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| The 2004 Atlanta JAZZ Party! |
Comments by Phil Carroll . . .
Irving Berlin summer up the venerable truth of human love of melody in music in this quintessential line, and it gets me to wondering... what has happened to the popular American song? Fewer songs seem to be offered to us that catch our love of melody and stay with us in our memory. Good grief, the halftime show of this year's Super Bowl was a complete wasteland of music!
When my wife, Lee, and I were kids in school in New Jersey, we had music and art as part of our curriculum. We got exposed to some European classical music and opera, but also early American popular songs like those of Stephen Foster. (I fondly remember singing Foster's "Nellie Bly" solo on the auditorium stage.) Foster's songs were influenced by black music he heard in churches, minstrel shows, folk and plantation songs. He stood out in early American songwriting and our native music seemed to stall when he died before the end of the Civil War.
As kids, we also sang the songs of James Bland, one of the first black composers to have his music published. It has always struck me as ironic that Bland was born in Flushings, New York, but wrote about plantation times in many of his songs. My father played many Bland songs on his guitar and family and friends loved to sing the familiar tunes in rich harmonies. Bland wrote 700 songs, including "Carry me Back to Old Virginny" (1878), "Oh, Dem Golden Slippers" (1879) and "In the Evening By The Moonlight" (1880).
Through the rest of the 1800s, white America slowly recognized that blacks had unique musical talent. Nobody knows for certain when ragtime started but it probably began about 1885 when itinerate black piano players began "ragging" short themes, learning from each other, competing in cutting contests but not worrying about ownership. The 1893 Chicago Exposition exposed the world to ragtime with piano players from all over the central U.S. playing on the Midway and in the saloons and sporting houses of Chicago.
Music publishers were aware of ragtime but were afraid of "that Negro music." So it was a white bandleader, William Krell, who traveled the Mississippi Valley with his band, who had the first rag published, "The Mississippi Rag." It is speculated that he had put together as his own many of the black players' tunes which he had heard. Just days later, the first black rag would be published -- Tom Turpin's "Harlem Rag."
Ragtime spread like wildfire and became America's first musical craze and also its unique musical form. At its best, rags by composers like Scott Joplin, Tom Turpin, James Scott, Joseph Lamb and others, were charming and happy -- often referred to as "elite syncopation." However, as one writer observed, "It took Tim Pan Alley's jaundiced ear to steamroll all the delicacy out of the lilting syncopation and make ragtime a dirty word." Still the finest ragtime pieces were quite melodious, and from that period populat American songs were published with increasing regularity.
Here are some highlights of this creative time:
Most jazz lovers can hum, whistle or sing almost all of these songs, and they remain favorites of jazzmen who like a melogy that isn't too complex. In the years that followed, America was blessed with great professional song writers -- Irving Berlin, of course, and such luminaries as Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Richare Rogers, and Vincent Youmans.
And you can't overlook the outstanding contribution of some of our best lyricists: Dorothy Fields, Ira Gershwin, Oscan Hammerstein, E. Y. Harburg, Lorenz Hart, and my personal favorite Johnny Mercer.
With the death of Scott Joplin and the issuance by Victor of the first jazz recording by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917, ragtime faded (never to fully disapear). So, from the decline of the ragtime craze, the Jazz Age was born.
Just as black players pioneered ragtime, it was a black man, Charles "Buddy" Bolden that is generall acknowledged to be the "first" jazzman. Jazz began in New Orleans in about 1894 and remained pretty much contained to that area until 1917 when the U.S. Navy persuaded the city to close its world-famous Storeyville red light district. The local jazzmen, mostly black, lost jobs in the district and moved West and North.
Just as the music publishers had been reluctant to publish black rags, in 1917 the recording companies favored the white Original Dixieland Jazz Band over the
black jazzmen. It was not until June of 1922 that a black band was recorded -- Spike's Seven Pods of Pepper, led by the legendary Kid Ory.
The Jazz Age flourished during the prosperous "Roaring '20s" but waned, along with all forms of entertainment, during the Great Depression but not before it had produced dozens of jazz classics that are still played today, as well as many popular songs that still endure.
In the mid-1930's, the Swing Era and big bands arose, and firmly established jazz's uniquely American contribution to the world's musical heritage. This melodic jazz tradition is the cornerstone of the Atlanta Jazz Party.
For the past 30 years or more, popular music has trended steadily toward emphasis on rhythm over melody. Lee's and my children bombarded us with rock 'n' roll (rooted, or course, in rhythm and blues) and we like to think we had some influence on them that they often chose the stronbgly melodic of the Beatles and Eric Clapton (hmmm, all Englishmen) over the (to my ears) tuneless twang of American songwriter Bob Dylan.
In all fairness, I should note that significant branches of jazz have also drifted away from melody in pursuit of more abstract approaches to music. It is interesting that, unlike "rock" or "hip hop", the musical fields of folk and of country and western have been relatively unaffected by the move away from melody and towards percussion. I hope I am correct in sensing a return to songs with melody and words that you can understand. The popular TV show "American Idol," for instance, uses time-honored songs with melodies to showcase the talents of their young contestents.
I will remark that my grandchildren, who seem to favor "boy bands" with repetitive tune-lines, can rattle off amazing, lengthy passages from "rap" tunes and can often be heard singing or humming charming melodies. But even so, if you ask young people to sing a popular song, do they really have the abundance of songs offered to them tat we old folks can recall?
Whatever the trends, you can count on this -- when the last song ends at this year's Atlanta Jazz Party, the melodies will linger on. And, I hope, for future generations -- that they may, too, enjoy a rich treasure trove of timeless, memorable songs such as we are privileged to enjoy!
-- PHIL CARROLL 2004
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