The History of Jazz (8 page)

Bolden would have been exposed to music not only at various social events, but also at church and in school—in fact, two of John Robichaux’s musicians taught at the Fisk School for Boys, which Bolden likely attended. At some point in the mid-1890s, Bolden began playing the cornet, initially taking lessons from a neighbor, and was soon supplementing his income as a plasterer with earnings from performing. At this remove, it is hard to evaluate how much formal training Bolden enjoyed. “[I] don’t think he really knew how to blow his horn right,” Louis Armstrong has suggested, and members of the Robichaux band dismissed Bolden’s group as a bunch of “routineers,” by which they meant fakers.
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Yet Bolden listed himself as a “music teacher” in the local directory. Certainly one would give much to know what pearls of wisdom he passed on to his private students. In any event, the lessons he gave in public, through the example of his own playing, came to exert an even greater influence over the nascent jazz style of his hometown.

Unlike many New Orleans horn players, Bolden’s initiation into the public music life of the city came not through the brass bands that figured prominently in the local social life, but instead as a member of the string ensembles that entertained at dances and parties. The personnel and instrumentation of Bolden’s band underwent constant shifts, but its general evolution tended to emphasize the wind instruments at the expense of the strings—the only surviving photo of the group reveals an ensemble consisting of cornet, valve trombone, two clarinets, guitar, and bass; drums, although absent in the photograph, also played an important role in the band according to all accounts. The evolution in instrumentation was accompanied by a shift in musical perspectives. By the closing years of the century, Bolden’s band was gaining increasing notoriety for its daring move into the syncopated and blues-inflected sounds that would prefigure jazz.

Bolden’s single biggest contribution to jazz may have been his focus on the blues. “On those old, slow, lowdown blues, he had a moan in his cornet that went right through you,” trombonist Bill Matthews recalled, “just like you were in church or something.” Trumpeter Peter Bocage concurred: “He played a lot of blues, slow drags, not too many fast numbers. … [B]lues was their standby, slow blues.”
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It is worth recalling that the blues form was little known at the time. W. C. Handy may be lauded by his admirers as the “Father of the Blues,” but he never encountered this style of music until around 1903, when Bolden was already twenty-five years old. Yet Jelly Roll Morton describes a blues he heard played by New Orleans resident, Mamie Desdoume, at the turn of the century. Bolden was likely incorporating the blues sensibility and structure into his music around this same time.

Certainly Bolden, even if he did not invent jazz, had mastered the recipe for it, which combined the rhythms of ragtime, the bent notes and chord patterns of the blues, and an instrumentation drawn from New Orleans brass bands and string ensembles. As we have seen, the syncopated rhythms of ragtime spread into the mainstream of American culture before the the blues became well known, and Bolden can hardly take credit for this aspect of African American music, although it certainly served as another key ingredient in his work. Yet his instistence on marrying these syncopations to the blues, in an era when the latter idiom existed only on the fringes of the music world, was a brash move, and no doubt a key reason why he captured the attention of his contemporaries and the later chroniclers of New Orleans jazz.

Bolden’s ragged and raucous music stood in stark contrast to the more traditional quadrilles, waltzes, and marches of the New Orleans Creoles. Although the Creole players tried initially to dismiss the new style, its vigor appealed to the local black audience, especially to the younger, more independent generation of African Americans born and raised after the Civil War. This was more than a matter of musical techniques. Bolden’s daring lyrics to his signature song, which included biting reference to a local judge and other contemporary figures, can be viewed as symbolic of the more outspoken attitudes of the younger black men of his day. Even so, Bolden pushed the limits as few of his contemporaries dared, no doubt enhancing the allure of his quasi-forbidden music in the process. Referring to the cornetist’s trademark piece, known under varying names—“Funky Butt,” “Buddy Bolden’s Stomp,” “Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” or “I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say”—Sidney Bechet recalls: “The police put you in jail if they heard you singing that song. I was just starting out on clarinet, six or seven years old, Bolden had a tailgate contest with the Imperial Band. Bolden started his theme song, people started singing, policemen began whipping heads.”
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Bolden’s career would span only a few years. By 1906, his playing was already on the decline, aggravated by the cornetist’s heavy drinking and increasing mental instability. In March of that year, he was arrested after assaulting his mother-in-law with a water pitcher—an event that led to the only newspaper articles mentioning this jazz icon during his lifetime. A second arrest, in September, and a third one the following March resulted in Bolden’s being declared legally insane and committed to an asylum in Jackson. For the next twenty-four years, Bolden remained at this institution, his condition deteriorating into pronounced schizophrenia. On November 4, 1931, Bolden died at the age of fifty-four—according to the death certificate, from cerebral arterial sclerosis—only a few years before growing interest in the early history of jazz would lead researchers back to this seminal figure.

Although Bolden has been typically heralded as the progenitor of jazz, such simplistic lineages ignore the broader musical ferment taking place in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. Many musicians—mostly black, but also Creole and white— were experimenting with the syncopations of ragtime and the blues tonality and applying these rhythmic and melodic devices to a wide range of compositions. At first, improvisational techniques were probably used merely to ornament composed melodies, but at some point these elaborations must have evolved into more free-form solos. What began as experimentation eventually led to formalized practice. Reconstructing these events with any precision is all but impossible—a terminology for describing this music would not exist for quite some time, and the first recordings of this new style would not be made for at least twenty years. Whether Bolden was the decisive figure or merely one among many to spur this transformation remains a matter for speculation. In any event, all our research indicates that sometime around the end of the nineteenth century, a growing body of musicians in New Orleans were playing a type of music that, with benefit of hindsight, can only be described as jazz.

A number of uptown cornetists built on the foundations that Bolden and others had created, including Bunk Johnson, Joe “King” Oliver, Mutt Carey, and later, Louis Armstrong, the greatest of the New Orleans trumpeters. But jazz quickly leaped over the racial barriers that divided New Orleans in the early 1900s. Musicians who were early practitioners of this new idiom also included Creoles Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory, and Freddie Keppard, as well as white players Papa Jack Laine, Emmett Hardy, Sharkey Bonano, and Nick LaRocca. By the 1920s, when the first recordings of a wide range of New Orleans jazz ensembles were made, the ethnic mix of the local bands was almost as diverse as the city’s population. These recordings featured, in addition to the major black and Creole players, such ensembles as Johnny Bayersdorffer’s Jazzola Novelty Orchestra, a solid New Orleans jazz band composed of musicians of central and southern European ancestry; Russ Papalia’s orchestra, another jazz unit, this one primarily comprising Italian Americans; and the New Orleans Owls, which included in its ranks, among others, clarinetist Pinky Vidacovich, pianist Sigfre Christensen, trombonist Frank Netto, banjoist Rene Gelpi, and tuba player Dan LeBlanc—a lineup whose lineage spanned much of Europe. Certainly jazz remained primarily an African American contribution to the city’s— and, eventually, the nation’s—culture; but like all such contributions, once given, it no longer remained the exclusive property of the giver. Instead, destined to become part of the broader cultural gene pool, it was taken up with enthusiasm by musicians of all colors, all nationalities.

Many of the earliest generation of players never recorded; others—such as Keppard—recorded when past their prime, thus limiting our ability to make a full and accurate assessment of their talent and influence. Still others, such as Jelly Roll Morton and Bunk Johnson, made outstanding recordings, but did so, for the most part, some years after the New Orleans style of performance was perfected, thus raising questions about how accurately these recordings represent turn-of-the-century practices. Our ability to decipher this history is further complicated by the personal mythmaking of important firsthand informants such as Johnson, Morton, and LaRocca—all players whose autobiographical narratives were tainted by a desire to enshrine themselves as major protagonists in the creation of this new music.

As previously mentioned, some twenty years transpired between Bolden’s glory days and the release of the first jazz recordings. Nor do these first commercial discs simplify the historian’s task. If anything, the opposite is true: the history of recorded jazz was initiated with an event that remains to this day clouded in controversy. And, as with so many of the loaded issues in the story of the music, the question of race lies at the core of the dispute. In an ironic and incongruous twist of fate, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB), an ensemble consisting of white musicians, was the first to make commercial recordings of this distinctly African American music. Raised in New Orleans, these five instrumentalists—leader and cornetist Nick LaRocca, clarinetist Larry Shields, trombonist Eddie Edwards, drummer Tony Sbarbaro, and pianist Henry Ragas—joined forces and performed in Chicago in 1916, then opened in New York in January 1917. During an engagement at Reisenweber’s Restaurant, the group attracted large audiences with its novel and spirited music, and spurred the interest of East Coast recording companies. Columbia was the first to record the band, but hesitated to release the sides because of the unconventional and ostensibly vulgar nature of the music. Soon after, the Victor label overcame such scruples, and a second session produced a major commercial success in “Livery Stable Blues.”

Partisan polemics have made it all the more difficult to assess this band’s importance and merits. LaRocca and his apologists have offered a stridently revisionist history that places the ODJB as key contributors to the creation of jazz.
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In contrast, critics of the band have attacked its playing as stiff and unconvincing, some going so far as to claim that it did not play jazz at all, just a raucous variant of ragtime. Others have looked for earlier examples of recorded jazz in their attempt to dislodge the ODJB from their place in the jazz pantheon, often tendentiously striving to classify the 1913–14 sides by James Europe’s Society Orchestra as the true maiden voyage of the new musical style, or else hypothesizing about lost recordings by Bolden and others.

Any fair assessment of this controversial band needs to tread cautiously through the exaggerations made on both sides. On the one hand, no evidence exists to support the claim that the ODJB initiated the jazz tradition—indeed, it is even doubtful that the band was the first white group of New Orleans musicians to play jazz (Papa Jack Laine, a turn-of-the-century bandleader, has stronger claims on that distinction). Yet smug dismissals of the ensemble are equally off the mark. LaRocca’s cornet playing stands out as especially supple and often inspired, while Larry Shields’s clarinet work, although seldom remembered nowadays, also exerted an influence on other musicians at the time. Sixty years later, Benny Goodman recalled that Shields had been a strong early influence (along with Jimmie Noone and Leon Roppolo) on his music, adding that he could still play Shields’s chorus on “St. Louis Blues” note for note. True, the group indulged in novelty effects of questionable taste, but so would a host of later jazz musicians—from Jelly Roll Morton to the Art Ensemble of Chicago—without subverting the underlying virtues of their efforts.

Although not the best of the early jazz bands, the ODJB was certainly one of the most wide ranging. Its recordings encompassed jazz, blues, rag forms, and pop songs, as well as arrangements with an additional horn that anticipated the textured voicings of swing music. In their travels, the band members were among the first global ambassadors for hot music; they moved from New York to England, where they gave a private command performance for the royal family, and also journeyed to France, where they helped celebrate the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The group disbanded in 1925 but rejoined forces briefly in 1936 to record again for the Victor label and go on tour, but this reunion proved short lived. LaRocca would survive another quarter of a century, and though he no longer performed on the horn, he worked tirelessly as an advocate arguing for the ensemble’s historical importance. Inevitably, this zeal in promoting the ODJB as pioneers of the music—no less than the “Creators of Jazz,” as their public billings proclaimed—created a fierce backlash within the jazz world, as would their success in securing a recording contract at a time when so many African American artists were ignored. Yet few bands of that period did more to expose the wider public, at home and abroad, to the virtues of this new music from New Orleans.

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Jelly Roll Morton, the greatest of the New Orleans jazz composers, also generated controversy by his claims to have invented the music. Indeed, Morton was known to exaggerate about many things, so much so that he has acquired the persona of a blustering loudmouth in most historical accounts. However, a careful study of Morton’s firsthand recollections, preserved by Alan Lomax in a series of taped interviews and performances for the Library of Congress, reveals that this often maligned figure could be, when the occasion warranted, one of the most thoughtful and accurate sources of information on early jazz.