1917 Centuries of Sound
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- Music History
“The music is a matter of the ear and not of technique. None of us knows music. One carries the melody and others do what they please. Some play counter melodies, some play freak noises, and some just play. I can’t tell you how. You “got to feel” Jass. The time is syncopated. Jass I think means a jumble. We came from New Orleans by way of Chicago. In Chicago a professor told us it was “the untuneful harmony of rhythm.” I don’t know what that meant, but I guess he was right. Anyway that’s Jass.”
Eddie Edwards, trombonist in the Original Dixieland ‘Jass’ Band, who was perfectly able to read music.
“Arriving as it did just nine days after Congress voted to declare war, the sound of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s manic, energetic music would be forever linked in the American Psyche with the new atmosphere in the country”
E. Douglas Bomberger – Making Music American; 1917 and the Transformation of Culture
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In April 1889, around the time Robert Browning made the earliest existent recording of poetry, Nick LaRocca was born in New Orleans, the son of poor Italian immigrants. His childhood, youth and early adulthood span the history of Centuries of Sound so far – a few decades where we have seen vast shifts in the recording and consumption of sound, but which all seem still to be somehow ancient history from the vantage point of 2019. This is something Nick is about to change. How much credit Nick or his band, the Original Dixieland ‘Jass’ Band, should get for this is difficult to measure – his own description of the birth of jazz is not just racist, but self-evidently untrue – but whether they are viewed as innovators, opportunists or just a catalyst, the record they made on February 26th 1917 is that rare thing in life, an unambiguous dividing line between an old world and a new one.
Over these last twenty years there have been no such revolutions, only gradual movements. We first heard Ragtime emerge as a flavour to season marching band music, then in its ‘hot’ form as a (sometimes frenetic) syncopated dance music – but even at its greatest surge, it remained in essence a minority interest, as far as the music business was concerned. There was enough interest in the general public for the genre to incite a moral outrage, but apparently not enough to get record companies and musicians cashing in.
Meanwhile in New Orleans, and (perhaps) down the length of the Mississippi River, jazz (or something not dissimilar to jazz) was already being played, perhaps as early as 1900. Not a single recording exists from this era, but later accounts have it that the sound began with cornet-player Buddy Bolden, whose hot ragtime band is often credited with introducing this mix of stomping dance music and bluesy swerves. It is unlikely that Bolden’s band truly sounded much like the records here – it’s better to view them as a vital missing link in the story. Bolden suffered an episode of acute alcoholic psychosis in 1907, and was admitted to the Louisiana State Insane Asylum with a diagnosis of schizophrenia – and there he would remain for the rest of his life. His successors largely remained within New Orleans until 1914, when a mixed-race group called The Creole Band began touring the vaudeville circuit. By 1916 Brown’s Dixieland Jass Band and Stein’s Dixieland Jass Band were active and performing in Chicago, and bandleader Bert Kelly claimed to have been playing Jazz in San Francisco as early as 1914. It was one thing to be playing new music on the circuit, though – for the genre to really break through this barrier it needed to be brought into the homes of the public, who in increasing numbers owned gramophones.
Among the clutch of New Orleans “Jass” bands playing Chicago in 1916 were Stein’
“The music is a matter of the ear and not of technique. None of us knows music. One carries the melody and others do what they please. Some play counter melodies, some play freak noises, and some just play. I can’t tell you how. You “got to feel” Jass. The time is syncopated. Jass I think means a jumble. We came from New Orleans by way of Chicago. In Chicago a professor told us it was “the untuneful harmony of rhythm.” I don’t know what that meant, but I guess he was right. Anyway that’s Jass.”
Eddie Edwards, trombonist in the Original Dixieland ‘Jass’ Band, who was perfectly able to read music.
“Arriving as it did just nine days after Congress voted to declare war, the sound of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s manic, energetic music would be forever linked in the American Psyche with the new atmosphere in the country”
E. Douglas Bomberger – Making Music American; 1917 and the Transformation of Culture
MP3 direct download | Itunes | Mixcloud | Feedburner (RSS)
In April 1889, around the time Robert Browning made the earliest existent recording of poetry, Nick LaRocca was born in New Orleans, the son of poor Italian immigrants. His childhood, youth and early adulthood span the history of Centuries of Sound so far – a few decades where we have seen vast shifts in the recording and consumption of sound, but which all seem still to be somehow ancient history from the vantage point of 2019. This is something Nick is about to change. How much credit Nick or his band, the Original Dixieland ‘Jass’ Band, should get for this is difficult to measure – his own description of the birth of jazz is not just racist, but self-evidently untrue – but whether they are viewed as innovators, opportunists or just a catalyst, the record they made on February 26th 1917 is that rare thing in life, an unambiguous dividing line between an old world and a new one.
Over these last twenty years there have been no such revolutions, only gradual movements. We first heard Ragtime emerge as a flavour to season marching band music, then in its ‘hot’ form as a (sometimes frenetic) syncopated dance music – but even at its greatest surge, it remained in essence a minority interest, as far as the music business was concerned. There was enough interest in the general public for the genre to incite a moral outrage, but apparently not enough to get record companies and musicians cashing in.
Meanwhile in New Orleans, and (perhaps) down the length of the Mississippi River, jazz (or something not dissimilar to jazz) was already being played, perhaps as early as 1900. Not a single recording exists from this era, but later accounts have it that the sound began with cornet-player Buddy Bolden, whose hot ragtime band is often credited with introducing this mix of stomping dance music and bluesy swerves. It is unlikely that Bolden’s band truly sounded much like the records here – it’s better to view them as a vital missing link in the story. Bolden suffered an episode of acute alcoholic psychosis in 1907, and was admitted to the Louisiana State Insane Asylum with a diagnosis of schizophrenia – and there he would remain for the rest of his life. His successors largely remained within New Orleans until 1914, when a mixed-race group called The Creole Band began touring the vaudeville circuit. By 1916 Brown’s Dixieland Jass Band and Stein’s Dixieland Jass Band were active and performing in Chicago, and bandleader Bert Kelly claimed to have been playing Jazz in San Francisco as early as 1914. It was one thing to be playing new music on the circuit, though – for the genre to really break through this barrier it needed to be brought into the homes of the public, who in increasing numbers owned gramophones.
Among the clutch of New Orleans “Jass” bands playing Chicago in 1916 were Stein’