[78-L] Lost Chords vs. different genes

[fnarf at comcast.net]

From: "Taylor Bowie" <bowiebks at isomedia.com>

Taking these paragraphs backwards:

> And no one can deny that, after a while,  there was cross-polination if you 
> will.  Lester Young famously said that his early influences included 
> Trumbauer and Jimmy Dorsey,  and Ella Fitzgerald on one occasion cited 
> Connee Boswell as her first "model."  Rex Stewart has written eloquently 
> about the influence of both Armstrong and Beiderbeck on his own 
> playing...and you can sure hear it on many of Rex's records.

Oh, absolutely. In the "classic" phase, it might be possible in some instances to identify "black style" and "white style" (think Basie vs. Miller, for instance) but these had lost their strictest definition, and whites could "play black" and vice versa, and the strict segregation had pretty much crumbled. In fact, jazz was in the vanguard of breaking down these barriers in the wider society. Not to say that there wasn't still plenty of discrimination, even in sophisticated New York; blacks couldn't play the Copa for a long, long time, and couldn't sit in the audience for much longer than that. But musically, while there was still separation, they could and did play together, influence each other, imitate each other, and so on. Ella exists in a space that is not "black" or "white" but rather "American song". It's important to remember, though, that she lived her entire life very much trapped in a "black world" -- segregation still exists. And look where she came from -- a homeless black teenager wandering Harlem sometimes without shoes.

> Perhaps one thing we can all agree on is that no one in jazz,  including 
> Bix, Bolden, Armstrong, etc. developed independently.  And surely the sound 
> of the European-style orchestras and instruments had a strong effect as to 
> how early black players developed their sound,  if not their style?

Well, certainly. Trumpets and trombones and pianos didn't come from Africa. Most people accept that blacks learned to use these instruments by playing in, or seeing whites play in, Civil War military bands. The whole setup of early proto-jazz bands was military in style, right down to the shoulder braids. Blacks in New Orleans in particular but everywhere in slave culture used to parody and imitate their white masters, and musically, by the time leading up to Bolden were probably playing a more-or-less straight version of Sousa-style marches, from which the variations came forth. Uptown, the creoles of status, almost white, were playing classical music on the piano, which is the real "folk music" of most of white America (as has been recently mentioned in another thread here). When that rag time started to show up, whites, creoles, and even blacks with aspirations got their knuckles rapped by many a teacher for "bringing that n****r music in here".

Once that "n****r music" idea infiltrated or infected the minds of the players, though, both white and black, there was no going back. The freeing idea itself, that I can tear this up if I want to, which naturally became a competitive arena, is what led to these proto-musics becoming something we would recognize as "jazz". 

I guess the point is, where both Crouch and Sudhalter can agree, is that jazz proceeds from the point of intersection. It is not African, not Spanish, not Cuban, not Haitian, and not white -- it's the mix. It's where a truly American idea took flight, rather than a European import (and, remember, the slaves themselves were a European import).




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