'A Highly Personal Music'

Jazz personalities have provided material for some of the best biographies and autobiographies written in modern times, and some histories of jazz qualify as significant contributions to the cultural history of the United States during the twentieth century. In Why Jazz Happened, Marc Myers of JazzWax.com has given us another important contribution, but this is a contribution with a difference.

Myers opens and ends his book with discussions of the Original Dixieland "Jass" Band, a quintet that, on February 26, 1917, played the two songs that constitute the first jazz recordever released. The band, though commercially successful, was far from the best ensemble of its type. Its members never improvised, and their tunes incorporated corny barnyard effects. But they were partially responsible, Myers writes, for "the dramatic moment in time when jazz was first documented on record. As I listened to the music, I couldn't help thinking about the irony—that jazz may have been born in New Orleans, but the music's documentation began at RCA Victor's studio on West 38th Street, in the heart of New York's Garment District."

Few jazz enthusiasts would see anything "dramatic" in the first recorded jazz tunes, except perhaps that they were performed by an all-white New Orleans ensemble instead of by superior black and Creole musicians who (for the most part) were the true pioneers. Myers' comments typify the unusual nature of his book. Most histories of jazz focus on what might called its internal history: the biographies of notable jazz musicians, composers, and arrangers; the various stylistic developments of particular musicians (such as the early and later styles of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, or Bud Shank); and the nature of jazz music itself. Myers focuses on the external history of jazz—on those "nonjazz events" that significantly influenced the genre's development. Among these influences were the invention of long-playing records (which permitted long solos to be recorded), the postwar G.I. Bill (which enabled many jazz musicians and composers to study classical music), unions (especially the two-year ban on recording, beginning in 1942, by the American Federation of Musicians, which led to the emergence of many small record companies), DJs, promoters, and much more.

Why Jazz Happened, by Marc Myers, University of California Press, 267 pages.

Read more: http://reason.com/archives/2012/12/30/a-highly-personal-music