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 every musician should know. 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.”
We teach students at our music school in Dallas, Texas the fundamental ‘core’ competencies they will utilize in any style of music, including Jazz – things like scales, foundational theory, tone quality, and music notation.
Following are the main point in the book:
- Jazz history’s first great composer was Ferdinand Joseph (‘Jelly Roll’) Morton. He was a pianist, gambler, pimp, self-proclaimed ‘inventor of jazz.’ “But Morton was also a remarkably creative arranger. His best arrangements were not mere orchestrations, but carefully organized structures in which all the details of instrumentation, of timbral relationship, of rhythmic and harmonic counterpoint were realized as integral compositional elements.” His mentor and earliest musician friend was Tony Jackson, legendary pianist. “It is clear that in all…respects Tony Jackson was Jelly’s idol, and his emphasis on notating his music, planning his recording dates in advance, and publishing his orchestrations, and his love of opera excerpts and ragtime music are all largely attributable to the influence of Tony Jackson.”
At our music school in Dallas, Texas we teach students the importance of the inter-relationship of composition, improvisation, and performance through reading music.
- “To Morton the composer, ragtime and blues were not just musical styles, but specific musical forms: the one a multi-thematic structure, the other an eight- twelve- or sixteen-bar single-theme form with a predetermined chord progression. These were forms as well-defined as the sonata form was to a ‘classical’ composer, and Morton accepted them as active, continuing traditions…Morton was able to horizontalize the music, as it were, and to suppress the vertical, harmonic emphasis of ragtime and other musical forms. This horizontalization was a crucial addition without which, either in Morton’s or subsequent players’ terms, there could be no jazz.
Many contemporary musicians believe that it is no longer important to read music notation, however, Jazz went through the same transition of those who only improvised to those who took the Jazz style and captured it in music notation. Eventually, it was expected that all Jazz musicians should read proficiently. At our music school in Dallas, Texas, we help students become successful in all aspects of music-making.
- “Morton, in combining ragtime and blues, combined two sets of opposites: conventional ragtime was based on strict repetition of phrases and was basically un-improvised, whereas the blues, especially at the turn of the century, was essentially improvised and as such featured not exact repetition…he learned to apply to basically diatonic material – ‘unbending’ its tempered intonation in the process – the intonational and expressive freedom of the blue notes. This was not just a matter of flatting thirds and sevenths. It meant re-thinking the music he played in terms of a melodic-harmonic language that did not exist in Western music, a language in which the blue notes, like the embellishing microtones of Indian and other Asian music, gave the music its expressive latitude, subject nevertheless to relatively strict habits of voice-leading, harmonic functions, and rhythmic associations.”
We teach varied scales to students in our music school in Dallas, Texas, including Blues and Microtonal.
- “The liberating inducements of improvisation he characteristically equated, not with the free-form extemporizations of early blues, but with the somewhat restrictive disciplines of variation. It was improvisation as the eighteenth-century baroque musician understood the term: embellishment of or improvisation on a given thematic material over a relatively fixed harmonic background…It is not likely that Morton heard ‘baroque’ improvisations, but he did hear the vestiges of this technique as they survived in Italian and French opera. We know that Morton attended performances at the French Opera House in his youth…He learned to appreciate the unity of form that characterized the great opera arias, many of which, significantly, were simple two- or three-part forms, not unlike ragtime pieces schematically. Morton also heard how Verdi, Massenet, and Donizetti varied or embellished their melodies upon repetition and how they introduced new material in the form of countermelodies…Morton learned to value the sense of enrichment and complexity contributed by such counterlines.”
This is, yet again, another correlation to the importance of Classical music history to the early beginnings of Jazz. At our music school in Dallas, Texas we teach our students the core competencies of Classical disciplines, so they can use them to be successful in any stylistic direction they choose.
- Morton was almost obsessive in his use of what was called the ‘break.’ “he was fond of saying that ‘without a break you haven’t got jazz,’ and that the break ‘didn’t come in until he originated the idea of jazz…Something like it also exists in traditional opera when singers, taking advantage of the fermatas composers often provided on high notes or at phrase endings…a break takes place within an eight- or sixteen-bar phrase. Similarly, though time is suspended in a break, the underlying beat is implied, while in an operatic fermata or in a cadenza no beat or tempo is felt…Morton peppered all his piano and orchestra performances with breaks, but he went even beyond this by writing them directly into his compositions, so that their retention became mandatory in performance.”
- “Some of the ingredients of Morton’s conception were to reappear again – slightly altered, of course – in Ellington’s varied and extended forms.”
- “Black Bottom Stomp”, “Grandpa’s Spells”, “Shreveport Stomp”, and “Mournful Serenade” are some of Morton’s most famous compositions. “Shreveport Stomp harks back to the march-like ragtime music of an earlier era, whereas Mournful Serenade is the kind of blues-y piece Ellington was to perfect a few years later with Mood Indigo. (It is even possible that Ellington may have known Mournful Serenade and expanded on one of its ideas.)
- Morton’s expansion of piano technique in Jazz is also important. “Jazz being primarily an instrumental ensemble music, few people realize that the unaccompanied solo piano as it exists in the classical field is an extreme rarity in jazz; and jazz pianists who qualify in this category are, even today, limited to a select few…The beat in ‘classical’ music, even in strict tempo pieces – and leaving aside the whole question of rubato in the romantic literature – was and is much more implied than explicitly stated. This removed the necessity for a least one of the three…functions, and hence for one of the three hands. The jazz pianist, given two hands and the rather rigorous allocation of the three functions, must perforce combine all three or compromise in some way…left-hand technique produced the bass roots, the harmony, and both combined, providing the rhythmic structure against which the right hand could now play, embellish, and improvise…Anyone who doubts Morton’s role as catalyst in the metamorphosis from ragtime piano to jazz should compare his 1923 recordings of King Porter Stomp and New Orleans Joys to those of most other pianists of the day or to the best of the ragtime players.”
Morton’s focus on linear development in the transformation of one style of music to another (i.e. Ragtime to Jazz) should not be underestimated. And Morton’s courage to move past his contemporaries, who were solidly rooted in Ragtime, reveals a creative mind of exploration, as well as a will to forge new music, regardless of its immediate acceptance.
He did not receive the notoriety he deserved because he was ahead of his time in many respects. “It becomes clear that Morton’s role in the development of jazz is a crucial one. And the evidence for this we can still find today in the musical record he left us, incomplete through it is, since it excludes the first twenty years of his career…Morton’s misfortune was that his successes came too late.”
Morton’s openness to be influenced by a variety of music (i.e. Classical) contributed to his ability to innovate. Through his exposure to a variety of influences, he was able to synthesize these elements into a new style: Jazz.