The history of jazz

560 Pages·2011·3.66 MB·English

by  Ted Gioia

The History of Jazz
THE HISTORY OF JAZZ

SECOND EDITION

Ted Gioia
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Copyright © 2011 by Ted Gioia
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gioia, Ted.
The history of jazz / Ted Gioia. — 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-539970-7
1. Jazz—History and criticism. I. Title.
ML3506.G54 2011
781.6509—dc22 2010023182
All photographs in this book are courtesy of The Frank Driggs
Collection.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
for my wife, Tara
Contents

1. The Prehistory of Jazz
2. New Orleans Jazz
3. The Jazz Age
4. Harlem
5. The Swing Era
6. Modern Jazz
7. The Fragmentation of Jazz Styles
8. Freedom and Fusion
9. Traditionalists and Postmodernists
10. Jazz in the New Millennium

Notes
Further Reading
Recommended Listening
Acknowledgments
Index
The History of Jazz

1 The Prehistory of Jazz

THE AFRICANIZATION OF AMERICAN MUSIC

An elderly black man sits astride a large cylindrical drum. Using his fingers
and the edge of his hand, he jabs repeatedly at the drumhead—which is around a
foot in diameter and probably made from an animal skin—evoking a throbbing
pulsation with rapid, sharp strokes. A second drummer, holding his instrument
between his knees, joins in, playing with the same staccato attack. A third black
man, seated on the ground, plucks at a stringed instrument, the body of which is
roughly fashioned from a calabash. Another calabash has been made into a
drum, and a woman beats at it with two short sticks. One voice, then other voices
join in. A dance of seeming contradictions accompanies this musical give-and-
take, a moving hieroglyph that appears, on the one hand, informal and
spontaneous yet, on closer inspection, ritualized and precise. It is a dance of
massive proportions. A dense crowd of dark bodies forms into circular groups—
perhaps five or six hundred individuals moving in time to the pulsations of the
music, some swaying gently, others aggressively stomping their feet. A number
of women in the group begin chanting.
The scene could be Africa. In fact, it is nineteenth-century New Orleans.
Scattered firsthand accounts provide us with tantalizing details of the slave
dances that took place in the open area then known as Congo Square—today
Louis Armstrong Park stands on roughly the same ground—and there are
perhaps no more intriguing documents in the history of African American music.
Benjamin Latrobe, the noted architect, witnessed one of these collective dances
on February 21, 1819, and not only left us a vivid written account of the event
but made several sketches of the instruments used. These drawings confirm that
the musicians of Congo Square, circa 1819, were playing percussion and
stringed instruments virtually identical to those characteristic of indigenous
African music.
Later documents add to our knowledge of the public slave dances in New
Orleans but still leave us with many open questions—some of which, in time,