Jazz

Week 2: Vaudeville, Minstrelsy, Blackface,

Chapter 4, & Chapter 5
 Agenda

• 12-bar blues review

• Vaudeville/Blackface

• Canada

• Chapter 4: New Orleans

• Chapter 5: New York

12-Bar Blues

What is it?
 “Reckless Blues”

• 12-bar blues

• Lyrics: A A B form

• Call and response

Bessie, 2015
Vaudeville, Minstrel Shows,
& Blackface
Blackface in Canada

Purple and Gold Revue cast and crew, April 1949

Wilfrid Laurier University photograph collection
New Orleans
New Orleans Jazz
 New Orleans Jazz

“That music, it wasn’t spirituals or blues or ragtime,

but everything all at once, each one putting something
over on the other” -Sidney Bechet (KT, 2)
 New Orleans & Jazz
“that [jazz] came, in fact, from doubtful surroundings in our slums”
“Jass and Jassism,” The Times Picayune June 20, 1918
Buddy Bolden: Man & Myth
 Term: Improvisation
Making it all up? Yes, but with some structure

• Melodic: taking an original melody and adding elements

to it. Example: “Somewhere over the rainbow”

• Harmonic: creating an original melody over a chord

progression. Example: John Coltrane, “Giant Steps” OR a
basic 12-bar blues

• Collective: multiple instruments improvising a unique

melody within their register, often at their own rhythm.
Example: “Dixie Jazz Band One-Step”
 Original Dixieland Jazz Band

• Collective Improvisation

• March/Strain structure
Jelly Roll Morton
Jelly Roll Morton:
Jazz Historian?
A series of interviews from 1938
with noted American
ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax

Can be seen as an early attempt

to control the history of jazz

About the “Tiger Rag”: “All this

happened back in the early days
before the Dixieland Band was
ever heard of (KT, 18)
Terms: Texture & Breaks
• Texture refers to the density or number of instruments we hear. There
are two main types:

• Homophony: a melody supported by harmony

• Example: Charlie Parker, “Now’s the time”

• Polyphony: two or more melodies heard at the same time

• Example: Morton, “Dead Man Blues”

• Break(s), another type of texture, refers to a short interlude where the

band stops and one instrument plays (can also refer to a rhythmic
moment);

• Also an example of monophony: one melody by itself

King Oliver’s Jazz Band
“Snake Rag”
 King Oliver,
“Dippermouth Blues”

• Oliver’s use of mutes

• Early “standard”
1920s New York & Jazz

“Three interlocking spheres of in uence” (Jazz, 85)

fl
Paul Whiteman, “Changes”
Symphonic Jazz
 Harlem Renaissance

Aaron Douglas, The Judgement James Lesense Wells, Looking Upward

Day (1939) (1928)
Johnson, “You’ve got to . . .”
Early Swing

Fletcher Henderson and his Orchestra

Duke Ellington
 Term: Block Chords

Type of texture where the harmony and the

melody move in unison.

Examples: “Dead Man Blues,” “Changes,”

“Copenhagen”
“Copenhagen”
 “Sugarfoot Stomp”

• Henderson recording of
“Dippermouth Blues”
Duke Ellington