Jazz spreads

The story

From Congo Square to New Orleans

Jazz was born in the United States, in New Orleans, a port city in Louisiana where people of many different origins met: descendants of Africans brought to America as slaves, French-speaking Creoles, Europeans, people from the Caribbean. Here, from the 19th century, in Congo Square, a square where enslaved people could gather on Sundays, drums were played and African songs were sung. Meanwhile spirituals were sung in churches and work songs on the plantations, and after the end of slavery the blues was born, a music that came from the suffering and hope of African Americans, with its “sad” notes and its sense of freedom.

At the end of the 19th century ragtime was added, a piano music with a bouncing rhythm, along with street bands, who played at parades, parties and funerals. In the early 1900s the musicians of New Orleans, with trumpets, clarinets, trombones, banjos, double basses and drums, began to mix all this together. A cornet player, Buddy Bolden, was considered the first “king of jazz”, although no recordings of him survive.

What jazz is

The most important feature of jazz is improvisation: the musicians do not just play written notes, but invent music on the spot, starting from a theme, answering one another as if in a conversation. It has a very special rhythm, called “swing”, which makes you want to move, with unexpected accents, and it uses “blue notes”, slightly flattened notes full of expression. Every musician has their own sound, and a jazz solo is never the same twice.

The record and the Jazz Age

On 26 February 1917 a group of white musicians from New Orleans, the Original Dixieland Jass Band, made what is considered the first jazz record in history. The record was a huge success, and the new music spread across the country with records and radio. In the following years, many African American musicians, to escape poverty and segregation in the South, moved to cities in the North, such as Chicago and New York. With the great wave of movement called the “Great Migration”, jazz arrived there too.

The 1920s were called “the Jazz Age”. In America Prohibition was in force, and drinking alcohol was forbidden; in many secret clubs people danced and listened to live music, and orchestras played new rhythms, such as the Charleston. Writers, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, described this season of parties, fashion and freedom. For many parents, though, that music was scandalous: they thought it vulgar and dangerous.

The greats

Among the leading figures was Louis Armstrong, born in New Orleans, probably in 1901, to a poor family. He learned to play the cornet in a reformatory, and was then noticed by the cornet king of the day, Joe “King” Oliver, who took him to Chicago. With his bright sound, his incredible trumpet playing and his gravelly voice, he changed jazz, turning it from group music into music of great soloists. He also did “scat”, singing nonsense syllables like an instrument. In New York, in the Harlem district, Duke Ellington, an elegant pianist and composer, created a rich and refined music with his orchestra at the Cotton Club. The singer Bessie Smith, known as “the Empress of the Blues”, was one of the best-loved voices of the age, and later Ella Fitzgerald took vocal jazz to very high peaks.

Jazz crossed the ocean: in 1918 the band of an African American regiment, the “Harlem Hellfighters”, played it for the French during the war, and in Paris in the 1920s it became fashionable; the dancer and singer Josephine Baker was a great success. In Italy it arrived with orchestras and records, although the Fascist regime later saw it as foreign music to be viewed with suspicion.