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JAZZ HISTORY TIMELINE
The Jazzistry story begins some four hundred years ago
when the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch competed
for control of the Atlantic slave trade. It's estimated that by
1860, more than 10 million Africans had been captured and transported
to the Americas. This human atrocity ravaged populations primarily
in regions we now call Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria. They were
transported mostly to the Caribbean Islands and Spanish colonies
in Central and South America. Only an estimated 6 percent of these
victims of slavery were traded in British North America. Far from
homogeneous, their diverse linguistic, ethnic, and religious origins
were all reflected in their musical traditions.
By 1750, enslaved Africans constituted 20 percent of the
population in British North America, almost 240,000 people. The
majority lived in the Southern colonies though slavery also existed
in Northern colonies. At the same time, particularly in Maryland,
a small population of free blacks did exist.
Because England's industrial revolution was funded by profits
from the British slave trade and from colonial America's slave-produced
sugar and tobacco crops, British slave ships were bringing as
great a number as 50,000 enslaved Africans to the New World each
year by the 1790's.
Slavery took a slightly different cultural turn in the French-dominated
city of New Orleans, founded in 1718. Here free colored people
called Creoles co-existed with whites and slaves. Creoles were
the racially mixed offspring of French slave masters and became
free when, according to custom, French slave owners would free
their slaves immediately prior to their own death. With freedom,
Creoles were able to achieve a level of education, opportunity
and wealth that approximated the status and rights of white people.
However, when the Spanish took over New Orleans in 1764, Creoles
lost their social and economic status, a change that forced them
to look for work. Many became traveling musicians, a phenomenon
that would evolve into the Southern minstrel show. These Creole
musicians and their descendants became the primary inventors of
early jazz.
At the same time, Connecticut and Rhode Island were the first
northern colonies to initiate the idea of gradual emancipation
and in 1774, the first laws prohibiting slavery were passed.
Eleven million Africans had been forcibly taken from their
homelands and an estimated 600,000 had been sold into slavery in
North America by 1807, when the British abolished their slave trade.
In fact, the period from 1798 to1808 was the largest slave importation
into the United States, totaling about 200,000. Even though United
States citizens were prohibited from exporting slaves, the slave
trade continued within the country.
The origin of the term "Jim Crow" comes from a minstrel
show routine called "Jump Jim Crow" ridiculing black
people and popularized in the 1830's. These deeply rooted attitudes
persisted long after the Civil War. Jim Crow segregation and discrimination
policies throughout the South severely restricted the lives and
freedoms of African Americans and caused many to flee the South.
Immediately after the Civil War, in 1867, black men cast ballots
for the first time. The passage of the 15th Amendment, granted
all rights of citizenship to men born in the US (except American
Indians) and to men naturalized. Two hundred sixty five black
men (107 were born slaves, 40 served in the Union Army) were elected
as delegates to ten state conventions.
In the late 1860's, Northern religious societies founded dozens
of black colleges and schools across the South, including Fisk
University in Tennessee, with the purpose of educating black students
to become teachers. The 1871 concert tour of The Jubilee Singers
of Fisk University marks an historic threshold because the work
songs and spirituals sung in this choir's repertoire provided
white audiences with their very first exposure to the lives and
music of black Americans.
Meanwhile, in the 1890's, the earliest forms of jazz began to
emerge in New Orleans, a multi-racial and multi-cultural French-ruled
city with a social order that demanded music and revelry. Creole
musicians were combining the elements of West African work songs,
slave spirituals, minstrel and vaudeville shows, and rural blues
expression with the European brass band instruments and harmonies.
This newly born hybrid music filled the streets of New Orleans
on every occasion from parades to funeral marches.
The magical quality of ragtime's syncopated rhythm captured
the hearts of millions of Americans. It distinguished the new sounds
of early jazz, spreading the music up and down the Mississippi River
on the riverboats, which provided a boon to the mobility of America's
population. Besides the river boat, it was sale of sheet music that
helped the spread of ragtime. Sheet music was sold to millions of
Americans (mostly women) who wanted to play it on their pianos in
their homes.
Ragtime and New Orleans jazz (more frequently known as "Dixieland
Jazz") were popularized nationwide in the early decades of
the twentieth century, the first forms of black music to cross
over into white America. Pioneers like Scott Joplin- "The
King of Ragtime", Jelly Roll Morton, Ma Rainey and W.C. Handy-"Father
of the Blues", paved a road on which many others after them
would travel.
Between 1910 and 1940, 1,750,000 black people left the South
as part of the Great Migration, They were seeking better lives
in northern industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland,
Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York. Despite the 13th, 14th
and 15th Amendments, the United States government had abandoned
Southern black people to an apartheid South of white supremacy
marked by railroad and streetcar segregation, segregated justice,
lynching and riots.
America's racially segregated society was reflected in its segregated
military. When the United States entered World War I in 1917,
Colonel Hayward was a white officer who persuaded the army to
recruit large numbers of black troops. He had been greatly impressed
by the bravery of the black soldiers he had commanded in the Spanish
American War. Hayward first recruited a widely acclaimed orchestra
leader from Harlem, James Reese Europe, as an officer and regimental
bandleader. Europe then recruited expert African American and
Caribbean musicians for his band, and wrote jazz arrangements
of the music. Because of Lieutenant Europe's band, over 370,000
black men enlisted in the Jim Crow army and navy.
The black soldiers of Jim Europe's 369th Regiment experienced
vicious racism during their basic training in South Carolina,
from both local people and white soldiers. To avoid a brewing
racial confrontation, the army shipped the "369th" to
the action in Europe, to become the first American soldiers to
reach war-torn France. They fought bravely and valiantly, saw
200 days of continuous trench warfare. Known as the "Harlem
Hellfighters," the fame of the 369th soared when two members
of the regiment were awarded France's highest military medal for
bravery, the Croix de Guerre. When they weren't in battle, the
369th played its sensational new music and won the hearts of the
French everywhere they went. It was the first jazz heard in Europe.
As a remarkable military battalion combined with their marching
band fame, they became the toast of Europe. Immediately after
the war, the 369th was also celebrated at home in the victory
parades of many American cities, playing their jazz music.
This decade is marked by the newly invented phonograph
and radio that became the rage in homes across America. For the
first time, Southern blues singers whose techniques and songs were
rooted in African American oral and musical traditions, were recorded
and then, broadcast on national radio. The title "Empress of
the Blues" was a nickname bestowed on Bessie Smith, the most
popular singer in America in this decade. Tragically, Bessie Smith
died in 1937, from injuries received in a car accident.
In 1920, The Volstead Act prohibited the sale of alcohol. However,
liquor flowed freely in Harlem's fashionable night spots, causing
blacks and whites to flock to Harlem's clubs where they heard
the legendary bands like bandleaders, Cab Calloway and Edward
"Duke" Ellington. In addition to black entertainers,
Harlem attracted black poets, painters, writers and intellectuals,
forging an unprecedented and prolific creative movement called
the Harlem Renaissance that spanned two decades, the fruits of
which have altered American arts and cultural traditions forever.
After the stock market crash of 1929, the Great Depression
created an era of severe economic suffering. At the same time, the
hardship of the times enabled the cultural power of African Americans
to drive a small wedge into the wall of racism separating whites
from blacks. It was the optimistic music of all black Big Bands
that boosted the morale of white America and transformed American
popular culture forever. Swing's popularity launched the careers
of jazz musicians, both black and white. Benny Goodman, a white
clarinetist and bandleader, was the first to form a racially integrated
band-a quartet with black jazz musicians Lionel Hampton, Charlie
Christian and Teddy Wilson and white drummer Gene Krupa -to perform
before a rapt audience at Carnegie Hall in 1938. This was a decade
prior to the integration of major league baseball with Jackie Robinson.
The economics and rationing of World War II caused the
recording industry to cease, but the jazz music transmitted across
radio waves was essential to uplifting the American spirit both
at home and overseas. During this time, many black jazz musicians
traveled around the world, gaining exposure to new ethnic and cultural
music traditions, adding to their notion of music of the day more
complexity and an impetus to push for change.
Bebop was such a musical revolution in the early '40s, fathered
by young black jazz musicians in New York City who were tired
of the predictability of Swing and wanted more freedom than white
Big Band audiences would allow. Most responsible for this radical
movement were Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk,
Bud Powell, Kenny Clarke, Max Roach and Ray Brown. In addition
to a new music full of complex rhythms, harmonies and improvisation,
Beboppers created their own slang, attire and life style. Despite
white America's initial resistance to Bebop, it flourished in
small clubs, in late night jam sessions, and endured for two generations
to become the principal musical language of jazz musicians worldwide.
Then, in 1948, the record industry gave birth to the revolutionary
long playing records, known as LPs!
America, post-World War II, was launched on an upward
economic spiral that paralleled the growth of jazz in many ways.
The Beat Generation turned jazz into a language of social and political
protest. East Coast Hard Bop reconnected jazz with the blues. West
Coast Jazz turned mellow. The Newport Jazz Festival was born in
1954, an idea that came from Europe and would spawn American jazz
festivals for years to come. And finally, rock and roll arrived--the
child of boogie-woogie, rhythm and blues, and country music--to
infatuate America's youth and further shape the popular music of
Europe.
As the Civil Rights Movement and resistance to the Vietnam
War intensified, jazz music truly reflected the mood of America'
political climate. Soul jazz became the music of the Black Power
movement. Free jazz invented a musical vocabulary for revolutionary
expression, and Avant Garde jazz trenched up the old to use with
the new, combining contemporary instrumental formulas with the sounds
of early jazz. Finally, a technological revolution produced the
electronic instruments and rock rhythms that steered jazz toward
Fusion, which was the predecessor to Rap that would emerge in the
'70s.
In 1971, the death of Louis Armstrong was mourned worldwide,
and he was lauded as the most beloved giant of jazz. Bebop made
a comeback, as young musicians looked back and at the same time
forward with the invention of the compact disc in 1983.
Jazz became a universal idiom in the 80's, and continues to develop
today, often as the vanguard, in conservatories, schools, clubs,
concert halls, and recording studios. As always, the unique language
of jazz melds histories, traditions, improvisation and experimentation
in order to express the most fundamental conditions of the human
experience. It is an art form treasured around the world as one
of America's greatest legacies and gifts!
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