The key ideas

The History of Jazz

Ted Gioia, 1997

No one alive today has heard the very first star of jazz: not a single recording of him survives. Pianist and historian Ted Gioia tells how African rhythms, church songs and brass bands gave birth to a music that shed its skin every ten years. After this book, jazz stops sounding like noise and starts sounding like a conversation, and you understand why it sounds so different from one era to the next.

Who it is for

For anyone who loves music but gets lost in jazz terms and names. And for anyone curious how the music of a few New Orleans neighborhoods went round the whole world in a hundred years.

Perhaps the most recognizable trait of jazz in its first century is simply its refusal to sit still.

The star nobody heard

The man called the first star of jazz has never been heard by anyone alive today. Cornetist Buddy Bolden played in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century. People who heard him said his cornet sounded loud and free, in a way no one had played before him. But not a single recording of his playing survives.

The music that later went round the whole world begins with a legend. Its story is told by Ted Gioia, an American pianist and music historian. He follows the whole journey: from the drums on a square in New Orleans to the dance halls, the New York nightclubs, the electric experiments and the arguments about what counts as jazz at all.

Gioia's main idea is simple: jazz never stood still. Each new generation took what its teachers had made and remade it in its own way.

You do not need to read music. Every musical term is explained right where it appears. And by the end of the book you will see why jazz has had such a restless history, and how to listen so that it stops being background.

Sunday in Congo Square

Gioia starts the story not in America but in Africa. In traditional African culture, music was not a concert for an audience but a part of life: people sang it at work, at rites and at celebrations, and everyone took part.

Two devices came from there, and without them there is no jazz. The first is called call and response. One voice throws out a phrase, and the others answer it. The second is polyrhythm: several different rhythms sounding at once and arguing with each other.

Nineteenth-century New Orleans was a rare corner of America where these traditions lived in the open. On Sundays, enslaved Africans gathered in Congo Square to dance and play drums. All around it, European music played: military brass bands, pianos, operas, church hymns. Gioia calls Louisiana at that time perhaps the most turbulent melting pot of peoples of that century.

So looking for a single source of jazz is pointless. The author insists: in music, purity is a myth. Jazz was born precisely because different traditions ended up side by side and mixed.

Read in Livria

About the author

Ted Gioia is an American jazz pianist and music historian. He has written books on the Mississippi Delta blues, on jazz standards and on West Coast jazz.

All books by this author: Ted Gioia

Terms from the book

  • Davis
  • improvisation
  • Armstrong
  • Fusion
  • Oliver
  • Cornet: A brass instrument like a trumpet, but shorter and with a softer sound. The lead instrument of the early jazz bands.
  • Bolden: Buddy Bolden (1877–1931), a cornetist from New Orleans. He is seen as the first star of jazz, but not a single recording of his playing survives.
  • Call and response: A device that came from African music: one voice or instrument states a phrase, and the others answer it.
  • Polyrhythm: Several different rhythms sounding at once, layered on top of each other.
  • Congo: Congo Square in New Orleans. In the nineteenth century, enslaved Africans gathered there on Sundays to dance and play drums.
  • Blues: A song form of African Americans in the American South, with a short repeating shape and special "sad" notes. One of the main foundations of jazz.
  • Ragtime: Piano music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, written out in notes, with a jaunty striding left hand and shifted accents in the right.
  • Syncopation: Moving the stress in music onto a weak, unexpected beat. Syncopation makes music feel like it "bounces".
  • Creole: Here: a descendant of the mixed French and African families of Louisiana. Many of them had musical training and read music.
  • Solo: A passage in which one musician plays the lead part while the others accompany.
  • Scat: Jazz singing without words, in nonsense syllables, with the voice imitating an instrument.
  • Harlem: A neighborhood of New York City, in the 1920s the center of African American culture and jazz.
  • Stride: A Harlem style of piano playing: the left hand leaps between a low bass note and a chord in the middle of the keyboard.
  • Chord: Several notes sounding at once. A change of chords sets the harmony, the "color" under a melody.
  • Big band: A large jazz orchestra of ten to twenty musicians, split into sections of trumpets, trombones, saxophones and a rhythm section.
  • Arrangement: A plan written out in advance of who in the band plays what, and when.
  • Henderson: Fletcher Henderson (1897–1952), a New York bandleader and arranger, one of the creators of the big band sound.
  • Goodman: Benny Goodman (1909–1986), clarinetist and bandleader, known as the "King of Swing".
  • Swing: The springy, rocking pulse of jazz. Also the name of the era of dance big bands in the 1930s and early 1940s.
  • Basie: Count Basie (1904–1984), pianist and bandleader from Kansas City.
  • Riff: A short musical phrase repeated many times in a row.
  • Ellington: Duke Ellington (1899–1974), pianist, composer and bandleader, the author of hundreds of pieces.
  • Gonsalves: Paul Gonsalves (1920–1974), tenor saxophonist in Ellington's orchestra.
  • Minton's: Minton's Playhouse, a Harlem club where young musicians gathered after their regular jobs in the early 1940s to try new things.
  • Monk: Thelonious Monk (1917–1982), pianist and composer with an instantly recognizable, angular way of playing.
  • Gillespie: Dizzy Gillespie (1917–1993), trumpeter, one of the creators of bebop.
  • Parker: Charlie Parker (1920–1955), alto saxophonist from Kansas City, one of the creators of bebop.
  • Bebop: A jazz style of the 1940s: very fast tempos, complex chords and virtuoso solos. Music for listening, not for dancing.
  • Cool jazz: The "cool" jazz of the late 1940s and 1950s: a soft sound, restrained solos, calm tempos.
  • Hard bop: A 1950s style: driving jazz that brought the blues and the feel of church songs back into the music.
  • Blakey: Art Blakey (1919–1990), drummer, leader of the Jazz Messengers, one of the central figures of hard bop.
  • Silver: Horace Silver (1928–2014), pianist and composer, one of the creators of hard bop.
  • Modal jazz: Jazz in which players do not improvise over fast chord changes but stay for a long time on one set of notes, a mode.
  • Coltrane: John Coltrane (1926–1967), tenor saxophonist and composer, one of the most influential musicians of the second half of the century.
  • Coleman: Ornette Coleman (1930–2015), alto saxophonist with whom the story of free jazz usually begins.
  • Free jazz: The open, free jazz of the late 1950s and 1960s, in which musicians give up set chords and form.
  • Marsalis: Wynton Marsalis (born 1961), trumpeter from New Orleans, a champion of the jazz tradition and head of the jazz program at Lincoln Center in New York.

All terms

Similar books