The Gumbo Years - The Beginning of Jazz

Just as difficult as it is to put together in a few words the early years of jazz, it is doubly difficult to define what it is. Duke Ellington, the legendary composer, pianist and jazz band leader, once said, ‘Put it this way. Jazz is a good barometer of freedom…In its beginnings, the United States of America spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom produced in our country.’ And Gerald Early, writer and essayist said that ‘when they study our civilisation two thousand years from now, there will only be three things that Americans will be known for: the Constitution, baseball and jazz music.’

But historians and jazz experts argue that it is much more. It is the story of two world wars and between them a devastating time of depression – some critics call jazz ‘the sound track that helped Americans get through the worst of times’ – a definition that surely must extend to include all those people and nations that have sought solace in this great art form. And yet another writer put is beautifully. ‘Jazz,’ he said, ‘is about sex, the way men and women talk to each other and conduct the complicated rituals of courtship -  a sophisticated and elegant mating call that has all but disappeared from popular music – it is about drugs and the terrible price of addiction and the high price of creativity. It is about the birth and growth of radio and the soul of the great American cities – New Orleans where jazz was born and Chicago, Kansas City and New York, where it grew up. It is about immigration and about assimilation and about feeling dispossessed and the times when the music came to the rescue. It is about dance and movement and entertainment, the sacred communion between artist and audience, about solitude and loneliness and the nearly unbearable burden of consciousness. It’s about suffering and celebration and it’s about tapping your feet.

Jazz is the story of dozens of extraordinary men and women, black and white, male and female, addicts and orphans, prostitutes and pimps, sons of privilege and despair who took enormous risks, shouldered unimaginable responsibility and did what most of us only dream about but never ever do. My friend the trumpeter Jimmy Owens once pointed to the eight keys of his piano and shook his head in disbelief. ‘Man, it’s all there in those keys – just eight keys and look at the magic that flows from there.’ And of the many great men and women who fashioned jazz, surely Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong stands tall, a gift of God as some called him.  Ken Burns, jazz critic reports that once while on the road he ran into a woman psychic, a medium familiar with things not of this world. When Burns told her that in researching his book he had interviewed many people who called Armstrong an angel, she closed her eyes and smiled and said softly, ‘Biggest wings I’ve ever seen.’

Jazz’s early history begins in a city as strange as any city could be – New Orleans. Established by the French in 1718, in the middle of a mosquito-infested swamp ninety miles north of the Mississippi’s mouth it was briefly ruled by Spain, reclaimed by France and finally sold to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Called The Crescent City because it was built along a bend in the river, New Orleans was home to a mad mix of multiple races. There were people from the Balkans, Dalmatians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Greeks, Albanians, Spanish-speaking Filipinos, Chinese, Malays – and by mid 1850s, Germans and Irish. There were also the slaves from Africa – New Orleans was a centre of the southern slavery trade and the traders called themselves Creoles. It was here that the blues came about. Creole musicians supplied whole orchestras, string trios or quartets for the music of the city’s dancers – dancing was epidemic in Orleans. By the mid 1890s three new kinds of music had begun to find its way into the city - three strains without which there would have been no jazz. Ragtime, born out of the decades old African-American improvisational music came to stay – jaunty, propulsive and irresistible - it would be America’s best loved music for a quarter of a century. Meanwhile a steady stream of black refugees from the Mississippi Delta were pouring into New Orleans carrying with them two inter-related forms essential to the development of jazz – the sacred music of the Baptist church and the music’s profane twin, the blues.

No one knows where the blues were born. The New Orleans clarinettist, Louis Nelson summed it up best. ‘Ain’t no first blues,’ he said. ‘The blues always been.’ The lyrics of the Blues could be about anything – a railroad track, a mean boss, the devil himself or an empty pocket, but mostly they were between men and women and each performer was expected to tell a story and to make the listener feel better, not worse. The earliest blues singers travelled and sang for pennies without adhering to any form but as the music caught on, it came to be built on just three chords most often arranged in twelve-bar sequences. The singing was both spiritual and earthly. It was ‘Oh God, let me go,’ and the other said, ‘Oh, Mister, let me go.’ Jazz would eventually embody both – the sacred and the secular and the musicians of New Orleans would be the first to deepen the essential expressive sound of the blues by bringing it to their horns, the sound that would replicate the ‘moaning’ of the singers in the churches, the first to reproduce the call-and-response patterns of the religious exhorter and his transported flock.

A multitude of events shaped the late 1800s and the early years of the 20th century but one name stands out. Jelly Roll Morton. Born in 1890, Jelly declared many years later, ‘It is evidently known beyond contradiction that New Orleans is the cradle of jazz and I, myself happen to be its creator in the year 1902.’ Although jazz had no single creator, born out of a gumbo stirred and seasoned by hundreds of hands, Morton was the first to play jazz, its first theorist and composer and master of form – the first to help this music spread across the country. He played the piano most elegantly and by 1905 at the age of 15 was producing music that combined both the blues and ragtime but was clearly different from either one. ‘Jazz,’ Morton said, is a style not compositions.’ And Morton had style. He sought to reproduce the sound of the New Orleans marching bands, polyphony of sound with his left hand reproducing the bass line while his right hand painted the lead instruments, the clarinet or the cornet. He gave a smooth syncopation to ragtime and blues, French and Italian operatic airs, Spanish popular songs and dances – all transformed into something new. ‘You could go by a house where Jelly Roll was playing,’ the bass player Bill Johnson recalled, ‘and you’d know it was him because nobody ….did play just like him.’ Jazz undeniably present in the air came into its own thereafter.