How (Not) To Listen To Early Jazz

By ANDREW J. SAMMUT, Published: December 19, 2012

Jazz listeners may admit that early music got things to where they are now, similar to how the Model T made the Lamborghini possible. Most just prefer not to drive anything too old. For most listeners, early jazz remains an esoteric and even a strange experience.

Perhaps it's all that monochromatic footage of tuxedoed fox trotters. Maybe it's those parades of straw-hatted, red suspendered and often white-haired Dixieland groups at amusement parks. It might be the kick lines of pinstriped gangsters and flappers on Broadway, or other images pointing back to some long gone, unfamiliar and seemingly frivolous time. The jazz tradition may or may not be innovation but its past is unavoidable. It's also incredibly productive, whether through a Sonny Rollins reissue or the best musicians on the radio today. The question is how far back listeners are willing to look for "new" music. As for those nostalgic, often hokey depictions of jazz's beginnings, they're probably about as accurate as berets, Nehru suits, and other historical stereotypes.

Maybe it's the particular era those images evoke, supposedly a time before jazz started taking itself seriously. Jazz of the 1920s and '30s (and a good part of the '40s) was linked to show business and recreational dance. Much of the music is viewed as pop rather than jazz, more a product of popular appeal than musical exploration or cultural advocacy. The assumption here is that the two are mutually exclusive.

Never mind trumpeter Louis Armstrong redefining the technical and expressive concept of the trumpet and the voice well after the last of his Hot Five sessions, or cornetist Bix Beiderbecke experimenting with sounds from the European avant-garde, both doing so while actually selling records. Ted Lewis and Sophie Tucker's jabs at Prohibition, Clarence Williams' lyrics about Baltimore brothels and Cab Calloway crooning the sorrows of a multiracial American in the days before segregation, all while surrounded by topnotch instrumentalists, somehow hindsight makes it all seem like kids' stuff. Jazz's early years are seen as (merely) entertainment; it took bop to make jazz the refuge of artists and allow the real musicians room to grow.Read more: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=43547#.UNN3n6UlYhR