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FACT FILES
GENRES
HISTORY
THEORY
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History of Jazz:-
Early 20th Century Jazz
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By the turn of the century, American society had begun to shed
the heavy-handed, straight-laced formality that had characterized
the Victorian era. Public dance halls, clubs, and tea rooms opened
in the cities; and black dances like the cakewalk and the shimmy
were eventually adopted by a white public, especially the flappers.
White audiences saw them first in vaudeville shows, then performed
by exhibition dancers in the clubs.
Much of the music for this dancing was not jazz, but it was new, and
the fashion for new music did involve enthusiasm for some idea of jazz.
Popular composers like Irving Berlin made attempts at jazzy writing,
though they seldom used the specific musical devices that were second
nature to jazz players--the rhythms, the blue notes. Nothing did more
to popularize the idea of jazz than Berlin's hit song of 1911,
"Alexander's Ragtime Band," which became a craze as far from home as
Vienna. Although the song wasn't written in rag time, the lyrics describe
a jazz band, right up to jazzing up popular songs, as in the line,
"If you want to hear the Swanee River played in ragtime...."
Meanwhile, two disparate, but important, inventions of the second half
of the nineteenth century quietly had set the stage for the incipient
music soon to be known as jazz to capture the spotlight in American
popular music. George Pullman's invention of the sleeping car in 1864
brought a new level of luxury and comfort to the nation's railways; and
Thomas Edison's invention, in 1877, of the phonograph record made music
accessible to virtually everyone.
Pullman's ingenious, rolling sleeping quarters provided employment to
legions of African-American men, who criss-crossed the nation as sleeping
car porters; and by the 1920s, the Pullman Company employed more
African-Americans than any single business concern in the United States.
But Pullman porters were more than solicitous, smiling faces in smart,
navy blue uniforms. The most dapper and sophisticated of them were
culture bearers, spreading the card game of bid whist, the latest
dance crazes, regional news and a heightened sense of black pride to
cities and towns wherever the railways reached. Many porters also sold
"race records" to augment their income, speeding artistic innovations
to musicians eager to hear the latest; spreading among the general
public an awareness of and appreciation for this rapidly evolving
musical form; and, in the process, putting jazz on the fast track to
first U.S., then worldwide, acclaim.
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