II.

The First Wave (1918-1926)

The biggest challenge one has in a book of this scope is not, as one might expect, find-
ing the right connections or enough connections between classical and jazz, but of somehow
managing the whole story in some sort of coherent narrative. There was a lot going on, but
none of it was linear; it was just all sort of jumbled together, with different musicians in both
camps doing different things at different times, and if by some quirk of luck or ballyhoo
George Gershwin trumped John Alden Carpenter, or Duke Ellington shot to local (New York)
fame and thence to national stardom while Earl Hines struggled to even be known to most
Americans, all these musicians and others like them were equally important within the great,
large juggling act that was musical exploration. Thus I will try as much as possible to tell a
chronological tale, but if and when the time comes to explore a major figure or trend involv-
ing several figures, I will step out of my chronology and bring the magnifying glass further in
to examine in greater detail the most interesting or salient features of that figure or trend.
Before judging Paul Whiteman (1890-1967) and the other jazz bands that prolifer-
ated in New York during the late teens and early 20s, we must understand that the Northern
concept of jazz was still extremely vague. Following on the heels of the ODJB, numerous
white bands and singers came to prominence playing what they thought was a hot style of
music, but which focused on the freak sounds heard in some of the ODJB recordings: whining
clarinets, whinnying trumpets, slurring trombones and loud, head-bashing rhythm sections.
Its ironic that, the same year Jim Europe died and Whiteman formed his orchestra, the black
band of Will Marion Cook (1869-1944) played in Paris, where it caught the attention of the
distinguished conductor Ernest Ansermet (1883-1969). Writing what is correctly considered
the first intelligent piece of jazz criticism, Ansermet was impressed not only by the audacious
solo playing of the bands starnone other than clarinetist and soprano saxist Sidney Bechet
(1897-1959), then only 21but also by the discipline and startling dynamic shadings of the
Cook band. Sadly, we cannot hear Bechet from that far back, but his 1923 recording of Kan-
sas City Man Blues gives us a good indication of what Ansermet and other French listeners
heard. It is not known whether or not composer Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) also heard this
concert, but one way or another he was intrigued enough by jazz to come to New York in
1922 to search for rhythms and sound textures that he could use to create a classical work.
Another transitional figure who receives little attention was reed player (mostly clari-
net) Wilbur Sweatman (1882-1961). A close friend of Scott Joplins, Sweatman inherited the
rag masters papers and scores when he died, and took very good care of them throughout the
remainder of his life. He also wrote one of the most famous and popular ragtime tunes of the
day, Down Home Rag (1911). Yet he became most famous for the ragtime orchestra he
formed and which made its first records in 1916, a year before the ODJB. Some observers,
noting that Sweatman did play some melodic variants in his clarinet solos, have concluded
that he was an early, primitive jazz musician, and this is probably so. After the ODJBs rise to
fame, he modified his band to play a hotter style of ragtime and called it his Original Jazz
Band. Whats interesting about Sweatmans band is that it was probably the only black mu-
sical group of its time to become famous among white audiences, their 1918 Columbia re-
cording of Kansas City Blues selling an amazing 180,000 copies, although he made even bet-
ter records the following year such as Frank Warshauers Rainy Day Blues. But despite their
catchy, hot ragtime/early jazz style, neither the band nor its leader ever really evolved, and in
fact many of Sweatmans arrangements were written by a white man, Harry L. Alford (1875-
1939), the most famous and prolific arranger for nearly all concert and show bands in Chicago
and, later, New York. By comparison with the kind of music Whiteman was turning out in the

14
early 1920s, however, Sweatmans band sounded remarkably looser and more relaxed in its
rhythmic swing, and played their music with a greater feeling of structure.
At almost exactly the same time, a major jazz style originated on the East Coast called
stride piano. This was an outgrowth of the faster-paced New York ragtime style that had
evolved from Eubie Blake and Luckey Roberts by New Jersey-based pianist James P. Johnson
(1894-1955). Johnson, who studied classical piano technique with Bruto Giannini, created this
style that was essentially ragtime with improvisation. It featured loping, alternating bass notes
and chords in the left hand and occasional single notes played in a walking style, against a
florid right-hand style. Johnsons compositions, particularly Carolina Shout and The Charles-
ton, took the East Coast jazz scene by storm. Johnson began making piano rolls as early as
1917, including a fascinating version of Carolina Shout which is actually more swinging than
the more famous QRS roll of 1921. By the early 1920s Johnson also began making disc re-
cordings and had a fair number of followers, among them his close friend Willie The Lion
Smith (who had given him some ideas in his early years), Edward Duke Ellington, Donald
Lambert, Johnsons own protg Thomas Fats Waller, and a young Pittsburgh pianist
named Earl Hines. But as an example of how different things were happening at roughly the
same time, Hines would add new wrinkles to stride, doubling octaves in the right hand, add-
ing flourishes in the left, and expanding the style into something far more complex, rather like
Roberts playing only with a constant influx of improvisation, and by decades end an even
younger Toledo pianist named Arthur Tatum took the style to its zenith. Both will be dis-
cussed in further detail anon.
To return to Milhaud, his sojourn in New York was fairly brief. He went to a few
nightclubs where he heard both black and white jazz bands, but since he had little time he
bought a small pile of jazz records and brought them back to Paris with him to compose La
Cration du Monde. Ironically, some of those records he bought, which he assumed were by
black bands, were actually white musicians recording under pseudonyms. Indeed, the princi-
pal record on which he based La Cration, Aunt Hagars Childrens Blues by Ladds Black
Aces, was in fact a studio-recording unit led by white bandleader Sam Lanin (1891-1977).
Among its jazz musicians were reed player Doc Behrendson and pianist Jimmy Durante.
Unlike most of the works of this era we will discuss, La Cration du Monde was never
ignored or forgotten. It was written in 1923 when Milhaud was commissioned to write music
for a script by Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961) that told the story of creation from the vantage
point of African mythology. In a certain sense, this was the seminal piece of jazz-influenced
classical music, despite the good work of John Alden Carpenter which had preceded it (and
which we will discuss shortly) because Milhaud not only caught the flavor of African-
American-inspired rhythms but also the true colors and feelings of jazz orchestras without re-
sorting to distortion or caricature. By now, nearly all listeners are familiar with its wonderful
use of counterpoint as well as Milhauds ingenious adaptation of the typical jazz band instru-
mentation of his day. We almost take his accomplishment for granted, but I can assure you
that in its time it was nearly as controversial a workparticularly outside of France, which
was probably the most jazz-hip country of the early 1920sas Stravinskys Sacre.
Middle-class American whites, for the most part, heard all this cacophony and the in-
flux of black musicians into white society as a threat not only to their social and moral stan-
dards, but also to the hallowed halls of great music itself. Numerous articles were written
attacking jazz, only a handful defending or trying to explain it. Yet 1921 was the year Ameri-
can composer John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951), of very high social standing, began incor-
porating jazz elements into his compositions, beginning with the ballet Krazy Kat, based on
the famous George Herrimann cartoon of the same name.

15
 During this period, too, young George Gershwin (1898-1937), who also started out as
a ragtime composer, wrote a 25-minute, one-act jazz opera with a libretto by song lyric
writer Buddy De Sylva titled Blue Monday. Based on the folk-pop song Frankie and Johnny,
about a sporting woman who shot her man because he done her wrong, its premiere was
greeted by embarrassment and apathy. It starts off with pounding tympani and an overture
in modified ragtime-Broadway-jazz style, and includes such embarrassing dialogue as Get a
move on, you lazy good-for-nothin. Yessuh, yessuh, boss! Pauls little arioso has a nice
melody and lilt to it, and the following orchestral bridge passage is fairly well written. An-
other orchestral bridge of great rhythmic energypossibly the finest passage in the whole
piececomes along at midpoint, but a later orchestral passage reminds one more of a corny
ragtime version of Mendelssohns Wedding March. By and large, the opera is disjointed
and bombastic. Even Gershwin himself wasnt very pleased with it. Yet ironically, one person
who was pleased with it was bandleader Whiteman. Well see how the apparent failure of
Blue Monday led to Gershwins greatest success.
Just how controversial this topic was may be seen from an article published in The
Etude, the most popular music educators magazine during the first half of the 20th century, in
1924 on The Jazz Problem. Several noted (white) composers, conductors and authors were
asked for their opinions on this cacophonous noise that had invaded the Walhalla of mu-
sic.1 It was, perhaps, not surprising to most well-up readers of The Etude that Carpenter,
Leopold Stokowski, and bandleader Vincent Lopez came down on the side of jazz while Ar-
thur Foote, Charles Wakefield Cadman, Henry F. Gilbert, Franz Drdla and Will Earhart came
down against it, but for me the two most surprising responses came from Stokowski and, of
all people, John Philip Sousa, because they were the only two professional listeners, if you
will, who really listened to the music closely enough to distinguish the difference between
real jazz and pop music ephemera. While the others, including Etudes anonymous introduc-
tory remarks, referred (as so much writing on jazz of the period did) to the extraordinary in-
ventive skill of such composers of Jazz as Irving Berlin, Zez Confrey, George Gershwin,
and George M. Cohan, of which only Gershwin is today recognized as a transitional figure
who really understood jazz to a certain extent and created a real fusion, Stokowski was the
only writer to cite black musicians as the principal creators of the day. He asserted that with
their open mind, and unbiased outlooknot hampered by traditions or conventions, and with
their new ideas, their constant experiments, they are causing new blood to flow into the veins
of music.2 Sousa began his remarks by refuting the Standard Dictionary definition of jazz as
Ragtime music in discordant tones or the notes for it, asserting that Jazz can be as simple
as a happy childs musings, or can be of a tonal quality as complex as the most futuristic
composition. Many jazz pieces suffer through ridiculous performances, owing to the desire of
a performer wishing to create a laugh by any means possible, later concluding that there is no
real reason why jazz should not become one of the accepted forms of composition. It lends
itself to as many melodic changes as any other musical form.3
American composer Edward Burlingame Hill (1872-1960), much older than Milhaud
or Carpenter (in fact, even older than Bunk Johnson), also took an avid interest in jazz. Buck-
ing the entire music establishment of his day, Hill, who graduated from Harvard before going
to Paris for further composition studies under composer-organist Charles-Marie Widor, re-

1
These observations of famous musicians and writers were republished in Robert Walsers book, Keeping Time:
Readings in Jazz History (Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 41-54.
2
Walser, ibid, p. 52.
3
Walser, ibid, p. 50.

16
turned to America where he was appointed to the faculty of Harvard in 1908. Some of his
later composition pupils included Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, Virgil Thomson, Elliott
Carter, and Leonard Bernstein. Between 1922 and 1924, he composed his four Jazz Studies
for Two Pianos which he premiered in a lecture-demonstration, in which he spoke impres-
sively of jazz according to the New York Times, only two days before the historic Aeolian
Hall concert given by Paul Whiteman in February 1924. The Jazz Studies, recorded complete
for the first time in 2010 by the superb British piano duo of Anthony Goldstone and Caroline
Clemmow (Divine Art 25089), evidently owe as much to dance music evolved from late rag-
time as to early jazz, but they are inventive and lively and do not cheapen jazz by eviscerating
the rhythm or feeling. His great contribution, for such early works, was in combining a real
jazz energy with a fairly advanced harmonic underpinning. The third piece, marked Tempo
giusto, is actually the most moderately paced of the four, and bears a strong resemblance to
the later music of Kurt Weill, which was also more ragtime than jazz influenced.
Several European composers wrote pieces with the title Ragtime, among them Stra-
vinsky and Hindemith, though of the two composers it was the latter who actually had more
fun with the form and produced the more harmonically inventive piece. As opposed to the
Stravinsky work, fascinating but somewhat static, the Hindemith has a spirited drive and the
kind of swing one associates with the best jazz bands of the time, and the trombones play
glissando figures as one heard constantly in ragtime and jazz performances of the period. A
xylophone plays along with the trumpets and, yes, once again there is the two-beat feel to
the rhythm that was a trademark of New Orleans jazz. A syncopated trumpet figure is passed
on to the flute while the basses plays a lively counterpoint. All in all, it is one of the most un-
usual and atypical pieces Hindemith ever wrote. Also, the same year Milhaud wrote Cration
du Monde, American expatriate composer George Anthiel, who lived in Paris, wrote his Jazz
Symphony. Like Milhaud, he adopted some of the orchestration of jazz, and the music was
extremely clever and not without merit, but to our ears today it sounds much more tango-
influenced. An extended piano solo in the second half of the piece dominates the proceedings,
and eventually leads into a finale which is strikingly like George Gershwins Rhapsody in
Blue, though since the Symphony was not played in America until 1925 Gershwin probably
had no idea of its existence.
By 1924, some of jazzs major creators were finally making records: the New Orleans
Rhythm Kings (a white band from New Orleans, but far looser in rhythm than the ODJB and
with some excellent soloists, particularly clarinetist Leon Roppolo), Ferdinand Jelly Roll
Morton, King Olivers Creole Jazz Band with young Louis Armstrong on second cornet,
Freddie Keppards Jazz Cardinals, and some freelance sessions by Armstrong and Sidney Be-
chet, but all of these were made for the small, independent Gennett and Paramount labels,
which had miserable sound quality, gritty surfaces, and extremely limited distribution. Only
those hardy souls who were lucky enough to hear all of these musicians in personmeaning
Chicagoanssought out and bought the records. They were available on the East Coast only
in limited numbers and without much promotion and, as Berton told me, many people who
first heard them could not make the distinction between this real jazz style and the ersatz pop
music being cranked out by white vaudeville bands in New York.

Jelly Roll Mortons early style

For close to a century now the debate has raged whether or not Morton invented jazz
as he claimed. Certainly, there was hot music around in New Orleans, not to mention blues
and spasm bands, before he claimed to have invented it in 1902; Morton even admits as
much in his Library of Congress recorded interviews. So what was it that he really invented?

17
You have to search for it, because Alan Lomax wasnt a musician and didnt understand jazz.
He was a folklorist and sociologist, thought jazz was a form of folk music, and asked more
questions about who drank what and what kinds of clothes and weapons they had in New Or-
leans in the early days than anything much about music. But in the recordings that have since
been titled The right tempo is the accurate tempo and Slow swing and sweet jazz music,
Morton explains that the best musicians in those early years were the ragtime pianists (of
whom he particularly admired Sammy Price and Porter King), whereas the bands of the time
played too fast and loud:

I decided that tempo was a mistakeI thought that the accurate tempo would be the
right tempo for any tune, regardless of any tempo that you would setI found that
the slow tunes did more in the development of jazzthat is, the medium slow
tunesthan any other thing, due to the fact that you would always have time to hit a
note twice when ordinarily you would only hit it once, and that give it a very good
flavor.

Of course, my theory is to never discord the melody. Always have the melody going
some kind of a way; and of course your background would always be with perfect
harmony, with what is known today as riffs, meaning figures, musically speaking as
figuresThe main idea of playing jazz is no piano player can really play jazz unless
they try to give an imitation of a band.

The fact of the matter is that every musician in America had the wrong understand-
ing about jazz music. Somehow or other it got into the dictionary that jazz was con-
sidered a lot of blatant noise and discordant tones, that is, something that would be
even harmful to the earsYou cant make crescendos and diminuendos if youre
playing triple forte.

This explains a lot. Mortons conception of jazz as music derived from the great-
est symphonies, operas and concertos may seem a little high-flown when listening to
Black Bottom Stomp or The Chant, but in essence Morton was the Mozart of jazz. His
sense of line and harmony were based very strictly in Classical era models; like Mozart
(and Rossini, another admirer of Mozart), his goal was to please the ears while throwing
in a few sophisticated turns for flavor. (Mozart used to say that the average listener would
realize there was something different about his music without really knowing why.) It
explains why Morton opposed the fast, loud New York style of jazz played by the
Fletcher Henderson, Charlie Johnson and Chick Webb bands (and oftimes by Duke El-
lington as well), why he got on their nerves and they got on his. It also explains why he
felt attracted to a pianist like Thomas Fats Waller, who like himself always kept the
melody going and only modified the harmony in accepted ways, whereas a pianist like
Earl Hines who was the closest thing to an outside jazz musician in his time would irk
him. Melodic content and relatively consonant harmony were the overriding features of
Mortons music, though he also enjoyed growling trumpeters like Joe King Oliver and
that dirty barrelhouse music that he grew up playing.
Probably because of the marked superiority of his Brunswick, Columbia, and espe-
cially his Victor recordings of the electrical period, little attention has been paid to Mortons
pre-1925 piano solo and band recordings, but it is here that the beginnings of his imaginative
and advanced style of orchestration can be heard. Morton was also the first major jazz com-

18
poser and innovator who has to be dealt with later in his career than when he made his initial
impact. He claimed to have been writing jazz tunes from the age of 17, in 1902, but even if
we stretch that out by a decade he was certainly writing and playing real jazz numbers, and
not just hot ragtime, sometime before World War I. Yet since he didnt make his first re-
cordings until 1923 (and this includes his piano rolls), one has to project his achievements
backwards in time rather than forwards in order to appreciate many of his innovations.
In addition, Morton only slightly modernized his piano and composition style as the
years rolled on, and especially in his famous Library of Congress recordings of 1938 he was
purposely recreating his earlier successes for the microphone. As a result, we are lucky to
have good electrical recordings of most of Mortons piano repertoire, either from the 1930s or
Vocalstyle piano rolls from 1923-24, all of which were collected and beautifully synchronized
by Artis Wodehouse in the 1990s. I have chosen two for closer inspection, The Crave and
Shreveport Stomp. The Crave is one of those pieces in which he based much of the rhythm on
the habanera, thus inserting what he referred to as the Spanish tinge in his music. What fas-
cinates me about The Crave is that, in addition to being a fine jazz piece, it is an excellent
piece of music, period, the darkness of its D-minor opening theme emphasized by the fact
that, after initially launching the pianist up the scale, it works its way downward chromati-
cally, and the break between verses also moves down the scale. Yet there is a bit of sunlight in
it, too: the second theme is in F (the relative major) and consists of a lightly dancing tune
played in a lilting fashion in the right hand, and at the end of this second melody Morton ends
the phrase with blue notes in an emphatic but broken rhythm. The improvised section is
played over stop-time chords in the left hand; and just when we think we know where the
piece is going, Morton throws in that delightful, sunny third strain beginning at 2:50 (I speak
here of the Library of Congress version) that suddenly cheers the entire piece up. At this point
were thinking of a ride-out, but before we get there Morton throws in further improvisation,
in fact deconstructing the tune and putting it back together like a jigsaw puzzle that only he
knows the secret of solving.
The 1924 piano roll of Shreveport Stomp is, in my opinion, the very best of a generally
quite good series of piano rolls. Somehow or other, Morton was able to not only etch his tem-
pos and fingering on the Vocalstyle piano rolls but also his very individual sense of swing, or
stomping as they called it in those days. Shreveport starts out with a wonderfully brief but
dramatic introduction, then launches into the main tune, played not-quite-straight by the pian-
ist; the second chorus immediately gives us variations on the same. The bridge is surprisingly
imaginative, leaping from the home key of B-flat into the relative minor (G), but more inter-
estingly running the bridge through several other keys: C minor, B-flat major, G-flat major, G
major, then moving upward through chromatic traps to F major, repeating the sequence with
variants and somehow landing us back in B-flat for further variants on the opening melody. A
four-bar interlude takes us to the next theme, in E-flat, and it is here that Morton stays har-
monicallyyet he has further surprises for us in some particularly hot variations, his right
hand running up and down the keyboard a bit like Earl Hines in the last chorus.
Thus a sample of how Mortons musical mind worked. It was like a steel trap that
heard different things played by different performers and instruments, processed the informa-
tion, ran it past his creative juices to create new tunes and new forms, and came out his fin-
gers. I am certainly not the first to note that Morton played the piano orchestrally, meaning
that he thought of his fingers as different lines within a band arrangement, thus when we turn
to his early band work we hear an extension of his pianism. The earliest of these sessions,
made in Chicago for Paramount in April 1923, features a band that is really just two players
shy of being an ideal one for Morton in this period, trombonist Roy Palmer being a stiff,

19
choppy player with no sense of jazz phrasing and woodblocks player Jasper Taylor not being
varied or imaginative enough for this music despite a firm grasp of rhythm. But the real
rhythmic impetus on the two sides made at this session, Big Fat Ham and Muddy Water
Blues, comes from Mortons own piano fills and countermelodies, and the three soloists
trumpeter Tommy Ladnier, clarinetist Wilson Townes, and alto saxist Charlie Harrisare all
quite good, Harris probably the least imaginative of the three. What is particularly striking is
to hear how, even at this early date, Morton modified the New Orleans front line to conform
to his musical concept. Morton gives the band the same breaks to play as he did on his piano
solo recording of the same tune, and in the final chorus Ladniers growling trumpet (surely
the hottest thing to come out of New Orleans during this period with the exception of Louis
Armstrong) plays in improvisation above the written parts for the other band members. Al-
ready, Morton was thinking in musical terms that were a little bit different and a little bit fur-
ther advanced than most of his contemporaries, even moreso that the Creole Jazz Band of his
friend Joe Oliver. Muddy Water Blues is an even more satisfying and distinguished perform-
ance, with Morton showing the world how to incorporate solos within a unified and structured
band performance. This is, indeed, jazz based on classical principles, musically beyond any
recordings made by any other jazz band of the period. For his October 1923 recording of Lon-
don Blues, Morton had a good trumpeter (Natty Dominique) and clarinetist (Horace Eubanks),
but trombonist Zue Robertson and drummer W.E. Burton are musical wet blankets.
Much more satisfying, because the band was much finer as a whole, were the re-
cordings Morton made with the best white New Orleans band of their day, the New Orleans
Rhythm Kings (or NORK) in July 1923. These, of course, are famous recordings now, but in
their time they were scarcely noticed except by young musicians living in the Chicago area
where they were fairly common. The NORK already had a well-developed sense of style and
construction in their performances before Morton arrivedlisten particularly to their 1922
version of Eccentric, which sounds arranged and scored by a master handbut the addition of
Mortons piano and compositions made them even a little better. Naturally, great attention has
been paid to the pieces Morton himself wrote, namely Mr. Jelly Lord, London Blues and
Milenberg Joys, the last of which was one of Mortons finest compositions and arrangements,
but even in the Nick La Rocca-Larry Shields Clarinet Marmalade there is a wonderful sense
of unity in the band style and greater variety in his use of instrumentsnote, particularly,
trombonist George Brunies counterpoint to Paul Mares cornet solo, or the final chorus
which sounds like a jam session but is in actuality a well-structured ride-outthat later be-
came hallmarks of Mortons mature style. Yes, there is greater musical interest in the Morton-
composed pieces (and to his dying day, Morton always praised the NORKs ability to pick up
on what he wanted so easily), where ensembles, breaks, and even his own piano playing just
sound much more relaxed and point towards a style of Dixieland that would not reach this
high a zenith of ensemble collectiveness until Sidney Bechets Feetwarmers sessions of
1932. Morton was teaching the world how to really score jazz, filtering the classical princi-
ples of voicing, counterpoint, multiple themes and variations through the instrumentation and
coloration of a jazz orchestra. Only he knew the secret, it seemed, of where to add piano
breaks, where to vary the drummers use of cymbals, where to use instruments in solo or
polyphonically, where to toss in altered chords beneath another soloists break. And if you
think this was accidental or incidental, listen to the recording of Mortons big hit Wolverine
Blues made around the same time by the Benson Orchestra of Chicago. The arrangement is
lively and has both a decent piano solo and a surprisingly jazzy out-chorus, but the scoring is
cluttered and not as imaginative as Mortons and the rhythm stiff and raggy. It would be a
while before the world caught on.

20
 Bix Beiderbecke and the influx of French style
A year after Morton made his first big splash in the recording world, a white band that
had been working around Chicago arrived at the Gennett studios in Richmond, Indiana, and
created a quiet riot in the jazz world. They called themselves The Wolverines, and they were
pretty good for a band of young white men who had never been to New Orleans and, in fact,
absorbed all of their jazz experience by listening to other, older musicians that they never ac-
tually played with. But it was specifically the bands lead cornetist, Leon Bix Beiderbecke
(1903-1931), who created the greatest stir. He didnt play with the forcefulness of Louis Arm-
strong, Freddie Keppard, Nick La Rocca of the ODJB, or even of Tommy Ladnier, all New
Orleans born and bred musicians. In fact, his concept of swing seemed peculiarly at odds with
theirs: he hung back a little on the beat but basically played within the proscribed meter of
each tune. What separated him from the pack was the haunting beauty of his tone and a cer-
tain something, indefinable to most jazz musicians who had a catch-as-catch-can musical up-
bringing, that just sounded different.
That something different was Bixs particular method of improvisation. He utilized
unusual intervals in his solos, making note choices that sounded perfectly logical after he
played them yet which simply didnt occur to most other jazz musicians of his time. Its al-
most as if Chet Baker or Bobby Hackett had gone to bed one night in 1954 and suddenly
awakened in 1924. Beiderbeckes wonderfully subtle sense of swing fit in with his fellow mu-
sicians, but the solos almost never did. They sounded like something from another planet.
The reason was that Beiderbecke was a huge fan of the music of Maurice Ravel and
Claude Debussy, at least the little of it he was able to hear and/or play himself (in addition to
the cornet, Beiderbecke was a pretty good self-taught pianist). And, after the Wolverines were
discovered by drummer phenom Vic Berton (ne Cohen, 1896-1951), who became their man-
ager, Beiderbecke was adopted by Bertons brothers Eugene (1903-1969), a classically-
trained baritone matin, and 13-year-old Ralph (1911-1993), who would go on to become a
noted jazz critic and one of Bixs biographers. 4 Eugene, who studied voice with Jean de
Reszke and had been a favorite singer of that group of French composers popularly known as
Les Six, filled Bixs head with more French music than he could absorb at one sitting: not
only Debussy and Ravel, who Bix already knew about, but also Tailleferre, Milhaud, and the
Russian-born sensation of Paris, Stravinsky. The Berton brothers claimed responsibility for
introducing Bix to Petrouchka and Le sacre du printemps via recordings,5 works that he could
just barely comprehend technically but whose harmonic and rhythmic language he grasped
intuitively. As the years went on and Beiderbeckes prowess as a soloist grew to legendary
proportions and he came to use slightly more and more of this harmonic and rhythmic sophis-
tication in his solos, he ironically felt more and more inferior to the better music he heard by
Ravel and Stravinsky. His last few years were a sad struggle to overcome alcohol addiction
and a deeply-rooted inferiority complex. He wanted to study music seriously, but being an

4
Berton, Ralph, Remembering Bix: A Memoir of the Jazz Age (Da Capo Press, 2000, originally published 1974).
5
Ralph Berton never identified these recordings in his book, but an abridged version of Petrouchka by the Royal
Albert Hall Orchestra under Eugene Goossens was issued in 1924 on Victor blue label discs. Music from Stra-
vinskys Firebird was first recorded by Thomas Beecham in 1916 for Columbia, then the suite by Leopold
Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1924 for Victor. However, the very first recording of Sacre (with
significant cuts) was made by Pierre Monteux and the Grand Orchestre Symphonique de Paris in early 1929,
followed shortly after by Stravinsky himself with the same orchestra, the first really complete recording, issued
in the U.S. on Columbia set 129. It is, however, within the realm of possibility that Ralph played this latter set
for Beiderbecke in 1929, as neither he nor his brothers moved to California to try to make their fortunes in the
burgeoning Hollywood movie industry until early 1930, or that Bix bought the Columbia set himself.

21
ignorant jazzer (in his mind, not those of the hundreds of musicians who admired him) and
not knowing where to turn for help led to a slow but inevitable downward spiral. Beiderbecke,
an extraordinarily introverted and highly self-critical personality whom Jimmy MacPartland
once said was the strangest person Ive ever known in my life, and Ive known a few, 6 died
not fighting to learn more of music and straighten himself out, butand it deeply pains me to
say thisin a depressed funk, unwilling to even keep himself alive. It is not by chance that
Eddie Condon, a man and musician rarely known for tact, later said that of all the musicians
he knew, Bix was the only one that hean inveterate hater of classical musicfelt was
headed towards a brilliant career as a classical composer when he died.
And you can already hear the startling originality and touching sensitivity of his aes-
thetic in his Gennett recordings of 1924-25, a group that includes two sides with his later
sidekick, C-melody saxist Frank Trumbauer, under the name of the Sioux City Six, and two
further sides made by a band that was three sheets to the wind (they had a gallon of corn liq-
uor in the studio and knew how to use it) under the name of Bix & his Rhythm Jugglers.
Oddly enough, some of the harmonic-melodic sophistication of Beiderbeckes playing comes
in the most unexpected pieces, such as the uptempo warhorse Tiger Rag as played by the
Wolverines, where his cornet solo employs unusual intervals in the rising and falling chro-
matic passages. Yet the two early Beiderbecke recordings that really show what he was capa-
ble of were Riverboat Shuffle, an early Hoagy Carmichael piece that was a real composition
and not just a jam tune, and the Sioux City Sixs recording of Flock o Blues, where his
cornet rides above and weaves in and out of the ensemble with harmonic impunity. As I said
earlier, once you hear what he played it sounded so logical youd think he wrote it out ahead
of time, but no one could have thought of those specific lines and executed them as he did.
Though we are getting ahead of ourselves, Id like to discuss Beiderbeckes 1927 pi-
ano piece In a Mist in this context. Though some pianists consider it a novelty piano piece
on par with Zez Confreys Kitten on the Keys, it is in fact a remarkably intuitive piece when
one considers that he made it up in the recording studio at the moment of recording. Modern
French harmonies are clearly evident in the first chorus, the ostinato of Stravinsky brought
somewhat to bear in the middle section. But even here, in a piece he conceived himself, Bix
proved himself purely a creature of inspiration and not one of reflection or logical construc-
tion. When G. Schirmer offered to publish the piece, they asked Beiderbecke to write a third
strain, something melodic to offset the ostinato rhythm of the second subject. He couldnt
think of one. Eventually, frustrated and dour, he turned to trombonist Jack Teagarden, who
happily came up with the trio theme. This may seem a small thing, and to Teagarden it was
he was only too glad to help a friend, particularly one whose talent he admired so muchbut
to Beiderbecke it was yet another failure in a brief but frustrated lifetime full of them.

Yet while the NORK, Morton, Beiderbecke and Armstrong were making real jazz his-
tory, the biggest story of 1924 was Paul Whitemans Aeolian Hall concert in February. Hear-
ing the complaints of cacophony all around him, worried about jazzs origins in New Orleans
gin mills and bordellos, Whiteman set about to make a lady out of jazz, and since he had
been impressed by portions of Blue Monday he felt that George Gershwin was the composer
to affect this synthesis. The Aeolian Hall concert started with jazz primitivism in the form
of the ODJBs arrangement of Livery Stable Blues, complete with horse whinnies on cornet,
jackass slurs on trombone, and rooster cries on clarinet, before eventually moving on to the
centerpiece of the evening, Gershwins Rhapsody in Blue. Gershwin slapped this piece to-
6
From a personal conversation with the author, New Jersey, 1977.

22
gether rather hastily, and did not orchestrate itthat task was assigned to Whitemans staff
arranger, Ferde Grof. In all honesty, both Gershwin and Grof did a pretty good job with
their assignments. The original 1924 Victor recording by Whitemans band, though recorded
acoustically, is more rhythmically vivacious and audacious in its growling trumpet and slur-
ring reeds than the 1927 remake, but no matter how you approach it, the Rhapsody is simply
not as consistent or well-integrated a piece of music as La Creation du Monde or Skyscrapers.
But Gershwin had one thing that Milhaud and Carpenter did not, and that was one of the na-
tions greatest publicists, Paul Whiteman.
We shall examine Whiteman in the next chapter, but it is still unclear, nearly a century
after his initial triumphs in the 1920s, whether he was simply misguided in his musical think-
ing or really believed that his streamlined, vaudeville-styled music was concert jazz, but
most of the music his band played was rhythmically stiffeven stiffer than Jim Europes rag-
timeand very badly scored. He hired many classical musicians, including oboe and bassoon
players in addition to a full string section, but the writing for these sections often included
cheap effects that were stiffly executed and the voicings for the reed section (sometimes inter-
acting with the strings) was horribly cluttered.

Carpenters Krazy Kat and Skyscrapers

The almost astonishing ballyhoo in the press over Rhapsody in Blue and the Whiteman
band very nearly obscured one of the most interesting of legitimate American composers
who took an avid interest in jazz. This was John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951), scion of a
wealthy Chicago family and part-time composer. He began private music lessons before
studying composition with John Knowles Paine and, briefly, with Edward Elgar in Rome in
1906. Essentially a tonally conservative composer, Carpenter heard in jazz something new
and vital which, like Sousa and Stokowski, he really liked and thought he could incorporate in
certain works. The two pieces that most show the influence of jazz are his ballet scores, Krazy
Kat (1921, premiered in 1922) and Skyscrapers (1923-24, premiered in 1926).
If Krazy Kat has become forgotten and marginalized, this was undoubtedly due as
much to its subject matter as to its musical construction. George Herrimans surrealistic and
zany comic strip, which appeared in newspapers for 31 years (1913-1944), never became one
of the most popular cartoons of its day, but by the early 1920s it had become a favorite of
writers and intellectuals thanks to Herrimans zany dialogue, backgrounds that changed from
panel to panel, and the borderline insane affection that the title character had for getting hit in
the head with a brick every day of his/her life by Ignatz Mouse. Carpenters 13-minute ballet
had the good luck, when produced, of having backdrops created by Herriman himself. If one
follows the scenario of the ballet, the music makes perfect sense and works splendidly, but
simply as a listening experience it tends to sound episodic, and although Krazy Kat has indeed
become an iconic cartoon, influencing many writers and artists, it has long since dropped out
of popular culture, and in America pop culture is often the only culture that matters. Neverthe-
less, it should be noted that it is only in the final section of the work, after Krazy does a
Spanish dance and imbibes catnip, that the jazz dance is introduced, thus Krazy Kat is not
entirely a jazz-inspired work.
Skyscrapers is an entirely different matter. Hearing of the success of Krazy Kat Serge
Diaghelev, proprietor of the famous Ballets Russe de Monte Carlo, commissioned Carpenter
to write a jazz ballet for his company. Carpenter received the commission money, wrote Sky-
scrapers during 1923-24, and then heard nothing. Diaghelev apparently lost interest in the
work or had other, more pressing projects to put on, but after two years Carpenter became im-
patient and privately funded a single performance at the Metropolitan Opera in February

23
1926. Beginning on an atonal chord played by the piano, the sound of percussion simulates
the sound of hammers on steel: the ensuing music, complex and a bit confusing at first, has a
similar motor rhythm to that of Antheils Ballet Mcanique, but with more melodic snippets.
Eventually the score moves into slow drumbeats with piano, after which an oboe and clarinets
plays swirling motifs with muted trumpet interjections, then open trumpets. The suspense
builds: its difficult to tell exactly where the piece is going. As the rhythm becomes more
regular, we hear a banjo playing with the orchestra as well as little flute swirls in triplets. Car-
penter very cleverly builds up the music and the suspense by very gradually adding other in-
struments until a cute little melody arrives. But not for long: the tempo increases, and we hear
simulated banging of nails and rivets in this musical skyscraper construction. However you
analyze it, Skyscrapers fuses the jazz elements with brilliant classical cohesion and enlivens
the classical structure with jazz elementsand neither one sounds forced or artificial.
The ballet received glowing notices in the press, and deservedly so. As jazz critic
Ralph Berton once said to me, Skyscrapers is the only work of its timeand, indeed, the only
work for 30 more yearsto successfully fuse jazz and classical music. Its subject, the erec-
tion of high-rise buildings in a modern city, lent itself well to this fusion: the pounding of riv-
ets, the clash of steel and the clang of glass windows, can all be heard in music that is both
colorful and, in this case, extremely well constructed. In fact, considering how good Sky-
scrapers is, it remains one of the great musical conundrums of all time as to why it didnt be-
come a repertory piece. The genius of its construction lifts it from the period piece genre.
The answer, or at least one very prominent answer, is Gershwin. Shortly after the sen-
sational premiere of Rhapsody in Blue, Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New York Sym-
phony Orchestra (and, ironically, the brother of Frank Damrosch, Director of the Institute of
Musical Artlater the Juilliard School of Musicwho had very snottily damned jazz as the
product of savage Negro Africans in the afore-mentioned issue of The Etude), commis-
sioned Gershwin to write a jazz concerto. Since the composer had little knowledge of musical
theory or orchestration, he immersed himself in books on these subjects and finished his Con-
certo in F, whose greatly-ballyhooed premiere on December 3, 1925 shot Gershwin to even
greater heights than before. Not only Carpenter, but even American expatriate George
Anthiel, who came to America with his small-scaled Jazz Symphony and was rebuffed by both
critics and audiences, were now marginalized. Both American pop culture and its high culture
was now not just ragtime crazy or jazz crazy but specifically Gershwin-crazy. Just how much
the strong magnetic field surrounding Gershwin sucked other experimental artists into its vor-
tex will be discussed in the next chapter.
Like the Rhapsody, all of the music of the Concerto, including the piano part, was
thorough-composed, so there was no element of improvisation in it, but the music was much
more advanced than the Rhapsody and like it, also jazz-influenced. The difficulty in our ac-
cepting it as a jazz piece, aside from the element of chance that open improvisation would
have lent it, was precisely the more formal scoring, though there exists a smaller orchestral
version that was recorded by Whiteman (with Grof at the piano) in 1928. In recent years,
there have been some performing versions of the concerto combining the feel of the jazz
band version with the more formal score, particularly the one by British conductor Michael
Francis in a recording with Canadian pianist Ian Parker on Atma 2656. Yet despite its lack of
musical adventurism, the Concerto, like the Rhapsody, was held in great esteem by a certain
coterie of jazz musicians.
Meanwhile, two other big bands were making a splash in New York that would have
an impact on jazzone black and one white, one famous and the other neglected or dismissed
as simply commercial. The African-American band was led by a college graduate in chemis-

24
try, who could not find work as a chemist, named Fletcher Henderson (1897-1952), and it be-
came legendary. The white band was led by a former farmer and coal miner from Ohio named
Isham Jones (1894-1956), and it became forgotten for many years.
Being a black orchestra, the Henderson band was noted for, and expected to play,
peppy dance music with a jazz inflection, yet during its first two years of existence its jazz
content was nearly as negligible as Whitemans, though its rhythm was consistently jazzier.
Yet Henderson and his chief arranger, another university-trained musician named Don
Redman (1900-1964), worked out a call-and-response pattern between brass and reeds that
became central to jazz orchestration if peripheral to classical music. After Louis Armstrong
joined the band near the end of 1924, playing cornet and later trumpet, its jazz quotient rose
considerably but often only when Armstrong was playing. The recordings made at that time
show that the other soloists were still working out an improvisatory style that was indigenous
to jazz feeling and less tied to ragtime. It was only after Armstrong left the Henderson band,
near the end of 1925, that the rest of the band got it and began playing in a true jazz style.
The late clarinetist Frank Powers (1931-2002), a lifelong student of the music, once told me
that even as late as 1926 or 1927 Hendersons band played and recorded stock arrangements
which didnt even have a true jazz feeling, though there were some exceptions thrown in.
Isham Jones was one thing that neither Whiteman nor Henderson were, an excellent
songwriter. During the 1920s he produced a string of hits that were easily and frequently
adopted by jazz musicians (including African-American musicians) as a means for taking off
on jazz improvisations: It Had to Be You, Swinging Down the Lane and On the Alamo among
them. (The latter tune was even recorded, decades later, by urban blues singer Ray Charles.)
Moreover, and this is important to our study, Jones band combined an easy, loping beat that
was neither stiff nor corny with an orchestral concept that was far more sophisticated than ei-
ther Whiteman or Henderson. Even on his earliest recordings from 1923, and despite the
handicap of acoustic recording, one can hear that Jones trumpets were rich and powerful but
not shrill, his reeds airy and relaxed even when playing at full volume in the lower register,
and most important of all, his rhythm section was fully integrated, meaning that the piano,
banjo, tuba and drums functioned as a one-piece unit. The key to this was in having the tuba
play a little more lightly than in other bands, and by having the banjo and piano work hard
along with the drumsto produce a seamless blend. At a time when even the very best white
and black bands had these rhythm instruments playing either two at a time or three at a time,
the synchronization of their sound was never there, and this was true until around 1932.
Yet just as the work of Carpenter, Morton, Henderson, Isham Jones and even mature
Gershwin were finally advancing the art of orchestration to the point where greater sophistica-
tion in voicings, harmony, and rhythm, one particular musical genius from New Orleans was
changing jazz, and the way people heard jazz, forever.

Louis Armstrong
Without question, the greatest and most startling innovator in jazz was cornetist (later
trumpeter) Louis Armstrong (1901-1971). After his two-year stint with the famed Creole Jazz
Band of his mentor, King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson hired Armstrong away in the fall of
1924. One might assume that this move would have a seismic effect on the Henderson band,
but this was not immediately the case, simply because Armstrongs prowess as a soloist was
not really that well known. Henderson had been mostly impressed with Louiss ability to play
improvised harmony parts behind Olivers solos, a trick the two of them had worked out
while playing at the Lincoln Gardens. Armstrong arrived on the bandstand for his first nights
work looking like a rube: short trousers revealing bright red socks and carrying a bucket of

25
beans and rice which was his normal meal while on a job. The New York sophisticates in the
band ribbed him mercilessly about this, but from the moment he stood up to play a solo the
ribbing stopped and the awe set in, for Armstrong was the most powerful melodic-rhythmic
soloist of his day, even more powerful than clarinetist and soprano saxist Sidney Bechet. Lis-
tening to the recordings Armstrong made with Henderson from late 1924 through the fall of
1925 is like listening to the Wolverines with Beiderbecke. The bands rhythm is stiff and its
phrasing somewhat choppy, despite the ingenious device of playing reeds against brass which
became a Henderson trademark, but as soon as Armstrong steps out to solo the jazz heat in-
creases by at least 50 degrees, as in their famous recording of Everybody Loves My Baby.
It almost sounds unfair to the other musicians, even such soon-to-be-famous names as
clarinetist Buster Bailey, trombonist Charlie Green or tenor saxist Coleman Hawkins, to hear
the way Armstrong tore them to shreds. As for his superiority over even Bechet at this period
of time, this can be heard in a January 1925 recording of the Clarence Williams tune Cake
Walking Babies From Home, where after doing a bit of parrying with Bechet, in the last cho-
rus Armstrong runs him over like a steamroller.
Returning to Chicago in the fall of 1925, Armstrong joined the much hotter but less
richly scored jazz orchestra of Erskine Tate, which played in the Windy Citys Vendme
Theatre. Searching around for good jazz musicians to add to the growing number of jazz art-
ists recording for the OKeh label, former New Orleans pianist Richard M. Jones went to hear
Armstrong, was bowled over, and offered him the chance to record as a freelance artist with a
pickup band of his own choosing. Armstrong immediately chose former King Oliver band-
mates Johnny Dodds on clarinet and Johnny St. Cyr on banjo, his wife (and also former
Oliver musician) Lil Hardin Armstrong on piano, and another New Orleans homeboy, Cre-
ole trombonist Edward Kid Ory. Lil Hardin was an interesting case. As a classically-trained
pianist, she had excellent technique and was a quick reader, but her sense of jazz rhythm was
as stiff and inflexible as any of Paul Whitemans similarly classically-trained musicians. Her
best playing is the classically-styled introduction to My Sweet, the rest of her playing being a
decided detriment to the rhythm.
Yet the other four musicians in what became titled Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five
scarcely mattered, even though Dodds played some superb jazz and blues choruses, because
Armstrong quickly and completely took over the proceedings by developing a solo style that
was miles ahead of any other horn or reed player in jazz. Listening to the recordings, this star-
tling innovation was based as much on a classical style as a jazz one, but in this case it was
not the formal style of cornet and trumpet music as much as an operatic style. An avid fan of
Italian opera, Armstrong loved tenors and sopranos in particular, and wanted some of the en-
thusiastic drive of singers like Enrico Caruso, Giovanni Martinelli, Luisa Tetrazzini, and
Rosa Ponselle in his playing. (One of his warm-up pieces, even in the late 1940s, was the In-
termezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana, played in two long breaths.) Being African-American,
he fused this exultant singing quality with the bent blue notes of the flatted third (and even
occasionally, prescient of the bop era, the flatted fifth and seventh) and a sense of melodic
construction that went far beyond what anyone else other than Beiderbecke (whom he greatly
admired) was doing. One could easily spend an entire chapter just trying to describe what
Armstrong did on his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings, but the bottom line is that his
commanding, innovative style upset once and for all the balance of New Orleans polyphony.
Not all musicians heard this as an advance; some complained openly and bitterly that Arm-
strongs stealing the show reduced everyone else in his bands to the function of background
figures, but Armstrong just shrugged this criticism off. In time his approach became every-
bodys approach, and jazz thus became a soloists art. For decades to come there would be

26
friction, and often open warfare, between those musicians who insisted on open blowing
dates and those who liked structure and/or orchestration, and this friction worked in reverse to
push off attempts to classicalize it.

It was almost expected that French-trained classical composers were more drawn to
jazz than Germans or Austrians of the period, and one such was Polish-born Alexandre Tans-
man (1897-1986). Though he later moved away from jazz expression, several of his works of
the 1920s and 30s featured a strong jazz base. Among these is the third movement of his
1925 Sonatine, marked Scherzo (Fox-trot), which he wrote for flute or violin and piano. The
interesting thing about it is that there were a few jazz violinists around at that time, particu-
larly Joe Venuti (1903-1978), but by 1925 he had only made a few records that I seriously
doubt were well known in Francebut who can say for certain?whereas there were no jazz
flautists at all. Indeed, when one hears the Scherzo played on the flute, even today, there is
normally no jazz inflection at all, whereas violinist Klaidi Sahati, who made the first re-
cording of the violin version as late as 2013, plays the music with the proper rhythmic loose-
ness. These are the kinds of pieces, written early in jazzs history but recorded much later,
where the possibility of an influence in its own time is negligible.
Near the end of this period, two elements of classical construction found their way into
jazz: chromaticism and the use of whole tone scales. Both were exotic elements at first,
largely because only trained readers who knew how to arrange music or improvisers who had
some classical knowledge knew how to use them within their improvisations, and of course
these were very mild modifiers to the melodic line and its harmonic underpinning, Western
classical music had moved significantly beyond these two elements, incorporating out-of-
tonality chords and other advanced techniques since at least the days of Beethovens late
string quartets, and in the more recent music of composers like Mahler, Scriabin, and the New
Vienna School, tonality had been blown wide open, but for the most part jazz was still tied to
popular music and wanted popular acceptance, thus chromatic movement and whole tones
were as far as jazz writers and arrangers of the period wanted to go. Just how much this style
influenced the popular market, however, may be seen from the fact that even the staid White-
man band used these techniques, albeit in a cheap and tawdry way. Unwilling to stretch the
limitations of his listeners, Whiteman had his arrangers pepper their scores with these ex-
otic elements in a way that was obvious and for the most part restricted to introductory or
closing passages in his arrangements. It was left to the real jazz composers and arrangers of
the day to use these elements in more interesting and constructive ways.
We will examine several of these in the next chapter, but by way of prelude I give you
one such composition: Rhythm of the Day by Donald Lindley, a trumpet player with the Earl
Carrolls Vanities show band and recorded by them (with guest musicians Red Nichols on
cornet and Miff Mole on trombone) in October 1925 (issued on Columbia 498-D). Like so
many such compositions of that time, the whole tone harmonies are used in the eight-bar
theme statement, suddenly resolving itself to more conventional harmony for the second eight
and the break, but the soloists (Nichols among them) also improvise on the tune using the
whole-tone or modal harmonies as their base. The record caused quite a stir, particularly
among white musicians, so much so that Moles regular working band of the time, a 12-piece
band led by the millionaire bankers son Roger Wolfe Kahn, also recorded it for Victor in De-
cember of that year, but the labels more musically conservative A&R man, Eddie King, re-
jected the disc and refused to release it on 78. Such things were symptomatic, alas, in the mu-
sic industry of that time, and unless one had the immense commercial clout of a Paul White-
man such things sometimes failed to be released for other musicians to appreciate.

27