1 Record Progressions: Technology and Its Role In
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1 RECORD PROGRESSIONS: TECHNOLOGY AND ITS ROLE IN THE DEVELOPMENT AND DISSEMINATION OF JAZZ ____________________________________ A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College Ohio University _______________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Science in Communication ______________________________________ by Greg A. Surber November 2009 2 This thesis has been approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of Media Arts and Studies ___________________________________ Dr. Arthur Cromwell Honors Tutorial College, Director of Studies Media Arts and Studies Thesis Advisor ___________________________________ Jeremy Webster Dean, Honors Tutorial College 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page 1 Introduction 5 2 Keeping Time: The Birth of Recorded Jazz and the Infant Industry 13 2.1 No-tation: The Recording as Primary Text 14 2.2 America’s Music Captured: What is this Thing Called Jazz? 16 2.3 Jazz on Record: The Economics of Time and Improvisation 19 2.4 Learning from Mistakes: The Recording as Instructor 21 2.5 Trials and Tribulations: Jazz Arrangement on Record 24 2.6 Swing’s the Thing: Records, Radio and the Great Depression 27 3 Reel Jazz: Tape, LP’s, and the Rise of Independent Labels 32 3.1 Spoils of War: The Introduction of Magnetic Tape 33 3.2 Transcending Limitations: The Practice of Splicing 34 3.3 The Primary Question: Phonography as Art 37 3.4 Microgrooves: The Long Playing Record and the 45 40 3.5 Out of Nowhere: Bebop and Independent Labels 42 3.6 Quantity vs. Quality: The LP Era and the Recording Session 45 4 4 Record Re-imagined: Stereo, Overdubbing, and the Producer 49 4.1 Two Ears, Two Channels: Stereo Recording 51 4.2 Sound on Sound on Sound: Overdubbing 53 4.3 Necessity and Invention: Examples of Jazz Overdubbing 56 4.4 Designing and Constructing Music: Enter the Producer 59 4.5 Miles Away: Jazz Fusion and the Studio as Instrument 61 4.6 Music in the Age of Mechanical (Re-)Production: Assembled Art 63 5 Conclusion 67 Bibliography 70 5 Introduction The relationship that people have with music has been irrevocably changed as it becomes increasingly mediated by technology. For centuries, music passed out of existence as quickly as it entered, unable to be fixed or saved even for a short time. The phonograph revolutionized music, etching grooves into wax cylinders and shellac records, preserving sounds that in a past time would be lost forever. Yet this machine created entire industries, permeated musical forms both old and new, and was one of several agents in the mechanization and reproduction of art throughout the twentieth century, redefining how music was written, distributed, and performed. Music no longer escapes reproduction. From Tuvan throat singing to Swedish disco, Chinese pop to Brazilian psychedelic rock, musical forms, popular and little known, old and new, are almost immediately captured and circulated in an age where recording technologies pervade our world. Indeed, often the first goal of an aspiring musician is to “cut a demo,” to create a recording and increase exposure. Music flows through speakers scattered throughout our public spaces, in locales as disparate as supermarkets and elevators. If we are not satisfied with the music surrounding us, we can put on headphones and plug in to our favorite portable music device. More than one hundred years of recorded sound endlessly replayed, reshaped, and recycled permeates our existence. Writer and theorist Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” offers a framework with which to examine the 6 ever-changing relationship of art to the machines that duplicate it. Though Benjamin’s investigation of technology’s influence on modern art focused primarily on forms such as photography and film, his insights are applicable to recorded sound as well. The phonograph made possible the reproduction of sound, a way to store the voices of our ancestors and provide living future generations the music of past times. The most prescient observation of this shift in art and technology is found early in Benjamin’s work: Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes.1 In Benjamin’s words, “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.”2 Benjamin’s concept of aura as related to art contains three separate but related ideas: first, the particular time and place in which the work of art is located; second, the “unique phenomenon of a distance,” the separation of the art from those who observe it, regardless of its physical proximity; third, the nature of the artwork within the “fabric of tradition.” Because its aura is diminished, the work of art is free to be reproduced beyond the places, occasions, and customs that dictated its existence in the past. Mechanical reproduction, then, leads to two forms of art: those works which lose their aura when reproduced and removed from their traditional time and space such as painting and sculpture, and works 1 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, comp. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 614. 2 Ibid., 616. 7 “designed for reproducibility,” lacking aura from their inception by the very nature of their form.3 Aura is reserved for those works which are valued by their “basis in ritual,” namely the function of serving a “magical” or “religious” purpose, such as the painting of the elk by early man. This painting was meant to function as a spiritual device, a “gift” to supernatural beings rather than an aesthetically pleasing creation. The exhibition value of the prehistoric painting was of little value because the art was, “first and foremost, an instrument of magic.” Throughout history, art became further secularized as its ritual value declined. With mechanical reproduction, the exhibition value becomes paramount as the uniqueness of a work of art disappears with its aura, culminating in media like photography and film. Art’s function then completely changes, no longer based in ritual but in “politics.”4 When the music called jazz is subjected to Benjamin’s analysis, it is difficult to determine whether the music fits into either classification. Before the advent of recording, a musical performance was completely transient, and jazz offered a mystifying experience to the unfamiliar spectator. Syncopated rhythms and improvised melodies composed an event that could never be experienced in the same manner again. The musicians became agents of magic as the ritual value of jazz emanated from its source, obscure and intangible. Yet its exhibition value was paramount, rendering it much unlike the art that preceded the age of mechanical 3 Ibid., 618. 4 Ibid., 619. 8 reproduction. In spite of this difference, jazz is clearly not an art designed for reproducibility, most evident due to one of its central practices: improvisation. As an improvisatory art, jazz must be considered separately from other musical styles captured on the phonograph. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to improvise is to “create and perform spontaneously or without preparation.” In live performance, then, jazz improvisations existed in a specific time and place, but were ephemeral, remaining only in the memories of those who heard it. Recording improvisation, however, fixes it in a form that can be reproduced, putatively, as it sounded when it was performed. An improvisation, then, becomes endlessly repeatable. This seemingly paradoxical statement underlines the nature of jazz as a recorded art, its history and traditions preserved in the records that reproduced its greatest examples for subsequent generations of musicians to carry forward. There is a second definition of improvisation not often raised in the context of music, to “make from whatever is available.” All art develops from what came before it. From the grooves of records, Americans heard an indigenous music influenced by but clearly distinct from the parlor songs, marching bands, and ragtime pieces that preceded it. Jazz sprang from the eclectic musical roots of American life, an African- American art forged from the instruments, styles, and creativity of performers in the post-bellum South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jazz has a unique position in the history of recorded music. European classical forms were recorded and sold as records, but they existed quite independently from the phonograph, created on paper instead of records. Rock music was an art designed 9 for mass distribution by an entrenched music industry, born of the technology that stimulated its creation. Jazz, however, emerged contemporaneously with the phonograph industry and adapted parallel to the advances in the equipment that documented it. America’s musical traditions were in a state of flux, and jazz was another style of American music recorded by a fledgling commercial enterprise looking for a profitable product. The first jazz recording is certainly not the earliest example of the music, but it is the earliest recorded example of the music. Beyond the testimony of people who witnessed them, the details of early jazz performances may be lost to history forever. Besides issues of bias and imperfect memory, musicians, however instrumental they were in its creation, cannot present a comprehensive account of a music that had no clear identity at that time. It was an art shaped by countless musicians in diverse geographical regions. From stories of the mythical performances of New Orleans trumpeter Buddy Bolden to the controversial claim by pianist and bandleader Jelly Roll Morton that he “invented” the music, anecdotes offer only a glimpse of the formative years of jazz.