Early Jazz History, Oral
Evidence and Pitfalls of Interpretation
Daniel Hardie
Jazz History is
founded on Oral History. Jazzmen: The
Story of Hot Jazz
Told in the Lives of the Men Who Created It, published in 1939 and seen by many as the foundation
text of jazz history, was based on a compilation of data gathered from
interviews. According to Bruce Raeburn:
“Nearly a hundred musicians
or close relatives were contacted, either in person or through the mails gathering
materials for the book.”[1]
This
was a major change of direction for Jazz History writing, previous histories
having been written based largely on interpretation of cherished surviving
recordings and experiences already remote from the historical period during
which jazz emerged.
Such
was the power of Jazzmen that its romantic narrative dominated the received
account of jazz history until, in the late 1970’s, researchers began seriously to
question its adequacy, pointing out that many statements had been accepted that
could be called into question in the light of later evidence.
Jazzmen was not alone in this regard. Later authors, too,
credited some witnesses to jazz history with self-serving motives and perhaps
lapses of memory that distorted the
narrative in some way.
Recently
theoretical historians have sought to find ways of interpreting such anecdotes
or historical remnants in such a way as to achieve a more satisfactory account
of history.
Three
examples of such significant personalized accounts of early jazz history stand out in this respect.
Each involved a highly respected musician and each illustrates distortions
arising from interpretation by historians remote from the events described,
particularly issues arising from decisions involving inclusion or exclusion of
evidence.
In
1978 Donald Marquis changed the course of jazz history by publishing In Search of Buddy Bolden, the first
proper biography of the leader of what is believed to have been the first jazz
orchestra. Much of what had previously known about Bolden had been gathered
from stories in Jazzmen that had
accrued elements of mythology. Marquis adduced evidence that many of these tall
tales could not be supported and some were confounded by reference to
documentation. In particular he ruled out evidence from Bunk Johnson the ‘hero’
of Jazzmen’s account of early New
Orleans Jazz. Marquis believed Johnson had deliberately overstated his age in
order to be able to claim that he had performed in Bolden’s orchestra in 1895
and considered him an unreliable witness. Where previous commentators might
have accepted Johnson’s assertion as factual
Marquis considered it dubious to say the
least.
Nevertheless
some of Johnson’s claims had become accepted and part of the recognized
narrative of early jazz history. Some historians now call such inclusions factoids[2] -
defined as “an invented fact, believed to be true because of
its appearance in print.” Alternatively they define a factoid as an apparently
trivial fact that appears in print. Though some historians reject the use of
the term others focus their attention on such apparently trivial anecdotes and
other neglected details as a means of placing evidence back into the
environment from which it came. They see this as a means of creating a more
accurate narrative image of a forgotten past that cannot really be recreated.
Bunk Johnson’s many
reminiscences of the Elemental Jazz period were recorded and some published.
Marquis decided not to include any evidence from these sources in his biography
of Buddy Bolden. On the other hand in his history Early Jazz[3]
Gunther Schuller interpreted Johnson’s recorded demonstration of Bolden’s
performance style as evidence of the style of early jazz
By far the largest single
oral account of Early Jazz appeared around 1938 in recorded interviews with Jelly Roll Morton
conducted by Alan Lomax for the US Library of Congress. The interviews were
made available as 78 rpm discs but not published in written form until 1950,
after the official version of jazz history received via Jazzmen had been in place some 12 years.
Some of the statements made
by Morton were apparently disruptive to
accepted interpretations of jazz history, none more so than his claim to
have invented jazz in 1902. He also asserted that Buddy Bolden did not play
jazz but was a ragtime player - troubling indeed. Though much of what Morton
had to say was absorbed by conventional jazz history many of his claims were
disregarded as self-serving. As was the
case with Johnson, uncertainty about the year of Morton’s birth clouded the
issue. Historians writing in the Swing era were unsure what to make of some of his claims.
No one has been more
beloved of Jazz Historians than Louis Armstrong but they were disturbed by his
apparent departure from their strict interpretation of what represented
authentic jazz style during the late 1920’s, his very successful entry into the
despised popular song market and some of his apparently heretical views on
performance.
One of his departures was
extremely distasteful.
Reviewer Steve Barbone put
it this way:
“Readers will be intrigued with
his friendship with Guy Lombardo, resulting from an invitation by Lombardo to
be his guest at a white’s only club to hear The Royal Canadians. And his later
trying for the Lombardo sound with his sax sections in big bands he fronted.”[4]
This enigma
puzzled many jazz historians for whom the Lombardo style of sweet swinging
popular dance music was an anathema to be excluded from the realm of real
jazz. As Schuller put it:
“The
years of the Hot Five represented, nevertheless, a peak activity that could
hardly be surpassed. The records of the next decade, though numerous and
commercially successful, added nothing to Armstrong’s stature as one of jazz’s greatest innovators and musical giants.
They did, however add to his reputation as a trumpeter…” (and…) For the rest there is a wasteland of whimpering
Lombardo-style saxophones and Hawaiian guitars, saccharine violins, dated
Tin Pan Alley tunes and hackneyed arrangements.”[5]
Emotional stuff! In reacting this way Schuller was responding to the historical
tenor and perspective of his time, excluding such performances from the oeuvre
of jazz.
Such exclusions represent demarcations of
non-acceptance that were taken up seriously in David Akes’ collection of papers
Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and Its Boundaries in 2012.[6] Ake
was concerned with the effects of such exclusions – what he called the ‘othering’
of various styles in the narratives of traditional jazz history:
“… rethinking the parameters of jazz history
and for the ways it identifies some of the negatively productive ways in which
jazz history is created. …I identify some of the complicated ways this process
is played out in practice, given the complex symbolism of jazz and its musical
others…(to) identify some of the complicated ways this process is played out in
practice, given the complex symbolism of jazz and its musical others.”
Among Ake’s collection of papers Elijah Wald
devoted his essay to Armstrong’s
apparently anomalous partiality for the Lombardo style.
In the case of Morton,
historians were puzzled by many of his utterances and omitted them from the
record. Others tried to slot them into their own historical arguments. For example, Morton stated that the violin
was regularly employed in early bands but that:
This was taken by Rudi Blesh,
to reinforce his belief that the violin was somehow out of place in an early
improvising jazz orchestra. However, a
plain interpretation in the light of what we now know of early jazz performance
practice might simply be that Morton was referring to the melody role of the
violin – i.e. that it did not improvise or rag, even in New Orleans, but maintained
the melodic impulse of the performance leaving improvisation (seen as
illegitimate ‘faking’ by some contemporary critics) largely to the wind
instruments.
Bunk Johnson, too, referred to
the violin being regularly employed in early jazz orchestras, but perhaps the
most interesting of the factoids originating in his testimony was his complaint
about the poor quality of the musicians with whom he had to play during the
early New Orleans revival – he called them ‘emergency musicians’. He also
contended that more contemporary popular songs should have been performed and
he received some criticism for that. In his last recording date he did include examples
of hit tunes - like ‘Chloe’, and
chose skilled musicians for the date. He saw himself as a skilled performer,
perhaps a musicianer, in the common terminology of his early career, having to
perform with faking musicians of a lesser standard. Comments like these were
largely ignored, or mentioned knowingly, probably seen as impenetrable,
strange, self-serving and irrelevant to the historical narrative.
Here there is a correspondence
with the Armstrong enigma. How could one of the fathers of ‘New Orleans Jazz”
tolerate the sweet swinging popular dance music and banal popular songs of the
thirties, forties and later?
Morton added to the puzzle,
singing popular songs and describing jazz as hot-sweet plenty rhythm. Other contemporary
witnesses also described Buddy Bolden as playing very sweetly and the theme was
repeated in accounts like that of Baby Dodds, who said that the violin-led jazz
music of his early days was ‘awful sweet’.
The dissonance between such
scraps of oral evidence and historical narratives derived from selected recordings
of the early 1920’s was not interrogated until Ake and his contributors began
to question their meanings. Their questioning went further, including scrutiny of
decisions to exclude performers like Louis Jordan and John Coltrane from the
oeuvre of legitimate jazz.
However we are concerned with
Early Jazz. Marquis lost little by
excluding evidence from Johnson from his biography of Buddy Bolden standing as
it did on a mountain of verifiable information. Though it added considerably to
our understanding of the performance environment of the time the historical
image of the musical milieu remained incomplete, partly because factoids such
those we have considered were not understood - not interpreted outside the
frame of reference of the history
writers of the 1940’s and later.
A more sociological
interpretation, seeking to view such comments within the time perspective of
the witnesses rather than that of the historians, might lead to a better
understanding of the music of their times and its evolution.
Though questions still remain
as to the exact dates of birth of Johnson and Morton those witnesses grew up in
New Orleans in a society where entertainment was focused on popular dance music
dominated by a nation-wide commercialized publishing industry. So did Louis
Armstrong. Bolden introduced new elements into the performance practices of the
time but the violin led dance orchestra playing a proportion of sweet pop songs
was the dominant medium as late as 1921. It is not surprising that Johnson
thought it legitimate to play popular music or that Armstrong saw no conflict with,
or betrayal of, his art while performing in the commercial music scene of his
day and enjoying the sweet violin led music of the time. Much more of what Morton said probably remains
to be subjected to interpretation that might further elucidate aspects of the
long period during which he was a major composer and performer.
Though our appreciation of the
performance practice, repertoire and audiences of the first twenty years of
jazz history has been considerably improved in recent times, narratives of the
period known as the Jazz Age and its successor the Swing Era remain constrained
between boundaries limited by definitions devised in the 1940’s - boundaries
that excluded much music popularly accepted and enjoyed at the time as jazz. Musicians
popular in the 1920’s like Isham Jones, (or Ben Bernie who was featured as a
star performer in the first American history of jazz)[8],
disappeared forever from the approved record. Perhaps a first step towards a
better appreciation of the jazz history in the period between 1917 and 1940
should be a re-examination of the many exclusion decisions that shaped the
traditional account and the range of recorded material considered inauthentic.
Did the word jazz mean the same in 1920 as it did in the jazz history books of the
1940’s or those of the 1990’s? Perhaps Louis Armstrong better understood the
music of his time than did many later historians.
___________________
4 Steve Barbone His review of Louis Armstrong Master of Modernism
by
Thomas David published on the internet chat group the Dixieland Jazz Mailing List
5 G. Schuller Early
Jazz p 132 and p 133 (My italics)
6 David Ake
ed. Jazz/Not Jazz: The Music and
Its Boundaries 2012UCL
7 R. Blesh Shining Trumpets p 55
8 H. Osgood “So This is Jazz” 1926
