Up the Mississippi

            Early jazz was fundamentally connected to the blues and ragtime traditions that immediately preceded it. The forced removals in New Orleans starting in 1894 paved the way for a period of immense cultural creolization, wherein the many poorer nonwhite racial and ethnic groups of the city found themselves living, working, and creating together. Even if this new intercultural community was distinctly lower class, it was socially integrated and provided a fertile breeding ground for a vibrant and inventive music scene. The famously diverse brass bands of New Orleans began to experiment with “head music,” i.e. improvised music which sometimes found its way onto the page (in contrast to traditionally-composed music, which starts on the page and may later be embellished and interpreted by the performer). Over time, this head music became more and more frequently and elaborately embellished, setting a standard for improvisation that held true in early jazz.

The deep emotional vocabulary of blues music also found a natural home in jazz. Since blues was at the turn of the century a predominantly black genre of music and since the post-Reconstruction world of the United States at the time was particularly turbulent for black Americans, especially in the South, its subject matter ranged from relationship and work problems to oppression, gender politics, and extreme poverty. These continued to be popular and enduring topics in early jazz. The vocal/instrumental call and response tradition so indicative of blues was also retained to an extent in jazz. A common motive in early jazz (and in modern jazz) is that same call and response mechanism, with a vocal line answered by a (usually improvised) solo instrument.

Call and response is one of several big flashy signifiers of blues music, along with the twelve-bar format and common stanzaic patterns (often AAB or AB refrain). However, even as modern popular music moves further and further away from these traditional structures, the “blues sensibility” remains important. The evolution of blues into jazz and all the way up to contemporary pop music started with the racial, ethnic, and cultural blend unique to early-1900s America. Early blues could not have happened without the centuries of Western oppression of African slaves or without the problem of Reconstruction after the Civil War or without the casual, day-to-day racism that pervaded white American culture through the Civil Rights Movement, and which in many ways continues to pervade white America today. The enormous emotional range of blues coupled with its appeal to and traditions borrowed from diverse cultures made it a music that is deeply defined by its identity and place, and to this day, blues and its modern descendants rely heavily on a similar sense of identity, even if specific place has lost some of its importance. Popular music can be subversive and ethically charged. Today, many of the specific tropes common to blues (such as relationship troubles and gender politics) are still some of the most widespread topics dealt with in popular music, and when popular music does not deal with one of those old subjects, it is often politically motivated in some other way.

Blues, ragtime, and jazz are prime examples of music that is defined by place. They could not have happened anywhere but in the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The conflict of institutionalized discrimination with extremely high levels of cultural diversity was a problem unique to post-Civil War American cities, and nowhere was that conflict more predominant than at the western edge of “old America” along the Mississippi River. Blues came from traditional African and slave music in the rural South, ragtime came from the 1983 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and found a home in St. Louis and New Orleans, and jazz came from the diverse red-light districts of New Orleans and spread up the Mississippi Delta into the rest of the country.

This idea of place as a powerful factor in musical culture is common throughout music history. The introduction of “primitivism” at the Paris Exposition allowed composers like Debussy to experiment with compositional tools they would otherwise never have had access to, and the ethnographic work of Bartok and the Realists created a musical environment that allowed Stravinsky to incorporate Russian folk music throughout Rite of Spring, which itself could only have created the massive uproar it did in Paris, thanks to the prevailing attitudes of the French upper class, the dynamics of the Parisian classical music and ballet scene, and the artistic reputation of Paris on a larger scale. In the same way, the Second Viennese School could not have happened outside of Vienna, a more conservative city than Paris that had trouble branching out and necessitated extreme measures on the part of the Secessionist artists – extreme measures which manifest themselves visually and aurally in the jarring, unfamiliar tradition of Secessionist art.

Thinking about music through the lens of “place” is less helpful today than it was in the days before modern globalization. There are still some exceptions – country music, for one, is monumentally less popular in New York or London than in Nashville – but in general, there is less place-specific creation happening worldwide now than there was a century ago. In my own musical life, however, place does hold some inherent value. We talk all the time in Luther choirs about the “Lutheran choral sound,” the meticulously-crafted and controlled sound associated with Lutheran college and high-level church choirs in the Upper Midwest. This tradition is deeply tied to Scandinavian immigrants to Minnesota, Iowa, the Dakotas, and Wisconsin and the ways they chose to worship. Still, the choral world too is becoming increasingly homogenous, and regional “sounds” are less common.