Jazz began to leave New Orleans in the years of the Great Migration, perhaps the largest movement of people in the history of the United States. It started in the late nineteenth century, when former slaves began to drift away from their agricultural labors toward cities like New Orleans, but with the coming of World War I the movement became a torrent, depositing African Ameri-cans further northward in new ghettos in Chicago and New York.
It’s not hard to understand why black Americans would want to leave the South. Very few owned land. Under the system of sharecropping, black
Robert S. Abbott founded the infl uential Chicago Defender in 1905, and helped fuel the
“Great Migration” of Southern blacks to the North.
GRANGER COLLECTION
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FREDDIE KEPPARD ■ 89
farmers would work a plot of land, relying on the white landowners for plow, seed, housing, and provisions. At year’s end, the two sides would “share” the proceeds. In reality, whites manipulated the accounting to leave black families permanently in debt. Meanwhile, blacks were continually reminded of their second-class status. Th ey were forced to use segregated transportation, wait-ing rooms, water fountains, lavatories, doorways, stairways, and theaters, as well as schools, housing, and every other aspect of life. Politically powerless, they were subject to white laws. Outside the law, the iniquity extended to murder.
We can never know exactly how many blacks were beaten, tortured, and killed in the years between Reconstruction and World War II, but more than 3,400 lynchings are documented, and thousands of other African Americans simply disappeared. No one was arrested for these crimes, despite photo-graphic evidence of participants (including postcards made as souvenirs). Th e federal government refused to intervene with legislation. Th e nation’s fi rst anti-lynch activist, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, herself the daughter of slaves, esti-mated in 1900 that as many as 10,000 blacks had been murdered in the latter part of the nineteenth century alone.
Th e issue was decided by economics. With the United States’ entrance into World War I in 1917, coming on the heels of Henry Ford’s automobile assembly line, the labor market in the Northern industrial cities exploded.
Th e war snatched millions of men away from the workforce, and put a hold on immigration. Th e manpower shortage was so severe that railroads paid fares to encourage blacks to move. Newspapers like the black-owned Chicago Defender encouraged Southerners to leave, and even listed contact numbers of people in churches and other organizations who would provide fi nancial help.
Agricultural interests in the South tried to stop the exodus through intimida-tion and such tactics as delaying travelers until their trains left or disregarding prepaid tickets. But they could not combat the lure of decent wages and a more humane way of life.
■ FREDDIE KEPPARD (1890–1933)
Foremost among pioneers seeking to escape the South were en-tertainers—in black minstrel troupes, tent shows, bands, and the formal tours of vaudeville. One of the most important of the New Orleans musicians to travel widely was the cornet player Freddie Keppard.
A hard-drinking, overweight, and temperametal man, Keppard was the star attraction of the Creole Jazz Band, a New Orleans band that played in vaudeville theaters in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and places in-between—all before 1917. Keppard’s historical importance thus lies in his impact in bringing New Orleans jazz to the rest of the country. By the time he fi nally made some record-ings in the 1920s, he had apparently lost much of his technique; but those who heard him in his prime hailed him as the dominant fi gure to follow Buddy Bolden. Sidney Bechet said, “He played practically the same way as Buddy Bolden, but he played, he really played!”
Keppard was said to play with a handkerchief over his hand so other musicians couldn’t see his fi ngering, and refused a historic
An inscribed 1913 portrait of trumpet player Freddie Kep-pard, one of the fi rst musicians to take a New Orleans ensemble to Chicago and Los Angeles.
Chicago Defender
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90 ■ CHAPTER 4 NEW ORLEANS
opportunity to record in 1916: some say he didn’t want to make his music available for others to steal, others say he didn’t like the money. Consequently, the distinction of making the fi rst jazz records went to a white New Orleans group: the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.
■ ORIGINAL DIXIELAND JAZZ BAND
Spell it Jass, Jas, Jaz or Jazz—nothing can spoil a Jass band. Some say the Jass band originated in Chicago. Chicago says it comes from San Francisco—San Francisco being away off across the continent. Anyway a Jass band is the newest thing in the cabarets, adding greatly to the hilarity thereof.
Reading this excerpt from the Victor Talking Machine Company’s pub-licity sheet for the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB), we may surmise that “jazz”—at the dawn of the “Jazz Age”—was often misspelled, that many people did not know the location of San Francisco, and that no one had heard about New Orleans, though all fi ve members of the ODJB were natives of that city. Th e reason for the company’s interest was that the band had come to New York to play at Reisenweber’s Restaurant in January 1917, causing a sensation. It was the talk of the town, and the record industry wanted some of the action.
Columbia Records was fi rst off the bench, but required the band to record a test of two pop songs, which the label then rejected as cacophony and refused to release. Within weeks, Victor signed the band and produced a double-sided blockbuster: “Livery Stable Blues” / “Dixie Jass Band One-Step.” Co-lumbia then rushed its “test” into stores, and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. To most listeners, the ODJB had no precedent. Many ragtime records had preceded those of the ODJB (from as far back as 1897), and elements of jazz can be detected in records made between 1914 and 1916 by such Af-rican AmeAf-rican performers as comic monologist Bert Williams, bandleader James Reese Europe, and clarinetist Wilbur Sweatman, as well as the white
“Mammy singer” Al Jolson. But those elements—robust rhythms or embel-lishments beyond written ragtime—merely hint at the real thing. Th e ODJB was the real thing, a musical eruption and something genuinely new to the market.
So great was the band’s initial popular-ity that it established the word “jazz” as part of the international vocabulary—a term, like
“okay,” that requires no translation anywhere in the world. Some older musicians would continue to call their music ragtime or New Orleans music, but the die had been cast.
Within fi ve years, dozens of bands had ap-propriated the word. (Originally, it was “jass,”
but the spelling was changed after vandals repeatedly crossed out the j on billboards and posters.) Hotels throughout Europe began to hire what they called jazz bands (basically any kind of dance ensemble that had drums and at least one reed instrument).
Th e 1920s would always be remembered as the Jazz Age.
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band popularized jazz (word and music) in Chicago and New York, and made the fi rst jazz recording in 1917: Henry Ragas, Larry Shields, Eddie Edwards, Nick LaRocca, and Tony Sbarbaro.
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ORIGINAL DIXIELAND JAZZ BAND ■ 91
Origins
A vital aspect of New Orleans at the turn of the century was that many neighborhoods were integrated. White musicians were attracted to ragtime and to jazz, although they don’t seem to have had much infl uence on the initial progress of New Orleans jazz. Th ere were important white ragtime players, songwriters, and teachers who likely infl uenced black jazz musicians in terms of repertory, harmony, and instrumental technique, but they don’t fi gure in written or oral accounts of the evolution of jazz. Th e widely imitated fi ve-piece instrumentation of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, for example, originated with Freddie Keppard.
Yet the white New Orleans jazz tradition is signifi cant in its own right.
Th e commonly accepted father of white jazz was a parade drummer named George “Papa Jack” Laine, who led the Reliance Band in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unlike Bolden, who was four years his junior, Papa Jack discouraged improvisation; nevertheless, he trained many young men who took jazz north, including trombonists Tom Brown (who brought the fi rst white jazz band to Chicago in 1915) and George Brunies (who made his name with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, an important and infl uential white band), as well as most members of the ODJB. By the time the ODJB began to play in New York, its personnel consisted of cornetist Nick LaRocca, trombonist Eddie Edwards, clarinetist Larry Shields, pianist Henry Ragas, and drummer Tony Sbarbaro.