Early Jazz

#3 The Significance of New Orleans

These Sunday gatherings in New Orleans helped to prolong African cultural heritage following the American War of Independence from British rule (1775–1783). They owe much to the relative leniency of French and Spanish colonial Catholicism in Louisiana, which accepted and assimilated African spirituality, to an extent.

According to contemporary accounts, the primary musical instruments included long, narrow drums in various sizes from three to eight feet long—it should be noted that Africans had been banned from drumming elsewhere in the Southern colonies. Other instruments included the triangle, jawbone and banza, a precursor of the banjo. Dances performed in Congo Square included the Bamboula, Calinda, Congo and Flat-Footed-Shuffle.

These gatherings survived the Louisiana Purchase of 1804, when New Orleans became part of the United States. Because many aspects of African music had been suppressed in the Protestant colonies and states, Congo Square became a popular site for visitors from elsewhere in the USA. Thus, entertainment value partially overcame racial prejudice, as it continued to do throughout the jazz age. 

The Haitian Revolution, a slave revolt triumphing in 1804, led to an influx of refugees to the Louisiana region, some of whom brought their own slaves. Consequently, New Orleans accommodated thousands of additional blacks and creoles in the early years of the 19^th century, who reinvigorated African traditions in New Orleans.

In 1819 an architect named Benjamin Latrobe wrote about one of his visits to the city. He summarises the scene as ‘savage’, expressing amazement at the sight of 500-600 unsupervised slaves assembled for dancing. He describes their dress as ornamented with a number of tails of the smaller wild beasts, with fringes, ribbons, little bells, shells and balls, jingling around the performers’ legs and arms.

#1 Slavery

In 1619 a Dutch ship arrived in Jamestown and exchanged its cargo of 20 Africans for food. By the 1680s slaves had become essential to plantation-economies of the North American colonies, especially Virginia and Maryland. By the end of the 18th Century more than half a million men, women and children had been forcibly transported to North America across the Atlantic, from that coastal area between present-day Senegal and Angola. Millions more West Africans were forcibly taken to South America and the West Indies, as well as to Europe.

Slaves came with diverse traditions, religions, languages and musical practices.

‘In Africa, music was a key essential of life. It was like breathing. With African music, everybody sang whether they were good or bad singers. Everybody participated. There was no audience.’

Art Johnson
http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/winter02-03/music.cfm
(accessed 19 April 2013)

Introduction

Without Africans in America, there’d be no jazz. Without Europeans in America, there’d be no jazz. The cruel exploitation of slavery provided a rough cradle for this extraordinary cultural fusion, so we should celebrate it, paying homage to those who suffered throughout the music’s long inception and beyond.
     If the birth of jazz is symbolic of segregation, then it also seeks to heal those wounds through its African-European credentials, and the pleasure of its common ownership today, throughout the world.     
     This blog puts the music and its creators into context, both historically and socially. It introduces the landmarks of early jazz, from Jelly Roll Morton to the end of the swing era, with notes on what went before and what followed. More detailed analyses of each period are provided by others, but hopefully this brief account will educate, entertain and whet your appetite for more. We begin with 12 episodes from the prehistory of jazz.

Professor David Burnand
Brighton, May 2013

Abstract

Expo 1958 was the first World’s Fair following WWII. The theme was ‘a balance sheet for the creation of a more human world’, but given the political antagonisms of the period it is hardly surprising that the Americans and Russians took competitive stances. It is significant that the US was represented musically by several African-American jazz musicians, most notably Sidney Bechet, the grandson of a slave. This forum will explore how music was (mis)used to curb American anxieties about the negative impact of segregation on anti-Communist rhetoric.

#13/13

We don’t know all of the repertoire that Bechet played on these occasions, but it’s interesting to note the presence of American show tunes in the Brussels album, and the absence of highly popular compositions such as ‘Nuages’ and ‘Petite Fleur’, which he’d recorded in Paris in the early 1950s alongside French and Belgian musicians. Of course, this absence of high-quality European-nurtured jazz supported the American organiser’s agenda, and reminds us of Mintz’s comments about webs of signification.

For The New York Times reporter and the US State Department, the fact that jazz had been embraced and produced by Europe since WWI did nothing to disconnect it from the idea of America and, by association on this occasion, positive American values. Today, audio branding attempts to work in similar ways to fix the meanings and associations of music into an unambiguous message supporting the marketing of an idea or product.

So what might Bechet himself have made of this? The following passage from his autobiography suggests a different attitude to what his music meant, more generally:

People come up to me and say, ‘What’s Negro music?’ …
‘What’s an American? What’s a Frenchman?’ How do you answer a thing like that? … it’s coming to an understanding; people are learning it. And when you get so you really hear it, when you can listen to the music being itself─then you don’t have to ask that question. The music gives you its own understanding of itself.

This may be a rather purist thought from a musician embedded in his own creations. But if we take a middle path, and accept Susanne Langer’s dictum of the unconsummated symbol, then music’s power lies in its ambiguity, or more accurately, its potential for plurisignation. 

Bechet’s appearance at Expo 58 meant much more than America and its diplomatic mission. Beyond the configurations of sound alone it represented a lifetime of cultural exchange, personal and professional hardship, uncertainty, violence, racism and anti-racism, tradition and renewal, art and entertainment; but most significantly, flexible notions of home, belonging and national identity. And these, of course, are universal narratives fit for any of the World’s Fairs and any of their pavilions.

But whether jazz made or makes the world more human is not the issue. Sidney Bechet’s music makes the human condition more richly resourced, and that’s the message his admiring Brussels audiences took away with them.

Abstract

Expo 1958 was the first World’s Fair following WWII. The theme was ‘a balance sheet for the creation of a more human world’, but given the political antagonisms of the period it is hardly surprising that the Americans and Russians took competitive stances. It is significant that the US was represented musically by several African-American jazz musicians, most notably Sidney Bechet, the grandson of a slave. This forum will explore how music was (mis)used to curb American anxieties about the negative impact of segregation on anti-Communist rhetoric. 

#12

So, in conclusion, we might re-examine the US State Department’s motivation to draw attention to the issue of race relations as ‘Unfinished Business’. At face value this critical self-reflection chimes with Expo 58’s theme: ‘a balance sheet for the creation of a more human world’. But, as suggested earlier, it’s better understood in the context of an ongoing propaganda war with the USSR.  Power shifts around the World had alarmed the US Government. Diplomacy was called for, as well as military force. This is why there were anxieties about negative stories of contemporary US society that could be exploited by the Russians, especially in a battle for the hearts, minds and territories of the Third World. Discrimination undermined the avowed position as champions of freedom, a central rhetorical tool in their promotion of democracy and capitalism.

The fact that many of the jazz musicians representing the US at Expo 58 were African-Americans, and no strangers to inequality, was intended to be a visible sign of the emergence of reciprocal confidence and pride. In other words, racial tensions were ‘almost finished business’. That most of these black musicians were well-established professionals with international reputations indicated the level of opportunity available to them, despite their colour. More generally, jazz itself was emblematic of the successful cultural fusion of traditions from Africa and Europe, nurtured in the Americas. Jazz had been influential in bridging the divides of black and white, as well as those of high art and popular culture.

Now, Bechet’s band was not the only jazz heard in the US Pavilion, but it did have the most impact as a musical representation of America, at least as far as this report from The New York Times was concerned:

Things didn’t start well at the United States Pavilion Theatre tonight. The first half of the program was turned over to the Newport International Youth Band, the ensemble of youngsters assembled from a number of European countries. The idea of putting together such a band has merits─on paper. It shows how widely jazz is appreciated and cultivated in Europe. The plain truth is that this international band is not much more than a stunt.

[The reporter continues:]

… things began to improve, though not rapidly enough. There was Teddy Wilson, a fine jazz pianist, playing in a makeshift trio that looked and sounded … as if it had been put together at the last minute.

Then came Sarah Vaughan, a gifted jazz singer. [who the reporter immediately dismisses] … It would be pleasant if vocalists … would abandon the corn that goes with their announcements.

[and now we come to it]

Mr. Bechet’s sextet saved the evening. It played with a sense of rhythmic momentum and a gusto that are in the liveliest tradition of American jazz. Weariness induced by some earlier dullness and fumbling was washed away. At last American jazz woke them up.

Abstract

Expo 1958 was the first World’s Fair following WWII. The theme was ‘a balance sheet for the creation of a more human world’, but given the political antagonisms of the period it is hardly surprising that the Americans and Russians took competitive stances. It is significant that the US was represented musically by several African-American jazz musicians, most notably Sidney Bechet, the grandson of a slave. This forum will explore how music was (mis)used to curb American anxieties about the negative impact of segregation on anti-Communist rhetoric.

#11

It’s clear that France gladly adopted Bechet in his old age, despite his youthful shoot-out in the streets of Montmartre. Ignoring the cold rain that fell in Paris that day, three thousand mourners attended his funeral procession, and the church organist played the spiritual ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’.

So, if Sidney Bechet’s career represented the roots of jazz in the cultural and racial crucible that was New Orleans in the early 20^th Century, and its adaptation to the popular demands of Swing in the US and Europe, what did his involvement in the Brussels 1958 Expo actually mean? He had left America for a foreign country in which he felt closer to home. He was old and at the end of his career. And anyway, why choose Bechet and not a more progressive jazz musician? After all, during the same period, the CIA and the Congress of Cultural Freedom were promoting modern art and literature as an expression of anti-Communist sensibilities.

Clearly, on this occasion, for the American organisers it was more important to present accessible popular entertainment with a homely (and potentially patronising) message, rather than avant garde high art as an overt challenge to socialist realism and repressive regimes. Remember that the US was on the back foot and looking for fitting, cultural distractions on this occasion.

We know some of the tunes that Bechet played, and with whom, because his last complete recording project was the album ‘Brussels Fair 1958’, compiled from live recordings at the Expo during the period July 29 – Aug 3. His band, the All-Stars, comprised five well-established US musicians: Buck Clayton (tpt), Vic Dickenson (tbn), George Wein [Ween] (pno), Arvell Shaw (bs), and Kansas Fields (dms). Their average age was 45, with Bechet the oldest at 61 years old. All were African-Americans apart from Wein, who was also the youngest at 32. Despite his relative youth, Wein was already an influential figure, being Director of the Newport Jazz Festival, as well as fixer for this band and the other jazz musicians playing the Fair.

We might wonder if Ween’s role was as much minder as fixer, since he was better known as an establishment-friendly impresario, rather than as a player. In the recorded introductions of individual band members, which are included on the album, the compere devotes more time to introducing Ween than any of the other musicians, and his own applause for Ween are louder and longer than that of the audience. It’s Ween’s solos that occasionally demonstrate the most advanced harmonic thinking, which sometimes sits uneasily with the rest of the band’s contribution. Nevertheless, Bechet is never daunted or eclipsed, and it’s he who repeatedly injects energy back into the recordings.

Their repertoire was standard, representing music that Bechet had performed since the 1930s. Not all of the recorded tracks feature him as soloist, though the strongest ones do.