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In Reply to: RE: My new writing gig posted by John Marks on December 07, 2020 at 18:08:56
Wynton Marsalis once observed that the ONLY major features distinguishing jazz from other improvisational musics are the swing beat and the consistent use of the the minor third and seventh "blue notes" in the melody.Ragtime was a major ancestor, but not the only one. What happened in New Orleans, in the years right before and after WWI, was a fortuitous collision of several musical styles. Ragtime was well established as a sophisticated urban piano style. But then there were the rural guys who heard they could earn better money portering on the docks than chopping cotton -- THOSE were the guys who brought the blues to town, and started the first jug bands. Military marching bands provided a template for the early jazz brass bands, and before long just about every volunteer fire dept. and fraternal lodge had its own marching band -- because in New Orleans, everybody loves a parade. Cajun and Creole folk styles found their way into the mix, as did the influence of Gospel singing. European influences -- particularly in the use of counterpoint -- were always in the background.
And thus it all came together -- and continues to come together, as jazz is a mighty river fed by numerous tributaries. Musicians with open minds and ears have always understood that genres are fluid things which slop over into each other, and have always done their best to steal one another's best tunes and licks.
Edits: 12/11/20Follow Ups:
Thanks for reading and thanks for your contribution.
Of course you raise valid points, but I was pressed for space.
The overlap between "the Blues" (whatever those are) and jazz is a very fruitful area for scholarship and therefore incomplete agreement. I plan to leave that at that.
You do mention one area that I have done a certain amount of research in, which the prevalence of brass instruments in a lot of jazz--"way back when," more recently, and now.
That too is complicated. There is an entire field of Musicology about Public Music, and much scholarship about the phenomenon of Brass Bands. I have seen a statistic that at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries, there were 30,000 brass bands in the US. Rhode Island seems to have been a hotspot, with cornet player Bowen R. Church memorialized by a statute in the largest public park in Providence.
One fact or factoid I have seen reported but I have never seen any primary documents supporting it is that at the end of the Civil War, the United States decided to ship all the war-surplus materiel all over the country, but that, perhaps because of lack of effective management communication, in cases at least, a city would receive a massive shipment of one category, such as blankets, and nothing else. Which then required unwinding.
Supposedly, that story goes, New Orleans got the lion's share of post-Civil-War Union Army brass band instruments, so the price of brass instruments in New Orleans was very low, hence the low cost of entry to a brass-instrument playing career.
I go (or I used to go) to musicological conferences, and in theory I could research this one, but, most journals don't want to be the first to publish an "independent scholar" whose formal credentials are in a different discipline.
One last point: at one of the last conferences we attended, there was a fascinating paper (I could not get to the presentation) about how in the late 19th century, bourgeoise Black families particularly valued music teachers for their children who either had been educated in Germany, or, even better, had been born in Germany.
After all, America's most feted opera singer of the 19th and early 20th centuries was Sissieretta Jones. She studied at the Boston Conservatory, and graduated from the New England Conservatory.
Three moves ago, I often used to walk past her unmarked pauper's grave--which since has been given a marker.
(BTW, "The Black Patti" is intended to draw an equivalence between Ms. Jones and Adelina Patti, the foremost soprano of the day. Kinda like saying, "John Marks is 'The Irish Pavarotti,'" (which he is not). Ms. Jones did not at all like the comparison; it was not something she would ever have said about herself. Welcome to the opera business, kid. Which omits a sad fact: Sissieretta Jones only sang in recital. She never appeared in an opera performance in the US because of Jim Crow laws, and therefore, she only sang in concert in Europe, from lack of experience in fully-staged, acted-out operas. Also, even though she lived well into the Gramophone era, she refused to record. I assume she doubted she'd ever get paid, or she feared that records would lessen demand for live recitals.)
atb,
john
Hi Brian, that Jazz explanation was better than the Ken Burns team! I like this certain music and I can't classify it; It is the music they used to play on the old NFL high lights . John Facenda was the narrator. I have the record but woudl like t find similar music.....it had a lot of baritone sax.....do you remember?......Mark
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