The Jazz Age

The Video/Audio below is an excerpt from the 6th show of my radio series Voices and Freedoms: A History of Jazz, based on my 1976 book of the same name.  This show is about the so-called Jazz Age, which ran roughly from 1919 to 1929. The 16-part series played across the nation for five years in the late 70’s/early 80’ and holds its relevance—or is even more so—today than it was back then. The excerpts present about 6 to 10 minutes of the original 30-minute broadcasts. The link above takes you to information about the book and our plans to re-release it and provide access to the full-length original shows. Go HERE for a complete list of shows and links to all excerpts.

 

Leon Bismark “Bix” Beiderbecke

The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald defined the so-called Jazz Age as starting roughly with the May Day Riots of 1919 and ending with the great Stock Market Crash of 1929.  The Roaring 20’s, the Age of Flappers, and excess, and a nation reeling from the carnage of WWI and fearful of another World War. So many writers of the time were saying the West was in trouble. Fitzgerald told us that Jay Gatsby’s extravagance was founded “on a fairy’s wing,” and as jazz finally truly entered into the American mainstream it did so partly because white imitators once again stole another product of Black Americans.  In many instances jazz was watered down so much that it, too, seemed founded only on a fairy’s wing.

The Victor Recording Company did offer its first jazz recording to a Black man, Freddy Keppard, but Keppard refused, fearing—rightly, though in an impractical move—that records would make his music easier to steal.  The first jazz recording contract, then, went to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, though there was little “original” to the band. They were neither as good, or as bad, as some have made them out to be, but fell far short of representing the fullness of jazz.  They pretended to be unschooled and free, but improvised little, if at all. “I don’t know how many pianists we tried,” said coronetist Nick LaRocca, “until we found one who couldn’t read music.” The public went wild and the ODJB’s posturing was one of the forces that started a vogue for “The Negro,” a vogue which saw Blacks as uninhibited, primitive, unschooled…but entertaining.  It was fashionable to have “A Negro” at your parties, or to go up to Harlem to all-white clubs to be entertained by all-black bands.  Even so elegant a personage as Duke Ellington couldn’t break that stereotype.  And while Nick LaRocca and the ODJB gave hardly gave Blacks any credit at all, a much better white jazz band, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, did. They knew where the music came from and respected that fact.

Joe “King” Oliver

There were other important white bands, like Chicago’s Austin High Gang, who got their first serious taste of jazz from the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, and some white great musicians who appeared: Eddie Condon, Frankie Trumbauer, Gene Krupa, Jimmie McPartland, Red Nichols…. The radiant center, the star of this group had to be Bix Beiderbecke.  I just couldn’t find a good place in the original show to start smoothly talking about Bix, so there’s a kind of confusing jump in the excerpt below.  Suddenly I start to talk about what Louis Armstrong said when he first heard Bix. He said, “There’s a man as serious about music as I am.”  He lacked Armstrong’s bold tone and improvisational flourish.  His style was more laid back.  He was less of a virtuoso but had a beautiful tone and wonderful lyric sense.  The great Lester Young carried a copy of Frankie Trumbauer’s “Singing the Blues” in his sax case, in large part because of Trumbauer’s and Bix’s solos.  Beyond his music, Bix’s life came to symbolize the costs of the 1920’s lifestyle. In poor health, an alcoholic, he died in August 1931 at the age of 29.

The first Black man to record jazz was Joe “King” Oliver, though he was an older man when he first recorded and so we catch only a glimpse of the genius that made him so important to jazz. Not only was he a great musician, he was Louis Armstrong’s mentor, and he played a lead role in the great Northern migration of Blacks when he headed to Chicago.

Gertrude “Ma” Rainey

The excerpt below ends with a nod to Blues singers, all women. Mamie Smith was the first to make a Blues record, an act which started the whole, massive enterprise of Race Records. There was also Bessie Smith, and we end with a moment from Bessie’s mentor, Ma Rainey. Not until Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman” in 1956 would a “Race Record” cross over into the general American public.  In the 20’s jazz entered the American musical mainstream, but the races and their cultures were still so separate. As Black American soldiers returned from World War I, they too remained largely segregated. Everyone was traumatized by the Great War, but that trauma wasn’t enough to break down racial barriers and injustices.

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Regression or Revival?

The Video/Audio below is an excerpt from the 12th show of my radio series Voices and Freedoms: A History of Jazz, based on my 1976 book of the same name.  The 16-part series played across the nation for five years in the late 70’s/early 80’ and holds its relevance—or is even more so—today than it was back then. The excerpts present about 6 to 10 minutes of the original 30-minute broadcasts. The link above takes you to information about the book and our plans to re-release it and provide access to the full-length original shows. Go HERE for a complete list of shows and links to all excerpts.

 

Julian “Cannonball” Adderley

Cool Jazz’s laid back style and muted sonorities took over jazz in the early 50’s…but not for long, though its popularity does last even to this day.  The 12th show in the Voices and Freedoms radio series shows that as Cool Jazz reached its peak of popularity a counter-movement was already taking shape in the form of Hard Bop, Soul Jazz, and Funk Jazz. These brought back a more vigorous, edgy voice to jazz, much of it coming from musicians reaching back into to jazz history even past Louis Armstrong and into blues and, a surprise to some, the music and preaching of the Black church.

While Cool Jazz’s popularity spread quickly, especially among whites, you just have to remember some of the titanic shifts happening in the black community, shifts which couldn’t help but influence the music.  There was, for one thing, the full flown beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement, plus the beginnings of legal change, in particular the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision.  The excerpt below speaks of these changes and of musicians leading another musical revolution: Sonny Rollins and Clifford Brown, Horace Silver and Art Blakey, Charles Mingus, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley.  And I spend some time talking about one of the most important figures in my life, Ray Charles, whose effect on Hard Bop and Soul Jazz has often been underestimated.  The show also features a poem composed and read by Julian Bond, whom I had the privilege of meeting several times. We were both huge Ray Charles fans.

Charles Mingus

But at the time many of the so-called Black Bourgeoisie were not. In fact, they were wary of Charles, whom many saw as a dangerous blues shouter, a throwback to an unsophisticated Black past they were wary of acknowledging.  They saw the move to Hard Bop and Soul as a regression rather than a musical revival. Amiri Baraka and many other Black writers often castigated this Bourgeoisie, this Black middleclass that had supposedly made it, for turning their backs on their own culture in favor of assimilating into whiteness and white society, including Cool Jazz and related movements (like Third Stream Jazz) which sought—in the name of a higher class, more sophisticated music—a way of escape from the blackness from which they came.  James Baldwin would call this “the price of the ticket,” the price of entrance into acceptable, white society. The cost, he said, was nothing less than the annulment of your own identity.  But the currents flowing throughout this American musical and social sea change were complex. Some proponents of Soul Jazz saw in it merely an escape into good times, and while the Black church ultimately fueled so much of the Civil Rights Movement, we must remember that all of it didn’t initially support that Movement, counseling the gradualist, go-slow approach adopted by so many white churches.

Since Ray Charles figures so prominently in this Voices and Freedoms episode, check out my five-part Video Lecture Series called “Me and Brother Ray,” which focuses on his life and work.
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Climbing Bryan’s Mountain, 2022

I hadn’t been up on Bryan’s Mountain (Bell Rock) since June 14, 2020, something I explained in my 2021 entry in this series called “Climbing Bryan’s Mountain.”  There had been our pandemic, then a year of extreme fire danger, but now on Thanksgiving Day 2022, over 2 years and 5 months later, I was back, this time with 12 others.  It was our Thanksgiving reunion in Sedona, AZ, with Rick’s family, Aaron’s, and Daniel’s. The picture above is of me and Linda with the five Guzman grandchildren: from left, Grace, Josie, Micah, with Adderly and Julian, the youngest ones, in front.  Because of being in a wheelchair, Kari had to stay a level below, but 12 of us made it up to Bryan’s Tree. The picture below shows (from left) Linda, me, Grace, Aaron, Micah, Rick, Josie, Desiree, Daniel, Julian, Tara, and Adderly—a string of names representing the most precious parts of my world.

I wondered whether Bryan’s Tree would be alive at all, given the extreme drought of 2021 which took down hundreds of thousands of trees. But there it was, looking more bedraggled than I remembered, but still vital. This time, too, as the pictures show it held another surprise: the large yucca in front, which had always given it such a unique look, had sprouted, sending its century plant stalk way up in the air.  So the plant will eventually wither completely away, giving the whole complex of plants around Bryan’s Tree a wholly different look.  Change. Always change.  As it will be for each of us who showed up for this reunion.

We had a great time, even an “epic time,” a phrase I kept hearing during our week together.  “That’s an epic shot,” I’d hear of a picture, or an “epic scene,” I’d hear when the grandkids got to dancing or singing together.  Our time, though, was shadowed by sickness, as Grace, our 11-year-old granddaughter, had come to Sedona sick and couldn’t fully participate in many things. Then her Dad, Aaron, got sick, so much so that I canceled my flight back to Illinois, sent Linda back lugging our two big suitcases herself, and drove them the 400 miles back to their Riverside, CA, home.  I caught their germs too. As I write I’m still dragging, just coming out of coughing and blowing my nose all the time, which is way better than Aaron’s fate. He wound up in a Riverside ER twice, though the second time asked to be picked up to avoid the 6-hour wait.  When I left he was barely coherent.  Now his wife Kari is going through a version of their sicknesses.  Back here in Illinois, Josie, Rick and Desiree’s daughter, is a little under the weather, but not too bad, while Julian, Dan and Tara’s son, seems a little puny but also not too bad.  All in all, it was a fairly good escape from illness.

And the time was more than worth it. A few times in the entries I’ve posted in “Climbing Bryan’s Mountain,” I’ve spoken of wanting to climb the mountain up to his tree with all the grandkids. Liam and Maddy, on Linda’s side of the family, had already been, as had Grace, and now all seven have been there. None of the grandkids ever met their Uncle Bryan in the flesh, only in the memories their parents and grandparents share with them and each other so often.  “Would he have loved us?” Micah once asked.  Yes. It’s one of the biggest things they will have missed out on in their lives, the wonderful, embracing love of Bryan Emmanuel Guzman.  Some of them carry the imprint of his name in theirs—Micah Breanne, Grace Emmanuelle, Julian Bryan—and now they’ve all stood by his tree on his mountain and looked out at the incredible beauty from there. It’s a place and a scene which has sustained me over the years. May it be so for them and all of us who gathered there Thanksgiving Day, 2022.

In 2007 Rick and Desiree started Bryan House (which became Emmanuel House, then The Neighbor Project) as a living memorial to Bryan. In 2016 Emmanuel House was named one of the “Top 100 Most Innovative” social change organizations in the world.

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