The History of Jazz (16 page)

Between the first and second 1924 sessions for the Wolverines, Beiderbecke celebrated his twenty-first birthday. Strange to say, though Bix was barely out of his teens, the cornetist was poised to enter the middle period of his career. Indeed, the chronology of this celebrated musician is all too compact: his entire recorded oeuvre would span less than seven years, with even this abbreviated history broken down into several distinct stages. By the time of Bix’s final recordings with the Wolverines, in late 1924, the band had already traveled to New York (at almost the same time that Armstrong had moved there to join Henderson). Before the close of the year Beiderbecke had left the band to embark on a fertile period of freelancing and experimentation.

These halcyon days, which lasted from the middle of the decade to the stock market crash of 1929, witnessed much of Beiderbecke’s greatest work. But this period also encompassed an exceptional flourishing of improvised music on a much wider scale, one that music historians have come to designate simply as Chicago jazz. Beiderbecke’s contributions, as great as they are, were just one facet of this new sound, this new style. Like the New Orleans tradition that preceded it, and the Swing Era offerings that followed it, Chicago jazz was not just the music of a time and place, but also a timeless style of performance—and for its exponents, very much a way of life—one that continues to reverberate to this day in the work of countless Dixieland and traditional jazz bands around the world. For many listeners, the Chicago style remains nothing less than the quintessential sound of jazz.

As with much of early jazz, the story of the Chicago school has taken on a larger-than-life quality with the passage of time. Facts and falsehoods, myths and memories have coalesced into a pseudohistory, a romanticized account of glory days with all the authenticity of a maudlin Hollywood script. Here we find gangsters and speakeasys, riverboats and flashy attire, all bundled together in a colorful tapestry. The truth is somewhat more complicated, and often less glamorous. True, jazz traveled to Chicago—albeit by land not river—at an early stage in its development, but it also journeyed to many other parts of the country through the missionary efforts of King Oliver, Freddie Keppard and the Original Creole Orchestra, Jelly Roll Morton, and others. The Chicago nightspots were often makeshift rather than opulent—Lincoln Gardens, the celebrated home base for King Oliver, had chicken wire on the ceiling, and the famous Dreamland Ballroom doubled as a roller rink. And, yes, booze and criminal elements could be found where the music played, but this connection neither started in the Windy City nor ended there.

Further, the association of the so-called Chicago style of music with its leading figure, Bix Beiderbecke, is also rather puzzling: Bix played little in Chicago—if anything, his residencies in New York stand out as the decisive interludes in his musical career. (Then again, when dealing with the topsy-turvy subject of jazz geography, be prepared for the strangest contradictions: just as much of the history of New Orleans jazz took place in Chicago, so did the sounds of Chicago jazz eventually find their most hospitable home in New York.) The further stereotype that associates early Chicago jazz almost solely with white musicians is equally off mark: as we have already seen, the finest African American musicians from New Orleans and elsewhere—Armstrong, Hines, Morton, Oliver, Noone, Dodds—had already gravitated to Chicago by the mid-1920s. William Howland Kenney, in his study of the biographies of fifty-five black musicians associated with Chicago jazz during the 1920s, determined that nearly half came from New Orleans, and a similar percentage arrived during or just following World War I.
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Black jazz, white jazz, hot jazz, sweet jazz, New Orleans jazz, Dixieland jazz: no matter what you call it or how you define it, it all became part of Chicago jazz during these formative years.

The similarities between the music of the white Chicagoans and their New Orleans models have often been noted—frequently by the Chicagoans themselves. But close listening reveals subtle gradations of difference. A certain restless energy begins to reverberate in the music. Counterpoint lines no longer weave together, as in the earlier New Orleans style, but often battle for supremacy. The specific roles filled by the New Orleans front line are modified. The tailgate trombone tradition, with its use of portamentos (or slurs) to link harmony notes, is less evident among the Chicago players; and, at times, the trombone is totally absent, replaced by the tenor sax, which takes on a more linear and overtly melodic role. The Chicago clarinetists, following the lead of Roppolo, move away from the figured arpeggios of New Orleans, instead adopting mannerisms that, in New Orleans style, were more typical of cornetists. Hear, for instance, Frank Teschemacher’s pungent and, at times, raspy lines—a cheeky attitude on the horn that would influence Benny Goodman and other Swing Era players. The Chicago horns often join together for brief written introductions and interludes, a technique closer to the big band idiom than to the New Orleans tradition. A host of stylistic devices, with some precedent in New Orleans jazz, also figure as signposts of the white Chicagoans: the
flare up
, a polyphonic outburst—at its simplest, merely a held chord—initiated by a drum break, placed for best effect at the close of the first chorus; the
explosion
, a forerunner of the bop drummer’s bomb, which aimed to light a fire under the soloist or ensemble by accentuating the backbeat in the measure before the start of a new eight-bar section; the
shuffle rhythm
, which conveyed the feel of double time, often used to add variety to the bridge of a thirty-two-bar song form; and the
break
, the time-honored formula, honed in New Orleans, a two-or four-bar interlude during which the band held back while the soloist stepped forward to proclaim a hot phrase.

But we should not neglect the influence of the various nonjazz musical traditions that the multiethnic Chicagoans (as well as the later members of the New York school) brought with them to their jazz making. At times, their minor key melodies conveyed more than a hint of klezmer, as for instance on Goodman’s early leader sides “That’s a Plenty” and “Clarinetitis.” Teschemacher also showed the influence of his early violin training, which occasionally transmits the ambiance of a European street fiddler to his clarinet lines. And who can listen to the string music of Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang without hearing echoes of the Italian lyric tradition? A fascination with contemporary classical music and other experimental currents is also evident among this generation of jazzmen, inspiring their adoption of esoteric harmonies and rhythms—Beiderbecke is the most prominent example, but also note Tesch’s use of 6/4 in the intro to “Liza.” These tributaries of inspiration flowed together in broadening the vocabulary of jazz during the late 1920s and early 1930s. The music was still a paean to the New Orleans sound, but it also pointed forward to the later Swing Era preferences for tighter arrangements, greater expressive range and variety, and a more pronounced separation of solo and ensemble textures.

Yet it is important to recognize that economic as well as aesthetic considerations contributed to the evolution of this music. Musicians of all styles, all races, all instruments came to Chicago not because of an allegiance to a certain idiom of jazz, but rather to tap the opportunities to perform and earn a livelihood that the setting offered. Sidemen in Chicago bands could earn $40 per week or more during the years following World War I—a far cry from the $1.50 to $2.50 per engagement a New Orleans player might have commanded during that era.
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In response, musicians from all regions converged on the city—a process that we have already described with regard to the World’s Columbian Exposition, which drew Scott Joplin and many other rag pianists to Chicago in 1893. There were, of course, many outstanding jazz players from this period who were born or raised in Chicago—Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Muggsy Spanier, and others; just as many came from the suburbs or, like Beiderbecke, from other parts of the Midwest. But these players remained in Chicago not due to any loyalty to their native soil, but because of the vibrant local jazz scene and the financial security it represented.

As previously mentioned, the conventions of New Orleans jazz began to change in this new setting, but even in this regard economic factors may have exercised a predominant influence. Perhaps the most obvious shift came in the repertoire of the local jazz bands. During the decade of the 1920s, popular songs and thirty-two-bar forms were increasingly used by Chicago jazz musicians, while blues and multitheme ragtime structures, so central to the New Orleans tradition, became less common. This move does not seem to have been driven by aesthetic considerations—it is hardly mentioned by the players themselves in the many memoirs and interviews from the period—but came about gradually as a response to the changing demands of audiences. The blues recording craze of the early 1920s had already subsided by the time Chicago jazz took off in full force, while the ragtime explosion of the turn of the century was only a distant memory. In this new world of mass marketing, jazz as a category of entertainment came to occupy a wider and wider orbit, encompassing a broad spectrum of performance styles. The definition of jazz already emerges as a problem by the middle of the decade, and this too must have contributed to an expansion in the repertoire of jazz performers. Consider, for example, the featured songs from the hit 1927 movie
The Jazz Singer
, the first talking film, which were much closer to popular music than to jazz; or Gershwin’s jazz-based classical compositions, which took the country by storm in the mid-1920s; or the success of Paul Whiteman, the ostensible “King of Jazz,” whose song choices cut across a dizzying array of musical genres. During the Jazz Age, as the period came to be known, it seems almost anything in fashion would, sooner or later, be classified as jazzy. Who can be surprised that, in this environment, jazz players felt that the popular songs of the day should be under their domain, subject to their interpretation and modification?

The music was now permeated by a mythology, one that romanticized the jazz life, and celebrated its leading practitioners as defiant, rebellious youths determined to go their own way in music, as in other pursuits. Some years later, Hollywood movies glamorized a series of antiheroes—one can see early hints of this figure in the films of Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart; it found its ideal type in the 1950s with Marlon Brando and James Dean; and lingers as an enduring archetype to the present day—whose quasi-cynical American individualism engages in an uneasy dance with conventional social mores. American novelists, especially Hemingway, had already drawn inspiration from this new character type. But even earlier, the Chicago jazzmen anticipated this powerful current in the popular imagination. They embodied in their lives and attitudes a fascinating series of antihero contradictions: they were worldly wise yet innocent; hard-edged yet wearing their hearts on their sleeves, especially in their music; self-centered but with a deep sense of camaraderie; flip and cynical, yet deeply committed to their calling.

If the mythology of Chicago jazz has a founding father, it is Eddie Condon. True, if our history dealt only with musical achievement, Condon’s role would be a small one, properly fitted to the dimensions of a footnote or an aside. Condon was certainly a capable banjoist with a buoyant front-of-the-beat pulse—hear him, for instance, joyously careening alongside Fats Waller on “Minor Drag”—yet his native talent shone more brightly in other spheres. As an advocate of hot music, a chronicler of his times, an epigrammist, a master of the grand style, and behind-the-scenes doer, Condon demands respect as a central figure in Chicago jazz. Histories, after all, need to celebrate the jesters and jousters and not just those with crowns on their heads.

Condon’s efforts led to gainful employment and a more bountiful recording legacy for other, greater players; and he, more than anyone else, created the appealing public image of the Chicago jazzman as bohemian revolutionary. Condon the aphorist was rarely at a loss for words. Complaining about a mediocre bandleader: “He made the clarinet talk and it usually said ‘please put me back in my case. ’ ” Describing an equally lamentable vocalist: “He once tried to carry a tune across the street and broke both legs.” On his chronic late-night partying: “I began losing sleep [in 1919] and I have never been able since to pay myself any more than the interest on the debt.” On the advances of modern jazz: “The boppers flat their fifths. We drink ours.” Whether quoted, lambasted, idealized, praised, dismissed—one way or another, this secondary figure managed somehow to become a primary source in the history of jazz.
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Born in Goodland, Indiana, on November 16, 1905, Eddie Condon apprenticed in dance bands throughout the Midwest. In Chicago during the mid-1920s, Condon became involved with a number of like-minded players, most notably a group of young instrumentalists who would come to be known as the Austin High School Gang. Like Condon, they displayed an almost obsessive fixation on jazz music and jazz culture. “They talked about jazz as if it were a new religion just come from Jerusalem,” was Condon’s account of his first meeting with cornetist Jimmy McPartland and tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman, two of the most prominent members of the Austin High School group.
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But then again, Condon could have been talking about himself. Enthusiasm ran deep with the Chicago school, and even in their musical triumphs they retained much of the wide-eyed ardor of a fan.

Austin, located to the west of downtown Chicago, was an inauspicious setting for a jazz movement. In 1922, a group of students began gathering regularly at a soda parlor located near the nondescript buff brick Austin High School. The parlor featured a windup Victrola and a pile of records. “One day we found a record by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in the stack, and we put it on, not knowing what kind of band we were about to hear,” Freeman later recalled. “Were we excited by it! We were used to hearing commercial dance bands, but this sound was something else.”
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“Right then and there,” Jimmy McPartland continues the story, “we decided we would get a band and try to play like these guys. So we all picked out our instruments. Tesch [Frank Teschemacher] said he was going to buy a clarinet, Freeman plumped for a saxophone, [Jim] Lannigan picked a bass tuba, my brother [Dick McPartland] said he’d play the banjo, and I chose cornet, the loudest instrument.”
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All but Freeman had studied violin before their introduction to the jazz idiom.