jazz cities
Jazz is America’s music, born of a million American negotiations: between having and not having; between black and white; between the old Africa and the old Europe and between the country and the city. And as the great cities of America grew, it was jazz music that provided a vivid soundtrack to accompany their burgeoning urban glamour.
It emerged in the early years of the 20th century in New Orleans, Louisiana, a handsome port built by the Spanish. Attractive stucco buildings decorated with elaborate wrought iron balconies were laid out in a coherent grid pattern, which gave way to sudden squares and wide sweeps of the great Mississippi with its barges and wedding cake paddle steamers. Bougainvillea thrived.
The alchemy that produced jazz remains a mystery but the disparate musical elements in its make-up — the blues, work songs, African forms brought by slaves, military music and European classical music — could all be heard in or around the musically sophisticated city of New Orleans. Jazz is a music of ingenious cultural miscegenation. American blacks, the descendants of slaves, used it to signal their ambition to join forces with mainstream America and did so with a quiet dignity that was truly impressive. Tragically, this ambition was not rebuffed by influential elements in the white American establishment.
But in the city that gave jazz birth, the optimism that underpinned it did not seem misplaced. New Orleans had a social history that marked it out from the rest of the American Deep South. It was ruled by the French until America acquired the territory in 1803. Property rights in the city were based on a line of descent from the original settler. So a wealthy caste of Creoles (people of mixed race whose culture was French) established itself. In Paris, French speaking Blacks in foreign territories were regarded as honorary Frenchmen.
Although the elaborate cuisine of New Orleans with its subtle and fierce sauces and ubiquitous seafood bars witness to a continuing French influence, the American system swiftly eroded the social standing of the Creoles. However, New Orleans remained more liberal and unpredictable racially than the rest of the Deep South: hence jazz. But it was not just in a social way that the city made its mark on jazz. The meditative, conversational sound of early jazz with its burry textures and informal voicings seems to drip with the intense humid heat of New Orleans nights. And the relaxed, insistent rhythm of the new music owed much to the sedate marching pulse of the brass bands that trod the streets of the city to celebrate funerals and Saints days.
The cornetist Buddy Bolden was probably the first person in New Orleans to play jazz. None of his music has survived but there are plenty of reports from people who heard him play. Bolden made a cylinder at the turn of the 20th century but it is lost forever. And if this grail-like object did turn up in one of the old working men’s halls where Bolden plied his trade, it would no doubt be infuriatingly inaudible. Those who heard Bolden spoke of his astonishing power. You could hear his cornet twelve miles away on a clear night, they said: not so fanciful as it sounds. The bayous and lakes that surround New Orleans project sound very effectively and in Bolden’s time there was neither traffic nor urban sprawl.
Bolden’s home at 2309 First Street still stands in a modest, respectable black neighbourhood which seems almost unchanged since Buddy’s time. The wooden house has decorative features below the eves and the yard is full of pots of flowering shrubs. It’s easy to imagine the first King of the cornet sleeping it off inside after a hard night at the Halls.
Today downtown skyscrapers tower over what is left of the original New Orleans skyline and the historic areas of the city have a slightly self-conscious, heritage feel to them: at times it can be like stepping into Disney Land’s New Orleans World. And I can confirm that there is a streetcar named Desire.
The jazz on offer today is mostly rather arthritic Dixieland revival music, played by blazered white men in the Vieux Carre and it is by and large unrewarding. But there is at least one venue worthy of note: Preservation Hall was established in the 1960’s to conserve the values of authentic jazz. It remains defiantly shabby and uncomfortable, without air conditioning or catering. When I first went there in the early 1980’s I heard musicians¾trombonist Preston Jackson, pianist Sweet Emma Barrett¾who made it possible to imagine the great days of King Oliver, Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet. But it is sobering to reflect that now, the second generation of Preservation Hall musicians has almost entirely died out.
New Orleans became a jazz backwater almost as soon as it had given spectacular birth to the new music. The enforced closure of Storyville, the lubricious red light district where many jazzmen played, and the decimation of the cotton crop by the Boll Weevil pest meant that by 1918 musicians were heading north in droves. Chicago was the magnet. In fact the first important recordings of New Orleans jazz were not put down until the cornetist King Joe Oliver settled in the windy city on the shores of Lake Michigan and called up the young Louis Armstrong to join him as second cornet. Oliver was so homesick he wrote asking his wife for the recipe of his favourite New Orleans dish, Red Beans and Rice.
Chicago was a city where raw capitalism was in full swing. The stockyards groaned with food from the Midwest and skyscrapers were going up on the lakeshore. The city swarmed with immigrants from Germany: it was like something out of Fritz Laing’s movie Metropolis. The Prohibition meant that the entertainment business was controlled by gangsters and jazz musicians, along with their managers, and had to live with that. Some got too close to the Mob, like Armstrong’s manager Johnny Collins. He worked Satchmo mercilessly, forcing him to play with split and bleeding lips. Eventually Armstrong, who was loyal to a fault, fired Collins, displaying a rare outburst of anger as he did so. But Chicago was much more than a home from home for New Orleans exiles. A unique jazz style developed in the city that echoed its character. The big bands of Basie and Goodman with their glittering brass and choirs of reeds were propelled by an infectious swing that seemed to draw its energy from the unbridled wealth creating ferment on the streets. These days Chicago boasts one of the finest clubs in the USA. The London House attracts leading musicians from all over the world and its residences are long enough to make them feel comfortable and produce a significant body of work. Around the time musicians were leaving New Orleans, New York was experiencing a remarkable cultural awakening. The Harlem Renaissance saw a heartening ferment of black culture. Poets, novelists and social theorists rubbed shoulders with singers and musicians. Harlem was to become a synonym for urban horror but in the 1920’s it was a mixed area of fine brownstone houses and wide avenues, with a thriving black bourgeoisie. Today the wheel has turned full circle and Harlem is being discreetly gentrified once again. The jazzman who best captured the high days of Harlem life was the Washingtonian Duke Ellington with his compositions Take the A Train and Harlem Airshaft. But it is worth remembering that when Duke played his legendary Jungle Music at Harlem’s Cotton Club it was to a ‘whites only’ audience.
When Harlem life unravelled in the 1940’s a new more edgy jazz emerged in Midtown Manhattan. 52nd Street became the axis of the Bebop revolution led by saxophonist Charlie Parker and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. They severed jazz from its dancing roots with their fierce rhythms and complex harmonies. Parker was a self-conscious modern artist and audiences in his club Birdland were often ritually humiliated by the mercurial altoist. This modernist glamour was not lost on a fading star of the Swing era, tenor saxophonist Lester Young. He lived in a room in the Alvin Hotel a few blocks away and drank frightening cocktails of gin and sherry, while he looked down on Birdland and brooded about his fate.
The Alvin Hotel is gone and 52nd Street has retreated into discreet anonymity.
Parker died in 1955 and the New York jazz scene migrated south to Greenwich Village, the attractive low-rise area of Manhattan south of the financial district. In the late decades of the 20th century, Modern jazz was the musical embodiment of the alternative, optimistic culture that flourished there. Fabled residencies at the Village Gate are still spoken of in hushed tones: John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Keith Jarrett. Today though, avant garde jazz has given way to the unforgiving chant of Hip-Hop. And the Village Gate is only a few blocks north of Ground Zero.
David Perry is author of Jazz Greats published by Phaidon Press
Jazz is America’s music, born of a million American negotiations: between having and not having; between black and white; between the old Africa and the old Europe and between the country and the city. And as the great cities of America grew, it was jazz music that provided a vivid soundtrack to accompany their burgeoning…