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 points in this book:
- “The career of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band was both as fantastic and as typical as any that jazz has had to offer. Its story features the inevitable high points: the gradual grouping together of basically self-taught musicians, their sudden catapulting to world-wide fame, their equally sudden demise, and, in between, the million dollar law suits over copyrights and the petty jealousies, alcoholism, premature deaths, and all the rest.”
“New Orleans was overflowing with musicians, and the extreme competition made a musical living precarious. Chicago, on the other hand, offered a new territory…the qualities which set it apart from other groups were worked out during the Chicago period when it was able to work consistently, to rehearse and to play to an increasingly demanding audience…the arrival of the ODJB in New York coincided with a ‘shift in popular dancing away…from gentility, ballroom decorum and elegance of motion to a franker, jerkier, faster and snappier kind of dance; and in cabarets and on the vaudeville circuits…a persistent vogue for ‘barnyard hokum.’”
“The ODJB reduced New Orleans Negro music to a simplified formula. It took a new idea, an innovation, and reduced it to the kind of compressed, rigid format that could appeal to a mass audience.”
“Contrary to being improvised, these choruses were set and rehearsed, and they were unchanged for years…the ODJB thus did not actually improvise.”
“The ODJB’s most famous recording, their legendary million-dollar record – it outsold even Sousa and Caruso – was Livery Stable Blues, also known as Barnyard Blues.”
“The ODJB rose quickly, and fell almost as fast; by 1924 the group had passed into history. But even before that the thin veneer of its musical content had begun to wear away.”
- The New Orleans Rhythm kings…influenced the greatest white jazz musician of the twenties, Leon Bismarck Beiderbecke (1903-31). Bix…has become a legend, and symbolized the jazz Age, much as F. Scott Fitzgerald did in the literature of the Jazz Age…Bix’s talent for the cornet was so natural that he developed with astonishing rapidity and by 1921, at eighteen, began jobbing around the North Shore Chicago area.”
“Riverboat Shuffle shows not only Bix’s great lyrical gift, but also his ability to shape the flow of ideas into an economically constructed miniature composition…His celebrated piano composition In a Mist (1927) uses a chromatic language beyond that of most jazzmen at the time…As an exercise in constantly modulating, unresolved ninth and whole-tone chords, the piece is a rambling, repetitious, popularized version of the kind of chromatic language Debussy and Scriabin had explored nearly two decades earlier.”
Classical music’s influence on Jazz cannot be overstated. The French connection between Paris and New Orleans, from a musical and cultural standpoint is essential to understand. At our music school in Dallas, Texas we teach Classical disciplines that can be applied to any musical style, just as the early composers and performers of Jazz had Classical underpinnings.
Bix was fascinated by the work of the arrangers Henderson and Ellington, “and through them he learned about Ravel, Holst, Delius, Debussy, and early Stravinsky. His growing interest in these composers and in symphonic music in general added one more dilemma to the various personal problems crowding in on him toward the end of his life. Fascinated by the music that lay beyond jazz, beginning with the skillful, commercialized music with which Whiteman sought to bridge the two worlds, he was torn between this new fascination and his allegiance to the free, untutored spirit of jazz.”
The Third Stream of combining Classical and Jazz in one style, again, shows the symbiotic relationship these two ‘streams’ of music had in common with one another. At our music school in Dallas, Texas we encourage students to explore how they can take the core competencies they have learned through classical disciplines and apply them in various ways, through the expression of many contemporary styles.
“Recordings of Copenhagen, Tiger Rag, and Royal Garden Blues disclose advanced arranged riff-ensembles (also beautifully performed)…Beiderbecke’s career was too short and too checkered to permit a complete view of his work…He deserves to be called one of the truly great jazz musicians of all time.”
- “The first generation of leading jazz clarinetists came inevitably from New Orleans. The marching band tradition, as we have seen, was highly developed there…in the almost daily parades, the holiday concerts, and the funeral processions required a host of clarinet players. The too, as the smaller groups developed featuring the classic front-line of clarinet-cornet-trombone, the clarinet remained a leading instrument.”
“Out of this milieu developed the three greatest clarinetists of the New Orleans tradition: Sidney Bechet, Johnny Dodds, and Jimmy Noone…Bechet must have turned to the soprano sax because of its wider, mellower tone and its greater ease of blowing…there is an exact corollary between the kind of music Bechet heard in his mind’s ear and his ultimate choice of the soprano saxophone.”
“Bechet is one of the supreme melodists in jazz. He had a natural gift for creating long melodies, developed unquestionably out of the blues in a conception much more vocal than that of any other reed player.”
“Bechet spent most of his life in Paris, and he was not involved with the mainstream of jazz developments in the late twenties and thirties. His fame spread when he returned to the United States briefly in the late thirties.”
- “Among the brass players of the 1920s, Louis Armstrong was, of course, the King, succeeding Joe ‘King’ Oliver. By the end of the decade, there was not a trumpet or trombone player who had not been affected in a small or large way by Armstrong’s innovations.”
“Three important brass players of the twenties remain to be mentioned: Johnny Dunn, and Jabbo Smith, trumpets; and Jimmy Harrison, trombone.”
“At his best, Harrison translated Armstrong’s solo concept and innovations in rhythm and swing into trombone language. In turn he influenced other trombonists like Dicky Wells, J.C. Higginbothan, Jack Teagarden, Lawrence Brown, and Tommy Dorsey.”
At our music school in Dallas, Texas we teach students Jazz theory, composition, orchestration, and arranging. The concepts are similar to Classical theory and orchestration, yet with distinct stylistic differences.
We believe that all musical styles that express authentic creativity and human emotion are meaningful and should be studied and taught. Most of those styles are standing squarely on the traditions given to us through Western art music, otherwise know as Classical music. At our music school in Dallas, Texas, we don’t have the attitude of exclusivity regarding the value of Classical music’s disciplines, but rather encourage the student to train in these areas for the purpose of pursuing their own artistic directions.