Jazz

A Beginner's Guide

Stuart Nicholson

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781780749990
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica jazz

This definitive guide includes a unique chapter-by-chapter playlist for the reader. Jazz: A Beginner's Guide is a lively and highly accessible introduction to a global musical phenomenon. Award-winning music journalist and author Stuart Nicholson takes the reader on an entertaining journey from jazz's early stirrings in America's south through to the present day, when almost every country in the world has its own vibrant jazz scene.En route we meet a host of jazz heroes past and present, from Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman and Miles Davis, to Keith Jarrett and Kamasi Washington. Each chapter is accompanied by a playlist designed to provide a stimulating and enjoyable entry point to what has been described as the most exciting art form of all.

1
Setting the Scene

What does Jazz Actually Mean?

Although jazz has been around for over a hundred years it’s never been satisfactorily defined, posing the inevitable question: ‘Well if you can’t define it, how do you know it’s jazz?’ This curious paradox dates back to the music’s origins when, in early 1917, a group of five young musicians from New Orleans calling themselves The Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded ‘Livery Stable Blues’ for the Victor Talking Machine Company, which quickly became one of its earliest million-selling recordings. Compared with other popular musical styles, jazz sounded brash, loud and abrasive, yet there was widespread interest and curiosity in this new, unruly music, its uptempo abandon coinciding with a craze for social dancing that took off immediately following the industrialized death and destruction of World War I. As R.W. S. Mendl later wrote, ‘Jazz is the product of a restless age; an age in which the fever of war is only now beginning to abate its fury; when men and women, after their efforts in the great struggle, are still too much disturbed to be content with a tranquil existence.’17

For a traumatized generation of young people who had survived the conflict and wanted to forget the past and ignore the future, jazz was more than a musical style: it was the style of the times. This was the so-called ‘Jazz Age’ of novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose Tales of the Jazz Age, a collection of eleven short stories published in 1922, gave its name to an era. Jazz music quickly became associated with youth, energy and a revolt against convention. For those with money in their pockets wanting to shake up the stifling social conventions of the time, the intersection of alcohol, jazz and dance had a liberating and dizzyingly dangerous aura.

Today Scott Fitzgerald is regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, but when he paused in 1931, after a decade of booze and partying that had only been cut short by the stock market crash of 1929, to reflect on the origins of the Jazz Age he explained that jazz music, ‘first meant sex, then dancing, then music’.18 By then, the word jazz had passed into common usage as an all-purpose adjective that was applied to almost anything from clashing colours to clothing with loud patterns. But jazz music was something else – ‘to jazz’ was to dance in a frenzied fashion, while to ‘jazz something up’ meant to give it a bit of pep and energy.

Almost a hundred years later, the word jazz invokes equally vague connotations. For most, jazz is music we take to be jazz, and although it has acquired the requisite gravitas due an important musical genre, in practice it’s an umbrella term covering a multitude of subgenres, any one of which might represent jazz in the public’s mind, which is why this book is content to go along with an open definition of jazz.

However, things are not quite such plain sailing in the land of its birth, the United States, where there’s a more rigid understanding of what jazz should be. In the 1980s, a line of reasoning was adopted by some that for jazz to be ‘jazz’, it must possess certain elements that were present when jazz was a social and cultural expression of urban black America between the turn of the twentieth century and the 1950s. It was a period when swing and a feeling for the blues were central to the music’s expressionism, and these elements were retrospectively claimed as benchmarks to define what jazz was. However, the very act of defining jazz in terms of what it used to be had the effect of narrowcasting the music and setting in train a perception among the American people that jazz was now more about the past than the present. ‘The real jazz’ was deemed to be music that touched base with the jazz from its Golden Years, and more experimental forms of the music were not considered by some to be jazz at all.

This prescriptivist view of jazz overlooked the radical processes of evolution which jazz had undergone in both a national and global context, and does not appear to acknowledge how any art form inevitably grows beyond its roots and as it does so evolves and changes. Today, for example, opera is making considerable inroads in China, a development composer and musicologist Howard Goodall reminds us ‘is likely to have an impact on opera itself within a generation or two. Each culture that has embraced it has played a part in its development and mutation.’19 No art form, not even opera – or jazz – remains pure when it goes out into the world and rubs up against the conventions of other cultures.

Thus many people might raise their eyebrows that in an age of globalization, the Internet, 4G mobile telecommunications technology and cheap air travel, some American jazz academics, ideologues and assorted camp followers argue that for jazz to be jazz it must reflect a specific Afro-American identity. This may have something to do with what Milan Kundera called ‘the parochialism of large nations’, meaning they do not look beyond their borders since all their perceived needs can be found within them, so making them surprisingly naive about what is happening in the rest of the world.20 Outside the United States jazz has taken on a life of its own, where, after a century of assimilation and emulation, a reconceptualization of the music has occurred, often with ‘local’ musicians developing ways of playing jazz that do not necessarily conform to the way jazz is played in America. This has tended to happen at a local level where American jazz has been reinterpreted, recast and transformed as part of a local cultural repertoire in a way that gives it meaning and relevance to its local community. This is hardly unique to jazz. In the world of classical music, for example, the interface between the global and the local was highlighted by a performance of the São Paolo Symphony Orchestra during London’s Henry Wood concert season of 2016, the Daily Telegraph noting, ‘[They] want to be taken seriously on the international stage, which means playing the core classics to a high standard, yet to ignore their own music would be perverse… so the São Paolo honoured both.’21 So Kabbalah, by the Brazilian composer Marlos Nobre was a combination of the global, western classical music, and the local, ‘Brazilian percussion.’ Similarly, it would be equally perverse if Brazilian jazz musicians wanted their music to sound like the product of urban Black America when they have the whole rich musical heritage of their own country to draw upon by adding elements from the samba, the bossa nova and other Brazilian rhythms into the jazz mix. Today, if we only listened to American jazz we would certainly be impoverished, yet the joy of listening to Brazilian jazz is just one example of the richness and diversity to be found in the global jazz scene. Clearly, then, jazz is many things to many people. It is, after all, an art form still in flux, still growing and developing with all the twists and surprising turns this implies, and at this point in the twenty-first century it has become a bewilderingly pluralistic music.

Using Playlists

Clearly it would take something of a Luddite – a term describing those opposed to, or slow to adopt, change in their lifestyle – to ignore the changes in how we now consume recorded music in a book such as this. So from now on, each chapter is followed by a recommended playlist and a song-by-song listening guide that’s something akin to the old album liner notes of years ago. The idea is that you have the detailed overview of the subject at hand in the body of the chapter and a more informal discussion of the music that relates to it in the listening guide. Each playlist can be easily sourced and downloaded from the Internet and either stored on your iPod or on Compact Disc. I should stress that they are not intended to be condensed ‘histories of jazz’ or, in the case of the next chapter, a condensed ‘history of the blues’. Equally, these playlists are not intended in aggregate to represent the ‘best 250’ or so jazz recordings and nor should they be construed as such. They are simply a means of illustrating each chapter in as interesting a way as possible. The whole idea is to try and avoid what is known in radio and television as the ‘tune-out factor’ by including tracks that are likely to put the listener off – jazz is, after all, something to be enjoyed rather than endured. Try and stay with the playlist for each chapter for as long as you can before moving on to build up your templates of listening experiences – with jazz it really is a case of familiarity breeding content.

2
The Blues

Recognizing the Structure

The vast majority of compositions, or songs, used in jazz have an underlying structure known as a song form which is always adhered to when the song is performed. These song forms, which vary from composition to composition, can be broken down into three broad categories – the blues, the American Popular Song (or Standard) and the original composition. Free jazz is less concerned with fixed forms, often favouring different organizing principles which we won’t concern ourselves with at this point. Recognizing a song form and knowing a bit about how they work is a very useful aid in understanding jazz, so in the next couple of chapters we’re going to look at each of the three categories, since together they cover a vast swathe of recorded jazz, and then in Chapter 4 we’ll see how this information can be used to get more out of listening to an improvised jazz solo.

You can Hear an Awful Lot Just by Listening

When we listen to music, our ears are drawn naturally towards the melody, or the words and melody if it’s a vocal performance. Some people think of the melody in ‘horizontal’ terms, meaning the twists and turns it takes as it seems to unfurl from left to right, or across the horizon. Underneath is the harmony, which is often thought of as ‘vertical’. These are blocks of notes piled one on top of another that, when sounded together, is called a chord. A succession of chords is called a chord sequence – sometimes called a chord progression, chord changes or simply the ‘changes’ – and whether these changes are simple or complex, they nevertheless give a song its sense of direction.

The chord sequence, then, is what’s going on beneath the melody of a song. One complete playing of a song’s chord sequence is known as a chorus and with every subsequent chorus, the sequence of chords is retained in precisely the same order no matter how long the song lasts. A song form, or ‘the form of a song’ or simply ‘the form’ is just a term for a container that preserves a particular sequence of chords in a particular order. For example, every time you open the container labelled ‘The Batman Theme’ – which incidentally is a 12-bar blues – you’ll find the same sequence of chords that are played in exactly the same way every time the tune is played. As the American jazz pianist Uri Cane observed, ‘I would say that for a lot of people, when they hear jazz, they’re not really hearing what the underlying structure is. Especially if they’re used to hearing songs in forms which are much more simple [than jazz]. They hear someone playing for 30 minutes and think, “What’s going on here?” But once you understand the underlying principle of what’s going on… then you start to hear what’s going on.’22 What Cane is referring to is the underlying chord sequence, and once you’ve heard a song a few times and can hum or whistle along with it and know what’s coming next, you have already grasped something of its structure or form. It’s that easy.

The Blues Form

Chances are you will have heard the blues a million times before you bought this book, since they are just as much a staple of rock and pop as they are of jazz – if you’ve heard the Elvis Presley single ‘Hound Dog’, Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’, Little Richard’s ‘Tutti Frutti’, The Rolling Stones’ ‘Little Red Rooster’, Tracy Chapman’s ‘Give Me One Reason’, ZZ Top’s ‘Tush’, Eric Clapton’s ‘Sweet Home Chicago’ or James Brown’s ‘I Got You (I Feel So Good)’, then you’ll have heard a 12-bar blues. What this chapter does is look at how jazz musicians make use of the idiom. This is better understood when you’re listening to the music. Each time you tap your foot to the rhythm, it’s a beat. Four beats equals a bar. In their most typical form the blues lasts for 12 bars and if you were to count those 12 bars it would be: 1-2-3-4, 2-2-3-4, 3-2-3-4, 4-2-3-4 and so on until 12-2-3-4, when the twelfth bar is reached and the whole sequence is repeated over and over until the end of the performance. Our brains tend to make sense out of the blues by ‘hearing’ them as 3 lots of 4 bars – but you need the music playing to hear what I mean. Here the blues lyrics help – a phrase of 4 bars is followed by a similar phrase of 4 bars and then resolved by a third 4-bar phrase. By listening to the lyrics in conjunction with the chord changes, you get a better sense of these 4-bar units. Go to the playlist that follows, and the first song by Elmore James. Keep listening to the lyrics until you can sing along with them. Note how each word is placed in relation to the blues changes being played on his guitar. Now sing the lyrics below – ‘The Beginner’s Guide Blues’23— in the style you’ve picked up from Elmore James. Then play the ‘The Sun Is Shining’ and when Elmore James starts singing, sing ‘The Beginner’s Guide Blues’ lyrics in the style of Elmore James over his vocal. You’ll soon get the hang of it, and once you do, you’ll realize that what sounds easy isn’t quite as easy as you might have first thought, and on top of that you’ll have deepened your understanding of the blues form in a way that will last you a lifetime.

Readin’ a Beginner’s Guide, gotta chapter on the blues

1 - 2 - 3 - 4, 2 - 2 - 3 - 4, 3 - 2 - 3 - 4, 4 - 2 - 3 - 4 (4 bars)

Readin’ a Beginner’s Guide, I said it’s got a chapter on the blues

5 - 2 ...