1.
New Orleans
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New Orleans is a major United States port and the largest city and metropolitan area in the state of Louisiana. The population of the city was 343,829 as of the 2010 U. S. Census, the New Orleans metropolitan area had a population of 1,167,764 in 2010 and was the 46th largest in the United States. The New Orleans–Metairie–Bogalusa Combined Statistical Area, a trading area, had a 2010 population of 1,452,502. The city is named after the Duke of Orleans, who reigned as Regent for Louis XV from 1715 to 1723, as it was established by French colonists and it is well known for its distinct French and Spanish Creole architecture, as well as its cross-cultural and multilingual heritage. New Orleans is also famous for its cuisine, music, and its celebrations and festivals, most notably Mardi Gras. The city is referred to as the most unique in the United States. New Orleans is located in southeastern Louisiana, straddling the Mississippi River, the city and Orleans Parish are coterminous. The city and parish are bounded by the parishes of St. Tammany to the north, St. Bernard to the east, Plaquemines to the south, and Jefferson to the south and west. Lake Pontchartrain, part of which is included in the city limits, lies to the north, before Hurricane Katrina, Orleans Parish was the most populous parish in Louisiana. As of 2015, it ranks third in population, trailing neighboring Jefferson Parish, La Nouvelle-Orléans was founded May 7,1718, by the French Mississippi Company, under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, on land inhabited by the Chitimacha. It was named for Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, who was Regent of the Kingdom of France at the time and his title came from the French city of Orléans. The French colony was ceded to the Spanish Empire in the Treaty of Paris, during the American Revolutionary War, New Orleans was an important port for smuggling aid to the rebels, transporting military equipment and supplies up the Mississippi River. Bernardo de Gálvez y Madrid, Count of Gálvez successfully launched a campaign against the British from the city in 1779. New Orleans remained under Spanish control until 1803, when it reverted briefly to French oversight, nearly all of the surviving 18th-century architecture of the Vieux Carré dates from the Spanish period, the most notable exception being the Old Ursuline Convent. Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, thereafter, the city grew rapidly with influxes of Americans, French, Creoles, and Africans. Later immigrants were Irish, Germans, and Italians, Major commodity crops of sugar and cotton were cultivated with slave labor on large plantations outside the city. The Haitian Revolution ended in 1804 and established the republic in the Western Hemisphere. It had occurred several years in what was then the French colony of Saint-Domingue
2.
Ragtime
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Ragtime – also spelled rag-time or rag time – is a musical genre that enjoyed its peak popularity between 1895 and 1918. Its cardinal trait is its syncopated, or ragged, rhythm, the genre has its origins in African-American communities like St. Louis years before being published as popular sheet music for piano. Ernest Hogan was a pioneer of music and was the first to compose ragtime into sheet music. The composition was called LA Pas Ma LA and it was released in 1895, Hogan has also been credited for coining the term ragtime. The term is derived from his hometown Shake Rag in Bowling Green. Ben Harney, who is also a Kentucky native has often credited for introducing the music to the mainstream public. His first ragtime composition Youve been an old wagon but you done broke helped popularize the musical genre. The composition was published in 1895 but released in 1896, Ragtime was also a modification of the march made popular by John Philip Sousa, with additional polyrhythms coming from African music. For at least 12 years after its publication, Maple Leaf Rag heavily influenced subsequent ragtime composers with its melody lines, Ragtime fell out of favor as jazz claimed the publics imagination after 1917, but there have been numerous revivals since the music has been re-discovered. First in the early 1940s, many bands began to include ragtime in their repertoire. A more significant revival occurred in the 1950s as a variety of ragtime styles of the past were made available on records, and new rags were composed, published. In 1971 Joshua Rifkin brought out a compilation of Joplins work which was nominated for a Grammy Award, in 1973 The New England Ragtime Ensemble recorded The Red Back Book, a compilation of some of Joplins rags in period orchestrations edited by conservatory president Gunther Schuller. This also won a Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance of the year and was named Billboards Top Classical Album of 1974, subsequently, the motion picture The Sting brought ragtime to a wide audience with its soundtrack of Joplin tunes. The films rendering of The Entertainer, adapted and orchestrated by Marvin Hamlisch, was a Top 5 hit in 1974. Ragtime – with Joplins work at the forefront – has been cited as an American equivalent of the minuets of Mozart, Ragtime also influenced classical composers including Erik Satie, Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky. Ragtime originated in African American music in the late 19th century and descended from the jigs and march music played by African American bands, referred to as jig piano or piano thumping. By the start of the 20th century, it widely popular throughout North America and was listened and danced to, performed. A distinctly American musical style, ragtime may be considered a synthesis of African syncopation and European classical music, some early piano rags are entitled marches, and jig and rag were used interchangeably in the mid-1890s
3.
Jazz
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Jazz is a music genre that originated amongst African Americans in New Orleans, United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in Blues and Ragtime. Since the 1920s jazz age, jazz has become recognized as a form of musical expression. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms, Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions including blues and ragtime, as well as European military band music. Although the foundation of jazz is deeply rooted within the Black experience of the United States, different cultures have contributed their own experience, intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as one of Americas original art forms. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on different national, regional, and local musical cultures, New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass-band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. In the 1930s, heavily arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz, bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging musicians music which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed in the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments. In the early 1980s, a form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful. Other styles and genres abound in the 2000s, such as Latin, the question of the origin of the word jazz has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well documented. It is believed to be related to jasm, a term dating back to 1860 meaning pep. The use of the word in a context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Its first documented use in a context in New Orleans was in a November 14,1916 Times-Picayune article about jas bands. In an interview with NPR, musician Eubie Blake offered his recollections of the slang connotations of the term, saying, When Broadway picked it up. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, the American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Twentieth Century. Jazz has proved to be difficult to define, since it encompasses such a wide range of music spanning a period of over 100 years. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions, in the opinion of Robert Christgau, most of us would say that inventing meaning while letting loose is the essence and promise of jazz. As Duke Ellington, one of jazzs most famous figures, said, although jazz is considered highly difficult to define, at least in part because it contains so many varied subgenres, improvisation is consistently regarded as being one of its key elements
4.
Twelve-bar blues
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The 12-bar blues or blues changes is one of the most prominent chord progressions in popular music. The blues progression has a form in lyrics, phrase, chord structure. In its basic form, it is based on the I-IV-V chords of a key. The blues can be played in any key, mastery of the blues and rhythm changes are critical elements for building a jazz repertoire. In the key of C, one basic blues progression is as follows, a basic example of the progression would look like this, using T to indicate the tonic, S for the subdominant, and D for the dominant, and representing one chord. In Roman numeral analysis the tonic is called the I, the sub-dominant the IV, using said notations, the chord progression outlined above can be represented as follows. The first line takes four bars, as do the two lines, for a total of twelve bars. However, the vocal or lead phrases, though they come in threes. This overlap between the grouping of the accompaniment and the vocal is part of what creates interest in the twelve bar blues, handy, the Father of the Blues, codified this blues form to help musicians communicate chord changes. The length of sections may be varied to create eight-bar blues or sixteen-bar blues, seventh chords are often used just before a change, and more changes can be added. Basic jazz blues progression Play In jazz, 12-bar blues progressions are expanded with moving substitutions, the cadence uniquely leads to the root by perfect intervals of fourths. The Bebop blues, Play This progression is similar to Charlie Parkers Nows the Time, Billies Bounce, Sonny Rollinss Tenor Madness and it is a bop soloists cliche to arpeggiate this chord from the 3 up to the ♭9. Minor blues Play There are also minor 12-bar blues, such as John Coltranes Equinox and Mr. P. C. made famous by Lil Green with Big Bill Broonzy and then Peggy Lee with the Benny Goodman Orchestra. The chord on the scale degree may be major or minor, in which case it fits a dorian scale along with the minor i7 and iv7 chords. Major and minor can also be mixed together, a characteristic of the music of Charles Brown. While the blues is most often considered to be in strophic form with a verse-chorus pattern. Handys St. Louis Blues However, many using the blues chord progression have lyrics that are not in the three-line form. For instance, Im Moving On has a verse in the first four bars, Im movin on, Ill soon be gone You were flyin too high for my little old sky So Im movin on
5.
Dixieland
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Dixieland, sometimes referred to as hot jazz or traditional jazz, is a style of jazz based on the music that developed in New Orleans at the start of the 20th century. The first use of the term Dixieland with reference to music was in the name of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, at that time, there was no issue of subgenres of jazz, so Dixieland referred to the band and not the music. That reflected the fact that all of the recorded repertoire of New Orleans musicians was from the period when the format was already evolving beyond the traditional New Orleans format. Dixieland may in that sense be regarded as denoting the jazz movement of the 1940s and 1950s as much as any particular subgenre of jazz. The essential elements that were accepted as within the style were the front lines consisting of trumpets, trombones, and clarinets. The Jim Crow associations of the name Dixieland also did little to attract younger coloured musicians to the revival, well-known jazz standard tunes such as Basin Street Blues and When the Saints Go Marching In are known even to non-jazz fans thanks to the enduring popularity of traditional jazz. The Vietnam-era protest song Feel Like Im Fixin to Die Rag is based on tonal centers, Traditional jazz is a major tourist attraction for New Orleans to the present day. It has been an influence on the styles of modern players such as Charles Mingus. New Orleans music combined earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime, the Dixieland sound is created when one instrument plays the melody or a variation on it, and the other instruments improvise around that melody. This creates a more sound than the heavily arranged big band sound of the 1930s or the straight melodies of bebop in the 1940s. The West Coast revival began in the late 1930s in San Francisco which used banjo, the Dutch old-style jazz was played with trumpets, trombones and saxophones accompanied by a single clarinet, sousaphone and a section of Marching percussion usually including a washboard. Dixieland is the given to early jazz by traditional jazz revivalists. The name is a reference to the Old South, specifically anything south of the Mason-Dixon line, the term encompasses earlier brass band marches, French Quadrilles, biguine, ragtime, and blues with collective, polyphonic improvisation. Louis Armstrongs All-Stars was the band most popularly identified with Dixieland during the 1940s and this creates a more polyphonic sound than the arranged ensemble playing of the big band sound or the straight head melodies of bebop. During the 1930s and 1940s, the earlier group-improvisation style fell out of favor with the majority of black players. Though younger musicians developed new forms, many beboppers revered Armstrong, many Dixieland groups of the revival era consciously imitated the recordings and bands of decades earlier. Other musicians continued to create innovative performances and new tunes, for example, in the 1950s a style called Progressive Dixieland sought to blend polyphonic improvisation with bebop-style rhythm. Spike Jones & His New Band and Steve Lacy played with such bands and this style is sometimes called Dixie-bop
6.
Swing music
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Swing music, or simply swing, is a form of American music that dominated in the 1930s and 1940s. The name swing came from the swing feel where the emphasis is on the off–beat or weaker pulse in the music, Swing bands usually featured soloists who would improvise on the melody over the arrangement. The danceable swing style of big bands and bandleaders such as Benny Goodman was the dominant form of American popular music from 1935 to 1946, the verb to swing is also used as a term of praise for playing that has a strong groove or drive. Notable musicians of the era include Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, Count Basie, Woody Herman. Swing has roots in the late 1920s as larger ensembles began using written arrangements, a typical song played in swing style would feature a strong, anchoring rhythm section in support of more loosely tied wind and brass. The most common style consisted of having a soloist take center stage, Swing music began to decline in popularity during World War II because of several factors. By the late 1940s, swing had morphed into traditional pop music, or evolved into new styles such as jump blues, Swing music saw a revival in the late 1950s and 1960s with pop vocalists such as Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Ella Fitzgerald. Swing blended with other genres to create new styles, in country music, artists such as Jimmie Rodgers, Moon Mullican and Bob Wills introduced many elements of swing along with blues to create a genre called western swing. Gypsy swing is an outgrowth of Venuti and Langs jazz violin swing, in the 1970s, and 1980s, fans of big band music attended swing music performances at supper clubs. In the late-1980s a trendier, more urban-styled swing-beat emerged called new jack swing, in the late 1990s and into the 2000s there was a swing revival, led by Squirrel Nut Zippers, Brian Setzer, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and Lavay Smith. In Canada, some of the early 2000s records by The JW-Jones Blues Band included swing revival elements, the 1920s saw parallel trends in jazz and popular music that would later converge into the swing style. New Orleans style jazz was based on a meter and contrapuntal improvisation led by a trumpet or cornet, typically followed by a clarinet. The rhythm section consisted of a tuba and drums, and sometimes a banjo, by the early 1920s guitars and pianos sometimes substituted for the banjo and a string bass sometimes substituted for the tuba. Further innovations in small ensemble playing led to development of the Chicago style identified with Louis Armstrong, a stint with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra familiarized him with arranged ensemble playing that differed from the New Orleans style, in which saxophones became the dominant sound among the reeds. Armstrong brought those back to his smaller ensembles, the soloist played over an ensemble relegated to a supporting role in the background. The string bass also lent itself to playing in a 4/4 rhythm rather than the 2/4 rhythm dictated by the tuba. The new format gave the soloist the opportunity to play with more rhythmic freedom, but playing with swing remained the province of the soloist, not the ensemble. The late 1920s saw increasingly sophisticated arrangements used by bigger ensembles, some arrangements used call-response between horn sections to build the melody
7.
Vaudeville
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Vaudeville is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment. It was especially popular in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s, a typical vaudeville performance is made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill. A vaudeville performer is often referred to as a vaudevillian, Vaudeville developed from many sources, including the concert saloon, minstrelsy, freak shows, dime museums, and literary American burlesque. Called the heart of American show business, vaudeville was one of the most popular types of entertainment in North America for several decades, the origin of this term is obscure, but is often explained as being derived from the French expression voix de ville. A second speculation is that it comes from the songs on satire by poet Olivier Basselin. Some, however, preferred the term variety to what manager Tony Pastor called its sissy. Thus, vaudeville was marketed as variety well into the 20th century, with its first subtle appearances within the early 1860s, vaudeville was not initially a common form of entertainment. The form gradually evolved from the saloon and variety hall into its mature form throughout the 1870s and 1880s. This more gentle form was known as Polite Vaudeville, in the years before the American Civil War, entertainment existed on a different scale. Certainly, variety theatre existed before 1860 in Europe and elsewhere, in the US, as early as the first decades of the 19th century, theatregoers could enjoy a performance consisting of Shakespeare plays, acrobatics, singing, dancing, and comedy. As the years progressed, people seeking diversified amusement found a number of ways to be entertained. Vaudeville was characterized by traveling companies touring through cities and towns, a significant influence also came from Dutch minstrels and comedians. Vaudeville incorporated these various itinerant amusements into a stable, institutionalized form centered in Americas growing urban hubs, pastors experiment proved successful, and other managers soon followed suit. B. F. Keith took the step, starting in Boston. Later, E. F. Albee, adoptive grandfather of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, circuits such as those managed by Keith-Albee provided vaudevilles greatest economic innovation and the principal source of its industrial strength. They enabled a chain of allied vaudeville houses that remedied the chaos of the booking system by contracting acts for regional and national tours. These could easily be lengthened from a few weeks to two years, Albee also gave national prominence to vaudevilles trumpeting polite entertainment, a commitment to entertainment equally inoffensive to men, women and children. Acts that violated this ethos were admonished and threatened with expulsion from the remaining performances or were canceled altogether
8.
Jelly Roll Blues
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Original Jelly Roll Blues, usually shortened to and known as Jelly Roll Blues, is an early jazz fox-trot composed by Jelly Roll Morton. He recorded it first as a solo in Richmond, Indiana, in 1924. It is referenced by name in the 1917 Shelton Brooks composition Darktown Strutters Ball, however, Morton varies and enriches this basic structure by providing many instrumental breaks in suspended rhythm, as well as giving the horns and the piano solo passages. The final chorus is in New Orleans ride-out style, where all the play together and vary the melody and chord progression in counterpoint over a driving. The tune is also notable for having an Argentine tango-like rhythm and flavor in several passages, which Morton claimed was essential to real jazz
9.
Jazz standard
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There is no definitive list of jazz standards, and the list of songs deemed to be standards changes over time. Songs included in major book publications and jazz reference works offer a rough guide to which songs are considered standards. Not all jazz standards were written by jazz composers, many are originally Tin Pan Alley popular songs, Broadway show tunes or songs from Hollywood musicals – the Great American Songbook. In Europe, jazz standards and fake books may include some traditional folk songs or pieces of ethnic music that have been played with a jazz feel by well known jazz players. A commonly played song can only be considered a jazz standard if it is played among jazz musicians. The jazz standard repertoire has some overlap with blues and pop standards, the most recorded jazz standard was W. C. Handys St. Louis Blues for over 20 years from the 1930s onward, today, the place is held by Body and Soul by Johnny Green. The most recorded standard composed by a musician is Thelonious Monks Round Midnight. From its conception at the change of the century, jazz was music intended for dancing. Edison, Inc. on Blue Amberol in December 1916 and in 1917, the first record with Jass on the label, The Original Dixieland One-Step was issue 18255 by Victor Talking Machine Company in 1917. Originally simply called jazz, the music of jazz bands is today often referred to as Dixieland or New Orleans jazz. Ragtime songs Twelfth Street Rag and Tiger Rag have become popular numbers for jazz artists, as have blues tunes St. Louis Blues, Tin Pan Alley songwriters contributed several songs to the jazz standard repertoire, including Indiana and After Youve Gone. Others, such as Some of These Days and Darktown Strutters Ball, were introduced by vaudeville performers, the most often recorded standards of this period are W. C. Handys St. Louis Blues, Turner Layton and Henry Creamers After Youve Gone and James Hanley, a period known as the Jazz Age started in the United States in the 1920s. Jazz had become popular music in the country, although older generations considered the music immoral, dances such as the Charleston and the Black Bottom were very popular during the period, and jazz bands typically consisted of seven to twelve musicians. Important orchestras in New York were led by Fletcher Henderson, Paul Whiteman, however, Chicagos importance as a center of jazz music started to diminish toward the end of the 1920s in favor of New York. In the early years of jazz, record companies were eager to decide what songs were to be recorded by their artists. Popular numbers in the 1920s were pop hits such as Sweet Georgia Brown, Dinah, the first jazz artist to be given some liberty in choosing his material was Louis Armstrong, whose band helped popularize many of the early standards in the 1920s and 1930s
10.
The Complete Library of Congress Recordings
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The Complete Library of Congress Recordings is a 2005 box set of recordings from jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton. The set spans 128 tracks over eight CDs and it won two Grammy Awards in 2006, Best Historical Album and Best Album Notes. In 1938, noted musicologist and Morton biographer Alan Lomax conducted a series of interviews with Morton at the Library of Congress. Richard Cook and Brian Morton describe these recordings as Jelly Roll Mortons virtual history of the pangs of jazz as it happened in the New Orleans of the turn of the century. His memory was unimpaired, although he chose to tell things as he preferred to remember them, perhaps, excerpts from the sessions first appeared on a 1948 album. Riverside Records issued the recordings as LP records in 1955, ron Wynn and Bruce Boyd Raeburn note that though the albums came out posthumously, the interviews generated tremendous new interest in Mortons life and music. During the 1990s, Rounder Records released a series of discs including the musical content. In 2005, Rounder released the 1938 recordings in their entirety as part of a box set. The first seven discs include Lomaxs 1938 interviews, in which Morton describes his life and the days of jazz, plays piano. The eighth disc includes 1949 recordings of Mortons contemporaries, reminiscing about Morton, the set was originally released in a piano-shaped box and included a copy of Mister Jelly Roll, Lomaxs biography about Morton. The set also includes a PDF file including additional notes, complete transcriptions of the recorded dialogue and lyrics, additional unrecorded interviews and archival documents. In 2007, Rounder released The Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, arwulf arwulf, writing for allmusic, described the recordings as having been beautifully restored. Indispensable records for anyone interested in jazz history
11.
Buddy Bolden
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Buddy Boldens father died when he was six, and young Bolden continued to live with his mother and family members afterwards. In documents of the period the name is spelled at different times as Bolen, Bolding, Boldan. He likely went to Fisk School in New Orleans, but evidence for this is circumstantial, as, in the area where he lived, early records of this school and other schools are missing. While there is substantial first hand oral history about Buddy Bolden, stories about his being a barber by trade or that he published a scandal sheet called The Cricket have been repeated in print despite being debunked decades earlier. He was known as King Bolden, and his band was popular in New Orleans from about 1900 until 1907, Bolden was known for his loud sound and improvisation. He made a big impression on younger musicians, while Boldens trombonist Willie Cornish among others recalled making phonograph cylinder recordings with the Bolden band, but no surviving copy has ever been found. Bolden suffered an episode of acute alcoholic psychosis in 1907 at the age of 30, with the full diagnosis of dementia praecox, he was admitted to the Louisiana State Insane Asylum at Jackson, a mental institution, where he spent the rest of his life. Bolden was buried in a grave in Holt Cemetery, a paupers graveyard in New Orleans. In 1998 a monument to Bolden was erected in Holt Cemetery, at least one writer has labeled him the father of jazz. He is credited with creating a looser, more improvised version of ragtime and adding blues to it and he was also said to have taken ideas from gospel music heard in uptown African-American Baptist churches. Instead of imitating other cornetists, Bolden played music he heard by ear, in doing so, he created an exciting and novel fusion of ragtime, black sacred music, marching-band music, and rural blues. Bolden was known for his powerful, loud, wide open playing style, joe King Oliver, Freddie Keppard, Bunk Johnson, and other early New Orleans jazz musicians were directly inspired by his playing. No known recordings of Bolden have survived and his trombonist Willy Cornish asserted that Boldens band had made at least one phonograph cylinder in the late 1890s. Three other old-time New Orleans musicians, George Baquet, Alphonse Picou, the researcher Tim Brooks believes that these cylinders, if they existed, may have been privately recorded for local music dealers and were never distributed in bulk. Some of the songs first associated with his band, such as the traditional song Careless Love, Bolden often closed his shows with the original number Get Out of Here and Go Home, although for more polite gigs, the last number would be Home. One of the most famous Bolden numbers is a song called Funky Butt, Boldens Funky Butt was, as Danny Barker once put it, a reference to the olfactory effect of an auditorium packed full of sweaty people dancing close together and belly rubbing. Other musicians closer to Boldens generation explained that the famous tune originated as a reference to flatulence, I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say, Funky-butt, funky-butt, take it away. It became so known as a rude song that even whistling the melody on a public street was considered offensive
12.
Gunther Schuller
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Gunther Alexander Schuller was an American composer, conductor, horn player, author, historian and jazz musician. Schuller was born in Queens, New York City, the son of German parents Elsie and Arthur E. Schuller and he studied at the Saint Thomas Choir School and became an accomplished French horn player and flute player. During his youth, he attended the Precollege Division at the Manhattan School of Music, but, already a high school dropout because he wanted to play professionally, Schuller never obtained a degree from any institution. He began his career in jazz by recording as a player with Miles Davis. While lecturing at Brandeis University in 1957, he coined the term Third Stream to describe music that combines classical, in 1966, he composed the opera The Visitation. He also orchestrated Scott Joplins only known surviving opera Treemonisha for the Houston Grand Operas premiere production of work in 1975. In 1959, Schuller gave up performance to himself to composition. He conducted internationally and studied and recorded jazz with such greats as Dizzy Gillespie, Schuller wrote over 190 original compositions in many musical genres. In the 1960s and 1970s, Schuller was president of New England Conservatory, Schuller was editor-in-chief of Jazz Masterworks Editions, and co-director of the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra in Washington, D. C. Another effort of preservation was his editing and posthumous premiering at Lincoln Center in 1989 of Charles Minguss immense final work, Epitaph and he was the author of two major books on the history of jazz, Early Jazz and The Swing Era. His students included Irwin Swack, Ralph Patt, John Ferritto, Eric Alexander Hewitt, Mohammed Fairouz, Oliver Knussen, Nancy Zeltzman, Riccardo Dalli Cardillo, see, List of music students by teacher, R to S#Gunther Schuller. From 1993 until his death, Schuller served as Artistic Director for the Northwest Bach Festival in Spokane, each year the festival showcased works by J. S. Bach and other composers in venues around Spokane, at the 2010 festival, Schuller conducted the Mass in B minor at St. Johns Cathedral, sung by the chamber choir from Eastern Washington University, accompanied by the Spokane Symphony. Other notable performances conducted at the festival include the St Matthew Passion in 2008, Schullers association with Spokane began with guest conducting the Spokane Symphony for one week in 1982. He then served as Music Director from 1984–1985 and later appeared as a guest conductor. Schuller also served as Artistic Director to the nearby Festival at Sandpoint and his modernist orchestral work Where the Word Ends, organized in four movements corresponding to those of a symphony, premiered at the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2009. In 2011 Schuller published the first volume of an autobiography, Gunther Schuller, A Life in Pursuit of Music. In 2012, Schuller premiered a new arrangement, the Treemonisha suite from Joplins opera and it was performed as part of The Rest is Noise season at Londons South Bank in 2013
13.
Alan Lomax
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Alan Lomax was an American field collector of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a folklorist, ethnomusicologist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England and he collected material first with his father, folklorist and collector John A. With the start of the Cold War, Lomax continued to out for a public role for folklore. He devoted much of the part of his life to advocating what he called Cultural Equity. In the 1970s and 1980s Lomax advised the Smithsonian Institutions Folklife Festival and produced a series of films about music, American Patchwork. In his late seventies, Lomax completed a memoir, The Land Where the Blues Began, linking the birth of the blues to debt peonage, segregation. Because of childhood asthma, chronic ear infections, and generally frail health, in Dallas, he entered the Terrill School for Boys. Lomax excelled at Terrill and then transferred to the Choate School in Connecticut for a year, because of his mothers declining health, however, rather than going to Harvard as his father had wished, Lomax matriculated at the University of Texas at Austin. The hardest thing Ive had to learn is that Im not a genius, at the University of Texas Lomax read Nietzsche and developed an interest in philosophy. He joined and wrote a few columns for the paper, The Daily Texan. At this time he also he began collecting records and taking his dates to black-owned night clubs. During the spring term his mother died, and his youngest sister Bess, Although the Great Depression was rapidly causing his familys resources to plummet, Harvard came up with enough financial aid for the 16-year-old Lomax to spend his sophomore year there. He enrolled in philosophy and physics and also pursued a long-distance informal reading course in Plato and he also became involved in radical politics and came down with pneumonia. His grades suffered, diminishing his financial aid prospects and he did his first field collecting without his father with Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle in the summer of 1935. He returned to the University of Texas that fall and was awarded a BA in Philosophy, summa cum laude, Alan Lomax married Elizabeth Harold Goodman, then a student at the University of Texas, in February 1937. They were married for 12 years and had a daughter, Anne, Elizabeth assisted him in recording in Haiti, Alabama, Appalachia, and Mississippi. Elizabeth also wrote radio scripts of folk operas featuring American music that were broadcast over the BBC Home Service as part of the war effort
14.
Creoles of color
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The Creoles of color are a historic ethnic group of Creole people in Louisiana, Southern Mississippi, Alabama, and Northwestern Florida. Mixed-race Creoles of color became identified as an ethnic group, Gens de couleur libres. During Louisiana’s colonial period, Créole referred to people born in Louisiana who had ancestors from elsewhere, the term Créole was first used by French colonists to distinguish themselves from foreign-born settlers, and later as distinct from Anglo-American settlers. Colonial documents show that the term Créole was used variously at different times to refer to people, mixed-race people. Many Creoles of color were free, and their descendants often enjoyed many of the privileges that whites did, including property ownership. During the antebellum period, their society was structured along class lines, while it was not illegal, it was a social taboo for Creoles of color to marry slaves and it was a rare occurrence. Some of the wealthier and prosperous Creoles of color owned slaves, other Creoles of color such as Thomy Lafon used their social position to support the abolitionist cause. Another Creole of color, Francis E. Dumas, emancipated all of his slaves, Some historians suggest that New Orleans was the cradle of the civil rights movement in the United States, due to the earliest efforts of Creoles to integrate the military en masse. Creoles of Color had been members of the militia for decades under both Spanish and French control of the colony of Louisiana, for example, around 80 free Creoles of Color were recruited into the militia that participated in the Battle of Baton Rouge in 1779. They volunteered their services and pledged their loyalty to their adopted country and its Territorial Governor appointed by Thomas Jefferson. Claiborne, when the French colony of Orleans was formally accepted by the United States on December 20,1803. In a February 20,1804 letter, Secretary of War Henry Dearborn wrote to Clairborne saying. it would be prudent not to increase the Corps, but to diminish, if it could be done without giving offense. A decade later, the militia of color that remained volunteered to take up arms when the British began landing troops on American soil outside of New Orleans in December 1814 and this was the commencement of the Battle of New Orleans. During and after the Louisiana Purchase many Creoles of color lost their social status, despite their service to the militia. Americas Southern society developed a caste system, in this new caste system, all people with African ancestry or visible African features were classified as black, and therefore categorized as second class citizens. Former free Creoles of Color were relegated to the ranks of emancipated slaves, with the advantage of having been better educated than the new freedmen, many Creoles of color were active in the struggle for civil rights. During Reconstruction and in the aftermath the American Civil War, white Democrats regained political power across the former Confederate states, by the late nineteenth century many Southern men in positions of power began to re-impose the idea of white supremacy. To achieve this, they established legal segregation under the Jim Crow system
15.
Faubourg Marigny
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Faubourg Marigny is a neighborhood of the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, U. S. A. Faubourg Marigny is located at 29°57′53″N 90°03′19″W and has an elevation of 1 foot, according to the United States Census Bureau, the district has a total area of 0.33 square miles. 0.31 square miles of which is land and 0.02 square miles of which is water, in the 19th century, Faubourg Marigny was the old Third Municipality of New Orleans. The triangular area between Esplanade and Elysian Fields Avenue is sometimes called the Marigny Triangle and is part of the 7th Ward of New Orleans, the remainder is in the 8th and 9th wards of New Orleans. The area farther back from the new Rampart/St, Claude street car to I-10 is considered New Marigny, the name dating back to the early 19th century. The lower boundary, with the Bywater neighborhood, is either Press Street or Franklin Avenue, the New Marigny Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. The area contains parts of the 7th and 8th Ward as well as Faubourg Saint Roch, Creole landowner Bernard de Marigny sold the lots in his 1806 subdivision, Faubourg Marigny, so quickly that he extended the development just four years later. Sales of the affordable, modest sized lots were spurred when the Pontchartrain Railroad, or “Smoky Mary, development of the area downriver of Elysian Fields Avenue followed when Faubourg Franklin was laid out in 1834. This neighborhood, like Faubourg Marigny across St. Claude Avenue, was settled by French Creoles, German immigrants, several musicians either grew up in the neighborhood or moved here as adults. Ferdinand LaMothe, better known as Jelly Roll Morton, snuck away from his upright Creole grandmother’s home just off Elysian Fields Avenue to play piano in the red light district, Storyville. Sidney Bechet, Manny Perez, Danny Barker and Paul Barbarin, all giants of New Orleans music, the Circle Market at 1522 St. Bernard Avenue continues to thrive even with competition from national grocery chains. Under the ancient oaks along St. Roch and Elysian Fields avenues, Creole cottages and shotgun houses are gradually taking on a coat of paint. A public park is underway for the formerly industrial Press Street corridor, as of the census of 2000, there were 3,145 people,1,960 households, and 391 families residing in the neighborhood. The population density was 10,145 /mi², as of the census of 2010, there were 2,973 people,1,881 households, and 359 families residing in the neighborhood. The portion of Faubourg Marigny closer to the river was built up first, in the early 19th century, New Marigny was where white Creole gentlemen set up households for their mistresses of color in the tradition of plaçage. Wide Elysian Fields Avenue, named after the Champs-Élysées in Paris, was designed to be the street of the Faubourg. It was the first street in the New Orleans area to extend directly from the riverfront to Lake Pontchartrain 8 km away, in 1830-31 the Pontchartrain Railroad was built, with its tracks down the center of Elysian Fields. The neighborhood declined badly in the century, and the area around Washington Square was nicknamed Little Angola for the dangerous criminals there
16.
Downtown New Orleans
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Contrary to the common usage of the term downtown in other cities, this historic application of the term excluded the New Orleans Central Business District. In the 19th century, much of New Orleans downtown was still predominantly Francophone, Downtown hosted the citys French-speaking Creole communities. There was a rivalry with the predominantly Anglophone uptown New Orleans on the other side of Canal Street. The broad median of Canal Street became known as the neutral ground, the city was for years divided into Downtown and Uptown. Development of the low-lying Back of Town only began after 1900, the growth of New Orleans East, as well as suburban Jefferson Parish, further complicated the picture. By the 1990s, the terms had largely fallen out of use, New Orleans Public Schools and various charter schools serve Downtown neighborhoods. New Orleans Downtown Development District New Orleans Central Business District Uptown New Orleans
17.
Louisiana
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Louisiana is a state located in the southern region of the United States. Louisiana is the 31st most extensive and the 25th most populous of the 50 United States and its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans. Louisiana is the state in the U. S. with political subdivisions termed parishes. The largest parish by population is East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana is bordered by Arkansas to the north, Mississippi to the east, Texas to the west, and the Gulf of Mexico to the south. Much of the lands were formed from sediment washed down the Mississippi River, leaving enormous deltas and vast areas of coastal marsh. These contain a rich southern biota, typical examples include birds such as ibis, there are also many species of tree frogs, and fish such as sturgeon and paddlefish. In more elevated areas, fire is a process in the landscape. These support a large number of plant species, including many species of orchids. Louisiana has more Native American tribes than any other state, including four that are federally recognized, ten that are state recognized. Before the American purchase of the territory in 1803, the current Louisiana State had been both a French colony and for a period, a Spanish one. In addition, colonists imported numerous African people as slaves in the 18th century, many came from peoples of the same region of West Africa, thus concentrating their culture. Louisiana was named after Louis XIV, King of France from 1643 to 1715, when René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle claimed the territory drained by the Mississippi River for France, he named it La Louisiane. The suffix -ana is a Latin suffix that can refer to information relating to an individual, subject. Thus, roughly, Louis + ana carries the idea of related to Louis, the Gulf of Mexico did not exist 250 million years ago when there was but one supercontinent, Pangea. As Pangea split apart, the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico opened, Louisiana slowly developed, over millions of years, from water into land, and from north to south. The oldest rocks are exposed in the north, in such as the Kisatchie National Forest. The oldest rocks date back to the early Tertiary Era, some 60 million years ago, the history of the formation of these rocks can be found in D. Spearings Roadside Geology of Louisiana. The sediments were carried north to south by the Mississippi River
18.
Rex Stewart
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Rex William Stewart was an American jazz cornetist best remembered for his work with the Duke Ellington orchestra. After stints with Elmer Snowden, Fletcher Henderson, Horace Henderson, McKinneys Cotton Pickers, Ellington arranged many of his pieces to showcase Stewarts half-valve effects, muted sound, and forceful style. Stewart co-wrote Boy Meets Horn and Morning Glory while with Ellington, after eleven years Stewart left to lead his own groups - little swing bands, that were a perfect setting for his solo playing. He also toured Europe and Australia with Jazz at the Philharmonic from 1947 to 1951, from the early 1950s on he worked in radio and television and published highly regarded jazz criticism. The book Jazz Masters of the Thirties is a selection of his criticism, Rex also wrote for Playboy, Down Beat and several other publications during his life. He lived in upstate New York after purchasing a 100+ year old farmhouse and he hosted a jazz radio program in Troy, New York and owned a small restaurant for a very short time near a drag racing stadium in Vermont. While living in France, he attended the Cordon Bleu school of cooking, Stewart moved to Los Angeles, California to be near his three children – Rex Jr. Helena and Regina. His other son Paul Albert Hardy lived in New York City, while in Los Angeles he re-connected to many of the Ellington side-men who lived there and played a lot of jam sessions in clubs in the Los Angeles area. Rex was also one of the studio musicians seen on the Steve Allen TV show. He hosted and coproduced two radio shows about music from his era, Dixieland Doings and Things Aint What They Used To Be
19.
Tony Jackson (pianist)
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Antonio Junius Jackson, best known as Tony Jackson was an American pianist, singer, and composer. Jackson was born to a poor African American family in Uptown New Orleans, Tony did not appear in the 1880 Federal census unlike his older sisters. He was born a twin, along with Prince Albert Jackson, the 1900 Federal census further reinforces the year and month of birth as October 1882, and his 1918 draft record shows a birth date of October 25, although the year reads 1884. Tony showed musical talents at a young age, at about the age of 10 he reportedly constructed a type of crude but working and properly tuned harpsichord out of junk in his back yard, since his family lacked the money to buy or rent a piano. Jackson got his first musical job at age 13, when he began playing piano during off hours at a Tonk run by bandleader Adam Olivier, by age 15 was already considered by many musicians the best pianist in town. Jackson became the most popular and sought after entertainer in Storyville and he was said to be able to remember and play any tune he had heard once, and was hardly ever stumped by obscure requests. His repertory included ragtime, cakewalks, popular songs of the day from the United States and various nations of Europe and Latin America, blues and his singing voice was also exceptional, and he was said to be able to sing operatic parts from baritone to soprano range. Clarence Williams noted He was great because he was original in all his improvisations, more than Jacksons music was copied. Jackson dressed himself with a pearl gray derby, checkered vest, ascot tie with a diamond stickpin and this became a standard outfit for ragtime and barrelhouse pianists, as one commented If you cant play like Tony Jackson, at least you can look like him. Jackson moved to Chicago in 1912, one of the few tunes published with Jacksons name on it, Pretty Baby came out in 1916, although he was remembered performing the song before he left New Orleans. The original lyrics of Pretty Baby were said to refer to his lover of the time. Jackson was resident performer at the De Luxe and Pekin Cafes in Chicago, although in his later years his voice and he died in Chicago on April 20,1921. Jackson never recorded, but portions of his style are no doubt to be found in the recordings of musicians he influenced, like Jelly Roll Morton, Clarence Williams. In 2011 the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame inducted Jackson into the hall, Jackson was honored for his musical contributions and for living as an openly gay man when that was rare. The play Dont You Leave Me Here by Clare Brown, which premiered at West Yorkshire Playhouse in September 2008, Jackson appears as a minor character in David Fulmers Storyville novel Chasing the Devils Tail. New Orleans Jazz, A Family Album by Al Rose and Edmund Souchon Biography of Antonio Junius Jackson by Bill Edwards, http, //ragpiano. com/comps/tjackson. shtml
20.
Minstrel show
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The minstrel show, or minstrelsy, was an American form of entertainment developed in the early 19th century. Each show consisted of skits, variety acts, dancing. The shows were performed by people in make-up or blackface for the purpose of playing the role of black people. There were also some African-American performers and all-black minstrel groups that formed and toured, Minstrel shows lampooned black people as dim-witted, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious and happy-go-lucky. Minstrel shows emerged as brief burlesques and comic entractes in the early 1830s and were developed into full-fledged form in the next decade, by 1848, blackface minstrel shows were the national artform, translating formal art such as opera into popular terms for a general audience. By the turn of the 20th century, the show enjoyed but a shadow of its former popularity. The form survived as professional entertainment until about 1910, amateur performances continued until the 1960s in high schools, the genre has had a lasting legacy and influence and was featured in a television series as recently as the late 1970s. Generally, as the civil rights movement progressed and gained acceptance, the typical minstrel performance followed a three-act structure. The troupe first danced onto stage then exchanged wisecracks and sang songs, the second part featured a variety of entertainments, including the pun-filled stump speech. The final act consisted of a slapstick musical plantation skit or a send-up of a popular play, Minstrel songs and sketches featured several stock characters, most popularly the slave and the dandy. These were further divided into such as the mammy, her counterpart the old darky, the provocative mulatto wench. Minstrels claimed that their songs and dances were authentically black, although the extent of the black influence remains debated, spirituals entered the repertoire in the 1870s, marking the first undeniably black music to be used in minstrelsy. Blackface minstrelsy was the first theatrical form that was distinctly American, during the 1830s and 1840s at the height of its popularity, it was at the epicenter of the American music industry. For several decades it provided the means through which American whites viewed black people, on the one hand, it had strong racist aspects, on the other, it afforded white Americans a singular and broad awareness of what some whites considered significant aspects of black culture in America. Although the minstrel shows were popular, being consistently packed with families from all walks of life and every ethnic group. Although white theatrical portrayals of black characters date back to as early as 1604, by the late 18th century, blackface characters began appearing on the American stage, usually as servant types whose roles did little more than provide some element of comic relief. Eventually, similar performers appeared in entractes in New York theaters and other such as taverns. Author Constance Rourke even claimed that Forrests impression was so good he could fool blacks when he mingled with them in the streets, Thomas Dartmouth Rices successful song-and-dance number, Jump Jim Crow, brought blackface performance to a new level of prominence in the early 1830s
21.
Stride (music)
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Harlem Stride Piano, stride piano, commonly abbreviated to stride, is a jazz piano style that was developed in the large cities of the US East Coast, mainly New York City, during the 1920s and 1930s. The left hand plays a four-beat pulse with a single bass note, octave, seventh or tenth interval on the first and third beats. Occasionally this pattern is reversed by placing the chord on the downbeat, Stride piano is highly rhythmic because of the oom-pah action of the left hand. There are many differences between stride and one of its roots, ragtime, unlike ragtime pianists, stride players were not concerned with ragtime form and played pop songs of the day in the stride style. Also, while the original music was composed, many stride pianists possessed impressive improvisational skills. Some of the finest players, in fact, did not read music at all, lastly, authentic stride makes use of tension/release, dynamics, and can be played at all tempos, slow or fast depending upon the underlying composition the pianist is performing. Some younger pianists have transcribed display pieces note for note from early recordings, however this practice is not really jazz piano. James P. Johnson, known as the Father of Stride, created this style of jazz piano along with fellow pianists Willie The Lion Smith, Thomas Fats Waller and Luckey Roberts. One of Johnsons greatest contributions was to recast the straight feeling of ragtime with a modern, swinging beat. He discovered and employed the tenth or broken tenth interval among other devices, tatum was awarded a posthumous Grammy for his contributions to jazz, in 1974. True Stride pianists practiced a full jazz piano style that utilized highly creative, often flamboyant devices such as arpeggios, black note slide-offs, varying rhythmic accents and they often engaged in marathon cutting contests to show off their skills. Bubbles, Jaki Byard, and George Winston, other prominent stride jazz pianists are Butch Thompson, Mike Lipskin, Bernd Lhotsky, Louis Mazetier, and Stephanie Trick, who perform internationally. Johnson online at the Library of Congress National Jukebox Stride Piano on BlueBlackJazz Dick Hyman Explaining Stride Dick Hyman Illustrating Ragtime to Stride Piano Thomas Fats Waller website, a tribute to the King of Stride Piano
22.
James P. Johnson
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James Price Johnson was an American pianist and composer. As such, he was a model for Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum, Johnson was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States. The proximity to New York City meant that the full spectrum of the citys musical experience, from bars, to cabarets. Johnsons father, William H. Johnson, was a helper and mechanic while his mother. Harrison was a part of the choir at the Methodist Church and was also a self-taught pianist, Johnson later attributed the popular African-American songs and dances at home and around the city as early influences on his musical taste. In 1908, Johnsons family moved to the San Juan Hill section of New York City, with perfect pitch and excellent recall he was soon able to pick out on the piano tunes that he had heard. Johnson, who got his first job as a pianist in 1912, from 1913 to 1916 Johnson spent time studying the European piano tradition with Bruto Giannini. Over the next four to five years Johnson continued to progress his ragtime piano skills by studying other pianists, in 1914, while performing in Newark, New Jersey with singer Lillie Mae Wright, who became his wife three years later, Johnson met Willie Smith. Smith and Johnson shared many of the ideas regarding entertainers. These beliefs and their complementary personalities led the two to become best friends, starting in 1918, Johnson and Wright began touring together in the Smart Set Revue before settling back in New York in 1919. During this period he met George Gershwin, who was also a young piano-roll artist at Aeolian, Johnson was a pioneer in the stride playing of the jazz piano. Johnson honed his craft, playing night after night, catering to the egos and idiosyncrasies of the singers he encountered. He developed into a sensitive and facile accompanist, the favorite accompanist of Ethel Waters, Ethel Waters wrote in her autobiography that working with musicians such as, and most especially, Johnson. made you want to sing until your tonsils fell out. Johnson seemed to be at his finest when he attacked the piano as if it were a drum set, the majority of his phonograph recordings of the 1920s and early 1930s were done for Black Swan and Columbia. In 1922, Johnson branched out and became the director for the revue Plantation Days. This revue took him to England for our months in 1923, during the summer of 1923 Johnson, along with the help of lyricist Cecil Mack, wrote the revue Runnin Wild. This revue stayed on tour for more than five years as well as showing on Broadway, in the depression era, Johnsons career slowed down somewhat. As the swing era began to gain popularity within the African-American communities, Johnson had a hard time adapting, Johnson began to write for musical revues and composed many forgotten orchestral music pieces
23.
Willie "The Lion" Smith
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William Henry Joseph Bonaparte Bertholoff was born in Goshen, New York. In his memoir he reports that his father, Frank Bertholoff, was Jewish, Willie was at least somewhat conversant in Yiddish, as he demonstrated in a television interview late in his life. Willies mother, Ida Oliver, had Spanish, Negro, and her mother, Ann Oliver, was a banjo player and had been in Primrose and West minstrel shows. According to Ida, Frank Bertholoff was a playboy who loved his liquor, girls. His mother threw Frank out of the house when The Lion was two years old, when his father died in 1901, his mother married John Smith, a master mechanic from Paterson, New Jersey. The surname Smith was added to that of The Lion at age three and he grew up living at 76 Academy Street in Newark, New Jersey. Bailey, Pork Packers, and he would leave the house around midnight to pick up the freshly killed pigs and he was supposed to be home by 4 am, but would usually go to bars. Eventually, Willies mother wanted him to accompany his stepfather to work to ensure that John Smith would come straight home. Willie said he enjoyed his job, but most of the time he would have to drive the horses home. He also could only work on Fridays and Saturdays, as his mother did not want him to miss school and he wrote about the experience of being at the slaughterhouse with his stepfather, I couldnt stand to see what I saw at the slaughterhouse. I would watch wide-eyed as the squealing pigs slid down the rails to the cutter where they were slashed through the middle. The kill sometimes went to as many as four hundred pigs a night and it was a sickening sight to watch. But the cries from the pigs brought forth an emotional excitement and it was another weird but musical sound that I can still hear in my head. The squeaks, the squeals, the dipping them in hot water, they put them on a hook, take off the head, thats what you hear in a symphony, destruction, war, peace, beauty, all mixed. In 1907, the moved to 90 Bloome Street in Newark. His stepfather got a new job at Crucible Steel Company, across the Passaic River in Harrison, the job paid more, and Willie would have to get him before his bosses got him drunk on his own money. He attended the Baxter School, rumored to be a school for bad children, the school was notorious for brawls between Irish, Italian, and African-American children. Willie was in Mrs. Blacks fruit store and was caught with his hand in her register, according to Smiths memoirs, he had wanted to borrow a dime to see S. H
24.
William Manuel Johnson
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William Manuel Bill Johnson, was an American jazz musician, considered the father of the slap style of double bass playing. Johnson claimed to have started slapping the strings of his bass after he broke his bow on the road with his band in northern Louisiana in the early 1910s. Other New Orleans string bass players picked up this style, Johnson was founder and manager of the first jazz band to leave New Orleans and tour widely in the 1910s, The Original Creole Orchestra. In Chicago in the early 1920s he assembled King Olivers Creole Jazz Band and he taught younger Chicago musicians his slap style of string bass playing. He made many recordings in Chicago in the late 1920s. Johnson continued to play with jazz bands and orchestras into the early 1950s. He was also involved in the business along the USA-Mexico border. Johnsons brother Ollie Dink Johnson was also a musician and his sister Anita Gonzales was common-law wife or perhaps married to Ferdinand Jelly Roll Morton during his stays in California. Bill Johnson died in New Braunfels, Texas, at the age of 100. com
25.
Tango music
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Tango is a style of music in 2/4 or 4/4 time that originated among European immigrant populations of Argentina and Uruguay. It is traditionally played on a guitar, guitar duo, or an ensemble, known as the orquesta típica. Sometimes guitars and a clarinet join the ensemble, Tango may be purely instrumental or may include a vocalist. Tango music and dance have become popular throughout the world, the first Tango ever recorded was made by Angel Villoldo and played by the French national guard in Paris. Villoldo had to record in Paris because in Argentina at the time there was no recording studio, early tango was played by immigrants in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The first generation of players was called Guardia Vieja. It took time to move into wider circles, in the early 20th century it was the music of thugs and gangsters who visited the brothels. The complex dances that arose from such rich music reflects how the men would practice the dance in groups, demonstrating male sexuality and causing a blending of emotion and aggressiveness. The music was played on instruments, flute, guitar and violin trios. The organito, a portable player-organ, broadened the popularity of certain songs, Eduardo Arolas was the major instrument of the bandoneóns popularization, with Vicente Greco soon standardizing the tango sextet as consisting of piano, double bass, two violins and two bandoneóns. Like many forms of music, tango was associated with the underclass. In spite of the scorn, some, like writer Ricardo Güiraldes, were fans, one song that would become the most widely known of all tango melodies also dates from this time. The first two sections of La Cumparsita were composed as an instrumental in 1916 by teen-aged Gerardo Matos Rodríguez of Uruguay. Besides the global influences mentioned above, early Tango was locally influenced by Payada, the Milonga from Argentine and Uruguay Pampas, in Argentina there was Milonga from the country since the mid eighteenth century. The first payador remembered is Santos Vega, the origins of Milonga seem to be in the Pampa with strong African influences, especially though the local Candombe. It is believed that this existed and was practised in Argentina since the first slaves were brought into the country. In 1876 a tango-candombe called El Merenguengué became very popular, after its success in the Afro-Argentines carnival held in February of that year and it is played with harp, violin and flute in addition to the Afro-Argentine Candombe drums. This has been considered as one of the strong points of departure for the birth
26.
Victor Talking Machine Company
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The Victor Talking Machine Company was an American flagship record company headquartered in Camden, New Jersey. The company was founded by Eldridge R. Johnson, who had previously made gramophones to play Emile Berliners disc records, Victor Talking Machine Co. was incorporated officially in 1901 shortly before agreeing to allow Columbia Records use of its disc record patent. Victor had acquired the Pan-American rights to use the trademark of the fox terrier Nipper listening to a gramophone when Berliner. Barraud noticed that whenever he played a recorded by his brother. Barrauds original depicts Nipper staring intently into the horn of an Edison-Bell while both sit on a wooden surface. The London branch was managed by an American, William Barry Owen, Barraud paid a visit with a photograph of the painting and asked to borrow a horn. Owen gave Barraud an entire gramophone and asked him to paint it into the picture, the original painting still shows the contours of the Edison-Bell phonograph beneath the paint of the gramophone when viewed in the correct light. Only 13 originally commissioned His Masters Voice paintings were commissioned by the company, in 1915, the His Masters Voice logo was rendered in immense circular leaded-glass windows in the tower of the Victrola factory building. The tower remains today with replica windows installed during Radio Corporation of Americas ownership of the plant in its later years, today, one of the original windows is located at the Smithsonian museum in Washington, D. C. There are different accounts as to how the Victor name came about, a second account is that Johnson emerged as the Victor from the lengthy and costly patent litigations involving Berliner and Frank Seamans Zonophone. A third story is that Johnsons partner, Leon Douglass, derived the word from his wifes name Victoria, finally, a fourth story is that Johnson took the name from the popular Victor bicycle, which he had admired for its superior engineering. Of these four accounts the first two are the most generally accepted, perhaps coincidentally, the first use of the Victor title on a letterhead, on March 28,1901, was only nine weeks after the death of British Queen Victoria. Before 1925, recording was done by the purely mechanical. No microphone was involved and there was no means of amplification, the recording machine was essentially an exposed-horn acoustical record player functioning in reverse. The sound-vibrated center of the diaphragm was linked to a stylus that was guided across the surface of a very thick wax disc. The wax was too soft to be played back even once without seriously damaging it, although test recordings were sometimes made, although sound quality was gradually improved by a series of small refinements, the process was inherently insensitive. From the start, Victor innovated manufacturing processes and soon rose to preeminence by recording famous performers, in 1903, it instituted a three-step mother-stamper process to produce more stampers and records than previously possible. These new celebrity recordings bore red labels, and were marketed as Red Seal records, for many years these records were single-sided, only in 1923 did Victor begin offering Red Seals in double-sided form
27.
Kid Ory
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Edward Kid Ory was a Louisiana French-speaking jazz trombonist and bandleader. He was born in Woodland Plantation, near La Place, Louisiana, Ory started playing music with homemade instruments in his childhood, and by his teens was leading a well-regarded band in southeast Louisiana. He kept La Place, Louisiana, as his base of operations because of family obligations until his twenty-first birthday and he was one of the most influential trombonists of early jazz. When Ory was living on Jackson Avenue, he was discovered by Buddy Bolden, playing his first new trombone, Orys sister said he was too young to play with Bolden. Garland and Carey were longtime associates who would still be playing with Ory during his 1940s comeback, while in Los Angeles, Ory and his band recorded two instrumentals, Orys Creole Trombone and Society Blues, as well as a number of songs. They were the first jazz recordings made on the West Coast by an African-American jazz band from New Orleans. His band recorded with Nordskog Records, Ory paid them Nordskog for the pressings and then sold them with his own label, Kid Orys Sunshine Orchestra, at Spikes Brothers Music Store in Los Angeles. In 1925, Ory moved to Chicago, where he was active, working and recording with Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Oliver, Johnny Dodds, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey. He mentored Benny Goodman and, later, Charles Mingus, during the Great Depression Ory retired from music and did not play again until 1943. From 1944 to about 1961 he led one of the top New Orleans–style bands of the period, all but Buckner, Probert, and Ewell were originally from New Orleans. The Ory band was an important force in reviving interest in New Orleans jazz, in 1944–45 the group made a series of recordings for Crescent Records, which was founded by Nesuhi Ertegun for the express purpose of recording Orys band. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Ory and his group appeared at the Beverly Cavern in Los Angeles, Ory retired from music in 1966 and spent his last years in Hawaii, with the assistance of Trummy Young. He was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California,1956 The Legendary Kid 1956 Favorites. Musical Metropolis, Los Angeles and the Creation of Music Culture 1880-1940 Kid Ory on redhotjazz
28.
Omer Simeon
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Omer Victor Simeon was an American jazz clarinetist. He also played soprano, alto, and baritone saxophone and bass clarinet, omer Simeon was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of a cigar maker. His family moved to Chicago, Illinois and he learned clarinet from the New Orleans master Lorenzo Tio, Jr. and started playing professionally in 1920. He worked in Chicago and Milwaukee, Wisconsin with various bands, including Jimmy Bells Band, starting in 1926 he began playing with Jelly Roll Morton, and made a well regarded series of recordings with Mortons Red Hot Peppers and smaller groups. In 1927 he joined King Olivers Dixie Syncopators with whom he moved to New York City, after time back in Chicago with Elgar, he joined the Luis Russell in Manhattan, then again returned to Chicago in 1928 to play with the Erskine Tate Orchestra. In 1931 he began a 10-year stint with Earl Hines, in the 1940s he worked in the bands of Coleman Hawkins and Jimmie Lunceford. After some recordings with Kid Orys band, he spent most of the 1950s with the Wilbur de Paris band, in 1954 he played saxophone in a duet with Louis Armstrong on trumpet in Armstrongs popular dixieland recording of Skokiaan. Omer Simeon died of cancer in New York City, aged 57
29.
Barney Bigard
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Albany Leon Barney Bigard was an American jazz clarinetist known for his 15-year tenure with Duke Ellington. Bigard was born in New Orleans to a family of Creoles, the son of Alexander and Emanuella Bigard, he had two brothers, Alexander Jr. and Sidney. His uncle, Emile Bigard, was a jazz violinist and he attended local schools and studied music and clarinet with Lorenzo Tio. In the early 1920s he moved to Chicago, where he worked with King Oliver, during this period, much of his recording, including with clarinetist Johnny Dodds, was on tenor saxophone, which he played often with great lyricism, as on Olivers Someday Sweetheart. In 1927 Bigard joined Duke Ellingtons orchestra in New York, where he was part of the Harlem Renaissance and he played with Ellington until 1942. They played primarily at the Cotton Club, with Ellington, he was the featured clarinet soloist, while also doing section work on tenor saxophone. After leaving Ellingtons orchestra, Bigard moved to Los Angeles, California and he did soundtrack work for Hollywood film studios and had an onscreen featured role with an all-star band led by Louis Armstrong in the film New Orleans. He began working with trombonist Kid Orys group during the late 1940s and he later worked with Armstrongs touring band, the All Stars, and others. Bigard appeared and played in the movie St. Louis Blues, with Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Pearl Bailey, Bigard wrote an autobiography entitled With Louis and The Duke. He is credited as composer or co-composer on several numbers, notably the Ellington standard Mood Indigo, the first version of the song Caravan was recorded in Hollywood,18 December 1936, and performed as an instrumental by Barney Bigard and His Jazzopators. Two takes were recorded and were issued, although L-0373-2 is by far the more commonly found take, the band members were Cootie Williams, Juan Tizol, Barney Bigard, Harry Carney, Duke Ellington, Billy Taylor, and Sonny Greer. All of the players were members of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, even though Ellington was present at the recording date, the session leader was Bigard. When Ellington signed with Victor in 1940, Bigard recorded for Bluebird under his own name and he sat in with the Glenn Miller Orchestra for some of their biggest hits, such as Moonlight Serenade, Little Brown Jug, and Tuxedo Junction. Bigard was also a member of Louis Armstrongs All Stars before, Bigard can be seen with the All Stars in the movie The Glenn Miller Story. After World War II, Bigard recorded under his own name for Signature Records, Rex, Black & White, Selmer Records and he also recorded an album for Liberty in 1957 and an album for French Vogue Records as Barney Bigard-Claude Luter Quintet in 1966. Bigard died on June 27,1980, in Culver City, with Louis and The Duke – Barney Bigards autobiography Barney Bigard at the Internet Movie Database Barney Bigard at the Internet Broadway Database
30.
Baby Dodds
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Warren Baby Dodds was a jazz drummer born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He is regarded as one of the best jazz drummers of the pre-big band era and he varied his drum patterns with accents and flourishes, and he generally kept the beat with the bass drum while playing buzz rolls on the snare. Some of his influences included Louis Cottrell, Sr. Harry Zeno, Henry Martin. Dodds was among the first drummers to be recorded who improvised while performing, Baby Dodds was the younger brother of clarinetist Johnny Dodds. He was born into a musical family. His father and uncle played violin and his sister played harmonica, in addition, his father was religious and the family regularly sang hymns together. Then I took some rounds out of my mothers chairs and made out of them. At age 16, Dodds saved up money to buy his own drum set. Although Dodds had several paid teachers during his years as a drummer. He started playing in parades around New Orleans with Bunk Johnson and his band and then got a job playing in Willie Hightowers band. The band played in venues around New Orleans, and Dodds recalls hearing many musicians along the way, including Buddy Bolden, John Robichaux. He played with different outfits including those of Frankie Duson and Sonny Celestin. Dodds describes this experience in his autobiography, The jazz played after New Orleans funerals didnt show any lack of respect for the person being buried and it rather showed their people that we wanted them to be happy. Dodds gained reputation as a top young drummer in New Orleans, in 1918, Dodds left Sonny Celestins outfit to play in Fate Marables riverboat band. A young Louis Armstrong also joined the band, and the two of them were on the boats for three years, the band played on four different boats, and usually left New Orleans in May and travel to St. Louis, though they also sometimes traveled further north. They played jazz, popular, and classical music while on the boats, Dodds and Armstrong left Fate Marables band in 1921 due to a disagreement about musical style, and Dodds soon joined King Olivers Creole Jazz Band. They moved to California in 1921 to work with Oliver there, in 1922, the band, excepting Garland, Palao, and Jones, followed Oliver to Chicago, which would be his base of operations for several years. They began playing at the Lincoln Gardens, and Louis Armstrong also joined this outfit, Dodds describes playing with this band as a beautiful experience
31.
MCA Inc.
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MCA, Inc. was an American media company. Initially starting in the business, the company next became a dominant force in the film business. MCA, Inc. is the predecessor of NBCUniversal, which since March 2013 is a wholly owned subsidiary of Comcast. MCA was formed in 1924 by Jules Stein and William R. Goodheart, Jr. as Music Corporation of America, MCA helped pioneer modern practices of touring bands and name acts. Early on, MCA booked such prominent artists as King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton for clubs and speakeasies run by legendary notorious Chicago mobsters such as Al Capone and others. Lew Wasserman joined MCA in 1936 at the age of 23 and rose through the ranks of MCA for more than four decades, Wasserman helped create MCAs radio show, Kay Kyser and His Kollege of Musical Knowledge, which debuted on NBC Radio that same year. Following that success, Stein installed Wasserman in New York City in 1937, the company was guided by a codification of Steins pet policies known as The Rules of The Road. The Rules were passed down from the Prohibition era, Chicago–area MCA to the 1940s Los Angeles–area firm, which focused on representing movie actors. The Rules were next passed to the 1950s generation of MCA talent agents, including Jerry Perenchio, Perenchio is well known for his version of the Rules, which vary from year to year and have some internal contradictions. Its aggressive acquisition of its clientele in all entertainment sectors earned MCA the nickname of The Octopus and this behavior led U. S. Department of Justice agents to investigate not only whether MCA was a monopoly breaking anti-trust laws, but also its suspected connections to underworld criminal activities. This investigation continued for the few decades. In 1948, Jules Stein moved up as MCAs first chairman and that year, Stein and Wasserman decided to get into a new medium that would, decades later, change the entertainment landscape forever, television. Although many motion picture studios would not touch this new medium, thinking it was just a fad and would fade away, MCA decided to embrace it. First, however, the company needed to get a waiver from the Screen Actors Guild, thanks to the newly elected SAG president, Ronald Reagan, MCA was granted a waiver to start producing TV shows. After the waiver was granted, the company formed MCA Television Limited for syndication, prior to 1958, all Revues shows were filmed at the old Republic Pictures studio lot in Studio City, California. In February 1958, MCA acquired Paramount Pictures pre-1950 sound feature film library through a newly created MCA subsidiary, EMKA, Ltd. Also in 1958, MCA bought the 423-acre Universal Studios lot from Universal Pictures for $11 million and renamed it, as well as the television unit. Stein, who by this time was the owner of MCA, decided to take the company public by giving 51% of his ownership of MCA to his employees
32.
Gary, Indiana
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Gary is a city in Lake County, Indiana, United States,25 miles from downtown Chicago, Illinois. The population of Gary was 80,294 at the 2010 census, from the middle of the twentieth century to the present, Gary has experienced drastic population loss, falling by 55 percent from its peak of 178,320 in 1960. Gary is adjacent to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and borders Lake Michigan, the city is known for its large steel mills, and for being the birthplace of The Jackson 5 music group. Gary, Indiana, was founded in 1906 by the United States Steel Corporation as the home for its new plant, the city was named after lawyer Elbert Henry Gary, who was the founding chairman of the United States Steel Corporation. Gary was the site of civil unrest in the Steel Strike of 1919, on October 4,1919, a riot broke out on Broadway, the main north-south street through downtown Gary, between striking steel workers and strike breakers brought in from outside. Three days later, Indiana governor James P. Goodrich declared martial law, shortly thereafter, over 4,000 federal troops under the command of Major General Leonard Wood arrived to restore order. The jobs offered by the industry provided Gary with very rapid growth. At that time,19. 3% of the population was classified as foreign-born, Gary was also becoming increasingly racially diverse, with 17. 8% of the population classified as black, and 3. 5% as Mexican. Garys fortunes have risen and fallen with those of the steel industry, the growth of the steel industry brought prosperity to the community. Broadway was known as a center for the region. Department stores and architecturally significant movie houses were built in the downtown area, in the 1960s, like many other American urban centers reliant on one particular industry, Gary entered a spiral of decline. Garys decline was brought on by the growing overseas competitiveness in the steel industry, the U. S. Steel Gary Works employed over 30,000 in 1970, declined to just 6,000 by 1990, and further declined to 5,100 in August of 2015. As the city declined, crime increased, rapid racial change occurred in Gary during the late 20th century. Non-whites were primarily restricted to live in the Midtown section just south of downtown, Gary had one of the nations first African-American mayors, Richard G. Hatcher, and hosted the ground-breaking 1972 National Black Political Convention. Since the 1930s, Gary had developed a reputation as a city due to rampant political corruption, racial violence & segregation, labor unrest. In the 1960s through the 1980s, surrounding localities such as Merrillville and Crown Point experienced rapid growth, including new homes. Owing to white flight, economic distress, and a perception of skyrocketing crime, many middle-class, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Gary had the highest percentage of African-Americans of U. S. cities with a population of 100,000 or more, 84%. This no longer applies to Gary since the population of the city has now fallen well below 100,000 residents, as of 2013, the Gary Department of Redevelopment has estimated that one-third of all homes in the city are unoccupied and/or abandoned
33.
Albert Nicholas
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Albert Nicholas was an American jazz reed player. Nicholass primary instrument was the clarinet, which he studied with Lorenzo Tio in his hometown of New Orleans, late in the 1910s he played with Buddy Petit, King Oliver, and Manuel Perez. He spent three years in the Merchant Marines and then joined up again with Oliver in Chicago from 1925 to 1927. After time in East Asia and Egypt, he returned to New York City in 1928 and played with Luis Russell until 1933, playing there with Red Allen, Charlie Holmes, later he played with Chick Webb, Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. The Dixieland jazz revival of the late 1940s reinvigorated his career, he played with Art Hodes, Bunk Johnson, and Kid Ory, and had a regular gig with Ralph Sutton in 1948. In 1953 he moved to France, except for recording sessions in the U. S. in 1959-60, nicholass uncle was Wooden Joe Nicholas. Roger Richard talks to Albert Nicholas
34.
Russell Procope
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Procope was born in New York City, and grew up in San Juan Hill, where he went to school with Benny Carter. His first instrument was the violin, but he switched to clarinet and he began his professional career in 1926 as a member of Billy Freemans orchestra. At the age of 20 he recorded with Jelly Roll Morton, and went on to play with bands led by Benny Carter, Chick Webb, Fletcher Henderson, Tiny Bradshaw, Teddy Hill, King Oliver, Fletcher Hendersons band was dissolved in 1934. Along with several other musicians, Procope went into Benny Carters orchestra. He also worked for a time with the Tiny Bradshaw and Willie Bryant bands before joining Teddy Hill in 1935, in 1938 Procope replaced Pete Brown in John Kirbys sextet, with whom he played exclusively alto sax until 1945. It was with Kirby that he began to make his name, Kirbys band included Charlie Shavers, Buster Bailey, Procope, Billy Kyle and ONeill Spencer. This group was billed as The Biggest Little Band In The World - performing intricate, tightly-woven small-band orchestrations, combining precision with relaxation, in some way John Kirbys music contributed elements to the experiments which were to be pursued by jazz modernists during the middle Forties. From 1942 until the end of World War II, Procope served in the U. S. armed forces, Procope joined the Ellington orchestra in 1946, standing in for Otto Hardwick for one night in Worcester, Massachusetts, and staying until Ellingtons death in 1974. Procope came to Europe again as a member of this band during the summer of 1950, Procope was also highly regarded personally within and outside the Ellington band. He was, wrote Ellington in Music is My Mistress, a sober and reliable musician. After Ellingtons death, Procope toured with Brooks Kerrs trio, in 1956, Procope recorded The Persuasive Sax of Russ Procope under the London Records label. Procope played the alto-saxophone, along with Remo Biondi, Earl Backus, Paul Jordan Mel Schmidt, although Procopes early playing reflected the influence of Benny Carter, he had evolved a highly individual style. It combined an essentially lyrical approach with a forceful, swinging attack, with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Masterpieces by Ellington Ellington Uptown Duke Ellington Presents. The Count Meets the Duke with the Count Basie Orchestra The Nutcracker Suite Swinging Suites by Edward E. ISBN 1-85828-528-3 Russell Procope — by Scott Yanow for Allmusic Liner notes from The Persuasive Sax of Russ Procope, London Records, HA-D2013
35.
Artie Shaw
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Artie Shaw was an American clarinetist, composer, bandleader, and actor. Also an author, Shaw wrote both fiction and non-fiction, widely regarded as one of jazzs finest clarinetists, Shaw led one of the United States most popular big bands in the late 1930s through the early 1940s. Though he had hit records, he was perhaps best known for his 1938 recording of Cole Porters Begin the Beguine. Prior to the release of Beguine, Shaw and his band had languished in relative obscurity for over two years and, after its release, he became a major pop artist within short order. The record eventually became one of the defining recordings. Musically restless, Shaw was also a proponent of what became known much later as Third Stream music. Shaw also recorded with jazz groups drawn from within the ranks of the various big bands he led. He served in the US Navy from 1942 to 1944, and, following his discharge in 1944, Shaw was born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky in New York City, the son of Sarah and Harry Arshawsky, who worked as a dressmaker and photographer. His family was Jewish, his father was from Russia, his mother from Austria, Shaw grew up in New Haven, Connecticut where, according to his autobiography, his natural introversion was deepened by local antisemitism. Shaw bought a saxophone by working in a store, and began learning the saxophone at 13, by 16, he switched to the clarinet. Returning to New York, he became a musician through the early 1930s. In 1929 and 1930, he played with Irving Aaronsons Commanders, where he was exposed to symphonic music, in 1935, Shaw first gained attention with his Interlude in B-flat at a swing concert at the Imperial Theater in New York. During the swing era, his big bands were popular hits like Begin the Beguine, Stardust, Back Bay Shuffle, Moonglow, Rosalie. The show was received, but forced to dissolve in 1937 because his bands sound was not commercial. His incorporation of stringed instruments could be attributed to the influence of classical composer Igor Stravinsky. S. However, after recording Any Old Time, she left the band due to hostility from audiences in the South as well as music company executives who wanted a more mainstream singer. His band became successful, and his playing was eventually recognized as equal to that of Benny Goodman. Longtime Duke Ellington clarinetist Barney Bigard cited Shaw as his favorite clarinet player, in response to Goodmans nickname, the King of Swing, Shaws fans dubbed him the King of the Clarinet
