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Make a Joyful Noise: The Music of New Orleans |
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Tuesday, 31 January 2006 06:55 |
Make a Joyful Noise
The Music of New Orleans
By John Sinclair
Uptown New Orleans, one bright day in 1895: a brash young trumpet man in his late teens steps down the middle of Dryades Street at the head of his little brass band, swinging the tight martial melodies with a beat picked up from the Creole Wild West Mardi Gras Indian gang and coloring them in with moaning blue notes and groaning gospel inflections never before heard in this context.
Later that day, playing for picnickers at Lincoln Park, over by Carrollton Avenue, the band continued to cook up its new brand of musical gumbo for the celebrants and dancers, striking a chord deep inside them that rang back over the years and reverberated throughout their being.
This was the music they'd been waiting for during the long years of slavery and reconstruction--the sound that would carry Afro-America into the 20th century, strutting and high-stepping like never before, incorporating all the misery and pain but also bursting with hope and promise for the future.
This was the music that would come to be known as jazz, and it sounded mighty good from the very beginning.
The earliest days of jazz are shrouded in myth and legend. Ask any American with a passing interest in the music and you'll hear about the whorehouses of Storyville, the piano-playing pimps and fast-living trumpet men, how the name of the music came as a corruption of the word jism--the way jazz floated on the riverboats up the Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Louis, Davenport, Chicago and points north.
Some of these myths still need to be exploded. Jazz was not born in the whorehouses of Storyville but grew out of the Baptist churches and the street parades in Uptown New Orleans, where thousands of everyday African-American citizens regularly celebrated their tenuous existence by making a joyful noise to lift up to the skies.
The early jazz makers (with some well-noted exceptions, of course) were not pimps and ne'er-do-wells but mainly young laborers and craftsmen in or just out of their teens who aspired to the status of full-time professional musicians. They pursued their craft in every available working situation, playing the bars and dancehalls and low dives where laboring people went to entertain themselves at night and enlivening with their music the ubiquitous parades and picnics and family outings in the parks which were so much a part of daytime New Orleans before the turn of the century.
These musicians moaned the blues and ragged up the popular marches and show tunes of the day to the endless delight of the midnight dancers, but they also played dirges and spirituals for the mourners they accompanied to the cemeteries on somber weekdays or bright Saturday afternoons.
The music would be slow and solemn on the way to the church and the gravesite and then, after "cutting the body loose" in a ceremony that went all the way back to West Africa, quick and spirited and joyful as the deceased's family and friends made a noisy return to their neighborhoods to celebrate together the good times they had shared with, and the good deeds done by, the dearly departed.
What we now call jazz emerged around 1895 out of these rituals and activities of everyday life in New Orleans, its roots deeply embedded in the experience of the Black Baptists and Catholics who had preserved, each in their own way, the quintessential elements of ancestral West African musical and social organization under the cover of the European religious forms imposed during the long nightmare of enforced servitude.
Two distinct streams of African-American culture--one rural and Protestant, the other urban and Roman Catholic--began to merge in post-bellum New Orleans as a function of the steady flow of Blacks who had left the vast plantations of Mississippi and Louisiana to seek greater economic opportunity and social mobility in the Crescent City.
These ex-slaves and sons and daughters of slaves brought Baptist spirituals and the blues to the city, where these musical forms were fused with the marching music of the brass bands and the syncopated rhythms of ragtime to lay the foundation for a fresh new musical approach.
The rough Uptown musicians lacked the musical sophistication of the downtown Creoles, but they more than made up for it with their unflagging exuberance and the incredible emotive power of the back-country idioms which they introduced to their urban counterparts.
In the local entertainment world, the relatively proper Creole musicians who had been painstakingly schooled in the European instrumental tradition found themselves face to face with the funk.
Suddenly they had to deal with the raggedy blues and spirituals which were the stock in trade of the Uptown players, and they had to approach the repertoire of the ragtime band with the uninhibited enthusiasm and profound depth of feeling brought to these rude forms by their untutored rivals if they wanted to remain active as professional entertainers in the dreadful new age of strict Jim Crow segregation.
The genteel dance music of the downtown Creole bands, modeled after the French prototype, simply couldn't satisfy the earthy tastes of the Black partiers in the joints around Rampart and Perdido or further uptown.
Louis Armstrong has recalled looking through the cracks in the wall of the Union Sons Hall--better known as the Funky Butt--at age 5 or 6 to see what was going on inside.
"It wasn't no classyfied place, just a big ole room with a bandstand. And to a tune like 'The Bucket's Got a Hole in It' some of them chicks would get way down, shake everything, slapping themselves on the cheek of their behind. Yeah!"
For the better part of the ten years between 1897 and 1907, Funky Butt Hall served as home base for the first acknowledged jazz outfit to emerge out of the rich cultural matrix of uptown New Orleans, cornetist Buddy Bolden's high-flying Eagle Band.
Six largely self-taught musicians who picked up their melodies by ear, transformed them through substitutions and improvisations, drove them with the syncopated rhythms of ragtime and the street, and peppered them with the rattiest, funkiest, nastiest renditions of the blues ever heard, the Buddy Bolden band gave America the music that would dominate its consciousness for the next 100 years.
"Let me tell you one thing: Jazz, that's a name the white people have given to the music... When I tell you ragtime, you can feel it, there's a spirit right in the word. It comes out of the Negro spirituals, out of [the slave's] way of singing, out of his rhythm. But Jazz--Jazz could mean any damn' thing: high times, screwing, ballroom. It used to be spelled Jass, which was screwing. But when you say ragtime, you're saying the music."
--Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle
They didn't call it "jazz" in New Orleans until some years later--it was known simply as ragtime, "ratty" or "raggedy" music until around 1915, when a white band from the Crescent City was billed as Tom Brown's Dixieland Jass Band for their opening at Lamb's Cafe in Chicago--but people responded to this new sound like nothing they'd ever heard before, and Bolden's influence began to spread throughout the musical community until it had inspired a whole generation of young musicians to embrace its syncopated rhythms and blue tonalities, its dazzling instrumental virtuosity and endless melodic invention as an inescapable way of life.
Buddy Bolden, "First Man of Jazz," by all available evidence devised a method of making music which drew upon the deepest wellsprings of African-American culture for its basic structure and technique, with little regard for the established conventions of European music and its American offshoots.
"Buddy Bolden cause these younger Creoles, men like [Sidney] Bechet and [Freddie] Keppard, to have a different style from old heads like [Lorenzo] Tio and [Manny] Perez," ancient jazzman Paul Dominguez told a researcher in the 1940s.
"He'd take one note and put two or three to it. He began to teach them--not by the [written] music--just by the head," fellow veteran Wallace Collins added. "They had lots of band fellows could play like that after Bolden gave 'em the idea."
Bolden, born in 1877 to an uptown Baptist family, turned 18 in 1895; he represented perfectly the new generation of people of color who knew nothing of slavery and were bent upon making a place for themselves in the modern world which could be shaped by their own individuality.
As a young musician closely in touch with his time, Buddy Bolden forged a synthesis which incorporated the instrumentation and repertoire of the Black brass bands, the rhythms and attitude of the Mardi Gras Indians, the funky blues and soulful spirituals he'd heard all his life, the sophistication and drive characteristic of ragtime, and the popular dance material played by the smooth downtown society bands at parties and outings.
Buddy Bolden put it all together and came out swinging so hard he knocked the entire musical community for a loop. His band set a new standard for popularity and impelled all others to investigate his conception in order to try to meet the mark this dynamic organization had notched in the public imagination.
Soon there were bands playing the blues all over town, but Bolden continued to rule as the musical 'King' of New Orleans until 1907, when he suffered a mental breakdown and was institutionalized at the state mental hospital in Jackson, Lousiana for the rest of his life.
Buddy Bolden set the pace, and all New Orleans followed close behind. Upon his disappearance from the scene a succession of brilliant trumpet players took up the crown and moved on to carry the new sound around the country.
Others, like Chris Kelly and Henry 'Kid' Rena, stayed in New Orleans to maintain the intimate relationship between the music and the life of the community that had given birth to it. But once the music was heard in Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Chicago and New York, the Crescent City could no longer lay exclusive claim to the sound of jazz.
Designed for the dance-floor, inspired by the good-time music fashioned for street parades and picnics and back-room parties, informed by the haunting harmonic and structural conventions furnished by backwoods bluesmen, spiritual singers and country preachers, shaped by the formal intricacies wrought by the composers of marches and the ragtime pianists, jazz spread quickly throughout The City That Care Forgot and then headed west, north, and east to transform American popular music for all time.
When Joe Oliver boarded the train for Chicago in 1918, a teen-aged Louis Armstrong was there at the station, looking wistfully down the tracks as his idol pulled out of New Orleans for good.
It would be four more years until Oliver sent back for Louis to join him in what had become Chicago's hottest ensemble. But when he finally moved on, he would complete the conquest of the world by the musicians of New Orleans and lead the music into its next stage: the age of the virtuoso soloist.
--New Orleans
Summer 1993
(c) 1993, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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