A History of Jazz

There was a time when jazz was the popular music of America. Back in the 1920’s and 1930’s there was an immense outpouring of creativity surrounding various technical innovations such as the invention first of the phonograph and then the soundtrack movie and electronic amplification.

The oldest jazz recordings I have are some of the Louis Armstrong Hot Fives and Hot Sevens recordings from the late 1920’s. One can hear a bit of the New Orleans in these sides, and I imagine that the earliest jazz bands were New Orleans marching bands that played negro spirituals, blues songs, and folk tunes in that typical ensemble way that we associate with that city and its music.

At some point fairly early on white dance bands started to play in a similar syncopated style and incorporated the music of songwriters like the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Hoagy Carmichael, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, Richard Rogers, and others who unleashed a veritable torrent of brilliant songs and tunes that usually first say the light of day in the musical theater, and then in movies, and then on 78 rpm records performed by dance bands with or without singers.

In segregated America black and white jazz bands grew up side by side, though there was a certain amount of personnel crossover, which was not easy in the days when touring black and white musicians could not always stay in the same hotels or eat in the same restaurants and when dances were racially segregated.

This music was what we now call jazz and these compositions collectively formed the basis of the repertoire we now call standards. It swung, and if it didn’t swing, said Duke Ellington, jazz philosopher and America’s answer to Descartes, it didn’t mean a thing. We can still listen to those 78 rpm records today and to our ears they tend to sound a bit rinky-tinky, though some truly marvelous remastering has restored some of the music to a better standard than we have any right to expect.

There are some recordings remastered from pre World War II original pressings, that I still enjoy listening to, but this probably requires a special pair of ears, and an imagination that can fill in the missing parts of the sound spectrum on the fly, so I won’t trouble you with them.

But in the early 1950’s came another massive technical revolution in recorded music, the invention of the 33 r.p.m. long playing record and Hi-Fi reproduction. Many of the great stars of the thirties and forties now went into the studios and re-recorded their earlier works using the very best studio musicians in Hi-Fi so good that if we listen to these records today they sound just as good as modern recordings. In fact if I play my CD of Saxophone Colossus (1956) in my office no one who hears Sonny Rollins playing Mack The Knife has the faintest idea that the recording is more than 50 years old.

Those artists who died young, notably Glenn Miller and Charlie Christian, did not have the chance to record in the new format, which also made it possible to record extended improvisational tracks of several minutes, whereas the 78rpm format had been restricted to numbers of less than 3 minutes. Some of the die-young brigand barely made into the Hi-Fi era, notably Charlie Parker and Clifford Brown, but thankfully were able to get some excellent recordings down before they cashed in their chops..

In the 1950’s a further huge development in popular song took place as Frank Sinatra recorded the first concept albums, LP records with songs thematically linked like Songs For Swinging Lovers and In The Wee Small Hours—quintessential late night listening. He also transformed popular song by putting the singer and the singer’s individual interpretation of the song up front. If you just listen to the young Sinatra with the Harry James band, he sounds like your average crooner, then you listen to his 1950’s recordings arranged by Nelson Riddle or by Billy Mays, you will soon grasp how huge this transformation was.

This is mostly what I listen to. It is marvelous music. It was the pop music of its day. And it is jazz, by my book, since the instrumentation is jazz instrumentation. No strings, no synthesizers, no electric guitars, just real musical instruments played by experts, many of whom were virtuosos of a type that we may never see again. Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Louis Armstrong, and the great singers, Frank Sinatra, Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, Anita O’Day,and Louis Armstrong again.

The golden era of jazz recording was the 1950’s and to some extent the 60’s. After the rise of rock ‘n’ roll jazz was no longer the pre-eminent format of popular music and it started to lose its way. Some jazz musicians who had been great mainstream performers turned, in desperation, it seems to me, to increasingly avante garde and inaccessible music and audiences have dwindled ever since.

Yes, there are still jazzmen in business, like the earnest Wynton Marsalis (who seemed an exceptionally nice guy in person when I once briefly met him ), or the tedious guitarist Pat Metheny keeping the embers of jazz alive, but I can’t say I care greatly for their recordings. One of the great problems for modern jazz players must be that all the great standards have already been done by the greats, and that the great songs are not being written any more.

But this music of the golden years of jazz recording is immediately accessible and enjoyable. It sounds great, and it does not cost a fortune to buy today. Many of the greatest CDs of all time can be obtained for less than $10, especially if you don’t mind going second hand.

Click here for Best 40 CDs list.