Black Music Sunday: It's Jazz Appreciation Month!

Jazz Appreciation Month was created in 2001 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. April was selected because a lot of jazz greats were born this month, including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Carmen McRae, Charles Mingus, and Herbie Hancock.

This year, JAM is a celebration of Ellington, because 2024 marks his 125th birthday. Also in April, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization—often referred as UNESCO—celebrates International Jazz Day on the 30th.

We’re celebrating Ellington here at Black Music Sunday too, both this week and throughout the month. But first I have a question for our readers, prompted by a conversation I had recently with a younger person who told me that they “didn’t like jazz.” 

When I asked them about which musicians they did appreciate, two of the top names on their list were jazz musicians—just not in one of the early genres most associated with the name. So let’s explore the broad diversity of subgenres, or styles, that make up jazz is—and hopefully you’ll find your jazz favorites along the way.

”Black Music Sunday” is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 200 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.

First, let’s answer the question: “What is jazz?” Jazz actually has multiple definitions.

From the Smithsonian:

Jazz is a kind of music in which improvisation is typically an important part. In most jazz performances, players play solos which they make up on the spot, which requires considerable skill. There is tremendous variety in jazz, but most jazz is very rhythmic, has a forward momentum called "swing," and uses "bent" or "blue" notes. You can often hear "call--and--response" patterns in jazz, in which one instrument, voice, or part of the band answers another   

From Jazz at Lincoln Center:

Jazz grew out of the African-American community in the turn of the 20th century New Orleans. It is a mingling of the musical expressions of all the people who came to the United States by choice or by force—people from Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean—as well as those already living in America. Jazz musicians brought their traditions together (with special emphasis on the blues, church spirituals and ragtime) in a new, universal language. Through the blues, jazz musicians showed that the sorrows common to us all could be overcome with optimism and humor.

[...]

“If jazz means anything,” DUKE ELLINGTON once said, “it is freedom of expression.”

From Jazz in America:

Jazz is musical conversation: a partly planned and partly spontaneous musical dialogue among the musicians who are performing it.

[...]

While performing (or practicing), jazz musicians utilize the inspiration of the moment, their knowledge of music theory, life experience, social, political, and economic surroundings, technical savvy on their instruments, and, especially, all the music (particularly jazz and blues) they have ever heard that has influenced them (even the most avant-garde jazz artists reflect, in some way, the music of their musical forefathers). Jazz is a music of the present moment, anchored lovingly and respectfully in the past.

And as jazz pianist and composer Herbie Hancock points out, when answering the question at his Institute of Jazz, it’s “Way versus What: In jazz, it’s more about the way a song is played, rather than what song is played.”

Though jazz is a relatively new music genre, given that it was birthed here in the early 1900s, it has grown past its roots and multiplied. If you search for jazz genres, subgenres, or styles, some music sites have 30 to 40 categories, while others have around 10. Either is far too many to cover today in one post, but I’ll list some here, and include Ellington’s contributions to many. 

Blues

This is the first genre on most lists. Though blues is a musical genre in its own right, and predates jazz, the two became intertwined .

Jazz and Blues notes that in the 1910s, Black music gained the interest of both white listeners and the music industry itself, which was still white. 

In 1912 W. C. Handy became the "Father of the Blues" with his composition, Memphis Blues. His inspiration for the style came from an African American musical practice of singing away one's sorrows to move on and up away from them.  W. C. Handy and "Ma" Rainey both recalled having heard the blues being sung by amateur singers in this tradition, but their ability to translate this country form into a performance style is what brought it to the attention of white audiences and the music industry.

The Folklife Today blog at the Library of Congress has an in-depth history written by Stephanie Hall, entitled “The Painful Birth of Blues and Jazz”:

Early blues recordings of [Handy’s] compositions, performed by white musicians, are often marked “foxtrot,” indicating the dance that could be done to it, and so played faster than was normal for the blues as played among African Americans. This is an example that was wildly popular when it was published in 1914, but not a foxtrot: “Memphis Blues,” played by a white minstrel show group,  the Honey Boy Minstrels. The lyrics, also by Handy, reflect minstrel show themes, as the minstrel shows were still an important venue for African American composers to market their works in 1914. The minstrel shows were a problem, of course, because they represented African Americans as caricatures, and both Black and white performers had to perform in blackface. Nevertheless, many African American songwriters and performers chose to work for the shows. A popular form of entertainment from the mid 19th to the early 20th century, these shows were an important part of American entertainment history, and also a source of pervasive negative stereotypes of African Americans.

RELATED STORY: Black Music Sunday: A taste of the rich creole gumbo that is New Orleans jazz

Ellington’s collaboration with alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges, a longtime member of his band, is a joy to listen to.

Listen to the full album here.

Ragtime 

Even though it is a precursor, ragtime has to be on this list because it contributed to jazz. As Dr. Douglas Henry Daniels writes for Carnegie Hall’s “Timeline of African American Music”:

Itinerant African American musicians developed ragtime as a playing style of music spontaneously created while performing in brothels, saloons, bars, and other venues where they played after the Civil War. Beginning in 1897, ragtime became available in a written tradition when African American ragtime players and their white counterparts began transcribing and writing original rags to be published and sold as sheet music. Printed versions of ragtime simplified the improvisatory quality of the original style, which changed the organic character of the tradition.

[...]

Tom Turpin’s “Harlem Rag” (1897) is the first ragtime song published by an African American. Scott Joplin, dubbed “The King of Ragtime Writers” by his contemporaries, is the best-known composer of ragtime.

[...]

Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” was widely performed by pianists and instrumental ensembles and led to ragtime as a standard in the repertoire of many society bands, such as Clef Club Orchestra. James Reese Europe also introduced the ragging style and a new sound to US military bands. As leader of the all-Black 369th Infantry “Hellfighters” Band, he began ragging the melodies and applying instrumental techniques that varied the timbre (as in “Memphis Blues,” 1919).

Here’s Jelly Roll Morton, playing Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.”

The Storyville Records website points out that the first piece of music written by Duke Ellington was “Soda Fountain Rag.” He was 15 years old.

[Ellington] got his first job selling peanuts at Washington Senators baseball games. In the summer of 1914, while working as a soda jerk at the Poodle Dog Cafe, he wrote his first composition, “Soda Fountain Rag” (also known as the “Poodle Dog Rag”). Ellington created “Soda Fountain Rag” by ear, because he had not yet learned to read and write music. “I would play the ‘Soda Fountain Rag’ as a one-step, two-step, waltz, tango, and fox trot,” Ellington recalled. “Listeners never knew it was the same piece. I was established as having my own repertoire.”

Enjoy this 1937 performance of “Soda Fountain Rag!”

And here’s a very short clip of a much older Duke playing a few bars, as featured in Ken Burns’ 2001 PBS documentary, “Jazz.” Be sure to watch till the end!

Dixieland

Much to my surprise, Ellington and his alter ego Billy Strayhorn composed some Dixieland for the soundtrack of the 1959 film “Anatomy of a Murder,” which went on to win three Grammy Awards. 

As Adam Scovell wrote for Little White Lies:

Though noted for an array of groundbreaking aspects, in particular its refreshingly realistic portrayal of the legal process and its fearless inclusion of a more detailed sexual reality, it is Ellington and Strayhorn’s soundtrack where the film is at its most ambitious. Arriving a year after Miles Davis’ celebrated score for Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Scaffold, Anatomy of a Murder was the first major Hollywood film to feature a score by an African-American composer, as well as being one of the earliest to use jazz in such a way.

Here’s “Happy Anatomy”:

Swing and Big Band

Before we go any further, the New Directions in Music website makes it clear that these terms are not interchangeable:

Are swing and big band music the same thing?

Let’s get one thing straight right away. Swing music is a style, just like traditional jazz and bebop are styles of music played by certain groups of musicians at a certain time in history. Styles can be revived, but there is always a time at which a certain style of music evolved, became popular, and eventually developed into or was replaced by something else.

Big band, on the other hand, is a format, and as such is has existed in jazz music from the swing era right into the present. There are big bands who played swing (Count Basie, Artie Shaw), bop big bands (Dizzy Gillespie’s big bands), progressive big bands (Stan Kenton, Duke Ellington), and even modern/experimental big bands (such as Carla Bley’s work with large groups).

Ellington’s "It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)" is now a classic. Victor Cooper, who hosts KVUO’s “Stories of Standards” series wrote:

Duke Ellington wrote the melody “It Don’t Mean a Thing” at Chicago’s Lincoln Tavern in August 1931 during intermissions. Irving Mills then wrote the lyrics and the first recording, featuring Ivie Anderson, was released February 2, 1932. This recording was added to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008. Ellington attributed the phrase “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing” to trumpeter Bubber Miley; Cootie Williams (Miley’s replacement) said it was his catch phrase; Mills said he originated the phrase when explaining to Ellington why customers weren’t dancing. Others may have been using the term at the time as well.

Here’s a 1943 performance!

Bebop

MasterClass offers this about bebop:

A Brief History of Bebop

In the timeline of jazz history, bebop falls between big band swing and cool jazz music.

[…]

Bebop pioneers: In the early 1940s, an innovative group of jazz musicians set out to create a new, more challenging style of jazz. The essence of bebop was born during late-night jam sessions with the Earl Hines Orchestra at Milton's Playhouse in Harlem, New York. These pioneers included alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, pianists Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, drummers Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, and guitarist Charlie Christian.

RELATED STORY: Celebrating 100 years of Charlie 'Yardbird' Parker

Here’s Ellington playing Charlie Parker’s “Ko-Ko”:

Post Bop

This thorough definition can be found at Jazz Music Archives:

Post Bop is a modern jazz style that continues the distinguishing characteristics that separate jazz from the world of pop and rock; swing rhythm and extended harmonies (9th chords 11ths, altered chords, etc). Post Bop grew out of the Hard Bop genre during the early to mid 60s as musicians such as Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock began to introduce more extended harmonies, abstract structures and looser rhythms in their playing and compositions. When Hancock and Shorter joined Miles Davis’ quintet in the mid-60s, that group became the perfect vehicle for extending the boundaries of what could happen in a Post Bop format. The Miles Davis Quintet albums, "Nefertiti" and "Sorcerer", continue to be pinnacles of Post Bop composition and performance. Some styles of free modal jazz, such as Coltrane's "A Love Supreme", are also part of the Post Bop sound. Sometimes referred to as 'spiritual jazz', this style has made a comeback with young musicians, especially in London and Los Angeles.

When most people think of Ellington, they don’t likely associate him with John Coltrane—whether it’s hard bop or post bop. As Andy O from KUVO writes:

JAM—Celebrating the Collaboration of Duke Ellington & John Coltrane

It’s Jazz perfection in under an hour. A rare gem of an album if ever there was one. Many consider it one of the finest albums ever made by the principals or by anyone playing Jazz. The eponymous album was recorded in one session on September 26, 1962. Ellington was 63 and Coltrane had celebrated his 36th birthday three days earlier. It was released in February 1963.

Andy O also includes great quotes from the men themselves!

“The only time I had the privilege of working with John Coltrane was on a record date. It was a very interesting session. We recorded some of his tunes with his rhythm section, and some of mine with my rhythm section. No hassle, no sweat—- John Coltrane was a beautiful cat. The date flowed so smoothly we did the whole album in one session, and that is rare. I loved every minute of it.” (From his book “Music is My Mistress.” by Duke Ellington)

“I was really honored to have the opportunity of working with Duke. It was a wonderful experience. He has set standards I haven’t caught up with yet. I would have liked to have worked over all those numbers again, but then I guess the performances wouldn’t have had the same spontaneity. And they mightn’t have been any better.” (John Coltrane from the liner notes of the album.)

Here’s “Take the Coltrane”:

I still have a long list of additional genres and jazz styles to explore, but I’m out of space—so this will be continued later on during this month devoted to jazz, which first inspired this series in 2020. 

Join me in the comments for more music, and more importantly, to share your favorites. Campaign Action