The record changer (Jan-Dec 1944)

The Record Changer, August 1944 QueJt/chJ and flftitoete . . . A Column Conducted By ERNEST BORNEMAN. All questions should be addressed to ERNEST BORNEMAN, National Film Board, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. I Readers Clark, Smith and Wittwer are surprised at my choice of boogie pianists (Ammons or Johnson) for the big band we discussed last month in the Q & A Column and the month before in the ANTHROPOLOGIST Column. The answer should be fairly obvious to all who agreed with the argument suggested in the May issue (Page 36, last paragraph). The piano was a latecomer to the jazz band. Cornet, trombone and clarinet had a headstart of nearly half a century for the simple reason that the first jazz bands evolved right out of the itinerant brass bands of New Orleans which played for parades, funerals and other open-air functions which excluded the use of an instrument as heavy and cumbersome as the piano. These Negro brass bands became the unwitting creators of ragtime by reverting to the traditional Africanism of shifting musical accents from strong to weak beats. Thus ragtime was born out of a simple inversion of march time, and when the ragtime bands graduated to the respectability of a fixed domicile in a darrce hall or night club, they naturally began to employ the piano as a ragtime instrument with a left-hand style which marked the off-beats as heavily as the brass bands marked the strong beats of march time. But while orchestral jazz developed from the jerky syncopation and heavy off-beat accents of ragtime to the easy swing of the blues, the band piano still lagged behind by half a century and kept using the old oom-pah bass which clashed more and more noticeably with the increasingly complex patterns of treble variations. Compare such right-hand virtuosos as Tatum and Wilson with such old-timers as Jelly Roll Morton and James P. John son and you will notice that all that has changed is the right hand: the left still plays ragtime. But while the piano lagged behind the other instruments as an orchestral unit, it had already developed into full maturity as a solo instrument — parallel and contemporaneous to the Bolden tradition of orchestral blues, the Basin Street Professors had developed a solo blues style which was as far ahead of St. Louis ragtime as Bolden was ahead of Robichaux. When Basin Street shut down in 1917 and the Professors moved up north to Memphis, East St. Louis and Chicago, the piano blues moved with them and developed into the party piano and boogie tradition. Where ragtime clung to heavy lefthand accents, the party pianists employed a steady rolling bass; where ragtime used jerky chords, the boogie pianists used an easily flowing counterpoint; where ragtime fell back on marches, two-steps and music hall tunes for material, the party pianists clung to the proper jazz tradition of the twelvebar blues. Thus, by the time the band pianists were "still deep in the nineteenth century, the solo pianists had already found a mature instrumental style. In conclusion: Jazz will not grow up until the last remnants of ragtime will have been stripped from piano technique. It will not become a fully integrated orchestral style until the whole orchestra assimilates the lesson of the rolling bass and all the other characteristics of the party piano blues with its four-bar cadence and its subdominant tenth bar. However much one may prefer Hines or Tatum to Ammons or Johnson, no one who has the tradition and the future of jazz at heart should fail to experiment with boogie pianists for orchestral effects. II Mr. J. Cook reminds me — unnecessarily, I hope — that my interpretation of the history of American Negro Music (The Anthropologist Looks At Jazz, April and May, 1944) stresses the "phony racial element" at the expense of "the true social and economic motivation." I trust that the July and August installments of the ANTHROPOLOGIST column will already have destroyed that suspicion as far as the early history of Negro Music is concerned. As for jazz itself, lei me get a few months ahead of the ANTHROPOLOGIST column to give you a quick survey of the economic background of jazz as I see it.