THE BIRTH OF JAZZ

THE SOUND OF NEW ORLEANS

Jazz didn't arrive fully formed. It emerged from a musical crossroads.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, New Orleans was a place where Blues, Ragtime, Gospel, marching-bands, Caribbean rhythms and African-American musical traditions were constantly colliding.

And the musicians weren't necessarily starting with completely new compositions.

They were taking the songs they already knew — popular songs, dance tunes, marches, rags, Blues standards and traditional melodies — and reworking them to fit their environment and style.

A familiar melody could become something completely different in the hands of a New Orleans band.

The rhythm could be shifted. The harmony could be changed and the melody could be stretched and answered or broken apart.

One musician could improvise around it while another answered from the other side of the band.

The song was no longer simply being played as written. It was being reinterpreted in real time, and that idea would become one of Jazz's defining characteristics: taking something familiar and making it personal.

You can hear this approach in early recordings of New Orleans musicians, where established tunes were transformed through syncopation, collective improvisation, variations and individual instrumental voices.

The Library of Congress, for example, documents how New Orleans musicians such as the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, radically reshaped the popular tune "Panama," changing its harmonies and rhythms in their 1922 under the name Friars Society Orchestra until later versions from the likes of Louis Armstrong or Jelly Roll Morton bore little resemblance to the original composition from William H. Tyers in 1910.

This was the beginning of something that would run through the entire history of Jazz.

Take something that already exists. Flip it. Rework it. Make it your own.

Long before the sampler, the record crate or Hip-Hop, Jazz musicians were already thinking like crate diggin’ producers.

01 — LOUIS ARMSTRONG CHANGES EVERYTHING

If early Jazz created the language, Louis Armstrong taught the world how to speak it.

Before Armstrong, early Jazz was often built around collective improvisation, with several musicians improvising simultaneously.

Armstrong changed the balance. Suddenly the individual musician mattered and the solo became an event.

The trumpet could step forward, tell a story and completely reshape the melody.

His Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings from the 1920s captured this transformation on record, with performances such as West End Blues, Potato Head Blues and Cornet Chop Suey demonstrating a new level of rhythmic and melodic freedom.

Armstrong didn't simply play the notes. He played around them filling the spaces in between.

He stretched them, bent them, anticipated them and sometimes seemed to completely ignore where the melody was supposed to go.

That idea would become fundamental to everything Jazz would eventually become.

The musician wasn't simply reproducing a composition. The musician was creating and building inside it.

02 — JAZZ GOES TO CHICAGO AND NEW YORK

As part of the Great Migration, African-American communities moved north, taking their music with them and Chicago became an important centre for Jazz.

Then New York. And as Jazz spread, the musicians began expanding the size and ambition of the music.

Louis Armstrong became a star and Duke Ellington became one of the great composers and bandleaders of the twentieth century.

Count Basie developed a lighter, more rhythmic approach to big-band music while Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald transformed the role of the Jazz vocalist.

The music became increasingly sophisticated, and the Jazz band was no longer simply accompanying the show. It was becoming an orchestra capable of colour, dynamics, arrangement and expression.

Duke Ellington was particularly important because he treated his orchestra almost like a palette of individual voices with a range of textures available from the entire orchestra.

Jazz was becoming more than a genre.It was a way of thinking about music.

03 — THE SWING ERA

By the 1930s, Jazz became America's dance music.

The Swing era arrived and big bands led by the likes of Benny Goodman. Count Basie. Duke Ellington and Chick Webb were filling ballrooms across America.

The rhythm section became more powerful and the concept of swing became central.

The music moved, but underneath the big arrangements, something else was developing.

Musicians were listening, learning, experimenting and competing for the spotlight.

Young players were taking the harmonic sophistication of the big bands and trying to discover where they could take it next.

Jazz was about to become much more complex and rebellious, but the next revolution would happen after hours in small clubs or jam sessions. And it would be called Bebop.