Jazz Band Music

As musicians, listeners, and scholars have sensed for many years, the story of jazz is more than a history of the music. Burton Peretti presents a fascinating account of how the racial and cultural dynamics of American cities created the music, life, and business that was jazz. From its origins in the jook joints of sharecroppers and the streets and dance halls of 1890s New Orleans, through its later metamorphoses in the cities of the North, Peretti charts the life of jazz culture to the eve of bebop and World War II. In the course of those fifty years, jazz was the story of players who made the transition from childhood spasm bands to Carnegie Hall and worldwide touring and fame. It became the music of the Twenties, a decade of Prohibition, of adolescent discontent, of Harlem pride, and of Americans hoping to preserve cultural traditions in an urban, commercial age. And jazz was where black and white musicians performed together, as uneasy partners, in the big bands of Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman. "Blacks fought back by using jazz", states Peretti, "with its unique cultural and intellectual properties, to prove, assess, and evade the "dynamic of minstrelsy". Drawing on newspaper reports of the times and on the firsthand testimony of more than seventy prominent musicians and singers (among them Benny Carter, Bud Freeman, Kid Ory, and Mary Lou Williams), The Creation of Jazz is the first comprehensive analysis of the role of early jazz in American social history.

Buddy Bolden's legendary wax cylinder recording of 1905. Louis Armstrong in 1928 taking jazz to a level of perfection never to be equaled. Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall playing a complex blend of blues, Jewish themes, and classical forms. The birth of bebop, a revolutionary form of jazz--complex, difficult, artful, and often antagonistic. John Coltrane takes the show tune "My Favorite Things" and turns it into a dark and sinister exercise in musical estrangement. Taking five key moments in jazz history, Brian Morton challenges our assumptions about jazz's origins, its ethnic identity, and its social and political nature. Morton follows jazz as it weaves a constantly evolving tale, full of intriguing sidetracks and occasional dead ends, sudden extinctions and bizarre archaeological survivals. Underneath it, though, there is a constant questioning spirit, an unwillingness to accept orthodoxies, conventional resolutions and simple chronologies. Morton is prompted to ask, at the end of jazz's first century, how can we define a music that embraces both the traditional Dixieland band as well as highly-innovative performances that blend pop, classical music, Karelian folk song, and the cool aesthetic of Miles Davis. Does the music have any more than nostalgic connections with its African-American origins? Is there some philosophy or cast of mind which creates jazz? What does it have to do with other, more settled genres, and why do people turn to it? This is a book for jazz lovers ready to reconsider the accepted versions of jazz history, but also for those who have until now looked on either in puzzlement or suspicion. It is, above all, an invitation to listen afresh.