Jazz History Part 2

The History Of Jazz Music - World Overview

In Part 1 of our look at the history of jazz music leading up to the Big Band era we discussed some of the early big bands, hotel bands, and advances and evolutions in jazz music that helped set the stage for its rise in popularity. This part of the discussion will attempt to provide an overview of the many external factors outside of the music itself that not only set the stage for the Big Band era to occur but also helped increase and sustain the approbation of jazz in the public's eye.
The Big Band era is generally regarded as having occurred between the years 1935 and 1945. It was the only time in history that the popularity of jazz music eclipsed all other forms of music in the U.S. Rightly or wrongly the appearance of Benny Goodman and his big band at the Palomar in Los Angeles in August of 1935 is often referred to as the official start of the Swing era. While Benny Goodman undoubtedly had a great big band, it should be clear by now that his may not have been the "best" or even most original big band playing hot jazz music at the time. Just as Benny Goodman did not start, conceive, or bring to fruition the Big Band era on his own, so no one incident can be cited as its genesis. Rather many circumstances, incidents, conditions, and inventions seemed to all work together and should be taken into account when viewing its conception.
On the morning of "Black Thursday," October 24th, 1929, a great sell off on the New York Stock Exchange occurred triggering panic by investors. While the market bounced back a bit that afternoon, on the ensuing Monday and Tuesday it plummeted again and soon America was in the midst of the Great Depression. On December 11th, 1931 The New York Bank of the United States collapsed. These incidents helped bring to an end the prosperity, frivolity, and gaiety of the roaring 20's. Money began to get extremely tough to come by. The public was not able to afford to go out and see live music performed or buy records. Work was hard to find for everyone let alone musicians. Record sales were at an all time low. Many talented players worked the studios of radio networks and stations or were hidden in the confines of the few "sweet" dance orchestras able to stay afloat. Enter the free entertainment world of radio.
In the 1930s radio became a household appliance. It is estimated that by 1935, the number of homes with radios was nearly 23 million, the total audience around 91 million. This was the "Golden Age Of Radio" when shows like "The Shadow," "Amos & Andy," "Tarzan," "Fibber McGee And Molly," and "The Lone Ranger" were at peak popularity. Studio musicians made their money as background instrumentalists both for shows and commercials. Radio executives had learned in the 1920s that music shows were also successful. However, as far as nationally broadcast music shows in the years preceding 1934, dance and "sweet" bands still dominated the airwaves. The general public was still only dimly aware of the great black jazz orchestras. Benny Goodman's Let's Dance broadcasts, which aired regularly in 1934, were one of the first such weekly live radio broadcasts of hot jazz music to be aired by a national network on a steady, reoccurring basis.
Given the economic conditions of the time it may be surprising that during this period advances in recording technology, and in particular the microphone, were changing the way Americans could hear recorded music and radio broadcasts. The ribbon or "velocity" microphone was introduced by RCA in 1931, as the model 44A, and became one of the most widely used microphones in vocal recording. Many bands today hoping to achieve a more authentic "vintage" sound still use the 44A. Another advance in recording sound came in 1933 when RCA introduced the 77A, cardioid pattern, dual ribbon microphone. These advances in sound enabled subtle nuances in both playing and singing to be amplified for the first time and made for better live broadcasts. Up until these advances vocalists were required to get up and belt out a song with many of the subtleties in inflection and voice tone being lost.
Advances in the discs that music was recorded on were being worked on and experimented with during the Great Depression as well. By the late 1930s a limited use of vinyl resin to replace shellac pointed the way to quieter records. Lacquer-coated aluminum discs also came into use in the recording process. These had a quieter surface and for the first time allowed immediate playback in the studio for auditioning purposes. This enabled both engineers and musicians the ability to instantly make adjustments of microphone or personnel placement, further refining their recordings. These advances in disc recording, being honed during the Great Depression, had significant impact on the quality of recorded music during the Big Band era. However in the early 1930s these advances were still in their infancy. Live radio broadcasts of music with the new microphones were nearly as good, quality-wise, (assuming the reception was clear) as personally owned recordings, and certainly much more affordable.
In 1933 Homer Capehart sold the Simplex record changer mechanism to the Wurlitzer Company. The jukebox was to become an important tool in the popularity and accessibility of big band swing music, and by the late 1930s one could find them located in speakeasies, ice cream parlors, and even drugstores. The jukebox was at least part of the reason record sales began to show a tremendous increase toward the end of the decade.
The disc jockey, a term not used until about 1940, was also to become a significant factor in getting music out to the public. At first the large U.S. radio networks were against the idea. In the early 1930s they sternly reiterated their policies in a memorandum discouraging the use of recordings in network broadcasts. But the records were already spinning on local programs. Los Angeles radio man Al Jarvis was playing records and talking about them on a successful program called "The World's Largest Make Believe Ballroom." Jarvis and his program were very popular on KFWB in the small Los Angeles radio market in the early 1930s. Originally a junior assistant at KFWB, Martin Block, who had moved to New York, borrowed the same concept during the breaks in the high profile Bruno-Hauptman trial on network radio and was met with great success in 1935. Although often controversial to the musician's union, to jazz writers, to music fans and to musicians themselves, these record jockeys, as they were called, were soon entertaining listeners with discs all over the country through the medium of radio.
While the youth of 30 years later could listen to thousands of stations catering to many genres of music; such was not the case nationally in the early 1930s. Hot jazz in a big band format was instead spreading in popularity through college age kids at Ivy League colleges like Yale. The Casa Loma Orchestra was a favorite of the kids there. In New York a new dance known as the Lindy Hop (named after Charles Lindbergh's famous Trans-Atlantic flight) was catching on with teens in ballrooms like the Alhambra, the Renaissance, and the Savoy where some of its most significant adaptations occurred. Kids from a new generation were searching for their own identity, searching for excitement, searching for something to call their own, and searching for the opposite sex. Jazz music through its evolution into swing and these new and energetic dances offered the whole package. Although the swing phenomena spread slowly and in small pockets at first, national publicity through radio and publications was about to assist in propelling jazz to the pinnacle of its popularity.
Benny Goodman's Let's Dance broadcasts first aired in December of 1934. His was the final of several music features of the night making it a late broadcast on the East Coast. Most high school and college students, who were more apt to like hot jazz music, needed to be up early for school and did not hear these broadcasts. The subsequent U.S. tour by Goodman ending in California in which Benny Goodman was booked following his Let's Dance broadcasts was largely unsuccessful until he hit the West Coast. The band was met with a tremendous amount of ambivalence and even scorn throughout the Midwest. The reason was the 3-hour time difference of his live broadcasts, between coasts, had enabled many of the youth out West to be tuned in nightly. They were ready and eager to greet and meet the band bringing them this new hot jazz music.
The tour culminated with Goodman's performance at the Palomar in L.A. Although Oakland turnouts were said to have been good and crowds enthusiastic, the band was not expecting what they were met with in Southern California. What seemed to be the end of the road for the Benny Goodman big band suddenly became the beginning of a new era in American music history when the kids that night, in the summer of 1935, heard the band launch into a hot jazz number and began crowding around the bandstand cheering and encouraging the group.
With the headlines talking about the success of the Benny Goodman big band in California, magazines like Down Beat and Metronome began to print more articles about the music. John Hammond, while known to most for his savvy in discovering artists like Count Basie and Billie Holiday, was writing about big bands in Down Beat as early as 1935. By 1936, when Benny Goodman was performing just blocks away from the magazine's Chicago offices, articles about the band filled its issues. Jazz in the form of big band swing was now beginning to sweep the nation.
Soon live radio remotes were regularly featuring this new swing music coast to coast as nearly all the major hotels in large cities had a "wire," as it was called, meaning a line installed for broadcast transmission. Jukeboxes were blaring, kids were dancing, record jockeys were spinning discs and talking about them and the Big Band era had arrived.

Jazz History Part 1

The History Of Jazz Music - Pre Swing Era

On this page of our journey into the history of jazz music we focus on pre Big Band era jazz music history as recorded before 1935. We use this date and classification of this period of jazz for timeline measuring-stick purposes only. Although most historians regard the year 1935 as the start of the Big Band era, it is still a debatable topic as big band jazz had indeed been recorded as early as the 1920s.
In 1917 the Original Dixieland Jass Band cut the first recorded jazz records in history. It is a pity the honor could not have been bestowed upon a true pioneer of the genre. Most jazz historians regard this small group as simply a poor copycat band, lucky to ever have been recorded. Nevertheless, their recordings sold over a million copies and enabled jazz to be heard all over the country.
Jazz began its development in New Orleans where King Oliver, a cornet player that Louis Armstrong idolized, was performing in the early 1900's. Steamboats using the Mississippi further helped spread the sound of jazz as many of the New Orleans jazz bands and musicians performed as entertainment on the boats.
In the 1920s the music of jazz began to migrate to a big band format combining elements of ragtime, black spirituals, blues, and European music. Duke Ellington, Ben Pollack, Don Redman, and Fletcher Henderson sported some of the more popular early big bands playing hot music. These bands contained burgeoning jazz stars and future big bandleaders like Coleman Hawkins, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Red Allen, Roy Eldridge, Benny Carter, and John Kirby.
While the aforementioned musicians were playing big band jazz; the popularity of the hotel dance bands of the 1920s was also an important factor in the evolution of the Big Band era. Paul Whiteman, The California Ramblers, Ted Lewis, Jean Goldkette, and Vincent Lopez were a few of the successful hotel dance bandleaders of the 1920s. Their main sources of revenue came from playing for ballroom dance crowds and doing radio remote broadcasts in the 1920s and early 1930s.
The hot jazz orchestras of the day soon found the necessity of using an "arranger" for their pieces of music. His job became an all-important function in the making of big band jazz. While small group jazz had previously allowed a group of musicians to basically just "blow," structure became necessary with large gatherings of musicians. Although improvisation in solos was still allowed, the arranger took a written piece of music and assigned various parts to the different sections in a band and also dictated when solos were to be taken. The big band sounds of The Dorsey Brothers, Fletcher Henderson, Cab Calloway, The Casa Loma Orchestra, and Duke Ellington's orchestra as well as the styling in jazz vocals of The Mills Brothers and The Boswell Sisters were all moving toward an "arranged" and easy flowing style of jazz which would become known as swing.
With this new structure and sound the stage was set for the rise in popularity of big band music, played in this new swing style, that took the country by storm in the mid 1930s. The popularity of the music increased as Americans invented exciting, new, dances to be done in rhythm with the music. The Savoy Ballroom in Harlem opened its doors in 1926 and later became a hotbed for swing bands during the Big Band era. It was here that a swing dance style called the Lindy Hop was named, refined, and popularized. Through the press, through recordings, and through live radio remote broadcasts the masses were about to hear about this new swing music and dance craze.

Louis Armstrong

Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong (1901 - 1971)

Louis Armstrong was the greatest of all Jazz musicians. Armstrong defined what it was to play Jazz. His amazing technical abilities, the joy and spontaneity, and amazingly quick, inventive musical mind still dominate Jazz to this day. Only Charlie Parker comes close to having as much influence on the history of Jazz as Louis Armstrong did. Like almost all early Jazz musicians, Louis was from New Orleans. He was from a very poor family and was sent to reform school when he was twelve after firing a gun in the air on New Year's Eve. At the school he learned to play cornet. After being released at age fourteen, he worked selling papers, unloading boats, and selling coal from a cart. He didn't own an instrument at this time, but continued to listen to bands at clubs like the Funky Butt Hall. Joe "King" Oliver was his favorite and the older man acted as a father to Louis, even giving him his first real cornet, and instructing him on the instrument. By 1917 he played in an Oliver inspired group at dive bars in New Orleans' Storyville section. In 1919 he left New Orleans for the first time to join Fate Marable's band in St. Louis. Marable led a band that played on the Strekfus Mississsippi river boat lines. When the boats left from New Orleans Armstrong also played regular gigs in Kid Ory's band. Louis stayed with Marable until 1921 when he returned to New Orleans and played in Zutty Singleton's. He also played in parades with the Allen Brass Band, and on the bandstand with Papa Celestin's Tuxedo Orchestra , and the Silver Leaf Band. When King Oliver left the city in 1919 to go to Chicago, Louis took his place in Kid Ory's band from time to time. In 1922 Louis received a telegram from his mentor Joe Oliver, asking him to join his Creole Jazz Band at Lincoln Gardens (459 East 31st Street) in Chicago. This was a dream come true for Armstrong and his amazing playing in the band soon made him a sensation among other musicians in Chicago. The New Orleans style of music took the town by storm and soon many other bands from down south made their way north to Chicago. While playing in Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, Armstrong met Lillian Hardin, a piano player and arranger for the band. In February of 1924 they were married. Lil was a very intelligent and ambitious woman who felt that Louis was wasting himself playing in Oliver's band. By the end of 1924 she pressured Armstrong to reluctantly leave his mentor's band. He briefly worked with Ollie Powers' Harmony Syncopators before he moved to New York to play in Fletcher Henderson's Orchestra for 13 months. During that time he also did dozens of recording sessions with numerous Blues singers, including Bessie Smith's 1925 classic recording of "St. Louis Blues". He also recorded with Clarence Williams and the Red Onion Jazz Babies. In 1925 Armstrong moved back to Chicago and joined his wife's band at the Dreamland Cafe (3520 South State Street). He also played in Erskine Tate's Vendome Orchestra and then with Carrol Dickenson's Orchestra at the Sunset Cafe (313-17 East 35th Street at the corner of Calmet Street). Armstrong recorded his first Hot Five records that same year. This was the first time that Armstrong had made records under his own name. The records made by Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven are considered to be absolute jazz classics and speak of Armstrong's creative powers. The band never played live, but continued recording until 1928. While working at the Sunset, Louis met his future manager, Joe Glaser. Glaser managed the Sunset at that time. Armstrong continued to play in Carrol Dickenson's Orchestra until 1929. He also led his own band on the same venue under the name of Louis Armstrong and his Stompers. For the next two years Armstrong played with Carroll Dickerson's Savoy Orchestra and with Clarence Jones' Orchestra in Chicago. By 1929 Louis was becoming a very big star. He toured with the show "Hot Chocolates" and appeared occasionally with the Luis Russell Orchestra, with Dave Peyton, and with Fletcher Henderson. Armstrong moved to Los Angeles in 1930 where he fronted a band called Louis Armstrong and his Sebastian New Cotton Club Orchestra. In 1931 he returned to Chicago and assembled his own band for touring purposes. In June of that year he returned to New Orleans for the first time since he left in 1922 to join King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band. Armstrong was greeted as a hero, but racism marred his return when a White radio announcer refused to mention Armstrong on the air and a free concert that Louis was going to give to the cities' African-American population was cancelled at the last minute. Louis and Lil also separated in 1931. In 1932 he returned to California, before leaving for England where he was a great success. For the next three years Armstrong was almost always on the road. He crisscrossed the U.S. dozens of times and returned to Europe playing in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Holland and England. In 1935 he returned to the U.S. and hired Joe Glaser to be his manager. He had known Glaser when he was the manager of the Sunset Cafe in Chicago in the 1920s. Glaser was allegedly connected to the Al Capone mob, but proved to be a great manager and friend for Louis. Glaser remained Armstrong's manager until his death in 1969. Glaser took care of the business end of things, leaving Armstrong free to concentrate on his music. He also hired the Luis Russell Orchestra as Louis' backup band with Russell as the musical director. This was like going home for Armstrong, because Russell's Orchestra was made up of predominantly New Orleans musicians, many of whom had also played with King Oliver. The band was renamed Louis Armstrong and his Orchestra and was one of the most popular acts of the Swing era. Glaser put the band to work and they toured constantly for the next ten years. During this period Armstrong became one of the most famous men in America. In 1938 Lil and Louis finally got a divorce. Louis then married Alpha, his third wife. The endless touring was hard on their marriage and they were divorced four years later, but Armstrong quickly remarried Lucille and they remained married for the rest of his life. For the next nine years the Louis Armstrong Orchestra continued to tour and release records, but as the 1940s drew to a close the public's taste in Jazz began to shift away from the commercial sounds of the Swing era and big band Jazz. The so-called Dixieland Jazz revival was just beginning and Be Bop was also starting to challenge the status quo in the Jazz world. The Louis Armstrong Orchestra was beginning to look tired and concert and record sales were declining. Critics complained that Armstrong was becoming too commercial. So, in 1947 Glaser fired the orchestra and replaced them with a small group that became one of the greatest and most popular bands in Jazz history. The group was called the Louis Armstrong Allstars and over the years featured exceptional musicians like Barney Bigard, Jack Teagarden, Sidney ‘Big Sid’ Catlett , vocalist Vilma Middleton, and Earl Hines. The band went through a number of personnel changes over the years but remained extremely popular worldwide. They toured extensively travelling to Africa, Asia, Europe and South America for the next twenty years until Louis' failing health caused them to disband. Armstrong became known as America's Ambassador. In 1963 Armstrong scored a huge international hit with his version of "Hello Dolly". This number one single even knocked the Beatles off the top of the charts. In 1968 he recorded another number one hit with the touchingly optimistic "What A Wonderful World". Armstrong's health began to fail him and he was hospitalized several times over the remaining three years of his life, but he continued playing and recording. On July 6th 1971 the world's greatest Jazz musician died in his sleep at his home in Queens, New York.

Okeh Records

OKeh was one of the most important and influential record labels in the black music market for over five decades. It was not only a source of great musicians and records, but also of song writers and producers. This homepage focuses on the soul and R&B era of OKeh, which gave us gifted musicians/ groups such as Walter Jackson, Major Lance, and The Artistics; song writers like Curtis Mayfield and Billy Butler; and producers like Carl Davis and Larry Williams. We should never forget the great talents which have given us so many soul songs that are an integral part of the Northern Soul Scene.

OKeh began its music history in 1918 in New York producing all kinds of music. Two years later, it launched the first black-music recording with the release of Mamie Smith´s "Crazy Blues", which became its first hit. The label focused in the 30´s on blues and jazz discs. The main hits of the Columbia-subsidiary label followed in the 50´s with "Cry" (1951) by white artist Jimmy Raye "Hambone" (1953) by the Hambone Kids and "I Put a Spell on You" (1956) by Screamin´ Jay Hawkins. OKeh released some of the most important blues, jazz, gospel and R&B greats (Chuck Willis, Big Maybelle, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, etc.) of that decade. The 60´s started slowly for the label and its doors were almost closed forever. The turnaround was made 1962 by hiring Carl Davis as a producer. He transformed OKeh into a successful soul label and an alternative to the Motown sound -within one year. Davis and Curtis Mafield formed a powerful team the following year. With Davis as producer and Mayfield as writer and co-producer, the duo was responsible for almost all hits during the label's subsequent years. The label selected from a large pool of talent in Chicago. Riley Hampton, known for his work on ballads and who was good with strings, along with Johnny Pate, who was especially talented with medium tempo and fast songs, came in for the arrangements. Major Lance and Walter Jackson were the most successful artists in the early 60´s. Additional hits came from southern-soul singer Ted Taylor and R&B legend Dr. Feelgood. The famous OKeh sound was determined by sentimental songs with pretty melodies, lush strings and smooth, slick vocals that avoid harsh or rough edges. OKeh's problems resumed when in 1966 Davis, Mayfield, and Pate left the label. Without its talented team, the label sounded stale and seemingly anyone and everyone was signed to release. Famous DJ Wolfman Jack, Rock´n´Roll legends Larry Williams and Little Richard and a long list of no-names had records on the label. After OKeh 7290 (last No.: 7338), very few records got past the promotional stage. OKeh was closed forever after only three releases in 1970.