Elite Syncopation: More on Early Jazz

More on Early Jazz

Roy Bargy (1894-1974), like his contemporary Zez Confrey, took his musical inspiration not only from the imaginative stylings of ragtime pianists, but also from the technical/ technological possibilities of the mechanical player piano, being employed by Imperial Piano Rolls in his early career. After recording for Victor with his own band, Bargy joined Isham Jones and later Paul Whiteman, for whom he created a number of impressive arrangements. Bargy was a virtuoso pianist as well as an accomplished composer and arranger, and appears in Whiteman's 1929 Hollywood film King of Jazz playing Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

Feedin' the Kitty is a whimsical and characteristic "novelty ragtime piece", originally cast for solo piano, which abounds in player-piano-like figurations and "futuristic" 20's harmonies.
The foxtrot Get Lucky (1924), although based on a blues structure, is also a characteristic "novelty ragtime" piece. It is full of player-piano figurations and “futuristic” 1920s harmonies borrowed from Debussy and Ravel.

The Russian-born Jewish songwriting phenomenon Irving Berlin (1888-1989), who began his musical career as a singing waiter on New York's Lower East Side, was one of the most significant contributors to American popular music of the 20th century. A songwriter with an uncanny ear for vernacular idioms throughout his career, Berlin's early rag success, the 1910 Beautiful Rag, was closely followed by his spectacularly successful 1911 Alexander's Ragtime Band.

In My Harem, with its faux-oriental strains, harks back to Berlin's early days as a writer of bawdy and politically incorrect ditties
Three pieces from the 1920s show the rapid evolution of Berlin's style into that of the Jazz Age:

The exuberant Charleston It All Belongs to Me was written for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1927.
The bouncy and diabolical foxtrot Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil dates from 1922.
The famous Puttin’ on the Ritz (1929) was written for the United Artists picture of the same title, in which it was sung memorably by Harry Richman.

The centenarian Eubie Blake (1883-1983), a native of Baltimore, was a close friend and colleague of James Reese Europe, and an original member of the Clef Club. Blake went on to score big successes on Broadway in the twenties, and lived long enough to be celebrated again in the ragtime revival of the seventies. Blake already had a well-developed, bues-inflected, highly individual style by 1914, when both the rhythmically effervescent onestep Fizz Water, and bouncy, bluesy tune The Chevy Chase appeared.
Perry ("Mule") Bradford (1895-1970) was born in Montgomery, Alabama, and spent his youth in Atlanta after his family moved there in 1902. Moving to New York about 1918, he became the first show business entrepreneur to talk a record company into recording a blues composition by a black female vocalist backed up by a black band. Bradford argued to the record companies that "fourteen million Negroes will buy records if recorded by one of their own." In 1920, his song Crazy Blues, recorded by “Mamie Smith & Her Jazz Hounds,” proved to be an unprecedented success. It sold about 75,000 copies in the first month after its release and surpassed the 200,000 mark during its first year in the record stores, acting as perhaps the most important impetus for the hundreds of great blues recordings made in the 1920s.
One o' them things! by James Chapman and Leroy Smith contains the first known published blues chorus as its main theme. Issued in 1904, the rag predates W.C. Handy's Memphis Blues, usually cited as the first published blues, by eight years. The 12-measure form of this blues strain is highly unusual in the realm of early ragtime. Generally this music, apparently descended from the European march tradition, conforms to the march's 16-measure metric and harmonic structures.
Clorindy or The Origin of the Cake Walk was the first Broadway musical to have been entirely written and produced by African-Americans. Its composer was the brilliant violinist and composer Will Marion (later Will Marion Cook) (1869-1944), a mentor to several famous musicians, including Duke Ellington. Cook attended Oberlin Conservatory at the age of 15, and later studied violin in Europe with the legendary Joseph Joachim. Unsuccessful in his quest to become a concert violinist, Cook turned to composition, and despite many setbacks attributable to racial discrimination, succeeded in scoring an enormous hit with Clorindy.
Duke Ellington (1899-1974) started out as a ragtimer in his native Washington DC, where he later worked as a sign-painter and society bandleader. Ellington moved to New York in the 1920s and, after some competent but undistinguished recordings, he and some remarkable colleagues quickly forged, by the end of the decade, a unique and forward-looking style, bold in both its orchestration and harmonic language.

Birmingham Break Down (1926), an uptempo piece anticipating swing style, ends in jazz fashion with a pair of blues choruses. At the same time, it harks back to ragtime style with its contrasting sets of repeated strains.
Black and Tan Fantasy (1927), a remarkable excursion on a Blues, was one outstanding fruit of his collaboration with trumpeter "Bubber" Miley, who played with Ellington's band in the late 20s. The opening theme is a bluesy paraphrase of Stephen Adams’ hymn The Holy City.
Soda Fountain Rag (1914), also sometimes called Poodle Dog Rag, is Ellington's earliest surviving composition.
The Mooche (1928), a remarkable and celebrated blues-based early Ellington masterpiece, dates from 1928, after Ellington had begun his celebrated engagement at Harlem's Cotton Club.

George Gershwin (1898-1937) was born to Russian immigrant parents and grew up in Manhattan and Brooklyn. His first steps as a musician including a stint at age 15 as a "song plugger" for the famous New York music publisher Jerome Remick. In 1917 he began his Broadway career as a rehearsal pianist. During the next two years, he contributed songs to several musicals, and created his first full Broadway score, La La Lucille, in 1919 at age 20. Nashville Nightingale, a delightful but now-forgotten song from that early score, already shows its composer's gift for integrating blues harmony and melody into his carefully crafted songs.
The great American composer and conductor James Reese Europe (1881-1919) was the founder of New York's Clef Club, an African-American musicians' organization that began a pathbreaking series of concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1910.

Sometimes credited with having invented the Fox Trot, Europe served for several years as music director for the dance duo of Vernon and Irene Castle, for whom he wrote Castle’s Half-and Half, (half waltz, half two-step, in the unusual time signature of 5/4), in collaboration with his colleague Ford T. Dabney in 1914.
Also in 1914 he wrote a flamboyant set of variations on the One Step called The Castle Walk.
The early and highly theatrical fox trot The Castle House Rag was written in the same year, taking its name from the Castles' ornate dance salon on E. 46th St. in New York.

A Song of India is arranger/composer Ferde Grofe's (1892-1972) whimsical transformation of the famous potboiler from Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov's 1898 opera Sadko. Grofe, who was to orchestrate George Gershwin's famous Rhapsody in Blue for Paul Whiteman three years later, did this arrangement in 1921 for the emerging Whiteman Orchestra, whom he had happened upon at a San Francisco skating rink two years earlier.
Bandleader W.C. Handy (1873-1958) was born in Florence, Alabama, the son of ex-slaves who strongly disapproved of secular music. Founding his own marching/dance band in 1902, Handy moved to Memphis.

Handy developed a piece based on blues themes called Mr. Crump (after Edward H. Crump, the political boss of Memphis). Used successfully as a campaign song, the tune gained such popularity that Handy was able to publish it in 1912, renaming it The Memphis Blues. The Memphis Blues owns the distinction of being the very first blues toappear in print.

The great American composer Scott Joplin (1868-1917) was born near Marshall, Texas around 1868. The son of a former slave and a freeborn black woman, Joplin was a remarkably ambitious and creative musician who worked tirelessly throughout his career to expand the formal and expressive possibilities of the ragtime idiom.

His landmark work is the Maple Leaf Rag, copyrighted on September 18, 1899; it became the first million-seller in American music history, and it also brought considerable visibility and a measure of long-term financial security to its creator.
Bethena. A Concert Waltz (1905) is an interesting example of the scope of ragtime repertoire; the persistent syncopations of this waltz place it in the category of the "ragtime waltz", a genre at least ten years old in 1905, when Bethena was issued. What sets this waltz apart are its unusually sophisticated harmonies and modulations, clearly emulating the techniques of European art music, and showing Joplin's determination to sophisticate his ragtime idiom.
Elite Syncopations (1902) shows Joplin boldly expanding the possibilities of syncopation in different directions, three years after he created the mold for classic rags with Maple Leaf.
Wall Street Rag, with its even more sophisticated and futuristic harmonies and rhythms, is generally regarded as the first of his "experimental" pieces; it's also unusual for the program that is printed above each of the four sections of the work: (1) Panic in Wall Street, brokers feeling melancholy; (2) Good Times coming; (3) Good Times have come; and (4) Listening to the strains of genuine Negro ragtime, brokers forget their cares.

The white Kansas City ragtimer Charles L. Johnson (1876-1950), an arranger as well as an unusually ebullient composer, wrote in a number of interesting idioms: dreamy waltzes, fiddle tune medleys, and catchy rags, like his early success, Dill Pickles.
- Dream Days, a romantic waltz harking back to the sentimental styles of the gay nineties, demonstrates both Johnson's lyric gifts and his ability to appeal commercially to his “parlor-piano” clientele.
- Hen Cackle Rag (subtitled "a barnyard disturbance") is a ragtime-era medley of country fiddler tunes, centering around the traditional string-band tune Better Stop Kickin' My Dog Around, and revealing the status of proto-Country-and-Western in 1912.
- Melody Rag (1912), an early example of “ragging the classics,” is a clever take-off on Anton Rubinstein's ubiquitous Melody in F, originally composed around 1890.
Jelly Roll Morton recalled Artie Matthews (1888-1958) as the foremost pianist in St. Louis when Morton passed through about 1910. Matthews, the composer of the famous 1915 Weary Blues, went on to write his five landmark Pastime Rags (published in 1918), some of the most advanced pieces in the ragtime idiom. Pastime #5 is a fascinating hybrid chronicling the evolution of ragtime into other styles; it includes whole sections in habanera rhythm, coupled together with highly chromatic ragtime strains, and ends with a new dance rhythm, the Fox Trot.
The remarkable pianist, composer, and bandleader Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941) was a key figure in the evolution of ragtime into jazz. His musical development took place in the international atmosphere of New Orleans, where he was born. The child of a broken family, by 1902 he was working as a pianist in the "sporting houses" of Storyville, generally regarded as the birthplace of jazz. In addition to the then-popular ragtime styles, Morton was conversant with opera, traditional European art music, and, perhaps most significantly, blues and Caribbean dance music.
- Hyena Stomp (1927) is a wonderful example of Morton's unparalleled ability to invent pieces of the greatest musical interest from the simplest harmonic materials. Comprised of one simple sixteen-bar progression in the same key throughout the whole piece; it becomes an exciting and constantly surprising set of variations with great formal momentum.
The New Orleans Rhythm Kings were headed by Paul Mares, George Brunis, and Leon Roppolo, three white boyhood friends from New Orleans who had previously played together there in various bands before re-uniting in Chicago in the early 1920s. They became a well-known and important fixture of the 1920s jazz scene there, making several classic recordings including the August 1923 classic Tin Roof Blues, based on traditional New Orleans themes. This song became an important hit for the new Gennett record label, as well for the young Melrose Music Company of Chicago, publishers of many great early jazz tunes.
Joseph Northup is one of the mystery men of American ragtime. It hasn't been possible to determine exactly who he was, or where he worked.
- In any event, The Cannon Ball was one of the most popular and successful rags of the early 20th century. The rag's opening strain is a folk theme that appears in both Mullen's Levee Rag of 1902 and Tournade's Easy Money of 1904, but it is the rag's trio strain, with its cascading triads, that is most striking.
Joe Sanders (1896-1965) was a singer, pianist, and bandleader who is mainly remembered today as co-leader of the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks The Nighthawks were famous for their late-night broadcasts from Kansas City, in which they responded to requests sent by telegram from all over the US. Sanders’ skill as a composer and pianist is demonstrated by the 1927 Roodles, an adroit blend of many disparate elements, including novelty-piano orientalism and boogie-woogie.
Hands Across the Sea is one of the finest 2/4 marches by the "March King" John Philip Sousa (1854-1932). Composed in the same year as Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag, it shows how rags coexisted for many years with their formal and harmonic forbears. Sousa's earlier Washington Post, one of his first successes, is famous as a parade piece today, but it was best known in the years immediately following its publication as the music for the widely disseminated new American-spawned dance craze, the Two Step. No doubt Hands Across the Sea and other marches were similarly employed as dance music, and it is easy to see how the evolution of march into ragtime was driven by the gradual introduction of ragtime's lilting, dancelike syncopations into the march style.
William H. Tyers (1876-1924), a remarkably versatile African-American musician who studied theory and orchestration in Germany. Tyers also served for a time as the Castles’ music director. This versatile, Jamaican-born and European-trained African-American composer was active as an arranger for several New York publishers as well. One of Tyers’s compositional specialties was Spanish-American music; he wrote the very influential tango Maori in 1908, and it became the first hit song in habanera rhythm by a North American, and anticipated the tango fever that swept the US five years later.
- Admiration, composed in 1915, is another example of a habanera-style piece.
The pianist and composer Clarence Williams (1898-1965) was born near New Orleans and began his musical career as a singer with a minstrel troupe. He later teamed up with the New Orleans violinist Armand Piron; the two founded a music publishing company, and also a successful performing duo. Williams moved to Chicago in 1920, and then to New York in 1923, where he did a celebrated series of recordings with the singer Bessie Smith. Williams was unsuccessful writing for the Broadway stage, but enjoyed a great deal of success as a record producer, recording artist, composer, and music publisher.
- Harlem Rhythm Dance, an early swing tune harking back to the Charleston rhythms of a decade earlier, was written in New York in the early thirties.
Spencer Williams (1889-1965) was a New Orleans-born composer whose early career was spent in Chicago, where he performed as a pianist and singer. He achieved considerable success as a songwriter in New York beginning in the teens, composing Shim-me-sha-wabble, one of the first tunes associated with the popular new dance “The Shimmy,” in 1916.
La Paloma is the second-most-famous melody written by the Spanish composer Sebastian Yradier (1809-1865). The more famous piece was El Arreglito, which became the famous Habanera from Georges Bizet's opera Carmen in the 1860s. Bizet appropriated what he took to be a folk tune from a collection of Spanish melodies, and was later shocked to discover that he had recycled a work by a living composer! The habanera, or Havana song, is an early Spanish-American form, later associated with the tango, in which Spanish travelers sung of their romantic encounters in the New World.