Black and White: The Rising Role of Race in Jazz

 Jazz had always been a music form intrinsically linked with the African American identity – its originators (James P. Johnson, Buddy Bolden) and famous figures (Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington) were black, and many of its basic elements such as call-and-response and syncopation are rooted in African song and dance. However, with the dispersal of jazz from New Orleans to New York and especially Chicago, white Americans became increasingly more involved in the hot new music form. White “students” went to music clubs to watch King Oliver and his band, and white musicians such as the Austin High School Gang and Bix Beiderbecke began making names for themselves in the scene. With this swell of support for jazz came increased commercial interest, and with more money involved the jazz artist soon came to need agents to book shows and critics to evaluate their musicality. The vast majority of these third-party players were rich, white and socially savvy entrepreneurs. John Hammond gained fame and notoriety as a supporter of jazz and became one of the most well-respected critics of swing. This catalyzed a conversation over race that had been taboo before due to the relative exclusivity of the jazz world to the black individual. Comparisons between black and white artists, spurred on by the pseudo-academic critics like Hammond, soon took center stage in the world of swing.

Jazz in New Orleans was an almost exclusively African American enterprise, played by black artists and consumed by black dance-hall and bordello patrons. Rooted to mostly black musical traditions such as African song and dance, the blues and ragtime, the biggest influence from the white world on the music was the Latin-Catholic emphasis on spirituals and the Creole assimilation of many European musical styles. Jazz only reached Chicago and New York after the Great Migration, along with the millions of black migrants leaving their fields for the Northern metropolises. Race had always played an integral role in the genesis and spread of jazz – its color just tended to be darker. However, the introduction of jazz to the North, especially Chicago and New York, added a new dimension to the role of race in swing.

The spread of jazz to Chicago and New York changed jazz into a multiracial phenomenon, with white players such as Bix Beiderbecke, white critics like John Hammond and all-white clubs with black performers like the Cotton Club. The rise of white players of jazz had a profound effect on the dialogue over race, creating debates over whether they could ever compete with their black counterparts. This was spurred on by jazz critics, especially the staunchly pro-African American John Hammond. Duke Ellington, his professional adversary, asserted that Hammond “consistently identified himself with the interests of... the Negro people” (Swing Changes). Hammond even went so far as to censure artists like Ellington, who he accused of “shut[ting] his eyes to the abuses being heaped upon his race” (Swing Changes). The issue of loyalty to one's race became especially salient with the advent of locales like the Cotton Club, where all-white patrons listened to jazz music played by black musicians while being served by a black waiting staff. Even just the name Cotton Club conjures negative images of slavery and racism, and the décor – which included pictures of slaves in their fields – did little to dispel these impressions (Gioia, 125). However, by exposing white patrons to jazz, these clubs spurred on the increasingly insatiable desire for danceable swing music held by members of all races. These interactions between white and black members of the jazz community are a main cause of the increased importance of race in the dialogue of swing.

New York: Jazz Capital

The 1920's are called the Jazz Age for a reason – they were boisterous, loud, hot, economically bullish and defined by the jazz music emanating from the instruments of greats such as Louis Armstrong, James P. Johnson and Duke Ellington.  However, while both cities were integral to the growth of jazz, I believe that New York contributed more to the tradition through the development of the Harlem Stride piano style and the popularization of big bands such as Duke Ellington's at venues like the Cotton Club, where the artists and the consumers of art formed a rapport and entered into a dialogue with one another.

New York was a fertile spawning ground of jazz music due to the European musical and social sensibilities of the richer, more established black Harlemites and the Southern swing and blues brought by former sharecroppers during the Great Migration. These two communities were simultaneously at odds and intrinsically linked together. The richer Harlem, famous for the Harlem Renaissance,  attempted to distance itself from the more rough-and-tumble Harlem of “racy music and racier dancing, of cabarets famous or notorious according to their king, of amusement in which abandon and sophistication are cheek by jowl” (Survey Graphic). In the poorer sections of Harlem, festivities thrown to help cover the cost of lodging (known as rent parties) used the musical acrobatics of skillful pianists to attract dancers (Gioia, 96). This gave rise to a very competitive yet mutually respectful community of musicians who, as with Bahktin's theory, in turn interacted with their audience to create the most mutually compatible sound.

Their most famous prodigy was James P. Johnson, who first popularized the usage of a percussive beat with a “single note on the first and third beats and a chord of three or four notes on the second and fourth beats” (John S. Wilson, The New York Times). His style is one of the first styles of jazz piano, giving credence to the importance of New York as a center of jazz; Chicago's style, meanwhile, remained fairly derivative of the New Orleans sound. Of all of the New York composers, it was Duke Ellington's compositions that really put the Big Apple on the map.

Duke Ellington rose to prominence after jazz had already became a major force in America's cultural identity. He represented a new breed of artists, highly educated, socialized and stylized in order to match the increasing popularity of jazz. The new jazz consumer was more high-class and was predominantly white and upper-middle class, a stark change from the predominantly poor, black audience of the rent parties. His compositions reflected this increased sophistication, and he became famous for his ability to create moods through a sparse aesthetic (Gioia, 121). Through this maturation, Ellington pushed jazz into the realm of fine art. Such professionalism was not as visible in Chicago at the time. Ellington's skillfully crafted persona and compositions that reflected the intense knowledge he had of his artists' strengths and weaknesses contributed to the modern vision of jazz that exists today and cements New York as the center of innovation in the 1920's.