by Travis Grant
Ken Burns’ 2001 documentary, Jazz, provides a thorough telling of jazz music’s history by exploring the genre from its fortuitous beginning in the Louisiana slave markets to present. Burns spells out the inspiration and motivation behind every period of jazz and links them together in a way that gives the viewer a broad yet comprehensive view of the genre. Although tales of musicians like Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis are each fascinating in their own right, the story of how jazz music formed by chance as a result of the slave trade, racism, war, the merging of other musical genres, and the eventual mixture of certain social classes is worth retelling.
The story of jazz began more than 200 years ago, not far from where the Mississippi spills into the Gulf of Mexico. At the start of the 19th century, New Orleans was several things that would make it crucial to the history of jazz. First, it was America’s most musical city. Citizens enjoyed New Orleans’ symphony orchestras (of which there were two) and the operas performed by each of the city’s three flourishing opera companies. Black slaves were also allowed to enjoy music. They would congregate to socialise, drum, and dance every Sunday in New Orleans’ Congo Square, which still exists in Louis Armstrong Park, in the city’s Treme neighbourhood. Most of all, everyone – black and white – enjoyed the music emanating from nearly every street corner in New Orleans. As respected jazz artist, Wynton Marsalis notes, even “the vendors […] would sing arias.”
New Orleans was also a key shipping port. The city’s proximity to the Mississippi River made it ideal, since the river was the primary waterway for ferrying goods great distances inland. Included in the goods being shipped were human chattel, bought and sold through the Atlantic slave trade. At the peak of the trade, New Orleans had the dubious distinction of being the largest slave market in the United States.
As trade moved slaves about the Deep South, inevitable cultural integrations began occurring amongst them. Slaves imported to New Orleans from the West Indies brought with them the beat-driven music of the Caribbean. Slaves who arrived there from the Southern interior had been exposed to the Baptist faith and brought with them the spirituals and work songs that were common to the area.
Another important cultural group also existed in New Orleans at that time – Creoles of Colour. The Creoles of Colour were the light-skinned descendents of French and Spanish colonialists who kept black wives and mistresses. Despite their lineage, Creoles of Colour were of a higher social class than blacks and rarely mingled with them. In fact, it was not uncommon for the Creoles of Colour to own slaves. Unlike African slaves, many Creoles of Colour were well off, well educated, and classically trained in European music.
On January 26th, 1861, the State of Louisiana seceded from the Union. For New Orleans at least, this secession lasted just over a year. 15 months after secession, a federal fleet made its way down the Mississippi, and Confederate forces found themselves under fire from both the Union army and navy. New Orleans officially surrendered to federal forces on April 28th, 1862. This ushered in a period of relative freedom for black slaves, which in turn gave rise to a flourish of artistic creativity.
New Orleans responded to occupation differently than other cities in the Confederacy would have. Before federal occupation, New Orleans tolerated the largest population of freed slaves, and once the city surrendered, it was apparent that significant commercial interests were compatible with federal occupation. The city and other federally controlled parts of Louisiana were even designated as states within the Union and granted representation in the U.S. Congress. In other words, keeping the peace in New Orleans, although not always easy, was not as difficult as one might expect.
The period following the Civil War was known as Reconstruction. The civilian governments that had controlled the 11 seceded states were deposed and placed under the control of the U.S. Army. During this time, federal troops patrolled the South and forced integration between blacks and whites; however, this early experiment in civil rights came to an end with a secretive agreement between Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans known resentfully to many as the Corrupt Bargain but formally as the Compromise of 1877. For Southern blacks, this backroom deal ushered in a dark period of prominent Ku Klux Klan activity, lynching, indentured servitude, and strictly enforced segregation of all aspects of public life. For the most part, these realities would remain in place until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
New Orleans was not immediately affected by the sudden collapse of Reconstruction. Although efforts to further disenfranchise former slaves were eventually successful, there was a period after Reconstruction’s collapse when life for blacks in New Orleans was preferable to other states and cities in the Deep South. As a result, waves of black men, women, and children made their way down the Mississippi in search of better lives. Keith David, the narrator of Jazz, says of this exodus, “The blues was part of their baggage.” With the arrival of so much blues in the Mississippi Delta, a key ingredient for jazz was in place.
By the late 19th century, ragtime music, which first rose to popularity in the red light district of Storyville, had taken hold of New Orleans. Ragtime was a mixture of African syncopation and the technical elements of European classical music. The defining characteristic of ragtime is a melody that dodges some beats in the meter of accompanying instruments. (Ragtime’s meter is usually 4/4, 2/4, or 3/4 if it’s a ragtime waltz). Crucial to this musical styling is a melody that either accentuates the notes that precede the beat (in anticipation of it), or a melody that lets wail the notes that follow close behind the beat, giving it a flourishing afterglow.
At the same time, the blues had better defined itself as a unique and expressive musical form, and the people of New Orleans began hearing it on a wider scale. Fundamentally less complicated than ragtime, the blues is based on three chords that are usually arranged over 12 bar sequences. These choruses allow for an infinite number of variations. The plastic nature of the blues made vocal accompaniment relatively easy, especially the spiritual verses transposed from scripture into a plaintive melody. “The blues,” says Keith David, “was the profane twin of the sacred music of the black Baptist Church […] one was praying to God and the other was praying to what’s human. One was saying, ‘Oh God, let me go,’ and the other was saying, ‘Mr., let me be.’”
As soon as these musical styles took hold, they began to integrate. Bugles and horns manufactured for military use were in abundance following the Civil War. Poor musicians acquired the cheap brass instruments and set about mixing the fundamentals of ragtime music and the blues.
In 1890, the Louisiana State Legislature began enacting laws that segregated public facilities on the basis of race. These laws were not only applied to the black people of Louisiana, but also to Creoles of Colour, a group who had previously moved about society as equals to their white counterparts. Outraged, the Committee of Citizens of New Orleans hired Creole of Colour Homer Plessy to challenge a particular law that segregated train cars. The plan was to seat Plessy in a first-class train car designated for whites only and have him arrested. This would ensure that Plessy got his day in court, where the Committee of Citizens of New Orleans could, by proxy, challenge segregations laws, claiming them to be unconstitutional. The committee hired a private investigator to arrest Plessy and, sure enough, he was charged and his case was heard before the United States Supreme Court. In an unanticipated decision, the Supreme Court ruled against Plessy, stating that separate but equal facilities were, in fact, constitutional. The Committee of Citizens of New Orleans’ plan had backfired, and the Creoles of Colour were suddenly barred from all aspects of white society, a turn of events that had a profoundly tragic impact on the lives of black people, but an important one on the merging genres of ragtime and blues.
Creoles of Colour who were classically trained musicians were now barred from playing with white musicians and were left with no choice but to make music with former slaves. The sudden introduction of Creoles of Colour and their musical skills to the ragtime-blues merger added an element of technical proficiency that would have an earth-shifting effect on the music and the musicians. Had Homer Plessy’s trial before the Supreme Court not gone so disastrously, the new direction towards Jazz might not have been forged.
When the strict beat of blues music is blown through a horn, it’s slower than than ragtime. As a result, the blues-ragtime merger often had spaces in between phrasings that needed to be filled; this marked a crucial turning point. To best understand how crucial this break between phrasings was, picture a band of Creole and black musicians and imagine them working out, in a single session, all of the ideas and innovations that would eventually crystallise into jazz. In the first break, the cornet player — a Creole of Colour — fills the space with a few notes. Surprised, the bassist, the drummer, and the trumpet look up at him. The truth is, the cornet player has surprised himself. But he can do better. Emboldened, he fills the next break with a creative, melodic, and emotional burst. Inspired, the other musicians begin taking turns filling the space, each time infusing the feelings in their gut into the music. Before long, the fills extend beyond the breaks, and the musicians are taking turns exchanging complex and sophisticated lines of music, each of which remains true to the spirit of the original piece. They are conversing with one another in the language of music – honest, uncensored, and brilliant. In this way, Jazz music was born.
Albums listened to while writing this: Saxophone Colossus, by Sonny Rollins; Jazz: Red Hot & Cool, by Dave Brubeck; Hi-Fi Ellington Uptown, by Duke Ellington; The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, by Charles Mingus; Bird and Miles, by Charlie Parker and Miles Davis; Introduction to Jazz by the Rev. A. L. Kershaw – a collection of the Rev.’s favourite compositions, from 1926-1944.
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