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.