USA > New York > New York City > New York panorama : a comprehensive view of the metropolis > Part 27
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brought into popular music the refreshing strain of jazz as it emerged from folk music itself. George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, and other New York composers participated in this development. In many cases, however, the Alley composer, smothered by his environment, was forced to bend his talent to the will of the publishing houses; this was particularly true in the early days when jazz was looked upon as more or less of a novelty.
In the early 1920's the situation had changed very little from what it was in 1916, when the Dixieland band came to New York. The site of Reisenweber's in 1937, however, revealed a former movie palace, its box office boarded up, the fake Roman pillars fronting the second floor already showing an appearance of age. Behind these pillars late in 1916 the Origi- nal Dixieland Jazz Band gave New York City its first taste of jazz. For a number or two the diners sat at their tables, listened, and stared. The boys were playing their own New Orleans music-Tiger Rag, Ostrich Walk, Bluin' the Blues-and the New Yorkers didn't know what to do about it. Finally the manager explained that it was dance music and the couples came out on the floor, one after another, and stayed there until the band was exhausted.
The orchestras that still put manners before melody were startled to see ob the commercial record companies playing up "the jass" for all the novelty thethere was in it-and there was certainly an excess of naïveté and novelty al in early jazz. Some of the "name-band" boys caught on, though often they headed directly for the cornfield (from corn, corny, cornfed, indicat- ing faked, inept or hackneyed attempts at hot music; generic metropolitan estsynonyms for the rustic and countrified). Earl Fuller's orchestra was at sed Rector's; and with Ted Lewis playing clarinet, Fuller, coming under the Dixieland influence but not quite up to it, could lay claim to the dubious es honor of being the first important corn band.
im- Meanwhile, in the country at large and particularly in the midwest, inghot musicians, Negro and white, played in honky-tonks, ginmills, working- fewclass dance halls. In these places the improvisational spirit of early jazz all was preserved, and its instrumental contributions were developed. The any musicians played what they felt, as LaRocca of the Dixieland band ex- pressed it, "from the heart." Their music also caught on with the college er crowd; the young men and women of the early 1920's have been its most or fervent supporters. Bix Beiderbecke and the Wolverines, encouraged by the Hoagy Carmichael, played many college engagements. There and then hebegan the practice of cats (fans) "freezing" before the band to catch the
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hot choruses which, with the Wolverines, were strictly variations-on theme. Although they played the college circuit, the Wolverines had minimum of pops and no waltzes in their repertoire.
Frank Signorelli, a Dixieland pianist of the 1920's, joined the Memphi Five and the first Cotton Pickers. The second Cotton Pickers, a recording set-up, enlisted pianist Rube Bloom, author of Swamp Fire and a talented composer in the hot music field. Both bands included a trombone player Miff Mole, who made great contributions in solo work and in stylistic in fluence on the bands in which he played. Red Nichols' Red Heads were perhaps the first New York band to show the Chicago influence in effect: that displayed a mingling of the quite distinct Negro and white traditions Already, in the small Gennett recording studio at Richmond, Indiana Negroes and whites were playing together as they did in the ginmills or. Chicago's South Side. In New York during the 1920's, white improviser: sat in with the Negro bands in Harlem; and by 1936 both Negroes and whites were sitting in with the jam bands in the drink-but-better-not-try. to-dance places along the section of West Fifty-Second Street called Swing Lane. For a few eventful nights the Negro trumpeter from Luis Russell's band, Henry (Red) Allen, Jr., of New Orleans, sat in with Chicagoans Joe Marsala (clarinet ) and Eddie Condon (guitar) at Hickory House.
The Nichols bands, which are everywhere in the history of jazz, contrib- uted a note of suavity to the hot strain. To some extent they helped carry along the improvisational and rhythmic tradition that was to emerge, again in Chicago, in a period jazz (ca. 1927-32) called Chicago style. (This is not to be confused with classic swing, sometimes called Chicago swing, which developed much earlier. ) In line with New York's reputation for heading the parade, the two bands that developed hot arrangements, pav- ing the way for the influence of hot music on popular music as such, were those led by Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson. The list of their personnel reads like an honor roll of musicians who have contributed to hot improvisation and instrumental style.
The younger generation growing up with the new music gave it a sub- stantial following. Their dance-steps-cake, collegiate, and the Charleston -that led into the Lindy Hop developed parallel to the development of jazz itself. When Red Nichols and his Five Pennies were at Roseland play- ing the precise stacatto jazz audible now only on the records made under the name of the Red Heads, there were always several couples dancing cake style, a style significant both for its complications and for its casual restraint. Broadly speaking, this was the Flapper Age, in retrospect an age
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f wise-cracking innocence. For New York's growing crowd of jitter-bugs synonymous with cats) there were increasing numbers of hot spots-the Colonnades, Connie's Inn, the Savoy, the original Cotton Club-where the lavor of jazz, elsewhere obscured by the prevalence of popular music, was howing that, like old wine, it could and did improve with age.
From a musician's point of view, New York was never the hot-music enter that Chicago so decidedly was in the 1920's. For this reason it points up what happened to hot music and its exponents in that decade. Popular music was called jazz, and musicians began to call the music that vas improvised, or of that spirit, hot jazz, sometimes referring to it, even n those days, as swing. (Today swing has no more specific significance to he public than did jazz in, say, 1926; though it has been assimilated more generally through hot orchestrations and the popularity of a few of its names.") The California Ramblers (many of them bona fide New York- rs, as were the Memphis Five) adapted hot materials to an early variety f "commercial swing." To a Detroit orchestra led by Gene Goldkette joes much of the credit for introducing into name-bands small nuclei of ot musicians. In this band was Joe Venuti, hot fiddle; Eddie Lang, great- st guitar soloist in hot jazz; Don Murray, of the silver clarinet; Frankie Trumbauer, C-melody sax; Bix Beiderbecke, a jazz composer whose im- rovisations on cornet are fully as important as his compositions; and Steve Brown (from the New Orleans Rhythm Kings) who slapped the ass fiddle and called it the doghouse. Red Mckenzie, who organized the Mound City Blue Blowers with Eddie Condon, the fine rhythm guitar, nduced the Goldkette hot nucleus to make records. Their first recording s a hot unit was Singin' the Blues, a Dixieland piece. Paul Whiteman ook over this hot nucleus almost intact; and it became customary for lame-bands to include a few improvisers who could swing out for the ats. Thus, the inculcation of popular music with the hot music germ took lace largely in New York City. Hot bands, as such, found it difficult to arn a decent living, and the improvisers were gradually absorbed in name- ands, playing hot style for records only.
This is an important point to bear in mind, for a technical reason. The ot bands on platforms, and subsequently in recording studios, used about he same number of rhythm and melodic instruments. Of the melodic in- truments, one of each was standard-clarinet, sax, trumpet, trombone-a lisposition that allowed for more counterpoint, in keeping with the folk nusic from which hot music derived. The emphasis on rhythm was obvi- bus, particularly in such record bands as the Chicagoans, in the formation
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of which Red Mckenzie and Eddie Condon were again prominent. was only in the commercial hot bands (bands that play hot arrangement jubl as against hot improvisations ) that the stiltedness of harmonic arrang 0
kate ment was avoided. Consequently these bands-Fletcher Henderson's, Dul
Ellington's and the rest-had a great influence on popular orchestratio
Throughout the development of present-day jazz, the most importar single influence has been that of the Negro. When, in more recent year the Benny Goodman band was packing them in at New York's Paramoul Les
tru Theater and Pennsylvania Hotel, the arrangements were often the wo of Negroes: Fletcher Henderson, Jimmy Mundy, Mary Lou Williams. . a unit of the large band, the Goodman Trio-Goodman (clarinet), W son (piano), Krupa (traps)-was perhaps the first Negro and whi combination to fill important ballroom, theater and hotel engagemen from coast to coast. The same personnel, with vibraphonist Lionel Ham ton, also played as the Goodman Quartet. Both groups were everywhe acclaimed. Just as the music had from the first vaulted color barriers, : the men who played it-with a few unhappy exceptions-refused to 1ba limited by invidious standards. And the public itself, steeped in prejudic was beginning to come round to the idea that pigmentation might ha less to do with personality and talent than innumerable other factors.
The Negro, with his wealth of folk-music background, was also to cr ate two of the important band styles of 1937: one represented by And Kirk's orchestra, with Mary Lou Williams as pianist and arranger, tl other by Count Basie's orchestra, with Basie himself, composer of Ros land Shuffle, as pianist. Both bands came out of Kansas City. The disco ery of the latter, like the first public notice accorded to Goodman, Bc Hackett and others, was largely due to John Hammond, who has devote so much of his time to the cause of hot music in general and the rank-an file musician in particular.
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Negro composers have also produced some of the best hot jazz cor positions. Duke Ellington, of course, stands first, with half a hundre numbers running from the Debussyan Misty Mornin' through Black a not Tan Fantasy and In a Sentimental Mood to Caravan. The list also includ King Oliver (West End Blues, Sugar Foot Stomp); Jelly-Roll Mort (Wolverine Blues, Kansas City Stomps ) ; Fats Waller (Honeysuckle Ros Wringin' an' Twistin'); Eubie Blake ( Ain't Misbehavin', Love Me Pac Leave Me), who collaborated with Milton Reddie on one of the mo charming numbers of 1937, I Praise Sue, for the WPA production Swir It; Fletcher Henderson; and Don Redman.
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Of the many concerts that have set out to "explain" hot music to the ent blic, only two or three have been primarily concerned with it. The cele- geated Paul Whiteman concert at Aeolian Hall in 1924 presented only e favorite of the swingsters, a pop tune called Whispering. At that time fior eorge Gershwin was still much more influenced by popular music than can, hot jazz. It was only in his later work that he began to utilize hot in- ar cumentation, though such European composers as Ravel, Stravinsky and lunes Six had perceived immediately that the great contribution of hot A usic, apart from its melodic improvisations, lay in the imaginative fresh- ess of its instrumentation. In 1928, Whiteman participated in another
Vi azz" concert, this time including several authentic hot numbers and per- hit ent ormers; but unfortunately both Grofé the arranger, and Whiteman mself leaned heavily on the much diluted classical forms that had seeped "Fown into what was euphemistically called the semi-classical field.
In 1936, a concert of hot music at the Imperial Theater in New York Sist money, though the SRO sign was out. At that time a song called The death of Swing had already been published. Something more than a year IC ter, the Columbia Broadcasting System sponsored a concert in one of its av imes Square radio theaters to celebrate the first anniversary of the Satur- ay Night Swing Club. Standees packed every corner of the house.
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Between them, these concerts signalized two important developments in tter-day swing. The first was a return to the small three-to-seven-piece and (Raymond Scott's Quintet, Bob Crosby's Bobcats, Benny Goodman's sequartet and Tommy Dorsey's Clambake Seven) usually as a big-band unit. 0 he popularity of the Goodman four and of Raymond Scott's admirably Bo ylized but rather mechanical compositions (Dynamo, Twilight in Tur- teley) set off this revival. In these new small units the rhythm instruments nGere often predominant, as against the accented horns and reeds of the Dixieland and modern jam bands. n
The second development is suggested by the fact that the Imperial Cheater get-together was sponsored by the Onyx Club, a late hangout for ot orchestra men, who often "sat in" with the band. It was soon discovered fy the cats and the curious. A faintly lighted blue-and-orange music box Ond bar with the photographs of hot immortals dim on its walls, the Onyx `lub sponsored Leo and his Spirits of Rhythm, a jam band that included fuch performers as Buster Bailey (clarinet) and Frankie Newton (trum- Det ); Martha Raye, in 1937 the gate-mouth singing star of Hollywood; tuff Smith's fervid jam band; and Eddie Riley, whose demonstration of he internal economy of a battered old horn made The Music Goes 'Round
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and 'Round a national furore in 1935. The Onyx Club's 1937 find what Maxine Sullivan, a handsome Negro vocalist from Pittsburgh, who reinteder preted such old favorites as Loch Lomond and Annie Laurie in relaxe and subtle swing style.
Along with hot instrumental technique, a hot vocal technique had dix veloped. It was Louis Armstrong who pioneered this technique, as it w:Mo Louis who replaced a cornet with a trumpet and gave jazz its hot stylthe on the latter instrument. Armstrong could take an authentic hot tune ari give it out "from the heart"; or he could take a pop tune and reinterpr 9 it, often ribbing (satirizing) it. He contributed largely to that wealth of humor which developed as one of the features of hot jazz. Ribbing was 12 culminate in jive treatment-at its worst so abandoned that it had lomo touch with itself and was a sign only of creative sterility. Hot men jiva a great deal-the environment encourages it; but they also reserve the talent for genuinely hot interpretation and melodic improvisations, as an ut one may learn by listening to Joe Marsala, Taft Jordan, Bobby Hackett Eddie Condon, Pee-Wee Russell, Bud Freeman, George Brunies, Har: James, Jesse Stacy, Tommy Dorsey and others in the New York nig) Di spots. Among the better hot vocalists should be listed Louis Armstrongty Henry Allen, Jr., Jack Teagarden, Red Mckenzie, Mildred Bailey, Ele Fitzgerald, Adelaide Hall and Billie Holiday. Bessie Smith, regarded } most hot singers as the standout in their field, was fatally injured in a automobile accident in September 1937.
This hot talent-at least a hundred gifted improvisers could be listen -has begun to affect the popular music field (witness the success of sucha bands as Tommy Dorsey's, Count Basie's, Bob Crosby's, Benny Good man's, Bunny Berrigan's, all of which may be called commercial swir ne bands) ; but composers per se are still proscribed by the moguls of musi who argue that the public isn't ready for originality. Raymond Scott, Reg nald Foresyte and other composers whose work is related to hot music fir. this work more acceptable when it is tagged with "funny" titles. Asic from a few hot composers such as Duke Ellington, the upsurge of creati talent to be expected in an era of hot music is apparent for the most pa in the originality of arrangements rather than of compositions.
The Alley Today
Meanwhile, the commercial pops followed the times without probir too deeply. Prohibition gave us Come Down and Pick Out Your Hufo
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wand; the year 1929 inspired I'm in the Market for You. There was a tenentimentally effective vulgarization of the jobless in Brother, Can You xerbare a Dime? from J. P. McEvoy's revue Americana, which opened in )32 with a sardonic line of ticker tape moving across a translux screen: deMy country-may she always be right; but right or wrong, Mickey wafouse." It was that sort of year. The musical field had been doubly hit: by tyhe depression, and by musical mass production in the radio and the talking anlicture. Sound pictures had come in with Jolson's The Jazz Singer in re927. As usual, the evil of plagiarism continued. The publishers of d'valon were required to pay $25,000 because the tune derived a little too stoviously from Puccini's E Lucevan le Stella. The Alley public was less logocked by this $25,000 duplicity than by the fact that a composer of ivalian opera was still alive.
hei There were innumerable other pops related to the depression of 1930-5; nyut the Alley songs, held down as they were by publishing restrictions, etjad little direct significance. The beginning of a recognition that social arconditions entailed social responsibility popularized the heroic mood of ghisney's Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?, which had been preceded ngy Harold Arlen's implicitly topical Stormy Weather with its melody sug- Ellestive of Joe Oliver's West End Blues.
b With the depression came a greater interest in labor organization; and ane folk tune of John Brown's Body, which had been adapted to Civil Var use in The Battle Hymn of the Republic, was adapted to labor use tel Ralph Chaplin's Solidarity Forever. Perhaps none of the later songs acad quite the folk quality of the Negro soldiers' war blues, Black Man odights Wid De Shovel, or of Joe Hill's Casey Jones (which implies that inhere is labor justice only in hell). An exception was Death House Blues sidScottsboro Blues), refrain by Peter Martin and music by Earl Robinson, ith its moaning
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Nine nappy heads wid big shiny eye, All boun' in jail an' boun' to die,
afted up by the chant of the chorus:
White workin' man goin' to set dem free, Black workin' man goin' go set dem free.
inThere were other effective compositions, such as the anonymous Hold the Tufort, which began as a song set to a gospel hymn by English transport
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workers; Abe Lincoln, derived from Lincoln's second inaugural addres rearranged by Alfred Hayes and put to music by Earl Robinson, in 193 the song of the American Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Spain. The Crad. Will Rock, by Marc Blitzstein, and Pins and Needles, by Harold J. Rom S brought to the stage an original musical treatment of material relating the everyday life and problems of the people.
Isolated and fragmentary, the social forces that inspired this new mat rial began to penetrate the Alley. Popular composers were becoming increa ingly aware of the public demand for less schmaltz and more significar compositions. The late 1920's and early 1930's produced an encouraging number of songs whose lyrics were not thick with romance and who: melodies had something of the elasticity of good musical thinking. In th smart revue and musical field, Cole Porter (Gay Divorcee, Fifty Millic Frenchmen ) and the English Noel Coward (Bitter Sweet, This Year ( Grace) brought quick wit and an engaging dilettante freshness to the jo in hand. Among the better revue composers and lyricists were Jerom Kern (Show Boat, Roberta) ; Vincent Youmans (Rainbow, Hit the Deck, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (A Connecticut Yankee, Babes ; Arms ); Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz (The Band Wagon); Irvin Berlin (Music Box Revues, Face the Music ); Harold Arlen and Te Koehler (Cotton Club Revue) ; and Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHug (Blackbirds of 1928).
But the foremost composer of this period was George Gershwin, wh died in 1937. His work ran all the way from the earlier George White Scandals through Girl Crazy to the political satire Of Thee I Sing an the Negro folk-opera Porgy and Bess. Gershwin earned the unspoken tril ute of the hot musicians, who have a highly selective ear for the popula tunes that lend themselves to improvisation. His I Got Rhythm was th number played most frequently at a jam session held in 1937 at New Yor City. In one set Artie Shaw (clarinet), Chick Webb (traps) and Dul Ellington (piano) improvised for more than ten minutes on this con position by one of New York's finest native musicians.
No doubt there would be more composers of Gershwin's caliber if tl younger men were encouraged to recognize the tradition and to utilize tl discoveries of hot music. This applies, of course, as much to the so-calle serious composers as to those in the popular field. In the future it ma quite possibly come to be regarded as sheer musical ignorance that a American composer should be unfamiliar with the hot choruses or vari tions-on-theme created by such improvisers as Bix Beiderbecke, Sidn‹
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echet, Frank Teschmaker and the early Louis Armstrong. The composers the future will not look down on this music of their progenitors. They ill understand it as a product of its environment, and its composers as orkers in a songshop that did not always favor the best talent or the nest exercise of talent. This understanding, with a more courageous ap- coach to the environment itself, may lead to a music as true to the life : its times as is the best folk music.
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XII. THE THEATER
Entrances and Exit
THE CURTAIN rose on the New York stage more than two hundred yea ago-on December 6, 1732. A circle of candles stuck on nails proje ing from a barrel hoop illuminated the Honorable Rip van Dam's ve honestly labeled "New Theater," and a stove in the foyer provided litt more than a fire hazard. George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer, vived many times since, was the offering. The bench-lined room, othe wise bare, displayed a large notice exhorting the audience not to spit.
David Douglass, another pioneer of the theater, who offered the first play based upon an American theme and whose presentations were oft attended by George Washington, thirty years later found himself co strained to offer "a Pistole reward to whoever can discover the person wlt was so very rude as to throw Eggs from the Gallery last Monday."
One of Douglass' theaters, the Park, on Park Row near Ann Street, w the city's first playhouse of real architectural pretensions. Here the "sta system, the practice of subordinating vehicle and cast to the celebrate actor, was definitely established. This house, built in 1798, was destroy by fire in 1820, and the new theater that went up on the same site rule the American stage for half a century thereafter. Here Edmund Kean act in Shakespearean drama; the first American production of Italian open with Italian singers, was presented here; James Hackett, W. C. Macread Charles Kemble, Tyrone Power, Junius Brutus Booth and Charlotte Cus man (the greatest tragedienne of her day) were among the celebrities appear upon its stage.
In 1796, William Dunlap acquired an interest in the old America Company, and began a notable career as playwright-manager. After a ter with this company in the John Street Theater, he took over the New Pa Theater as director and manager. He introduced many of the plays Kotzebue, and through his promotion of horror subjects did much bring about the vogue of the mystery play. Although he was America first professional dramatist, he is chiefly remembered today as the auth
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f the first documented History of the American Theater (1832) and a History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United tates (1834).
The Bowery era of the New York theater, extending from about 1800 .) around the middle of the century, would seem in the light of historic uct to have held even more glory, gaudiness and turbulence than legend tributes to it. Built in 1826, the Bowery Theater that year presented Ed- in Forrest in Othello. It burned down no fewer than three times within e next ten years, and again in 1845. Incidentally, in the history of the rly theater the phrase "destroyed by fire" recurs with sinister monotony. ea is usually followed, however, by the statement that "a new structure ed
as promptly erected upon the ashes of the old."
tt Although the early New York stage was dominated by the European, [ d no responsible group could be found to challenge this supremacy, hek ere were certain critics who dared to hope that the American theater puld develop its own native actors and plays. Washington Irving thus frisposed of such persons: "Let me ask them one question. Have they ever teen to Europe? Have they seen a Garrick, a Kemble, or a Siddons? If ogey have not, I can assure you (upon the word of two or three of my whends, the actors) they have no right to the title of critics." Nevertheless, ring the Bowery Theater fire of 1845 the audience prevented firemen wom reaching the burning structure because uniforms recently issued to tare police too closely resembled those worn by English bobbies to suit teeborn American taste. In 1849 the great English actor W. C. Mac- yerdy was driven from the stage of the Astor Place Opera House by a mob let gathered in response to the anti-English demagoguery of Edwin For- test. When Macready tried again, a few nights later, more than ten thou- ernd exasperated critics assembled in Astor Place and stoned the theater. ad acready fled to the then distant village of New Rochelle, and later to ston and England.
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