Ted Gioia - The History of Jazz

The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture

West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 19451960

Work Songs

Healing Songs

Delta Blues

The Birth (and Death) of the Cool

The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire

Love Songs: The Hidden History

How to Listen to Jazz

Music: A Subversive History

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the Universitys objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

Ted Gioia 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gioia, Ted, author.

Title: The history of jazz / Ted Gioia.

Description: Third edition. | New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. |

Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020024390 (print) | LCCN 2020024391 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780190087210 (paperback) | ISBN 9780190087241 (epub) | ISBN 9780190087227

Subjects: LCSH: JazzHistory and criticism.

Classification: LCC ML3506 .G54 2021 (print) | LCC ML3506 (ebook) |

DDC 781.6509dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024390

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024391

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190087210.001.0001

for my wife, Tara

An elderly black man sits astride a large cylindrical drum. Using his fingers and the edge of his hand, he jabs repeatedly at the drumheadwhich is around a foot in diameter and probably made from an animal skinevoking 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 bodies forms into circular groupsperhaps 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 Squaretoday Louis Armstrong Park stands on roughly the same groundand 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 string instruments virtually identical to those used in indigenous African music.

Later documents add to our knowledge of the public slave dances in New Orleans but still leave us with many open questionssome of which, in time,

The dances in Congo Square were a nexus where opposites collided. The ingrained Western division between performer and audience was eradicateda distinction so fundamental to us, but of such little importance in traditional African cultures. The separation of song from dance, also pervasive among Western thinkers who deal with the arts, was equally nullified, replaced with a more intrinsically African congruence of sound and movement. These gatherings, a mixture of the ceremonial and social, further broke down barriers between secular and spiritual impulsesa firsthand account from 1808 even uses the word worship to describe them.

The dances themselves, marked by clusters of individuals moving in a circular patternthe largest less than ten feet in diameterharken back to one of the most pervasive ritual ceremonies of Africa. This rotating, counterclockwise movement has been noted by ethnographers under many guises in various parts of the continent. In the Americas, the dance became known as the ring shout, a ritual that, in the words of scholar Sterling Stuckey, served as the main context in which Africans recognized values common to them.on other celebratory occasions, as well as presented in formal concert hall settings.

The Congo Square dances disappeared long before preservationists and folk song collectors appeared on the scene. Traditional accounts indicate that they continued, except for an interruption during the Civil War, only until around 1885. Such a chronology implies that their disappearance almost coincided with the emergence of the first jazz bands in New Orleans. More recent research argues convincingly for an earlier cutoff date for the practice, probably before 1870, although the dances may have continued for some time in private settings.

Above all, this transplanted African ritual loomed large in the collective memory and oral history of the citys black community, even among those too young to have participated in it. These memories shaped, in turn, the jazz performers self-image, their sense of what it meant to be an African American musician. My grandfather, thats about the furthest I can remember back, wrote the renowned New Orleans reed player Sidney Bechet in his autobiography, Treat It Gentle. Sundays when the slaves would meetthat was their free dayhe beat out rhythms on the drums at the squareCongo Square they called it.... He was a musician. No one had to explain notes or feeling or rhythm to him. It was all there inside him, something he was always sure of.

Within eyesight of Congo Square, Buddy Boldenwhom legend and scattered first-person accounts credit as the earliest jazz musicianperformed with his pioneering band at Globe Hall. The geographical proximity is misleading. The cultural gap between these two types of music is dauntingly wide. By the time Bolden and Bechet began playing jazz, the Americanization of African music had already begun, and with it came the Africanization of American musica synergistic process that we will study repeatedly and at close quarters in the pages that follow. Anthropologists call this process