On Mar 18, 1:20 pm, "David Webber" <d...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
> "LJS" <ljsche...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
>
> news:279a005f-2f3d-4de3-a0e7-5399682b22c5@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> > On Mar 18, 9:36 am, "David Webber" <d...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> >> >They were not the same people. Creoles did not mix
> >> > with the Blacks.
>
> >> You only have to look at the early jazz bands to see what total
nonsense
> >> that is. Creoles and blacks played together all the time!
>
> > They hired them. And they were not stupid. They learned from them.
>
> Sorry - who learned from whom? Armstrong certainly learned from
Oliver
> (ie black from creole) as he always acknowledged.
I never said that he didn't. Only that neither of them were there when
Jazz began. They both learned the music from generations before then.
Oliver learned if from someplace and someone just as Armstrong did.
Neither of them originated the music. Both advanced it.
>
> > To
> > say that Jazz came from the Creole culture is to say the it was
> > predominantly European, i. e. French and Spanish.
>
> Absloute nonesense. The Creoles were Americans not Europeans. The
whole
> point of the word "creole" is that it refers to mixed race - not
> "predominently European". Look at pictures of the people I listed -
they
> don't look a bit European.
Creoles were only Americans when the U.S. bought Louisiana. You are
talking about a much later time than the beginnings and roots of Jazz.
Haitian as well as Jazz was influenced by Senegal rhythms. Jazz added
the Blues and popular tunes to the mix. It all started before anything
that you mentioned. The aristocratic Creole people did not play for
the funerals nor did they work playing music for the guests at society
parties on the plantations. It just wasn't that way. (As I hear tell)
You don't know what New Orleans Creoles are! You may be talking about
Haitians, but the New Orleans Creoles are not the same people. This is
also, quite a bit afar from the art songs that were examples of Creole
music.
>
> > You are mixing up
> > Haitian with the N.O. Creoles.
>
> No I am not. Haiti is something else altogether.
>
> > They are not the same. The Creoles in
> > New Orleans had nothing to do with slavery except that many owned
> > them.
>
> You're the one who keeps bringing slavery into it. I haven't mentioned
it
> except to deny that slaves played jazz.
And you base that denial on what?
>
> >> Look at the early jazz bands, for heavens sake! Are you telling me
the
> >> people who played together (and Oliver and Armstrong form just one of
a
> >> plethora of examples) couldn't have done so because of "strong
> >> divisions".
> >> I'm afraid you're the one who is rewriting history. If what you say
were
> >> true, then I guess I'll have to thow away all my recordings of King
> >> Oliver,
> >> Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Alphonse Picou, A J Piron, Alcide
> >> Nunez,
> >> Omer Simeon, Kid Ory, Freddie Keppard, .... These people were
> >> obviously
> >> impostors.
>
> >> If Jelly Roll Morton was not the first jazz composer, then who was?
This is a quote about Jelly Roll.
"His business card referred to him as the Originator of Jazz, and
during his life he was regarded as a source of rare historical
information, despite his penchant for hyperbole." He wasn't even born
until the late 1800s. He was educated and he could write music. He
wrote tunes and he spread Jazz around quite a bit. In addition to a
composer he was a business man. His father actually banned him from
the house for playing the "devil music" as this disgraced his family.
Yes, disgraced his "Creole family". He wasn't disgracing his family
for promoting the Creole culture, but for playing that Devil Music.
The originators of Jazz were not educated. They couldn't write or read
music in general. The Creoles could and the younger generations picked
up on it. If you understood the culture in New Orleans, this would all
make sense to you.
>
> >> And just from curiosity - who are you claiming did start the
"bandwagon"
> >> that all these people "jumped on".
> > Well Dave, This whole thing is really off topic. I know it was an off
> > hand comment that you made and that I only pointed out that the Creole
> > Music you gave as an example was not related to Creole music except by
> > the title. I am glad that you are pointing out what our history here
> > is and I am glad that we are discovering that the natives have all our
> > history wrong...
>
> Ah I see - your argument is that because you are in the USA, I must be
wrong
> :-(
It is more that I was born in New Orleans, my grandmother was a mid-
wife and a nurse. She birthed and cared for White Society people,
Creole society people and poor people of all races. She knew the
families. She knew the history. Then I started to meet old musicians
and they told stories and I spoke with many on this topic. By the time
you are talking about, the white musicians were spreading Jazz as
well. Jazz originated in the very special culture and society that was
(and still is despite attempts to get rid of it) New Orleans. It is
not of any one culture It is from the mix that grew here. By the time
you are ascribing as the beginnings of Jazz is only when people
started to make money at it and it started to spread throughout the US
and then the world.
Who originated it? What a question! Who originated folk music? There
are no records of what person said, "I will invent Jazz today". I
don't think that there was a piece in the paper saying that
"yesterday, a new form of music was born. etc" There were no re****ters
around taking notes. There were many factors. Some attribute it to the
music on the plantations. First in the field and then in the music as
it translated to the workers being given instruments to play for the
parties. Some say it came more from the church. some say that the
VooDoo rituals that were down on what is now N. Rampart and St.
Peter's Streets (Congo Square) was an influence. There were dirges and
Hymns that were sung for the funerals. These tunes are still part of
the repertoire today, still played at funerals and in much the same
way that we believe that they were played back then. I think that it
was a combination of all these things. Now, if you ask, who spread the
form to other parts of the world, well then we are getting into what
you are claiming as its origins. If you ask who advanced the music and
recorded it, well then we are talking about the era that you are
referring to.
I believe that Jelly Roll Morton is said to have sold lots of sheet
music and spread his writings of what he heard, but it was going on
long before he was born. The fact that he could do this is evidence
that it was going on before him. He heard it, he liked it, he had the
intelligence and the education to do something very im****tant with it.
He may have helped bring it into the world, but the seed and
incubation was started long before then and the Creole culture
Research Jelly Roll Morton and find that quote for yourself about the
Devil Music. The Creoles eventually became quite big in the spread and
development of Jazz, but they did not originate it. It is not Creole
music. It did not come out of the Creole culture of New Orleans. It
eventually became a part of it, but it did not originate there.
>
> > I can see that you know more than those that live here.
>
> Well as I have been listening to New Orleans Jazz (records do make it
> outside the country) and reading about it (as do books) for the last 45
> years, then I thnk I possibly do know more about it than some who simply
> happened to have been born on the same continent where jazz started.
>
> > You have ****fted and mixed up my chronology
>
> *Your* chronology?
>
> > When Sidney Story created the Storyville
> > district, in the late 1890s Jazz was well established and with the
> > added money legal status of the clubs, the music flourished.
>
> Your evidence?
Evidence that the music flourished in Storyville? Evidence that
Storyville was in the late 1890s? (I checked, it was 1897 that it was
established? You do have Google don't you? Write this in the window
"Storyville history". This is all public record.
>
> The first recordings generally acknowledged to be jazz were by the ODJB
(a
> white group!) in 1917. There are lots of recordings of American
musicians
> before that (starting in about 1900 and including non-white musicians)
but
> no jazz. Read Gunther Schuller "Early Jazz - its roots and Musical
> development" and you'll know that there is essentially no evidence at
all
> for the existence of jazz in the 1890s. Ragtime became popular in the
> late 1890s (with the first sheet music publication in 1899 becoming an
> enormous hit) but there's no evidence at all for jazz. And in the
> statements of people like W C Handy who toured the south a lot, there is
> some evidence that there was no jazz then - as he'd have seen it i it
> existed.
WC Handy was a blues man. I think he was mostly in Alabama and then
moved to Tennessee. This was not jazz country. Unless he went to New
Orleans, he would not have had much to do with it. Gunther Schuller? I
won't even address this here. He would have had to rely on the
available research for his sketchy writings of the origins I think he
started about the time of JRM IIRC, or maybe he went back to Scott
Joplin and Ragtime. Better yet, I will give you a place to start.
There is a book on Google. <http://books.google.com/books?
id=PSvxJtF3_****&pg=PA316&lpg=PA316&dq=%22jig+piano
%22&source=web&ots=9Gh_ai5HFF&sig=396XiSQhoYKSzw9xifJbe1u6_lw&hl=en#PPA365,M1>
If this link is too long to work here the book is called "The Music of
Black Americans: A History"
By Eileen Southern
Go to Chapter 10 its on page 365. It talks about a lot of things. Most
interesting is the statement that the term Jazz did not appear in
print until around 1912 and until this time there was no reason to use
the term. In 1915 a Tom Brown's band Played in Chicago and was billed
as "Brown's Dixieland Jazz Band, direct from New Orleans, the Best
Dance Music in Chicago". Two years later Nick LaRocca opened with his
band in New York. There is then a blank in the book as is often the
case in Google books, but if you think that all of this happened all
of a sudden and it was just created then, you have a poor sense of
timing.
If is very difficult to trace things when no one cared. There were
other things on people's mind, but if you look further into that book
(or maybe earlier, I don't remember, you may have to look for 'jig-
piano' to locate the specific sections, but this was a style of piano
that had evolved from the blacks on the plantations and spread through
out the Southwest and even up the coast maybe around the mid 1800 or
sooner. Who really knows. There was very little press concerning the
travels of Blacks in those days, but there was a lot of things going
on in this society that people were unaware of. This style of piano
was a ragged type of piano that was played "houses of ill
repute" (there is not much written about it, but there were slaves
that were moved around for prostitution and why not bring the piano
player along to help business!) This music was never written down but
rather passed on from player to player.
This would have been the music that Scott Joplin was influenced by
when he played in these establishments and contracted his disease. He
was, I believe, the first person that wrote down this music and had
the the education to put this style into a form that was acceptable to
the public. W.C. Handy would probably have heard this music as well in
his travels. Blues, after all, was also part of the mix that
eventually become blues.
Black music was going on since before they were brought to the US as
slaves. There were blacks playing music on all the plantations, not
just in New Orleans. When the slaves were freed around 1861, their
music started to flourish. No one called it Jazz. It wasn't until
Storyville that some say the term Jas started to be used at all and we
all know what this term meant! No, Jazz music was around since at
least the mid 1800s. It did not use the term Jazz. Maybe that is why
WC Handy didn't mention hearing it or maybe he did not frequent the
houses of ill repute. I don't know and I don't care. The music was
there in the slave days. Nick LaRocca and his family is still fighting
over the origins of a tune or two with one of the Creole families (at
least they were 20 years ago) When his grand son, a trumpeter, was
telling me about this, I managed to not point out that they both stole
it from the every day Black musicians of the day.
Believe what you want to believe, but if you want to know the truth.
Research about the life in the plantation south and especially look
deeper into life and culture in New Orleans. You have read some books.
I have grown up with this culture. There is more to it than you have
discovered so far. The book that I cited is a good place to start.
There are a lot of footnotes if you really want to know how this all
got started. But if you think that Jazz just magically appeared around
1910 or so, you need to turn back the hands of time a bit in order to
get closer to its true origins. Yes, the Creoles jumped on the band
wagon, but they were not even the first ones to jump on that wagon.
The poor originators of the style died unknown. Sorry, that is the way
life is in the Big Easy.
LJS
>
> >...
>
> So as you know all about it, just answer the question:
>
> King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Alphonse Picou, A J
Piron,
> Alcide Nunez,
> Omer Simeon, Kid Ory, Freddie Keppard, ....
>
> Who were the great jazz musicians before them and whose band wagon they
> jumped on?
It would be nice if we knew their names or if we could hear recordings
of their music, but until someone came along that saw the value in
learning it and notating it, (like JRM per example) it was all passed
on from musician to musician.
>
> Which jazz composers do we have from before Jelly Roll Morton?
>
> Dave
> --
> David Webber
> Author of 'Mozart the Music Processor'http://www.mozart.co.uk
> For discussion/sup****t
seehttp://www.mozart.co.uk/mozartists/mailinglist.htm
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