Speaker 1: Hudson River Radio dot com. It beats listening to nothing.
Speaker 2: My goodness, being Frank, where the only way to be
Speaker 2: is Frank. Hello everyone, and welcome to being Frank. We're
Speaker 2: the only way to be is Frank. I'm your host,
Speaker 2: Frank WELBORNA. What I'd like to thank you for joining
Speaker 2: us on what we like to call the Intelligent Conversation podcast,
Speaker 2: where no conversations out of bounds and all points of
Speaker 2: view are welcome. You know, we record live to tape
Speaker 2: and I give you the date so you have some
Speaker 2: context and relevant It's May Day. May first. Me, the
Speaker 2: appreciation of jazz has always been a lot like my
Speaker 2: feelings towards hockey. It's not for everyone, but those who
Speaker 2: do enjoy them are almost fanatical in their support, and
Speaker 2: because it's not for everyone, only seems to make their
Speaker 2: love even more passionate. It's kind of a paradox. However,
Speaker 2: what cannot be disputed is the importance of jazz and
Speaker 2: mut style and influence on American society and culture. It's
Speaker 2: not hyperable to say that we would not be what
Speaker 2: we are today without it. So as we complete Jazz
Speaker 2: Appreciation Month, let's take some time to reflect on that
Speaker 2: history and significance. Today, of course, we have an expert
Speaker 2: on just that joining us for this edition of the
Speaker 2: Intelligent Conversation Podcast. Please welcome back to being Frank freshof
Speaker 2: is highly successful library series The History of Jazz in
Speaker 2: America is the jazz historian, musician and teacher mister Eric DeVito.
Speaker 2: Welcome back, Eric.
Speaker 1: How's it going. Frank happy to be on the show
Speaker 1: as always, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: It's great, and I want to say how much I
Speaker 2: enjoyed your series of both the Nayak and Puremont Public
Speaker 2: Libraries were absolutely wonderful where you link the history of
Speaker 2: jazz to the music. You brought in wonderful top shelf musicians.
Speaker 2: And we're going to go through some of those examples
Speaker 2: in our program tonight. Here a few examples of just
Speaker 2: how jazz influenced American society. So we're looking forward to that.
Speaker 2: So let's let's go right into it. Okay, Jazz, like
Speaker 2: America was created from a melting pot of cultures and people,
Speaker 2: so so talk about its origins, where did it come from,
Speaker 2: and how did it come to represent American and American style?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, so, you know, to me, jazz is such a
Speaker 3: personification of what it means to be American.
Speaker 1: You know, it's you know, you can't.
Speaker 3: I always I always explain this to my students this way,
Speaker 3: and it's, you know, it's it's this is so fresh
Speaker 3: in my head because it's we're just coming off, as
Speaker 3: you said, you know, Jazz Appreciation Month in April, and
Speaker 3: it was just you know, International Jazz Day April thirtieth.
Speaker 3: So you know, I've literally been going through this lesson
Speaker 3: plan with all my classes.
Speaker 1: So it's always kind of.
Speaker 3: What I lead off with is how much jazz really
Speaker 3: does you know, parallel or symbolize being American? And the
Speaker 3: first thing I always do is I always ask my students.
Speaker 3: I always say how many people were born here in America?
Speaker 3: And depending on you know, over the over the career,
Speaker 3: the years of my career, I've taught in different areas,
Speaker 3: sometimes in New York City, sometimes in Westchester. Now I'm
Speaker 3: in Yonkers, but you know, and the amount of hands
Speaker 3: always changed, but usually I get a you know, majority
Speaker 3: of hands that I you know, go up, who was
Speaker 3: who was born here in America? And then I say, okay, uh,
Speaker 3: now put your hand down if your or keep your
Speaker 3: hand up if your parents were born here, and then
Speaker 3: a few hands go down and grandparents, and I go
Speaker 3: as far back as I can, and at some point
Speaker 3: all the hands go down, because you know, we I
Speaker 3: talk about, to be American means that your roots come
Speaker 3: from somewhere else, because we're a very young country with
Speaker 3: a very short history compared to say, you know, Europe
Speaker 3: or other in other parts of the world. And then
Speaker 3: I asked them, you know, how many you know, we
Speaker 3: talk about where their family comes from and and how
Speaker 3: they identify with their culture. So being an American, you know,
Speaker 3: has to mean your culture comes from from somewhere else.
Speaker 3: And jazz is the same way. And I kind of
Speaker 3: paralleled by saying, you know, jazz, like many of you,
Speaker 3: was born here, but its roots come from somewhere else.
Speaker 3: That's where it gets its identity from. So we kind
Speaker 3: of start there, and that's, you know, a very American thing.
Speaker 3: At a lot of times, when you go to other countries,
Speaker 3: you ask somebody where they're from, and and you know,
Speaker 3: of course I'm from Germany, where you're in Germany or
Speaker 3: I'm from and they identify with that. But I feel
Speaker 3: like America very much, we very much identify with all
Speaker 3: the various different places our ancestors come from, and I
Speaker 3: think that's really important key factor to jazz as well.
Speaker 2: So I think go ahead, I'm sorry, no, no, go ahead. Well,
Speaker 2: you know, I think what's important to mention there that
Speaker 2: it's the roots are are strongly in Africa. The very germ,
Speaker 2: if you will, of jazz comes from African sounds, and
Speaker 2: I know you have an example of that, but talk
Speaker 2: to that and then how jazz from that dealt with
Speaker 2: certain social issues as racism, segregation, that that came as
Speaker 2: so interesting, how music can develop thoughts in other areas
Speaker 2: as as we just mentioned. But but talk a little
Speaker 2: bit about the African the actual African roots of jazz.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, so, you know, jazz, jazz gets its roots from really,
Speaker 3: you know, a lots of different places, but primarily the
Speaker 3: two places it gets its roots from are Africa and Europe,
Speaker 3: and in particular, it's it's African influences have a lot
Speaker 3: to do with its rhythm, the use of syncopated rhythm
Speaker 3: and how rhythm is perceived, not just in jazz, but
Speaker 3: in all the styles of music that have come after
Speaker 3: jazz or and really the blues that have been influenced
Speaker 3: by the blues. You know, they have a very a
Speaker 3: very rhythmic characteristic that is contributed to the music of Africa.
Speaker 3: And also you know, of course European classical music has
Speaker 3: a huge influence on It's it's harmony, it's use of harmony,
Speaker 3: and it's a lot of its structures and its forms.
Speaker 3: So what I usually start out my lesson with actually
Speaker 3: is a big map with a circle around the United States,
Speaker 3: like you are here for jazz, and then I have
Speaker 3: two arrows pointing to each continent, one to Africa and
Speaker 3: one to Europe, and this is where you come from.
Speaker 3: So regarding that African influence, you know, we start way back,
Speaker 3: you know, I always the first thing I asked my
Speaker 3: students is how did an African influence or culture get
Speaker 3: here in the United States. And of course it's all
Speaker 3: ties into American history. We talk about the Transatlantic slave trade,
Speaker 3: you know, and so with the slave trade from about
Speaker 3: sixteen fifty to eighteen sixty. Of course, you know, this
Speaker 3: is one of the ugly parts of history that yielded
Speaker 3: maybe an unexpected I don't like to say, you know,
Speaker 3: a good result, but a positive outcome came out of.
Speaker 1: A tragic historical thing.
Speaker 3: So through the slave trade, millions of Africans, of course,
Speaker 3: were transported against their will, broke families, broken up, stripped
Speaker 3: away from their culture, terrible, terrible thing, and they were
Speaker 3: brought to all different parts of the world, across the
Speaker 3: Atlantic Ocean. Many to South America. Actually over five million
Speaker 3: went to South America, about four and a half million
Speaker 3: went to you know, what was the West Indies, the
Speaker 3: Caribbean area, and.
Speaker 1: A lot of people like you don't know this.
Speaker 3: About half a million were transported to North America, and
Speaker 3: of course that was primarily in the South, and a
Speaker 3: lot of that had to do with first the geography
Speaker 3: of of of transporting them it was closer, but also
Speaker 3: of course the you know, the the reliance on manual
Speaker 3: labor for agriculture that was a big part of the economy.
Speaker 3: So that's kind of where we start with, how did
Speaker 3: this African culture get here in the first place. And
Speaker 3: then of course we talk about with that culture or
Speaker 3: with that with those people came their culture. You know,
Speaker 3: you could take somebody away from their family, away from
Speaker 3: their homeland, but you can't take their culture.
Speaker 1: Away from them.
Speaker 3: So of course when those when those Africans came here,
Speaker 3: most of them from you know, West Africa, from places
Speaker 3: like the Congo and Sierra Leone and Senegal.
Speaker 1: They brought with them their culture.
Speaker 3: Now how they you know, how much they were allowed
Speaker 3: to express their culture varied and the different ways they found,
Speaker 3: you know, they were able to do that. Sometimes it
Speaker 3: was done in secret, sometimes it was done you know, depending.
Speaker 1: On what the situation was.
Speaker 3: But they brought with them their music, and we first
Speaker 3: started to see that with things like slave songs and
Speaker 3: work songs, and these were songs that were sung on
Speaker 3: many different levels.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: One level was it was it was just a way
Speaker 3: to pass the time. Another level was, of course they
Speaker 3: were used as ways to communicate among slaves, and they
Speaker 3: could have been what's called signal songs or map songs
Speaker 3: where the words actually had double or hidden meanings about
Speaker 3: you know, things they wanted to communicate, or how to
Speaker 3: escape using the underground railroad and things like that. So
Speaker 3: so that's kind of where the mix from their African
Speaker 3: music and culture kind of became a.
Speaker 1: New thing that was mixed.
Speaker 3: One of the musical examples I share with you before
Speaker 3: we go even into that, is just talking about the
Speaker 3: rhythm and the use of poly rhythms, and you know,
Speaker 3: African music is so much more rhythmically sophisticated than European
Speaker 3: you know, quote unquote when I say European mean like
Speaker 3: Western European music. When we think of music from the
Speaker 3: you know, sixteen hundreds to the twentieth century that primarily
Speaker 3: had composers from Germany, Austria, you know, Italy, for it
Speaker 3: was so much more rhythmically complicated that we actually don't
Speaker 3: our own Western music system has trouble notating it. You know,
Speaker 3: we use things like triplets, which is a way to
Speaker 3: divide a beat into three equal parts. But that's irrational.
Speaker 3: You can't divide a number into three equal parts. So
Speaker 3: that's why we have trouble performing a lot of that
Speaker 3: music because you know, and not to get too but
Speaker 3: it's it's not as quote unquote natural because we tended
Speaker 3: to divide our beat into two equal parts. But when
Speaker 3: a lot of you know, African music, and when we
Speaker 3: deal with the blues and jazz, it's based off the triplet,
Speaker 3: and so that comes with an unequal division of the beat,
Speaker 3: which means there's more room when we do it for interpretation.
Speaker 3: And then when we talk about swinging rhythms.
Speaker 1: And stuff that all comes off of it.
Speaker 3: So just to kind of start as a point, I
Speaker 3: think it's really important to listen to African drumming, you know,
Speaker 3: the music of traditional music of West Africa, and also
Speaker 3: this music features lots of improvisation. You know, improvisation was
Speaker 3: something that it happened in class styles of classical.
Speaker 1: Music, like baroque music. There it was expected.
Speaker 3: If you were a baroque musician in the sixteen hundreds,
Speaker 3: you knew how and when to appropriately and stylistically improvise.
Speaker 3: But traditionally, you know, quote unquote classical musicians are a
Speaker 3: lot less comfortable improvising than people who are maybe jazz
Speaker 3: or popular musicians who have studied, you know, contemporary music,
Speaker 3: which gets its roots really from the blues and jazz.
Speaker 1: And music of Africa.
Speaker 3: So you hear right away the improvisation that's a part
Speaker 3: of the structure of the music, the call and response,
Speaker 3: the dialogue that's happening. That becomes such an important part
Speaker 3: of the blues and then of jazz and a more contemporary.
Speaker 1: Styles of music.
Speaker 3: So when you listen to this African drumming, it's almost
Speaker 3: like can put you in a trance because of all
Speaker 3: the rhythmic layering that's happening. That to our ears is
Speaker 3: really complicated. But you know, somebody who grew up maybe
Speaker 3: in Africa listening to this music, it was just natural.
Speaker 1: It was just part of the organic feel of the music.
Speaker 3: And I think that's a really good place to start
Speaker 3: to understand what we're dealing with rhythmically.
Speaker 2: H So, what what so? What are we hearing there? Eric? What?
Speaker 4: What?
Speaker 2: What did we? What did? Obviously it's drumming, but within
Speaker 2: that drumming explo exactly what we were hearing kind of
Speaker 2: musically if you can.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you're you're hearing you know, lots and lots
Speaker 3: of rhythmic layering and you know, different polyrhythms and and
Speaker 3: creating almost like this, you know what we call syncopation,
Speaker 3: which is when you accent and parts of the beat
Speaker 3: that are kind of not generally on the beat, something
Speaker 3: that we're more familiar with in Western European music, but
Speaker 3: you know, the parts of the beat, or the offbeats,
Speaker 3: are in between the beats, and when you accent and
Speaker 3: emphasize those different parts of the beat, it creates this
Speaker 3: kind of tug of war against the beat and the accents,
Speaker 3: and it kind of almost you know, I describe it
Speaker 3: to my students as it almost pulls you.
Speaker 1: Into two different directions.
Speaker 3: I call it like a tug of war of rhythm,
Speaker 3: and a lot of that is what makes it. When
Speaker 3: I listen to that music, I can't help but move.
Speaker 3: It's like my body is being pulled. And of course,
Speaker 3: when you when you you know, as much a part
Speaker 3: of the music of African music is the movement. Dancing
Speaker 3: and movement was an integral part of performing this music.
Speaker 3: If you ever watch anybody you know African music be performed,
Speaker 3: there's almost always a dance element or a movement element,
Speaker 3: and that's because the rhythm. It's almost just the phenomenon
Speaker 3: of hearing those syncopations and those polyrhythms and that layered
Speaker 3: rhythm just makes your body want to move and dance.
Speaker 3: And I think that is kind of where, you know,
Speaker 3: as we go further down the line, and jazz is
Speaker 3: being a music that people dance to and that became
Speaker 3: a popular form of music, it really has to do
Speaker 3: with that syncopated rhythm and also that improvisational component to it.
Speaker 2: And if I might add, and it brings me into
Speaker 2: my next question, about jazz culture. It can be and
Speaker 2: was often seen as sexual music if you will, there's
Speaker 2: a sexual component to listen to it and to see
Speaker 2: the dance movements can be interpreted by some people as sexy.
Speaker 2: So it kind of was kind of called immoral music,
Speaker 2: if you will for a while. You know, the music
Speaker 2: of blacks, if you will, was at a time, as
Speaker 2: we know, it was like different. So it's over there, okay,
Speaker 2: all right. Social implications, yes, the social implications of it
Speaker 2: were strong. How did they overcome that to become serious
Speaker 2: musicians and for people to go beyond that kind of
Speaker 2: trite way of looking at it?
Speaker 3: Well, so I think, you know, it's interesting when you
Speaker 3: when you say that, because there's a lot of assumptions
Speaker 3: that go into it. I think over here in our
Speaker 3: very you know, Anglo white, Caucasian based on European, we
Speaker 3: look at that and think of that because, you know,
Speaker 3: especially when our society, you know, when America first started
Speaker 3: with the Puritans and the Quakers and all that, we
Speaker 3: were very rigid people. You know, we had a very
Speaker 3: religious kind of beginning, and so music that was more
Speaker 3: maybe we'll use the quote unquote like primitive to us
Speaker 3: or even exotic, because that's what it was. Right before
Speaker 3: the world was really connected. You couldn't turn on the
Speaker 3: radio and hear or to go on the internet and
Speaker 3: hear music from other parts of the world. So these
Speaker 3: things were very exotic and exhilarating and exciting, and and
Speaker 3: a place like Africa would have definitely, I think been
Speaker 3: parts of it would have definitely been considered more primitive
Speaker 3: or less civilized to early you know, settlers and Europeans
Speaker 3: back then. So when they saw them moving and of
Speaker 3: course the way they were dressed and and and you know,
Speaker 3: comparing it to our own culture in a very ethnocentric way,
Speaker 3: we would have said that that was less civilized and
Speaker 3: more primitive, and the use of their bodies and dancing
Speaker 3: and something that was more primitive. Of course, I could
Speaker 3: definitely see that being characterized as more sexual. And it's
Speaker 3: not too unlike you know, when we look at people
Speaker 3: tango dance or something that's very sensual and there's a
Speaker 3: kind of a rawness to it. And I think that's what,
Speaker 3: you know, is part of what makes the music so
Speaker 3: visceral and organic and exciting. But you're right there, there
Speaker 3: is definitely a cognitive dissonance or like a dichotomy of
Speaker 3: of a of a very Anglo you know, religious culture
Speaker 3: that was, you know how a lot of America we
Speaker 3: started out in a way.
Speaker 1: So I definitely see that, can see.
Speaker 3: The parallel there, you know, you were so we're talking
Speaker 3: about it being a moral so when that first happened,
Speaker 3: you know, we we'll get to it in a bit,
Speaker 3: but jazz, when jazz kind of evolved as its own
Speaker 3: musical form, This happened in New Orleans, right in Louisiana,
Speaker 3: and there's a rich history there of why that happened.
Speaker 3: You know, that wasn't a coincidence or an accident. Louisiana
Speaker 3: was it was owned by France.
Speaker 1: It was owned by Spain.
Speaker 3: Actually then it was owned by France. There was some
Speaker 3: wars and treaties, then it went back and eventually we
Speaker 3: bought it. We purchased it Asia Louisiana purchase, and that
Speaker 3: completely changed the landscape of the US.
Speaker 1: But we also.
Speaker 3: Acquired a huge, you know, piece of land that was
Speaker 3: full of European culture already, and it was also full
Speaker 3: of African culture. And by the way, the Africans there
Speaker 3: weren't considered slaves or weren't considered you know, they enjoyed
Speaker 3: a lot more freedom than Africans did. African people did,
Speaker 3: so it was kind of there was a lot of
Speaker 3: shock there to the way Africans were treated once they
Speaker 3: were part of the US, and there was a big
Speaker 3: culture there of you know what we think of as
Speaker 3: creole culture, or a mix of French or European and
Speaker 3: African culture from you know, different cultures that were there
Speaker 3: and that were over there already, and and the Africans
Speaker 3: that were there, and the mixing of those cultures, and
Speaker 3: a lot of those creoles were the first jazz musicians.
Speaker 1: But this music was often in.
Speaker 3: The beginning, it was kind of like relegated to or
Speaker 3: delegated to what you might call the red light districts
Speaker 3: where you know, things were not it was a little
Speaker 3: bit more underground. It was kind of like not in
Speaker 3: the you know, you wanted to stay far away, just.
Speaker 1: Like Times Square used to be. Right in the nineties,
Speaker 1: it was the red light district.
Speaker 2: I remember the seventies. It was good in the nineties
Speaker 2: compared I remember the seventies right.
Speaker 3: Right, So, yeah, I guess I'm dating myself a little bit.
Speaker 3: But so that's where the music was kind of allowed
Speaker 3: to because you know, the big cities and the red
Speaker 3: light districts, that's where the bars and the speakeasies and
Speaker 3: the clubs and all that were, and so that's where
Speaker 3: you heard that music really had a chance to kind
Speaker 3: of start and do its thing. And then you know,
Speaker 3: it did that for a while until it became a
Speaker 3: little bit more mainstream. But going back before we even
Speaker 3: get to Louisiana, it's important to kind of know that
Speaker 3: that so that African music it that was brought here,
Speaker 3: that started to be you know, that was used as
Speaker 3: a main ingredient in a lot of the songs that
Speaker 3: slaves were now singing while they were here, and so
Speaker 3: you get this this concept of a slave song or
Speaker 3: a work song, and that in itself as such as
Speaker 3: interesting history and culture because of all the functions. You know,
Speaker 3: first of all, the fact that people can be stripped
Speaker 3: from their culture, stripped from their families, and then find
Speaker 3: a way through music to give themselves hope to overcome,
Speaker 3: to me, is like one of the most powerful things
Speaker 3: about music. The fact that these a lot of these
Speaker 3: you know, these people had in some ways nothing to
Speaker 3: live for, and yet they overcome all odds, and they
Speaker 3: create music, they make art, and so I think that's
Speaker 3: a real testament to just them and their music and
Speaker 3: their culture. And so you see these songs emerge, whether
Speaker 3: they're songs to give people hope, which eventually becomes the spiritual, right,
Speaker 3: we talk about the spiritual, which is a huge ingredient
Speaker 3: in the blues, and eventually jazz and and all American
Speaker 3: folk music, and then eventually gospel music comes from spirituals.
Speaker 1: But that all really comes.
Speaker 3: From the slaves song and the work song, which were
Speaker 3: sung by slaves.
Speaker 2: And wet we haven't exact, we have an exact.
Speaker 3: So I have an example here, and a lot of
Speaker 3: these songs, of course were sung a cappella because they
Speaker 3: might might be songs people sung while they were working
Speaker 3: out in fields or maybe when they got to congregate
Speaker 3: the little bit of time they got to socialize. But
Speaker 3: this is called You're Gonna Rea just what you sew,
Speaker 3: and it's just kind of characterizes from an album songs
Speaker 3: of the American Negro Slaves. And I love the title
Speaker 3: because there's a real kind of hidden meaning.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: Of course, a lot of you know, this could have
Speaker 3: been taking place on a plantation and so you have
Speaker 3: the agricultural reference.
Speaker 1: You're gonna reap just what you sew.
Speaker 3: But I think there's also some very interesting foreshadowing going
Speaker 3: on there about, you know, the slavery in general and
Speaker 3: what's to come and and and all that. So this
Speaker 3: is a great a cappella example of just the slaves,
Speaker 3: you know, what we'd call an American negro slaves.
Speaker 2: Let's listen, turning your broda keep nu, find.
Speaker 1: Fighting on the out and.
Speaker 2: Fight horror in the valley. You will read so you
Speaker 2: believe just what you show. You be ree what you.
Speaker 1: Saw, you know, Eric.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, people can't see us. They can only hear us.
Speaker 2: And it's great that they could hear the music, but
Speaker 2: I wish they could see my expression and yours. You
Speaker 2: kind of go away when you hear that music. It
Speaker 2: takes you somewhere. It is spiritual, it takes you inside.
Speaker 2: There's something about it that that reaches you. That's that
Speaker 2: it's emotional so and yet it's the same time it's
Speaker 2: so simple. Speak to you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, and you could just hear I mean,
Speaker 3: if you can't hear the blues in that, even though
Speaker 3: this is pre the blues, if you can't hear like
Speaker 3: the you know, when I listen to that, I'm I'm
Speaker 3: hearing the blues, even though this is a song before
Speaker 3: the blues existed, probably, you know, so you can see
Speaker 3: the connections or you can hear the connections there. And
Speaker 3: I think, you know, the comments that you're making are
Speaker 3: interesting because I think it's funny how we you know,
Speaker 3: we think of this as as a very you know,
Speaker 3: like before when you were talking about the music being
Speaker 3: you know, sexual or primitive. It it was funny because
Speaker 3: we very often I think that's one of the things
Speaker 3: that made a lot of people connect to this music.
Speaker 3: It was I don't want to say it was taboo,
Speaker 3: but in some ways it was. And it was very
Speaker 3: counter to what we kind of looked at as you know,
Speaker 3: quote unquote appropriate acceptable music. You know, a lot of
Speaker 3: Polish went into Europe, goes into European classical music and
Speaker 3: its compositions and it's tone, you know, just how we
Speaker 3: spend time on things like tone production and technique, and
Speaker 3: that's not what this was about, of course, And so
Speaker 3: I think there's a freshness to it in a in
Speaker 3: a real organic part of that music that really appeals
Speaker 3: to a lot of people and part of the reason why,
Speaker 3: you know, and that's true with a lot of folk
Speaker 3: styles of music, of course, but I think definitely this
Speaker 3: kind of music.
Speaker 2: Now, Eric, you mentioned the importance of geography, and particularly
Speaker 2: in the South. In New Orleans is still famous for
Speaker 2: for for jazz, but yet it's certainly not the only place.
Speaker 2: And it expanded is as it should, and took its
Speaker 2: culture with it out of Mississippi and then involved not
Speaker 2: only in terms of where it was but how it
Speaker 2: was being played. It became bebop, for example, when it
Speaker 2: came to New York and some of the other great
Speaker 2: northern cities, you know, Chicago and Troit and New York,
Speaker 2: and each kind of had its own sound, if you will,
Speaker 2: from what my understanding, speak a little to that. Sure, well, you.
Speaker 3: Know, talking about how jazz parallels you know, society, you know,
Speaker 3: back in you know, the earlier part of the late
Speaker 3: part of the nineteenth century, in the early twentieth century,
Speaker 3: you know, things flourished where cities were, where big, where
Speaker 3: people were, where trade could happen, right, and that was
Speaker 3: generally along you know, trade routes which were rivers for
Speaker 3: the most part, especially before we had trucks and planes
Speaker 3: and all that stuff. So, you know, New Orleans or
Speaker 3: Louisiana in general, but New Orleans. You know, like I
Speaker 3: said earlier, it wasn't just coincidence. There was a lot
Speaker 3: of factors about being in the right place at the
Speaker 3: right time. And I always talk about jazz as being
Speaker 3: like this chicken soup. When I teach it, you know,
Speaker 3: we go, how do you make chicken soup? And we
Speaker 3: talk about all the ingredients, and you know, there was
Speaker 3: a blues as an ingredient, and slave songs were an ingredient,
Speaker 3: and rag time when we get to that as an ingredient,
Speaker 3: and classical music and all these ingredients, and we talk
Speaker 3: about New Orleans being the pot where it all cooks together.
Speaker 3: And of course, you know, you need heat and you
Speaker 3: need time to make soup. And that's kind of what happened.
Speaker 3: So you have New Orleans, which is on this port
Speaker 3: city right it's on the Mississippi River.
Speaker 1: Of course, it's also.
Speaker 3: On the near it's on the ocean is nearby, and
Speaker 3: it's this important city for trade, international city. So you
Speaker 3: have all sorts of people coming in and out, different cultures.
Speaker 3: Some are transient, some are decide to stay, some leave.
Speaker 3: You have the French and Spanish, you know, the European
Speaker 3: culture that was there through the Louisiana purchase, and so
Speaker 3: you have just this hub of activity. And so that's
Speaker 3: where cultures really start to mix.
Speaker 1: And that's what jazz is.
Speaker 3: It's a mixing of all these So all these people,
Speaker 3: they bring their culture, they bring their music, the pieces
Speaker 3: of its stay, Different things come in, and over time
Speaker 3: we start to have this development of this new kind
Speaker 3: of music that takes all of these this African influence
Speaker 3: and the slave songs and the work songs, and the
Speaker 3: European classical influence and the music that the Creoles were
Speaker 3: playing because Creoles were African people that were they weren't
Speaker 3: you know, as I mentioned before, they weren't. They were free,
Speaker 3: many of them. They were allowed to have an education.
Speaker 3: They studied classical music, many of them, and so they
Speaker 3: brought their own, you know, flavor of a mix of
Speaker 3: African and European music already, so all that mixes together
Speaker 3: in Louisiana, and right about the turn of the century,
Speaker 3: the late eighteen hundreds, you know, some people will say,
Speaker 3: who's the first jazz musician.
Speaker 1: That's a great thing.
Speaker 3: People like to argue about Most people will say it
Speaker 3: was well, some people will say it was Jelly Roll Morton,
Speaker 3: who was a self proclaimed inventor of jazz. He's probably
Speaker 3: the most interesting character of my favorites because he was,
Speaker 3: you know, definitely a pathological liar, and yes, he was
Speaker 3: there part of its on set and its inception and
Speaker 3: an important bridge between ragtime and true jazz. A lot
Speaker 3: of people tell you it's Buddy Bolden, who is a
Speaker 3: trumpet player that I think died around the age of
Speaker 3: twenty three or twenty four years old. There's only like
Speaker 3: one surviving picture of him. It's you know, and that's
Speaker 3: one of the things that I talked about it in
Speaker 3: one of my lectures. But the mystery of history around
Speaker 3: jazz is is we don't you know, if you ask
Speaker 3: ten different people, you might get ten different answers. But
Speaker 3: you start to see these early jazz musicians like Buddy Bolden,
Speaker 3: who are now playing what we might consider the first
Speaker 3: form of jazz. And then of course you have Lewis Armstrong,
Speaker 3: who's from New Orleans, you know, a great symbol of
Speaker 3: our country, a symbol of jazz, symbol of New Orleans,
Speaker 3: and he's one of the first people to really, you know,
Speaker 3: maybe commercially become very successful that it becomes a you know,
Speaker 3: eventually a household name.
Speaker 1: From this era, in this time period. And so you
Speaker 1: see what we call New Orleans jazz or early jazz.
Speaker 3: And some of the best examples of that are the
Speaker 3: early works by Lewis Armstrong in the Hot five or
Speaker 3: is Hot seven and one of the things that you
Speaker 3: saw in New Orleans jazz. And it's funny because some
Speaker 3: people call this Dixieland jazz. But I always think this
Speaker 3: is interesting because right from its inception, the first recorded
Speaker 3: jazz album was actually not recorded by African Americans. It
Speaker 3: was recorded by a bunch of white dudes, and they
Speaker 3: were called the Dixie Land something jazz Man or something.
Speaker 3: And then you hear that term and it was like,
Speaker 3: right as it started, the people who created this music
Speaker 3: were exploited through commercialism and a great symbol for America, right,
Speaker 3: what a great symbol of our country. So I love
Speaker 3: how jazz is from its inception. It just parallels American society.
Speaker 1: Is so great.
Speaker 3: But actually, yeah, the first recorded jazz album was a
Speaker 3: Dixie Land they called it, and it was all white
Speaker 3: musicians and when you see Dixieland jazz, you tend to
Speaker 3: see that we really think of true early jazz. It's
Speaker 3: kind of referred to as early jazz or New Orleans jazz,
Speaker 3: and there's a couple of key characteristics you can't ignore.
Speaker 3: And I didn't include it for time, but ragtime music.
Speaker 3: A lot of people confuse ragtime music and jazz music
Speaker 3: because there's a lot of similarities and there is some crossover,
Speaker 3: but generally speaking, you know, if you think of Scott Joplin,
Speaker 3: who's maybe the most famous ragtime composer, ragtime music does
Speaker 3: mix the African rhythms with the European harmony and forms
Speaker 3: and structures. But one of the distinctive differences of true
Speaker 3: rag time music is that it's not improvised. It was
Speaker 3: written out. You know, a lot of those early player pianos,
Speaker 3: you used to be able to buy the roles and
Speaker 3: the piano would play it and it was all written out.
Speaker 3: And those ragtime pieces were written out like a classical
Speaker 3: piece of music. But it featured that exciting syncopation, that
Speaker 3: danceable rhythm that made people want to move and dance
Speaker 3: and became very commercially popular. However, one of the things
Speaker 3: that really sets apart earlier early jazz is its use
Speaker 3: of improvisation, which comes from the blues and also comes
Speaker 3: from African music of course, and then you know, you
Speaker 3: hear people like Jelly Royal Martin who was doing more
Speaker 3: of that, and then eventually Lewis Armstrong who kind of
Speaker 3: standardized it. And before we get there, you know, I
Speaker 3: have a recording because we're talking about the South and
Speaker 3: New Orleans and the Mississippi area, and we don't want
Speaker 3: to neglect the Mississippi Delta area where which kind of
Speaker 3: we see the blues really form in the South, and
Speaker 3: before we get into jazz, really need to hear the blues.
Speaker 3: And you know, the blues is important, of course, because
Speaker 3: without the blues, there really would be no contemporary musical
Speaker 3: styles period, whether it's the blues turning into jazz, which
Speaker 3: influences you know, rock and then all sorts of popular music.
Speaker 2: Right, none of.
Speaker 1: It exists without the blues.
Speaker 3: And of course the blues doesn't exist without slave songs
Speaker 3: and work songs, and those don't exist without the music
Speaker 3: of Africa. So it's all kind of linearly connected. But
Speaker 3: there was different kinds and blueses and you know, a
Speaker 3: lot of people when we talk about the Blues, if
Speaker 3: slave songs and work songs were expressing the hardships of
Speaker 3: the of the life of a slave, then what the
Speaker 3: Blues was doing is it was really expressing the hardships
Speaker 3: of life post slavery. And when I teach this to
Speaker 3: my students, you know, we talk about, okay, when did
Speaker 3: slavery end? Does that mean African Americans were just everything
Speaker 3: was great in the world. They were free and they
Speaker 3: had equal opportunities, and of course not of course, the
Speaker 3: residual effects are still happening today. All so many social
Speaker 3: problems with racism and and of course we dealt with
Speaker 3: segregation and all that, you know, stems from that. So
Speaker 3: the Blues was really the anthem for the post slave
Speaker 3: about expressing the hardships of life and how we would
Speaker 3: adapt to this you know, quote unquote freedom, which in
Speaker 3: many ways it wasn't, and how they adapted to life
Speaker 3: post slavery. And the Mississippi Delta Blues, which is just
Speaker 3: blues that comes from that area. It had its very
Speaker 3: own unique culture that it dealt with, you know, and
Speaker 3: I like listen to the Blues, you hear a lot
Speaker 3: of things called street cries, which were in a sense
Speaker 3: like commercials.
Speaker 1: There's some of them. I teach them.
Speaker 3: I tell my students they were like the first commercials,
Speaker 3: where people were shouting what they might be selling on
Speaker 3: the street in a very musically phrased way and in.
Speaker 2: Something Italian, and all the Italian neighborhood music to it.
Speaker 3: Yes, and that that kind of it ends up turning
Speaker 3: into some ways early blues because they're mimicking a lot
Speaker 3: of that that you know, inflection and intonation and that structure.
Speaker 3: But the Mississippi Delta blues has kind of got its
Speaker 3: own thing going on. And of course you characterize this
Speaker 3: is a lot characterized by the use of the slide
Speaker 3: guitar and the kind of rawness to it, and and
Speaker 3: the rawness of the voice and the way that the
Speaker 3: musicians are often accompanying themselves on the guitar. So I
Speaker 3: have a great example of a piece by Sunhouse, one
Speaker 3: of the great early blues musicians, uh, and this is
Speaker 3: called Death Letter Blues, and it's just you can hear
Speaker 3: the kind of rawness and the crudeness of his guitar
Speaker 3: and the slide guitar, and you know, if you try
Speaker 3: to transcribe this, which I had done because I used
Speaker 3: I actually performed this at I think by the first
Speaker 3: session of my jazz workshop, and I decided I'm going
Speaker 3: to do this with a singer because I'm not much
Speaker 3: of a singer, and realizing that, oh, this is almost
Speaker 3: impossible to notate because it doesn't follow what we think of,
Speaker 3: you know, in quote unquote Western European I'm thinking of
Speaker 3: how many bars is this? This should be a twelve
Speaker 3: bar blues and it's not. Sometimes it's twelve and a
Speaker 3: half bars if you're going to try to write it out,
Speaker 3: or thirteen bars, and hey, how come he doesn't change
Speaker 3: harmony where? And of course that's not what these musicians
Speaker 3: were thinking. That's a very academic way to look at it.
Speaker 3: So when we hear, you know, the true rawness of
Speaker 3: the blues, it's a very hard thing to notate if
Speaker 3: we're trying to be academic about.
Speaker 1: It, because that's not what it was about. So check
Speaker 1: this out. This is death letter blues.
Speaker 5: Got down on a cooling board. Well, I wash your
Speaker 5: right toors look down in her feet. It's a cruel
Speaker 5: gun of the dead to change day. I walked up
Speaker 5: reclos I said, I looked down in a friend, I said,
Speaker 5: go on, girlin't gonta lay her and judgment day the
Speaker 5: bragging of ten thousand people standing around the bearing ground.
Speaker 5: I didn't know how Lord tell.
Speaker 1: Her letter down?
Speaker 5: Look like chim sounding almost standing on the bearing.
Speaker 6: Ground, you know, idea of the love.
Speaker 5: Don't tell her the general leader down?
Speaker 1: Where is the fool?
Speaker 2: Wow? Wow? Right? What do I really could see our
Speaker 2: expressions would all going to these far away places. But
Speaker 2: that's I mean, guess the idea. It's trip, yeah, journey and.
Speaker 3: The guitartoonings and stuff, you know. I like one of
Speaker 3: the one of the things I loved about playing that
Speaker 3: song was it's in this open tuning, you know, which
Speaker 3: is you know, very common in the in the Delta
Speaker 3: blues tradition and stuff that I hadn't experimented too much with.
Speaker 1: So it was very cool.
Speaker 3: The sounds that they're getting out of the guitars and stuff,
Speaker 3: the way they tune them, and of course using the
Speaker 3: slides and you know, kind of changing the tone of
Speaker 3: the instrument.
Speaker 2: Incredible. Now, you know, jazz is always as I mentioned
Speaker 2: in my intro, it's kind of it still is to
Speaker 2: a degree underground music. But was there a golden era
Speaker 2: where of commercialization where jazz even approached mainstream music. Was
Speaker 2: there such an era?
Speaker 1: Absolutely?
Speaker 3: So, Yeah, this what we would think of as the
Speaker 3: swing period of the big band era. The nineteen thirties
Speaker 3: was really the heyday of when jazz was as it's
Speaker 3: most commercially successful, most popular, and it hasn't been so since.
Speaker 3: That's really the last time jazz was that it's most popular.
Speaker 2: And why why? I mean, what was it? The music?
Speaker 2: Was it the timing? Was it a combination of things,
Speaker 2: whether certain changesalities?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so there was. There was a lot of factors.
Speaker 3: You know, one is we're coming off with the Great Depression,
Speaker 3: so people were looking for something to be hopeful about,
Speaker 3: and jazz checked a lot of those boxes.
Speaker 1: Also.
Speaker 3: You know, it's funny, my I I always think of
Speaker 3: one of the people who got me into jazz.
Speaker 1: Was my grandmother. And wow, you know she when I
Speaker 1: when I.
Speaker 3: Was in college and studying jazz. You know, I'm learning
Speaker 3: all these tunes I'd be practicing for and she would
Speaker 3: know the words to every song that I sang. She
Speaker 3: would know the tune and I get Gramma, how do
Speaker 3: you know all these songs that was the music she
Speaker 3: grew up with. You know, she grew up and earned
Speaker 3: a Great Depression. And it's funny because when I play
Speaker 3: this music for my students, it's old music.
Speaker 1: You know, Oh this is old music.
Speaker 3: And with my grandma, this was the music her parents
Speaker 3: didn't want her to be listening to.
Speaker 1: You know, it's funny how it changed.
Speaker 3: But but you know that time period, you had the
Speaker 3: Great Depression and you had people looking young people especially,
Speaker 3: and young people, by the way, always drives every time
Speaker 3: I say young people, I feel like that makes me
Speaker 3: I'm older, but you are young, you know. I tell
Speaker 3: this to my student. The record companies, they look for
Speaker 3: what the young people are into, and that's what drives
Speaker 3: record sales. So young people were into jazz because remember
Speaker 3: there was no people weren't going to the movies.
Speaker 1: They weren't playing video games.
Speaker 3: Yet they were, and they weren't during the Great Depression.
Speaker 1: They weren't going the opera.
Speaker 3: So they were going There was a dance in a
Speaker 3: swing hall band in every town and that's that was
Speaker 3: the entertainment. And so the swing band was and the
Speaker 3: dance hall band was the form of entertainment. That's what
Speaker 3: young people were going to do. And so when the
Speaker 3: record labels got involved, and this is also when you
Speaker 3: see jazz commercially exploit, you know, the musicians for the
Speaker 3: first time because they because it wasn't the African Americans
Speaker 3: at the time who were the business owners and the
Speaker 3: club owners and the record label producers, and those were
Speaker 3: all white people, and they were business people, and they said,
Speaker 3: this is a money maker. How do we tap into this?
Speaker 3: And so they did, and jazz was able to become
Speaker 3: extremely commercially successful during that time period, and it hasn't
Speaker 3: enjoyed that.
Speaker 1: Kind of success since.
Speaker 3: You know, if you if you went right now and
Speaker 3: googled how many what percentage of all record sales in
Speaker 3: the world are jazz records? You know, last time I
Speaker 3: did it, it was far less than one percent, you know, wow,
Speaker 3: And I don't know what it was in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 3: but it was certainly were much much much higher.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It was what happened to Eric. I mean, we you know,
Speaker 2: and we talk, you know, fans do come and go, oh,
Speaker 2: but this is a music that's been with us for
Speaker 2: over a centuries. Yeah, So two things.
Speaker 3: Happening, well, lots of things happened but two primarily things happened.
Speaker 3: First of all, it became economically almost impossible to continue
Speaker 3: to operate as a big band. You know, you saw
Speaker 3: success with bands like Duke Ellington and Count Basie Band.
Speaker 3: There was loads of big bands. They're extremely expensive.
Speaker 1: To operate, you know.
Speaker 3: It's just the you know, the fuel cost of touring,
Speaker 3: these buses going around, touring, hotel So just this aspect
Speaker 3: of such a large band being financially stable.
Speaker 1: It had to fizzle out because it's just too expensive
Speaker 1: to do.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I can tell you that when I go on tour
Speaker 3: with just a couple of musicians, I run out of
Speaker 3: money between gas and hotel rooms and feeding everybody. So
Speaker 3: there's an exorbitant expense to have twenty five musicians touring
Speaker 3: around or whatever. But the other thing is, like I said, music,
Speaker 3: you know, the record sales follow the young people. And
Speaker 3: in the nineteen fifties rock and roll exploded and that
Speaker 3: was the young people's new favorite thing, and that's what
Speaker 3: took over, and the record labels and the business executives
Speaker 3: and all these people said, hey, this is where we
Speaker 3: need to invest, this is the this is what the
Speaker 3: young people are into now.
Speaker 1: It was jazz.
Speaker 3: Now it's rock and roll, and so we better give
Speaker 3: that our attention, make those record deals, you know, get
Speaker 3: those people in, make them the stars, because that's what's
Speaker 3: gonna sell records.
Speaker 1: And so that's what did happen, you know, rock and roll,
Speaker 1: and I love rock and rolls great. And by the way,
Speaker 1: there be no rock and roll.
Speaker 3: Without jazz because in the blues, right, but that really
Speaker 3: was took, you know, took a big chunk or slice
Speaker 3: of the of the pie away from jazz.
Speaker 1: And you know, that was what became popular now the
Speaker 1: young people.
Speaker 3: But before we go too much into swing, I would
Speaker 3: be remiss as a jazz musician and educator to not
Speaker 3: talk a little bit about when jazz. You know, so
Speaker 3: when rag time and the blues mixed together and we
Speaker 3: have what's known as early New Orleans jazz.
Speaker 1: Letwis Armstrong.
Speaker 3: We really look at him as the maybe most important
Speaker 3: jazz musician because he was kind of like in fact,
Speaker 3: his nickname is Pops for a reason. A lot of
Speaker 3: the trends that even happened today in jazz, the standardization
Speaker 3: of the art form, a lot of it started with him.
Speaker 3: You know, first of all, he's from New Orleans great
Speaker 3: trumpet player and a vocalist. He started, you know, his
Speaker 3: groups and his early groups really started and personified that sound.
Speaker 1: Of early jazz.
Speaker 3: And one of the characteristics I always teach my students,
Speaker 3: you know, because they're they're younger people and they're not
Speaker 3: used to growing up with this music. And they always say, like,
Speaker 3: mister Devido, how do you how do we tell the
Speaker 3: difference I we're listening to New Orleans jazz or if
Speaker 3: it's swing or if it's bebop.
Speaker 1: And we say, well, first of all, most.
Speaker 3: Of the time, if you're listening to a proper New
Speaker 3: Orleans jazz group, you know, you listen for the instrumentation.
Speaker 3: You're gonna the New Orleans tradition, the street parades and
Speaker 3: the brass bands. That tradition came from these bands, these
Speaker 3: marching bands and brass bands. So you hear a lot
Speaker 3: of brass, and very often you hear tuba before you
Speaker 3: even hear the bass. The tuba line. The basslines were
Speaker 3: played by a tuba. And also you hear a lot
Speaker 3: of banjo because this was before the electric guitar. You know,
Speaker 3: we talk about the difference, and once the guitar, the
Speaker 3: electric electricity, you know, allowed for the electric guitar. Then
Speaker 3: you started to see banjos being replaced, and now bands
Speaker 3: could be bigger. You can't really hear a banjo over
Speaker 3: a huge band.
Speaker 2: As easy.
Speaker 3: Anyways, I tried to do it in one of my
Speaker 3: jazz sessions. It was a little tricky, and this is
Speaker 3: before amplifier and a lot of these bands were walking
Speaker 3: around the streets.
Speaker 1: They were marching around anyways, So you're.
Speaker 3: Hearing things like the tuba and the banjo, but also
Speaker 3: there are three main instruments. The melodic instruments are the trumpet,
Speaker 3: the clarinet, and the trombone. So and the combination of
Speaker 3: those instruments and the collective improvisation, and that idea of
Speaker 3: collective improvisation. We don't hear that in the swing period
Speaker 3: and the swing period the music was more arranged and
Speaker 3: you had these very polished arrangements that had very minimal improvisation.
Speaker 3: But in New Orleans jazz and proper New Orleans early jazz,
Speaker 3: the musicians were constantly improvising over each other, almost like
Speaker 3: under and over each other. While one would kind of
Speaker 3: one instrument might take the forefront and play the melody,
Speaker 3: typically the trumpet. You know, Louis Armstrong played the trumpet,
Speaker 3: and he was usually the band leader. But you'll hear
Speaker 3: the clarinet just if you were playing clarinet or trombone.
Speaker 3: You knew that how to appropriately and stylistically improvise while
Speaker 3: the trumpet player was playing the melody. And so I
Speaker 3: get my students to really tune in to listen for
Speaker 3: that combination of instruments.
Speaker 1: And so I have a great example here of an example.
Speaker 3: I have a great example of you know, any Lewis
Speaker 3: Armstrong of course is a great example. But I have
Speaker 3: a piece called Hotter than That, and it's by Lewis Armstrong.
Speaker 3: He had two very famous groups, the Hot five and
Speaker 3: the Hot seven. I forget which one of this is.
Speaker 3: I'll have to listen when it comes on. And also,
Speaker 3: Louis Armstrong was one of the first people, or at
Speaker 3: least he's attributed, you know, we credit him with being
Speaker 3: the first person to take the idea of playing a
Speaker 3: melody and then embellishing it in a way that we
Speaker 3: think of as improvising over the chord changes, you know,
Speaker 3: And what that really was was him making the melody
Speaker 3: unique in his own and taking it, you know, a
Speaker 3: little further and further away, but always related to the melody.
Speaker 3: And that kind of was how that that's still today
Speaker 3: how we approach Most jazz musicians approach a tune.
Speaker 1: We state the.
Speaker 3: Melody, then we improvise over the harmony, kind of based
Speaker 3: off the melody, and different periods veer further from it
Speaker 3: than others. But Louis Armstrong was really the master at this,
Speaker 3: and he was really the first kind of person we
Speaker 3: think of, the first musician as standardizing how do we
Speaker 3: do this? And there was of course Sidney Boschet during
Speaker 3: his time period also.
Speaker 1: Who did that. And also he was a scat singer.
Speaker 3: You know, he was one of the first people to
Speaker 3: try and use his voice to sound like an instrument,
Speaker 3: like improvised with his voice. He had that low browy
Speaker 3: voice and and and when we even hear him sing,
Speaker 3: we we hear him you can hear him thinking like
Speaker 3: how he would play on the trumpet. And so that
Speaker 3: scat singing is also something that's still done today. And
Speaker 3: that idea of making your voice sound like an instrument,
Speaker 3: right because most classical musicians, we want to make our
Speaker 3: instruments sound like a voice. But Louis Armstrong he was
Speaker 3: trying to make his voice sound like his instruments.
Speaker 2: All right, well that that can't be anybody else. You
Speaker 2: hear certain voices into like Frank Sinatra can't be anybody else,
Speaker 2: Louis can't be Yeah, you can't be anybody else. But
Speaker 2: we have to take a quick break, but just very quickly,
Speaker 2: if you will, Eric, what what was just what would?
Speaker 2: What did we hear there? What's most important to take
Speaker 2: from that? Most? Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, first of all, so that was kind of
Speaker 3: mid clarinet solo, so unfortunately we didn't get to hear
Speaker 3: Louis Armstrong and some trumpet on that, but we heard
Speaker 3: certainly heard his scap singing, like you said, his unmistakable
Speaker 3: scat sing.
Speaker 1: But also.
Speaker 3: One of the things I noticed right away is that
Speaker 3: banjo playing. I don't know if you heard the banjo
Speaker 3: just chunking away under there and and really just.
Speaker 2: And the clarinet is unmistakable.
Speaker 3: Certainly visions of New Orleans there and lots of you know,
Speaker 3: back the The improvisation of course then was very you know,
Speaker 3: you heard lots of our peggios and the improvisation and
Speaker 3: you know this is before bebop and what we think
Speaker 3: of as quote unquote modern jazz. So if you are,
Speaker 3: you know, if you're a lot of jazz musicians today
Speaker 3: kind of are trained in the bebop language, and this
Speaker 3: is pre bebop, so you're hearing a vocabulary that is
Speaker 3: very much centered around chord tones and arpeggios, which is
Speaker 3: you know, outlining the harmony and and a very To me,
Speaker 3: it's very refreshing, and it's I don't like to use
Speaker 3: the word simplistic, because there's nothing simplistic about it.
Speaker 1: To me, it's more it's it's it's funny.
Speaker 3: It's like the more the more I the older I
Speaker 3: get when I play jazz, the more I want to
Speaker 3: play traditionally because I feel like I don't need to
Speaker 3: try to. You know, a lot of younger cats, so
Speaker 3: they want to play a lot of notes and be
Speaker 3: impressive and show that they can play all this advanced harmony,
Speaker 3: which is great and I love all that stuff. But
Speaker 3: there's something about listening to Lewis Armstrong just phrase something
Speaker 3: that is so melodic using just you know, chord tones
Speaker 3: that are maybe simpler in a way, but not they're
Speaker 3: just perfect and very melodic. Like all of his solo
Speaker 3: sound like they could be the melody of the song.
Speaker 1: Sometimes er, we've got.
Speaker 2: To take a quick break when we come back. When
Speaker 2: we have I think we could go off for house.
Speaker 2: We'll have about ten minutes left, and we still have
Speaker 2: to talk about bebop and modern jazz in the future
Speaker 2: and so but we're gonna make it. Don't let anybody
Speaker 2: go anywhere yet. We still have to talk about that,
Speaker 2: and I want to talk about the future with some
Speaker 2: of the changes. I know art Westchester has been hit
Speaker 2: with some of some of the changes from our current administration,
Speaker 2: and I know that's affecting many artists, including you. Well,
Speaker 2: we'll talk about that brief anyway, and more music to hear.
Speaker 2: This is Being Frank. I'm your host, Frank Lebono. My
Speaker 2: very special guest is musician, historian and teacher mister Eric Devido.
Speaker 2: We'll be back with more of Being Frank writ after
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Speaker 2: Welcome back to Being Frank. The Intelligent conversation podcast. Thanks
Speaker 2: for sticking with us. I'm your host, Frank Lobono, and
Speaker 2: of course our engineer is Neil Rick. My very special
Speaker 2: guest tonight is historian, musician and teacher mister Eric DeVito.
Speaker 2: You know, we bring our audience a fresh topic every
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Speaker 2: you're there. Of course, we're talking about the history of
Speaker 2: jazz in America with mister Eric DeVito. Eric, we've been
Speaker 2: running through kind of historically. We've gone up to we're
Speaker 2: getting up to the swing and bebop era. What's that about? Yep?
Speaker 3: So you know we got to talk about Louis Armstrong
Speaker 3: and early jazz and New Orleans jazz and the collective
Speaker 3: improvisation that was such a unique feature of it. And
Speaker 3: then you know, we kind of hit this earlier, but
Speaker 3: we talked about the nineteen thirties, and you know that
Speaker 3: we also think of the nineteen twenties, of course as
Speaker 3: the jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance, and this is
Speaker 3: where we see a lot of these big bands, and
Speaker 3: also New York start to really get on the scene
Speaker 3: as a place where all arts and culture was, especially
Speaker 3: African American artists, authors, poets, musicians. But the swing period
Speaker 3: is when we saw you jazz being its most commercially successful,
Speaker 3: of course, and we have these big bands and one
Speaker 3: of the most you know, there's so many ones, of
Speaker 3: course that are important, but you know, the one that
Speaker 3: comes to mind, one that we can't not talk about is,
Speaker 3: of course Duke Gallington. The Duke Gallington Orchestra is, you know,
Speaker 3: one of the quintessential jazz orchestras just the fact that
Speaker 3: it was a jazz orchestra.
Speaker 1: Not just a jazz band. It wasn't just a dance band,
Speaker 1: it was an orchestra.
Speaker 3: Duke Gallington wrote for the orchestra like any other composer wrote,
Speaker 3: and you know, he was very he was a master
Speaker 3: of orchestration, and and the way he wrote is akin
Speaker 3: to how any great classical composer wrote. He also had
Speaker 3: a you know, he had a residency of course in
Speaker 3: Harlem at the Cotton Club, one Hunt and twenty fifth Street,
Speaker 3: and every week his band would play, and you know,
Speaker 3: people would line up and and you know to get
Speaker 3: to get in from all all over the town, all
Speaker 3: over all over the state. You know, probably people came
Speaker 3: in from all over the place. But also there's a
Speaker 3: really important thing, important piece of technology which also is
Speaker 3: is you know happening at this time, which is the radio.
Speaker 3: You know, so, yes, well, how did jazz become so popular? Then, well,
Speaker 3: the radio is part of it, just like the TV
Speaker 3: helped make rock and roll really popular when it became
Speaker 3: a household thing late, you know, a few decades later,
Speaker 3: people were turning on the radio in different parts of
Speaker 3: the world and hearing the Duke Ellington Orchestra every week.
Speaker 1: You know, they had a live broadcast.
Speaker 3: From the Cotton Club, and so that really helped launch
Speaker 3: not just jazz to the rest of the world, but
Speaker 3: also Duke Gallington. You know, he kind of became this
Speaker 3: unofficial spokesperson for you know, swing music. Because that's you know,
Speaker 3: what people were you know, listening to on the radio.
Speaker 3: So that was very important. And like I said earlier,
Speaker 3: this is also when we saw jazz become very commercial
Speaker 3: a lot of you know, a lot of people. One
Speaker 3: of the criticisms is that a lot of the music
Speaker 3: lost its African influence and that you know, some of
Speaker 3: it was it was catering to white audiences and they
Speaker 3: had the white club owners and business owners and driving
Speaker 3: the commercial sales. But also you had radio requirements too, right,
Speaker 3: like things were gonna be played on the radio. There
Speaker 3: was time constraints and if the object was now more
Speaker 3: about putting on a show and production, there was all
Speaker 3: that that those things to consider to make it polished.
Speaker 3: And of course we see this is when a lot
Speaker 3: of the segregation and racism becomes apparent in jazz. You know,
Speaker 3: you had great musicians who created this music that weren't
Speaker 3: allowed to stay in the hotels or eat in the
Speaker 3: restaurants where they were performing. You had black bands, you know,
Speaker 3: or black clubs and white clubs. And if they if
Speaker 3: people mix, they didn't mix very often. And it really
Speaker 3: wasn't until this period where you saw integration, you know,
Speaker 3: Benny Goodman, the King of swing, one of the greatest
Speaker 3: swing musicians, white musician, but he puts an African American
Speaker 3: guitarist in his band, Charlie Christian, only because he had
Speaker 3: the buying power and the and the and the audience,
Speaker 3: you know, fan loyalty that he said to clumboters, you know,
Speaker 3: if you if you don't let me put this guy
Speaker 3: in my band, I'm not playing and you're out all
Speaker 3: these tickets sales. So you started to see people like, uh,
Speaker 3: you know, his stature being able to help break down barriers.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: I always called Charlie Christian like the Jackie Robinson of
Speaker 3: jazz because he was like the first and you know,
Speaker 3: Benny Goodman, Uh, he demanded that. And and so here's
Speaker 3: another great example where jazz is kind of taking the
Speaker 3: reins in the forefront and dealing with issues like racism
Speaker 3: and segregation and uh, you know, and taking these risks
Speaker 3: before you saw it done in other places.
Speaker 1: You know, this is long before the civil rights movement.
Speaker 3: So Duke Ellington, of course same kind of power. You know,
Speaker 3: he was a household name and his band was, of
Speaker 3: course one of the most swinging bands is the Duke
Speaker 3: Ellington Band. So I have a great, classic example of
Speaker 3: from the Duke Ellington Orchestra. It's actually written by Billy Strayhorn,
Speaker 3: who was kind of like his silent writing partner. If
Speaker 3: you're a jazz musician, you know all about Billy Strayhorn.
Speaker 1: If you're not, you might not.
Speaker 3: But he co wrote a lot of tunes with Duke
Speaker 3: and a lot of times he didn't get the credit
Speaker 3: for them. But take the A Train is a classic
Speaker 3: class yeah, of course, referring to the A train that
Speaker 3: goes up.
Speaker 1: To Harlem, which is where the Cotton Club was. So
Speaker 1: we'll just play a little bit of that.
Speaker 3: But this is a classic example of the Duke Ellington
Speaker 3: Orchestra really swinging on a really you know, great tune.
Speaker 2: H Well, I I certainly think we can consider that
Speaker 2: swing because I was definitely swinging. It's a perfectly descriptive
Speaker 2: name for the title. You want to swing, you want
Speaker 2: to roll, not quite full on.
Speaker 3: The trumpet there, swinging And you know that word swing
Speaker 3: has two meanings of course in jazz, so you have
Speaker 3: swing music which refers to really the swing dance that
Speaker 3: kind of part of the culture of that that style,
Speaker 3: but also the way eighth notes are performed in jazz,
Speaker 3: we swing them, and that has to do with you know,
Speaker 3: again dividing them not equally, but based on the triplet,
Speaker 3: which is what gives it instead of that one and
Speaker 3: two and feel that's that's completely symmetrical. It has a
Speaker 3: longer first eighth notes. So when we play eighth notes
Speaker 3: in jazz, not to get too technical or music.
Speaker 1: Nerdy, but we have the bab ba ba.
Speaker 3: And that's based on the triplet feel, which of course
Speaker 3: comes from the African influence of the music. So we
Speaker 3: kind of that you that word kind of sometimes gets
Speaker 3: thrown around interchangeably. But when we swing, when when we
Speaker 3: say somebody is swinging, they're really locked into that groove
Speaker 3: that kind of comes from that rhythmic feel, that triplet.
Speaker 2: Okay, that brings up We don't have a lot of time, unfortunately,
Speaker 2: it's just great. But now we're up to bebop. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so set up and modern jazz and let's let's see
Speaker 2: what we can get there.
Speaker 3: Well, I'll do I'll do a crash success that can
Speaker 3: on bebop. So bebop is what we think of as
Speaker 3: the beginning of modern jazz. And this is really you know,
Speaker 3: happens in the nineteen forties, and this is also when
Speaker 3: New York City really starts to become the center of jazz,
Speaker 3: as we're all the underground clubs and stuff and kind
Speaker 3: of first emerge and where bebop is born. And a
Speaker 3: lot of the first bebop musicians were swing musicians. Those
Speaker 3: were their bread and butter gigs. But what happened is
Speaker 3: that this was a reaction to some of the things
Speaker 3: we spoke about the commercialization of jazz, the feeling that
Speaker 3: their culture was being exploited by you know, white business owners,
Speaker 3: and they kind of wanted to take their music back.
Speaker 3: You know, you notice when you were listening to Duke Ellington,
Speaker 3: you don't hear all that collective improvisation or the solos
Speaker 3: were very short. It was more about the band and
Speaker 3: the arrangement. Bebop is a reaction to that. They want
Speaker 3: to kind of bring the music back to its African roots.
Speaker 3: So you see small groups again, longer solos that feature
Speaker 3: the individual, and the improvisation is more of a central
Speaker 3: part of the music now. And of course they wanted
Speaker 3: to be They wanted the music to be more abstract
Speaker 3: and more experimental, so they were challenging and pushing the
Speaker 3: boundaries of the music. So you saw much more complex harmonies,
Speaker 3: melodies that weren't so singable and memorable, but they sounded
Speaker 3: like improvisations themselves. There was almost like a one upsmanship.
Speaker 3: There was a lot of competitive nature. How fast can
Speaker 3: we play, how high can we play? How abstract can
Speaker 3: we be? How creative can we be? And so excuse me,
Speaker 3: this is when the we really see the music become
Speaker 3: a lot more creative, abstract, and we see these this
Speaker 3: new kind of language emerge, this modern jazz language which
Speaker 3: we call bebop vocabulary, which really hasn't changed a lot,
Speaker 3: although some people will tell you with free jazz and things,
Speaker 3: but a lot of jazz people will tell you that
Speaker 3: not a whole lot has changed, you know, vocabulary wise
Speaker 3: in the music. We still kind of use this as
Speaker 3: the ba thesis of kind of our our vocabulary in jazz.
Speaker 3: And of course that's what musicians like Charlie Parker there
Speaker 3: to say, who are some of.
Speaker 2: The ambassadors of bebop that we that we know.
Speaker 3: Charlie Parker, of course, Disney Gillespie a big one, stealoneous monk,
Speaker 3: Bud Powell. I mean we could go on and on,
Speaker 3: but Max Roach, those are like some of the real
Speaker 3: early creators.
Speaker 1: Of this music.
Speaker 3: And then even a young Miles Davis who didn't create
Speaker 3: this music, but he kind of was taken under the
Speaker 3: wing of Charlie Parker and Disney Gillespie and he was
Speaker 3: a part of it as a you know, as a
Speaker 3: teenager really and and he used that language, that bebop
Speaker 3: language to help create the later styles of jazz like
Speaker 3: cool jazz, modal jazz fusion, which wouldn't have happened without
Speaker 3: his bebop you know, knowledge and involvement.
Speaker 2: But yeah, a podcast for another day, of course, gone
Speaker 2: on what we're almost out of time and I want
Speaker 2: to get the song and what are we going to hear?
Speaker 1: Now? That's exah.
Speaker 3: So this is a great example of bebop tune. This
Speaker 3: is a called bloom Dido Charlie Parker tuon You're gonna
Speaker 3: It's a classic, you know recording with Charlie Parker and
Speaker 3: Dizzy Gillespie. And you really hear the You hear the
Speaker 3: almost like frantic nature of be popular. Bebop's more angular,
Speaker 3: a lot more improvised, a lot longer solos, so you'll
Speaker 3: hear both of those guys on there, and of course
Speaker 3: piano bassed drums rhythm section.
Speaker 2: Wow, that just screams feedbop.
Speaker 3: You just you can really hear the interaction, you know,
Speaker 3: that's one of the interaction. All of a sudden, the
Speaker 3: drums and the bass are just as involved, where.
Speaker 2: Maybe it's almost like yeah, where you didn't.
Speaker 3: Hear that in the swing period as much. But now
Speaker 3: every musician is kind of just as an integral part
Speaker 3: of the creativity and the creation, the spontinuity and the improvisation.
Speaker 2: Eric. So much more to talk about, but two key
Speaker 2: questions I have to get to before we close the program.
Speaker 2: Why is it important to continue to study and celebrate
Speaker 2: jazz today? Especially you know, it's still, as you even mentioned,
Speaker 2: it could be considered marginal music at least in terms
Speaker 2: of sales at least, So why is it important that
Speaker 2: we continue the tradition of jazz?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, it's a great question, and I think
Speaker 3: it's kind of the thing where the more you study it,
Speaker 3: the more you realize why.
Speaker 1: You know, it can be a challenge.
Speaker 3: It's one of the things that's a challenge for me
Speaker 3: with my students is you know how to get them
Speaker 3: you know, to feel connected to this music. But you know,
Speaker 3: throughout this whole discussion, we keep talking about how jazz
Speaker 3: parallels American society. And when you study jazz, you're studying
Speaker 3: American history, and I think that in itself is so important,
Speaker 3: you know, from its creation to where it gets its
Speaker 3: roots to You can't talk about jazz without talking about
Speaker 3: the blues and talking about slavery. You can't talk about
Speaker 3: jazz without talking about segregation and racism. You can't talk
Speaker 3: about jazz without talking about you know, pushing boundaries without
Speaker 3: talking about the jazz age and different cultural you know,
Speaker 3: societal issues, time periods. So jazz is just so interwoven
Speaker 3: into the American fabric and it's just part of the
Speaker 3: DNA of who we are, whether you identify as an
Speaker 3: American or not. You know, jazz is just a part
Speaker 3: of this culture in this place. And you know, like
Speaker 3: anything else, if you don't study the past, then you're
Speaker 3: not less informed. You might be doomed to repeat things
Speaker 3: about it. But there's so much in there to listen to,
Speaker 3: you know. There When I listen to Bebop, I'm hearing
Speaker 3: the blues, I'm hearing West African drum.
Speaker 1: Music.
Speaker 3: I'm hearing slave songs and work. So it's all in there,
Speaker 3: just like when you eat some chicken soup. You might
Speaker 3: not see every ingredient, but it's in there you taste.
Speaker 3: It's the complexity of it to me is what makes
Speaker 3: it so rich and so unique.
Speaker 2: That leads me to my final question. And it's all
Speaker 2: relative to what you were saying, how important it is
Speaker 2: to continue these things. Yet I just read recently that
Speaker 2: art organizations like Art Westchester, Arts Westchester, you're going to
Speaker 2: have their funding cut, which will definitely affect to the
Speaker 2: brilliant programs that you had planned. I saw all four
Speaker 2: of them, two with the Nayak Library and two with
Speaker 2: the Piramont Library. They're just fantastic. What is that going
Speaker 2: to mean for the future cuts in funding like that?
Speaker 2: What will happen?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I can't say I don't have a
Speaker 3: crystal ball.
Speaker 1: It's you know, I was very fortunate.
Speaker 3: This was a great you know, I was fortunate this
Speaker 3: year to receive a generous grant through Arts Wenchester. I
Speaker 3: just got another one through these Casilina their Artists Support fund,
Speaker 3: So I've kind of been fortunate this year.
Speaker 1: But I also see the cuts happening.
Speaker 3: Even as a music teacher in schools, you know, it's
Speaker 3: something you're always aware of. Music in general always is
Speaker 3: the first thing on the chopping block and always has
Speaker 3: the smallest budget usually, So it's tough to say. You know,
Speaker 3: I think it all comes down to a lot of times,
Speaker 3: it comes down to what the public.
Speaker 1: You know, what the public prioritizes.
Speaker 3: Right, If if people are okay with having less music
Speaker 3: and less art, and then there's not always a reason
Speaker 3: to bring it back, right, but if people demand it,
Speaker 3: if people want it and make it a priority, then
Speaker 3: you know, you hope that the trickle down effect is
Speaker 3: that the leaders involved who make all the budgets, they
Speaker 3: see it as a priority.
Speaker 1: You know, it's funny people tend to.
Speaker 3: People tend to praise the art so much when there's
Speaker 3: money for them, you know, when they when they can
Speaker 3: they can give money. They love to say how important
Speaker 3: the arts are. But I always say, like, you know,
Speaker 3: what about when the money isn't.
Speaker 1: There, then where you're seeing your leaders?
Speaker 3: You know, that's to me, how they support the arts
Speaker 3: when the money isn't there, What things are they doing?
Speaker 3: You know, sometimes it's just doing simple things like going
Speaker 3: out to a local establishment that has live music, buying
Speaker 3: a local musician's records. There's little things you can do,
Speaker 3: you know, donating some money if somebody's doing a project
Speaker 3: on GoFundMe for a record album, throwing them twenty bucks.
Speaker 3: All those little things are stuff that we can do
Speaker 3: that maybe a big government you know budget can't do.
Speaker 3: But we still have the power if we make it
Speaker 3: a priority, you know, And I think that's important. The
Speaker 3: more you listen to it and study it, the more
Speaker 3: you justify wanting to make it a priority for yourself.
Speaker 3: You don't know about this music, Why are you going
Speaker 3: to donate any money to keep it going? Why do
Speaker 3: you think it's important? So learning about it is one
Speaker 3: of the forms that you really It deepens the appreciation
Speaker 3: for it, and it makes it so you can't be
Speaker 3: without it.
Speaker 2: Eric, if you don't want to thank you for being
Speaker 2: Frank and you all of your intelligent conversation, please come
Speaker 2: back to These are always wonderful conversations. I always learned
Speaker 2: so much, and I'm sure people do as well.
Speaker 1: I always love be in here, Frank, thanks for having.
Speaker 2: Me, certainly my pleasure, and of course we offer special
Speaker 2: thanks to our listeners who take time to give us
Speaker 2: a voice in their lives. Remember you offer fresh topic
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Speaker 2: Like to leave you with our last two nuggets. As
Speaker 2: I said, a closing slogan and some great original music.
Speaker 2: This one comes from one of my favorites and one
Speaker 2: of the greats of bebop, Disney Gillespie, who said, some
Speaker 2: days you get up and put the horn to your
Speaker 2: chops and it sounds pretty good and you win. Some
Speaker 2: days you try and nothing works and the horn wins.
Speaker 2: This goes on and on, and then you die and
Speaker 2: the horn wins. As a musician, you have to keep
Speaker 2: one foot back in the past and one foot forward
Speaker 2: into the future. That's great advice from Disney Gillespie. We
Speaker 2: have some great closing music from my good friend Jim Donica.
Speaker 2: This is the Jim Donica Quartet with Storm the Barricades
Speaker 2: for our engineer, Neil Richter. I'm your host, Frank Luborono.
Speaker 2: We hope to have you join us for the next being. Frank.
Speaker 2: We're the only way to be is Frank.
Speaker 7: Thanks everybody, bat.
Speaker 4: Anything about, let all of this, let a little boer, serumer,
Speaker 4: difot nothing.
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