I. Jazz: a Historical Perspective II. Duke Ellington III. Charles Mingus

I. Jazz: A Historical Perspective II. Duke Ellington III. Charles Mingus GUNTHER SCHULLER THE TANNER LECTURES ON HUMAN VALUES Delivered at Cambridge University February 5-7, 1996 GUNTHER SCHULLER has developed a musical career that ranges from composing and conducting to his extensive work as an educator, Jazz historian, administrator, music publisher, record producer, and author. By age seventeen he was principal French horn with the Cincinnati Sym- phony, and later held the same position with the Metro- politan Opera Orchestra. He gave up performing to de- vote himself primarily to composition, although he still conducts around the world. He has taught at the Man- hattan School of Music, Yale University, and at the New England Conservatory of Music, Boston, where he was president for ten years. He has also been artistic director for the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood and for the Festival at Sandpoint, Idaho. He has been awarded the Pul- itzer Prize and two Guggenheim Fellowships, and in 1991 he received a MacArthur Fellowship. He has written dozens of essays and four books, including Early Jazz (1986), The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945 (1989), and The Compleat Conductor (1997), and his collaborative album Rush Hour was selected as Downbeat Magazine’s Record of the Year for 1995. I. JAZZ: A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE It must be self-evident to everyone in this room that one cannot deal in any significant detail with the history of jazz in a one-hour lecture. Such a task could take several days, not hours; and there- fore I would like to clarify that the title of this talk, “Jazz: A His- torical Perspective,” with the emphasis on the final word, signifies a look at jazz history from a very general perspective and painted with a very large and broad brush -but aided and abetted by a few specially selected musical illustrations and personal points of view. Since jazz is a musical language and since music is an aural art, it would be the happiest of options if we could now embark on a three-day listening marathon, with me acting as a kind of super disc jockey, presenting for your pleasure the great classics of jazz, past and present, In that connection, I trust that you can all attend the listening session Professor Malcolm Longair has so kindly arranged on Wednesday afternoon. It might just be the most rewarding of all the planned Tanner events, as -I suspect -the discussant session earlier that day will also be. Now to the subject at hand! The beginnings of jazz lie in obscurity somewhere in the past, say, about a hundred years ago, or perhaps somewhat later, one’s dating depending on what one wants to call— properly— jazz, as a clearly definable musical style or language. Historians have, of course, used a certain day in early 1917 as the beginnings of jazz, when a group calling themselves the Original Dixieland Jass Band-mostly spelled jass in those days-made a series of recordings in New York. Whether those recordings really represent jazz, or, at least, jazz at its purest and best, is highly debatable. But some form of jazz music making was taking place long before that chance recording event in various parts of the United States, no- 206 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values tably in New Orleans and the surrounding deep South, but also in the Midwest, around St. Louis and Kansas City, and very probably even in the far West, in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco. Several early tributaries to the eventual mainstream of jazz, such as the blues or ragtime or various kinds of popular dance musics, were, we know, practiced in many of these regions as early as the 1880s and 1890s. When all of this rich musical bouillabaisse coa- lesced into a more-or-less distinctive style and musical expression is shrouded in the past, and we shall probably never be able to date the actual beginnings of jazz in the precise way that we can now, for example, date the discovery of prehuman or animal skeletons millions of years ago, or the invention of the telephone, or the first visit to the South Pole. An art form does not lend itself to that kind of precise dating and defining. The origins of jazz are a little easier to deal with, at least in relatively broad terms. There is little argument that the essential elements of jazz-those elements that make jazz jazz and separate it linguistically, stylistically, from any other forms of music-making — are of African, specifically West African, origin. Those elements are, above all, three primary ones: (1) a certain form of syncopation, rarely if ever heard in European music before, (2) that speci- fic rhythmic pulse, which in jazz is called swing, and (3) the con- cept of improvisatory music making. However, those African elements, brought to America by the slaves, were fused in jazz with distinctly European elements, such as the European classical har- monic language (as it had developed into a relatively chromatic language around the turn of the century) and, of course, also a basically European instrumentarium. Jazz is essentially an ensemble music, although admittedly it has, in its long evolution, also embraced the “solo,” as both a composed element and an improvised one. Certainly in its early stages it was almost entirely an ensemble music, best exemplified by the great collective ensemble playing of the so-called New Orleans style, as epitomized by, let’s say, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band [SCHULLER] Jazz: A Historical Perspective 207 [brief excerpt from “Dippermouth Blues”]. I would add that it was almost inevitable, given its primary West African sources, that jazz be an ensemble music, since West African tribal, ritual, and dance musics are also all performed in collective ensembles. Now, one of the immediate historical forerunners of jazz was ragtime, despite its pianistic origins soon to develop also into an ensemble music, involving a great deal of syncopation and a good deal -if played right-of swing. But ragtime was a composed, written- down, notated music -not improvised -to be played and performed more or less in a particular predefined way, very much in the same sense that classical music was defined and to be performed as notated by the composer. Other tributary sources, such as the white European-based dance and popular musics of the late nineteenth century and the light semiclassical fare that flourished in America, were a mixture of composition and improvisation, mostly composed, notated, published, but often played in a semi- memorized loosely and spontaneously re-created manner that one cannot quite call improvisation, but at the same time quite removed from the strictures and performance practices of “serious” classical music. But the blues, the other important predecessor of jazz, was primarily an improvised, handed-down (not written-down) kind of music. It was sung and played by ordinary folks, not necessarily trained or professional musicians, existing in an infinite, spontaneously created plethora of forms and personal interpretations. One can thus see that, in its various component source influ- ences, jazz was from the outset a musical hybrid. On both its Afri- can and European sides, it was the result of an unpremeditated, spontaneous coming-together of musical expressions and styles that ranged, in greatly varying degrees, from fixed, notated to loosely, spontaneously semi-improvised forms. I say “semi-improvised” -and here I come to perhaps the first possibly controversial point of view in my talk -because, although jazz historians and jazz musicians have long perpetuated, either 208 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values implicitly or explicitly, the notion that jazz always was an “improvised music,” a spontaneously, instantaneously created, off-the-cuff kind of music, the facts are that, at least in the first three or four decades of jazz, the music was not improvised, certainly not in the pure and simple sense of that term. I say “at least in the first three or four decades of jazz,” because it is true that eventually jazz -jazz musicians -did learn to improvise, to create truly spontaneously. Indeed, today everybody in jazz worth even talking about im- provises, can improvise, feels he or she must be able to improvise. How well, how creatively, is perhaps another matter. But if we could casually claim in the past that improvisation “is the heart and soul of jazz,” then that is only technically accurate and true in recent decades, say, since the 1940s and 1950s, and a rather inaccu- rate and imprecise claim as regards earlier jazz forms. For the fact is -and this is now easily confirmed by the issu- ance of hundreds of second and third takes of recorded pieces in the 1920s and 1930s as well as by the existence of archival manu- script evidence of countless written-out “solos,” formerly thought to have been “improvised” -that the full flowering of truly spontaneous jazz improvisation did not, could not, occur until the tech- nical virtuosic abilities of the players had reached a certain level of total command. Before that players prepared their “solos” -in a great variety of ways: everything from writing out to memorization and varying degrees of mental, musical, practical preparation. Some “soloists” always played previously premeditated “solos,” memorized -but, let’s say, in the case of the great Ellington trom- bonist, Lawrence Brown, so magically rendered, every time, that they sounded as if they were spontaneously created that moment. In the archives of the Duke Ellington collection at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington there are dozens of “solos” written in Duke Ellington’s hand, which were then rendered by a Johnny Hodges or Harry Carney or Cootie Williams.

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