in Africa. Things such as the strong 2 and 4 beat, syncopated rhythms in our melodies, and cyclical forms, along with ‘call and response’ phrases all have African origins. Rock, after all, is the merging of Country and Jazz, or in other words a merging of the White and Black traditions.
At our music school in Dallas, Texas we teach foundational ‘core’ competencies that have been used for centuries to train successful musicians, which can be applied to any style of music in history and into the future.
Following are the mains points in this book:
- “Some historians use the year 1895 as a working date; others prefer 1917, the year that jazz seems to have become current and the year that the Original Dixieland Jazz Band made what are generally considered the first jazz recordings; still others prefer dates in between.”
- Not all Negro music was jazz. Walter C. Allen writes of New Orleans Negro musicians, “Many of these men were not jazz musicians; many had strict classical or legitimate training.”
W.C. Handy, composer of St. Louis Blues, in his book Father of the Blues: An Autobiography states, “The New Orleans musicians were scholarly and played classics.”
Many people are unaware of the fact that Classical music is at the very foundation of most music we hear in Western culture, regardless of the style. This is why, at our music school in Dallas, Texas, we believe in training students in the ‘core’ competencies of Western art music that have been used for centuries in training successful musicians. These skills transfer easily into any musical style.
- In 1919, Garvin Bushell recounts, “Ragtime piano was the major influence…the change [to jazz] began to come around 1912 to 1915, when the four-string banjo and saxophone came in.” In the 1920s New York, Bushell said, “you could only hear the blues and real jazz in the gutbucket cabarets where the lower class went. You usually weren’t allowed to play blues and boogie-woogie in the average Negro middle-class home. That music supposedly suggested a low element.”
- “The only tributary source of jazz that seemed to remain constant was the blues. It is unlikely that the blues changed basically between the 1880s and the early 1920s.”
- George Morrison was a competent violinist. “Although Morrison’s father and grandfather had been square-dance and coon-song fiddlers, young George set out to be a concert violinist. He developed into such a fine violinist that no less a master than Fritz Kreisler, upon hearing him play Kreisler’s Tambourin Chinois in 1920 at the Carlton Terrace on Broadway and 100th Street in New York, introduced himself to Morrison and offered to give him six free lessons on certain technical and bowing matters…Morrison become violist-leader of various trio combinations in the parlor houses of Denver, jobbing around in hotels.”
“When the jazz age began in earnest, Morrison naturally turned to jazz as well, but his orchestra, playing primarily for white society dances, never abandoned entirely the ‘sweet’ side of the music.”
“The story of George Morrison and his musical development could…be duplicated [in] the careers of Wilbur Sweatman, Noble Sissle, Will Mario Cook, W.C. Handy, Erskine Tate, Eddie Heywood, Sr., Garvin Bushell…the picture that emerges from these careers is that the music played depended almost entirely on for whom it was played. The music of a Negro playing for white society dances was different from that required at a rough southwestern honky-tonk…The city of New Orleans itself sported two kinds of jazz: the rougher, blues-colored music of Uptown and the more polite Creole music of Downtown.”
Again, this is an example of how Western art music is at the foundation of Jazz. When we teach core competencies at our music school in Dallas, Texas, our students are well-positioned to succeed in any artistic direction they desire.
- “Almost all the great musicians who played authentic jazz before the 1920s made their first recordings years later. King Oliver, Freddie Keppard, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Bennie Moten’s orchestra- all started recording in 1923…Players reached sudden success and then as rapidly declined sometimes all within a very few years.”
- The New Orleans style “consisted more of embellishment of a melody than improvisation on chords, and much outright repetition…The highly disciplined nature of this music was the most important factor in holding it together for so long. It was only the genius of a Louis Armstrong, erupting coincidentally with a major social revolution) brought on by the post-war industrial boom), that was able to break through these bonds.”
- “Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band represents one of jazz’s great achievements. It proved, for example, that planning, organization, and discipline are not incompatible with jazz expression; but that at the same time, they must not become autocratic and rigid procedures incapable of assimilating new ideas.”
The planning and organizational structure of Classical music can be seen as giving ‘boundaries’ and form to the early beginnings of Jazz. We teach students in our music school in Dallas, Texas how to analyze the works of great composers such as Mozart and Beethoven, which has direct application to modern styles.
In this style “vertical integration…is matched by a sense of horizontal progression…The younger men like Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, and Johnny Dodds gradually broke away from the theme-improvisation concept, and after the mid-twenties solo improvisation, with few exceptions, came to mean extemporizing on chords rather than melodies.”
“Occasionally, the linear complexity borders on the chaotic; it may only be saved by the fact that all the lines are operating over a very simple harmonic substructure.”
- “As Chicago and New York became the centers of jazz activity, New Orleans was virtually forgotten.” When Louis Armstrong, once part of King Oliver’s band, began to step out in his own creativity, through “his influence jazz became a truly twentieth-century language. And it no longer belonged to New Orleans, but to the world.”
The modern musical language, that has its roots in both Classical music and Jazz, is important to understand, to move forward historically. We teach students in our music school in Dallas, Texas how to assimilate these ideas for the purpose of future creativity.