Generating page narration, please wait...

Overview

African American music-including work songs, spirituals, the blues, and ragtime-are drenched in improvisation and syncopation, those ancient African pillars of music. Improvisation and syncopation therefore remain a constant presence in the creative genius of an oppressed people-an expression "born out of a million American negotiations"(Burns 2001). Jazz music, as we'll discover in this lesson, is next in this chain of connection.

Be ready to:

Outline the significance of Congo Square and Storyville to the African American community of New Orleans.

Trace the lineage of jazz, while connecting to earlier African American music genres.

Describe the unique demographics of New Orleans during the early to late nineteenth century.

List the socio-political events that contributed to the birth of jazz.

Discover Music

Discover Video

Keywords

Listening Guides

References

The Art of Collective Improvisation to the Art of the Improvising Soloist 3

"Struttin' with Some Barbecue"♫ exhibits a characteristic form in jazz known as A A' form (pronounced "A A prime form"). It is often a thirty-two-bar form, as it is here, and each of the larger sixteen-bar sections may be further divided into eight-bar subsections. In that regard, it shares much in common with the thirty-two-bar song form. The big difference between the two forms is at the midway point: in song form, the contrasting B section-the bridge-begins the second half of the form, whereas, in an A A' form, the second half of the form starts with a return to the opening material. The contrasts in A A' form exist principally between the two eight-bar subsections in both sixteen-bar halves of the form. Characteristically, smaller letters could represent the eight-bar subsections in an A' form, with the A section broken down as a b and the A' section as a b'.

Notice the classic New Orleans sound of collective improvisation through the first chorus, as the cornet carries the melody. At the turnaround at the end of the first chorus, there is a break-that is, a point in the music when everyone stops playing for one or two bars, except for a soloist. Most often, this will allow the soloist to enter very dramatically. In this case, the banjo player Johnny St. Cyr simply fills the turnaround before Johnny Dodds enters on clarinet to take a solo through the first half of the second chorus.

There's another break at the next turnaround, midway through the second chorus, providing Dodds a spotlight as he wraps up his solo before Kid Ory makes his entrance on trombone to solo through the second half of the chorus. Ory receives a similar break at the turnaround for the end of his solo. Then Satchmo (as Armstrong was known) takes command with an exuberant, masterful solo over an entire chorus. Notice how St. Cyr on banjo creates a backbeat by strumming only on beats two and four, thus providing more space for the soloist. The virtuosic manner in which Armstrong fills the break at the midway turnaround provides yet another stellar benchmark to which other players of the time could only aspire.

Kid Ory in 1944 with the All Star Jazz Group

Louis Armstrong

Very few of the men whose names have become great in the early pioneering of jazz and of swing were trained in music at all. They were born musicians: they felt their music and played by ear and memory. That was the way it was with the great Dixieland Five.

Heebie Jeebies

Say, I've got the Heebies
I mean the Jeebies
Talking about
The dance, the Heebie Jeebies
Do, because they're boys
Because it pleases me to be joy