Jump for Joy: Jazz, Basketball, and Black Culture in 1930s America

Chapter 5 - The Joint Is Jumping

⢇CHAPTER 5 : THE JOINT IS JUMPING The new social dances of the 1920s led to a nationwide demand for dancing and dance music. Bands that had previously specialized in ragtime or country-fiddle dance music, in brass band music, or even in supplying music for minstrel or carnival shows began to include jazz in their repertoire. Traveling territory bands brought dance music to small towns but also provided jobs and experience to young musicians and served as nomadic conservatories, where musicians could develop skills in playing, arranging, and in the business of music. In The Swing Era, Schuller asserts that “virtually all jazz orchestras were at one time territory orchestras, at least of territory origin.”1 Many of the orchestras that contributed to a national swing style began as regional bands with highly individual styles. Schuller reminds us that Jimmie Lunceford began in Nashville and Memphis with a group called the Chickasaw Syncopators, Chick Webb came from Baltimore, Duke Ellington from Washington. And the Count Basie Orchestra, of course, operated out of Kansas City. During the first wave of urban blues, from 1925 to 1942, big bands of eight pieces and larger toured the South and Southwest playing the blues in arranged form. Schuller describes traveling bluesmen from Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma who were among the best-known and most influential of all blues musicians, particularly in the Southwest, where blues somehow broke through social and economic barriers into a middle-class and urban world: “Southwestern orchestras quickly adopted the form and used it more consistently than bands anywhere else . . . out of this earthier, deeper feeling in the music developed a way of playing jazz which was eventually to supercede the New Orleans, Chicago, and New York styles.”2 In recordings from these years, Schuller says, there is “a spirit and musical feeling which was at once radically new and thoroughly indigenous to the Southwest. The difference is clearly the blues.”3 In addition to the blues tradition, the Southwest bands drew heavily from the rocking boogie-woogie piano style that Schuller says was “spreading like wildfire throughout the Southwest.”4 Jesse Stone’s Blues Serenaders, the T H E J O I N T I S J U M P I N G 69 Dallas-based Alphonse Trent band, Walter Page’s Oklahoma City Blue Devils, and the bands of Terrence Holder, Andy Kirk, George Lee, San Antonio’s Troy Floyd, and Oliver Cobb flourished and competed for audiences (often in faceto -face confrontations) in an area reaching as far north as Chicago, west to Denver, east to Memphis, and as far south as San Antonio. Strategically placed in the middle of this landscape, Kansas City became a mecca for such bands, because its political boss, Tom Pendergast, maintained a wide-open entertainment district that defied the laws of Prohibition. Musicians who played the clubs and casinos of Kansas City from the late 1920s until Pendergast’s death in 1938 fused jazz and blues styles so tightly that few distinguished between them. One of the strongest of these bands was that of Bennie Moten, whose pianist, Count Basie, had been stolen from Walter Page in 1929, after a battle with Page’s band. With a recording contract from Victor, Moten acquired a national reputation and became the undisputed ruler of the “territory” bands, although the group had to fight to stay on top: one battle in 1931 involved no fewer than six different bands.5 Moten’s band, according to Schuller, accomplished a “rhythmic revolution,” completing the transition from the earlier “stiffly vertical” beat of New Orleans–style jazz to the swinging , horizontal ensemble work of the rhythm section: piano, guitar, drums, and bass.6 When Moten died in 1935, Count Basie took over. The Kansas City style of the Count Basie Orchestra marked the culmination of the Southwest blues style, but it also marked an important step in the evolution of swing. And it may very well have been the origin of the jump style that defined the high-energy music and dance that emerged in the late 1930s. Like his swing counterpart Duke Ellington, Basie was a pianist. But unlike Ellington, who composed and orchestrated lush harmonies for his featured melodic soloists, Basie let his rhythm section fuel the rest of the band. While rhythm guitarist Freddie Green and drummer Jo Jones laid down a driving rhythmic pattern, Walter Page played melodic bass lines, more often than not a “walking bass,” notes...