Creating Jazz Counterpoint

New Orleans, Barbershop Harmony, and the Blues

Vic Hobson

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781617039911
• eBook ISBN: 9781626740969
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música jazz

The book Jazzmen (1939) claimed New Orleans as the birthplace of jazz and introduced the legend of Buddy Bolden as the "First Man of Jazz." Much of the information that the book relied on came from a highly controversial source: Bunk Johnson. He claimed to have played with Bolden and that together they had pioneered jazz. Johnson made many recordings talking about and playing the music of the Bolden era. These recordings have been treated with skepticism because of doubts about Johnson's credibility. Using oral histories, the Jazzmen interview notes, and unpublished archive material, this book confirms that Bunk Johnson did play with Bolden. This confirmation, in turn, has profound implications for Johnson's recorded legacy in describing the music of the early years of New Orleans jazz. New Orleans jazz was different from ragtime in a number of ways. It was a music that was collectively improvised, and it carried a new tonality--the tonality of the blues. How early jazz musicians improvised together and how the blues became a part of jazz has until now been a mystery. Part of the reason New Orleans jazz developed as it did is that all the prominent jazz pioneers, including Buddy Bolden, Bunk Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Johnny Dodds, and Kid Ory, sang in barbershop (or barroom) quartets. This book describes in both historical and musical terms how the practices of quartet singing were converted to the instruments of a jazz band, and how this, in turn, produced collectively improvised, blues-inflected jazz, that unique sound of New Orleans.

1

JAZZMEN

TODAY JAZZ IS STUDIED IN UNIVERSITIES, DISCUSSED AT ACADEMIC conferences, and is the subject of musicological research. It was not always so. Early jazz researchers were not, in the main, historians or musicologists, but enthusiasts—people for whom day jobs got in the way of their real passion—collecting “hot jazz.” This was a small, dedicated band of phonograph record collectors in search of what were known at the time as “race recordings.” At the center of the American section of the loose confederation of hot jazz collectors was Frederic Ramsey Jr.¹ After graduating from Princeton in 1936, Ramsey took a job in the production office with publishers Harcourt Brace. Given his interest in jazz, when a manuscript on jazz arrived at the office, he was asked to review it. As he would later recall, “I read it carefully and wrote an editor’s report. The manuscript was miserable. … Out of ‘sheer modesty,’ I wrote in the last line ‘I could make a better book on jazz.’”² The result was a landmark in jazz publishing, Jazzmen (1939).³

The appearance of Jazzmen was timely. Jazz had been a part of mainstream American culture for more than two decades, and by the middle of the thirties was enjoying unparalleled widespread acceptance. When Jazzmen appeared in 1939, it was the first book of its kind: it presented jazz as music with a history and firmly placed New Orleans at the origin.

Despite wartime restrictions, a U.S. Army and Navy edition for circulation among service personnel overseas appeared in 1945. After the war, overseas editions began to appear. The French edition in 1947 was “the first American book on jazz translated into a foreign language.”⁴ Sedgwick and Jackson produced an edition to satisfy the demands of the New Orleans revivalists in Britain in 1958; back in the States, Harcourt-Brace were preparing a “Giant Edition” for inclusion in their Harvest Book Series.

In retrospect, Jazzmen’s strength was also its weakness: it relied heavily on oral testimony of the jazzmen themselves. Because it had been published within a very short period and with a severely limited budget, there was very little time or opportunity to check the information for accuracy. The greatest weakness, many would argue, was that it relied heavily on the recollections of the cornet player Bunk Johnson. Johnson had been located working on a rice farm in New Iberia and claimed to have firsthand knowledge of the early years of jazz. As Johnson increasingly became promoted as a figurehead of the traditional jazz revival, he and his testimony came under scrutiny. Historically, much that he said simply did not seem credible. He claimed he and Buddy Bolden had started jazz in New Orleans. But there was just a single photograph of Bolden and his band, and Johnson was not in the photograph. Even if he had been in the Bolden band, there was nothing that proved Bolden had any significant role in the making of early jazz. Critics would also come to question when Johnson was born. Even by his own testimony he was still in short pants when Bolden was musically active.

A second weakness that is perhaps less obvious is that Jazzmen did not identify its informants. Although a good number of interviews were conducted for the book, in most cases it is not possible to know who said what. As the credibility of Bunk Johnson became increasingly questioned, it was also assumed that much of the more doubtful information came from Bunk. This, it turns out, was by no means always the case. The only way to test this would have been to have access to the original interview notes, and a full set of these notes has only recently become publicly available.⁵

While Jazzmen was widely read and commented on, a book on New Orleans jazz by a Belgian lawyer, Robert Goffin, has received far less attention. Goffin visited New Orleans in 1944 and employed similar methods to the Jazzmen authors: he interviewed local jazzmen. Goffin’s book, La Nouvelle-Orléans Capital du Jazz, appeared in 1946 and has never been published in English. A rough translation provides a fascinating insight into the development of New Orleans jazz. It would be a further decade before the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University would begin collecting interviews with local jazz musicians. By this time, a number of musicians who had played with Bolden, and who Goffin interviewed, had already died.

Fred Ramsey died in 1995, and his personal archive was acquired by the Historic New Orleans Collection. In 2009, I was fortunate to receive a Woest Fellowship to the HNOC to research the papers of Ramsey. These papers included the interview notes from Jazzmen. This was informative because these notes show that some of the claims that have been attributed to Bunk Johnson did not originate with him, but rather with Willy Cornish, Bolden’s trombonist.⁶ It was Cornish who provided Jazzmen with the photograph of Bolden and his band. Cornish is in this photograph, and clearly had an unrivaled knowledge of the role Bolden played in the early years of jazz. Significantly, Cornish confirmed that Bunk Johnson had played with the Bolden band. This, in turn, fundamentally affects the credibility of Bunk Johnson’s recollections regarding Bolden. This is not only of historical interest. Bunk Johnson made a considerable number of recordings recreating the music of the Bolden era. These recordings have been largely treated with skepticism by musicologists. In the knowledge that Johnson did play with Bolden, these recordings assume new significance.

Wilder Hobson (who contributed to Jazzmen) also published American Jazz Music in 1939. An issue he raised in the book is still unresolved: how did jazz counterpoint function? By the time New Orleans musicians began to record after World War I, a recognizable New Orleans style of jazz had developed. This was a largely improvised, polyphonic music, rooted in the tonality of the blues. However, as Wilder Hobson notes in American Jazz Music, the idea of jazz counterpoint “has often appalled academic musicians, who have said that it was impossible, or at least that the musical results would be impossible.”⁷ The question this raises is how could a group of musicians apparently improvise simultaneously and produce music of consistent harmonic and melodic relations? Retrospectively, as many revival recordings testify, it is quite possible to reproduce New Orleans style jazz, but it is quite another thing to do this with a novel repertoire. We can, of course, using conventional music theory analyze what New Orleans jazz musicians played. What we have been unable to do (so far) is to describe why they played as they did. Given the significance of jazz in the music making of the twentieth century, this is of some importance.

Central to the argument made in this book is that jazz counterpoint is the application of the principles of African American four-part singing (commonly called barbershop) to the instrumentation of a jazz band. The historical case for the African American origins of barbershop harmony has already been established by Lynn Abbott in his groundbreaking essay “Play That Barber Shop Chord.”⁸ Abbott’s paper is essentially historical rather than musicological. It has long been recognized that the tonality of the blues is an essential element in jazz. This book expands on Abbott’s research to show how barbershop quartet practices relate to the tonality of the blues and how this, in turn, relates to the polyphony of New Orleans jazz. Critical to this argument is an understanding of barbershop cadences. Sigmund Spaeth produced two books on Barber Shop Ballads, the first in 1925 and a revised edition in 1940.⁹ Both books provide extensive analysis of barbershop cadences and the vocal practices that underpinned them. He did not, however, provide any harmonic analysis in terms of chord symbols. I have added these to enable comparison with sheet music and transcriptions.

An understanding of the nature and principles that underpin New Orleans jazz also makes it possible to engage with some of the outstanding issues in early jazz. Was New Orleans the unique birthplace of jazz? Was New Orleans style only played in New Orleans? Did the same musical practices develop among African Americans, Creoles, and white New Orleans musicians, and what light does this shed on the racial origins of jazz? It may never be possible to answer these questions with certainty, but an understanding of how and why New Orleans jazz counterpoint developed may make it possible to form a reasoned judgment and suggest further lines of investigation.

2

THE BOLDEN LEGEND

THE LEGEND OF BUDDY BOLDEN DID NOT BEGIN WITH THE PUBLICA-tion of Jazzmen. In 1933, African American journalist E. Belfield Spriggins first described the role that Bolden played in the early years of jazz. Donald Marquis in 1971 discovered back copies of these articles in the Louisiana Weekly. A search of the telephone directories established that Spriggins was still alive. Unfortunately, in 1965 Hurricane Betsy had destroyed Spriggins’s personal archive, and the experience of losing his life’s work had rendered him speechless. He never did recover and died in 1973.¹

In 1933, Spriggins wrote: “For quite some years now there has been an unusual amount of discussion concerning the popular form of music popularly called ‘jazz.’ The name followed the old name ‘rag time’ which was a more or less modified form of jazz. Seemingly, New Orleans has been either too modest to enter the discussion or entirely disinterested in the matter.”² Today we assume that New Orleans had a particular and significant role in the early years of jazz. However, when jazz became a national craze the New Orleans Times-Picayune of June 20, 1918, stated the position of the paper. Since it had been suggested, “this particular form of musical vice had its birth in this city, … we do not recognize the honor of parenthood, but with such a story in circulation, it behooves us to be the last to accept the atrocity in polite society.”³ Spriggins’s articles made clear that, more than a decade later, New Orleans polite society had little interest in exploring the question further.

These articles contain the first known reference to Buddy Bolden as an important figure in the early years of jazz. Spriggins interviewed Willy Cornish, Bolden’s trombone player, who told him about Bolden.

Many years ago jazz tunes in their original form were heard in the Crescent City. Probably one of the earliest heard was one played by King Bolden’s Band. It seems that one night while playing at Odd Fellows Hall, Perdido near Rampart St., it became very hot and stuffy in the place and a discussion arose among the members of Bolden’s band about the foul air. The next day William Cornish, the trombonist with the band, composed a “tune” to be played by the band. The real words are unprintable but these will answer.

“Thought I heard old Bolden say

Rotten gut Rotten gut!

Take it away.”

The rendition of this number became an overnight sensation and the reputation of Bolden’s band became a household word with the patrons of the Odd Fellows Hall, Lincoln and Johnson Parks, and several other popular dance halls around the city.⁴

When six years later the Jazzmen authors began their work, Charles Edward Smith also located Cornish living at 2024 Perdido Street. Cornish gave his date of birth as August 1, 1874. He told Smith that he was the only member of Bolden’s “original” band still alive.⁵

Cornish had a photograph of Bolden and his band that included Cornish in the lineup. For nearly seventy years the photograph that he loaned to Charles Edward Smith (it was not returned, and the whereabouts of the original is unknown) has intrigued jazz scholars. Which way around should it be? As printed in Jazzmen it appeared with Jimmy Johnson (the bass player) on the left.⁶ This did not appear to be correct; in a New Orleans band, the bass player is traditionally on the right. Al Rose and Edmond Souchon in New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album decided to reverse the image to correct this apparent mistake.⁷ The paradox now was that Johnson, on bass, and the guitarist, Brock Mumford, were playing left-handed. That did not seem correct either; they were not left-handed players. Alden Ashford cleared up some of the mystery through reasoning that clarinets are not made symmetrically. Looked at from the front, the keys depressed by the player’s little fingers appear on different sides and at different heights. This is not reversible. Despite the poor quality of the image, the photograph, as it first appeared in Jazzmen, was a reversed image. Rose and Souchon were correct and Johnson on bass should have been on the right. It therefore followed that Johnson and Mumford were posing left-handed for some inexplicable reason.⁸ Charles Edward Smith’s interview notes from his interview with Willy Cornish suggest a reason for this. Cornish had shown Smith the photograph and identified the members of the band: “The photo line-up: left to right. Jimmy Johnson, bass; Bubby Bolden [sic], cornet; Jeff Mumford, guitar (sitting); Willy Cornish, key trombone; Frank Lewis, b clarinet, sitting; Willy Warner, C clarinet, standing.”⁹

Figure 1: Tintype photograph of a guitarist circa 1890s

Evidently, the photograph, as it first appeared in Jazzmen, was as it was when Cornish first showed it to Charles Edward Smith, with Johnson on the left. It follows that since this was a reverse image, the photographic process itself was responsible for the reversal. The most likely explanation is that the Bolden band photograph was a “tintype”:¹⁰ a photograph made directly onto a plate of metal (not actually tin), coated with a layer of light sensitive chemicals. In this process, there is no negative and the image appears reversed. An example of this proc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Jazzmen
• 2. The Bolden Legend
• 3. Just Bunk?
• 4. Cracking-Up A Chord
• 5. Bill Russell’s American Music
• 6. The “Creoles of Color”
• 7. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band
• 8. New Orleans: Capital of Jazz
• 9. The Blues And New Orleans Jazz
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index