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4 A Brief History of Jazz in America A s befits a type of music as iconoclastic as jazz, just about everything one can say about it—from its origins to its very definition—is a subject of controversy. To some, jazz and improvisation are synonymous and you can’t have one without the other, while to those who disagree, the written arrangements of Duke Ellington or Fletcher Henderson—to name but two outstanding practitioners—are perfectly valid examples of the genre. Claims are made in some quarters that the basic rhythms and stylistic innovations of jazz are traceable to Africa, while in other corners of scholarship these elements are said to have developed exclusively on American soil as much from European compositional traditions as from those of Africa. While it would be presumptuous to support one side or another, it is illuminating to examine some of the theories. There is no better place to find these various hypotheses espoused than the highly respected Oxford Companion to Jazz, in which different authorities are granted space to present their views. Bill Kirchner, the editor of this 852-page tome, prefaces his introduction with two tantalizing quotes, the first from saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter, the second from Bill Evans, pianist and composer: “The word ‘jazz’ means to me ‘no category, ’” and “Jazz is not a ‘what,’ it is a ‘how,’ and if you do things according to the ‘how’ of jazz, it’s jazz.” (The latter sounds like the flip side of “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing!”) These all-embracing definitions andothersfoundinKirchner’sintroduction(“amusicofhealthydefiance”; “a melting pot of influences and techniques”)1 seem to negate the necessity for improvisation—or anything else, for that matter—as a criterion for inclusion in the jazz canon; they may, in fact, make the very idea of a jazz canon meaningless. Nevertheless, there are great jazz players and great jazz compositions, and a general agreement on who and what they are. One point on which all scholars seem to agree is that the earliest center of jazz activity was New Orleans, that most cosmopolitan and musical of American cities. In the late nineteenth century New Orleans boasted three A Brief History of Jazz in America 35 opera houses and two symphony orchestras, a plethora of marching bands, innumerable church choirs, and countless individual street musicians. Until 1803, when President Jefferson negotiated the controversial Louisiana Purchase, giving an overextended Napoleon I $15,000,000 in exchange for the first and biggest single tract of land ever bought by the rapidly expanding United States, the enormous Louisiana territory had belonged to France. Before the French took over, Spain ruled the area, and throughout its history there had been immigration from the Caribbean as well as Europe. Whites of European origin mingled with native blacks far more in New Orleans than in other Southern American cities, so the area’s population contained a wide assortment of groups, from the poorest slaves and newly freed blacks to upper-middle-class black Creoles, from aristocratic plantation owners to poor white sharecroppers. The class and color fluidity resulting from the relative—and it was only relative—absence of racial rigidity make it difficult to sort out the origins of anything native to New Orleans, most particularly its jazz. Most often debated is the extent to which the earliest New Orleans jazz musicians, who were mostly—but not exclusively—black, were influenced by African traditions. To support the Eurocentric arguments, ethnomusicologists cite the undeniable fact that early jazz was invariably tonal, that is, reliant on the Western European tonic-dominant harmonic system. Furthermore, as the French Impressionist composers made the augmented chord and the whole-tone scale vital components of Western classical music, jazz musicians followed suit. In addition, the Classical format of two-bar phrases “answered” by other two-bar phrases was also the norm in jazz. This was exploited so successfully by Haydn, Mozart, and the other Viennese masters that deviations from it were used for special effects and recognized as out of the ordinary. In sum, says William Youngren, author of the article in The Oxford Companion to Jazz entitled “European Roots of Jazz,” “The various interrelated elements of early jazz—harmony, melody, rhythm and form—are very similar to that of late 18th century music and are in fact derived more or less directly from them by way of the American popular song literature.”2 Youngren also notes that music...

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