Early Jazz
• The birthplace of jazz was New Orleans. The
largest of many ethnicities that settled there
was French.
• Descendents of French settlers and their black
mistresses or slaves were called Creole of
Color.
• Ragtime is highly syncopated, uptempo dance
music. The most famous composer of ragtime
was Scott Joplin.
• The blues is constructed of a 12 bar repeating
phrase with improvisation, which is when you
make music up as you go. The blues always
follow the same chord progression.
• Buddy Bolden was a trumpet player who is
considered to be the first real jazz player.
• Jelly Roll Morton was a piano player who said
he invented jazz. He didn’t, but he was the
first person to write it down.
• Joseph “King” Oliver was a trumpet player and
the bandleader of the Creole Jazz Band. He
invented the plunger mute.
• Sidney Bechet was a clarinet prodigy who had
a professional playing job by age 10. He
played with lots of vibrato.
• The first jazz recording was made by The
Original Dixieland Jass Band in 1917. The
recording was played on a Victrola, an early
record player.
• New York and Chicago became the two
geographical centers of jazz. Harlem in the
1920’s was the center of black culture.
• Prohibition was an ill-planned law that banned
the sale or consumption of alcohol, but instead,
thousands of speakeasies opened up, creating
many new jobs for jazz musicians
• Louis Armstrong is one of the most important
figures in jazz history. He grew up in New
Orleans, playing trumpet in jail, and then in
King Oliver’s band.
• Armstrong followed Oliver to Chicago, where
the two became quite famous with both black
and white listeners. He married Lil Hardin,
who convinced him to go to New York and
join Fletcher Henderson’s band.
• He soon created his own band and a recording
band called The Hot Fives. He popularized
scat singing, is singing on nonsense syllables.
He also invented what he called modern time,
which is what we call swing.
• Paul Whiteman was a classically trained white
bandleader who wanted to civilize jazz. White
audiences loved him and called him The King
of Jazz.
• Pianists in Harlem played a style called stride.
These players would often get into
competitions called cutting contests.
• The four stride piano masters were:
• Fats Waller
• Art Tatum
• Willie “the Lion” Smith
• James P. Johnson