Jazz is 104 Years Old!
Stated this starkly, this banner headline still seems shocking. The music that defined the ‘Roaring 20s’ is a centenarian, ffs.
I’m delving way back into the early days of the music, and I still find it strange that jazz’s generally accepted birthday, that of the initial recordings of the (white) Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB) in February 1917, was so little celebrated, at least as far as I can ascertain. The next significant recordings followed in August 1922, again by white pretenders, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. Of course, it is now accepted that the ‘original’ title is manifestly absurd, as daft as the notion that Paul Whiteman (oh the irony of his name!) was the ‘King of Jazz’. But still, the very idea of these recordings being 100+ years old!!
The prompt for this blog is actually my listening to the proper fountainhead of the music, Louis Armstrong’s tracks made with his Hot Five and Hot Seven, from 1925-1928. I was talking to a friend today about the classic anti-wat film, All Quiet on the Western Front, made only twelve years after the end of the First World War, and still probably at the top, or at the least near it, of the best war films ever made. Its sheer longevity is as impressive an achievement as Armstrong’s. Similarly, the late 20s recordings of the pre-Great Depression acoustic Delta Blues musicians, such as Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Willie Johnson, musicians is a equally miraculous archival triumph. (The recent film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom demonstrates the conditions that these sort of recordings were made under, only softened by the glow of celluloid retrospection.) The re-mastering work of John R. T. Davies for JSP Records, with Armstrong’s groups, to give just one example, is a genuine service to the world community. It is redundant to say so, but Armstrong’s (and Davies’s) genius, makes this music shine through after nearly a century. A cursory listen to much of Charley Patten’s scratched and decayed (and not in an ironic, hauntological way!) records demonstrated how lucky we are to have Satchmo’s music rendered up in such a pristine fashion.
I guess that this is a roundabout way of delineating my aspirations to preserve the work of the early UK free improvisers. (Their work being now a half-century old.) Some early New Orleans players were suspicious of the recording medium, fearing that it might lead to their styles being half-inched (as they surely were by white imitators/bowdlerisers), one result of this nay-saying being that the ODJB had the honour of making the very first recognised jazz recordings. For very different reasons, free improvisers were also suspicious of making permanent their transient interactions (Eric Dolphy’s statement about music’s impermanence loomed large), but the formation of Incus Records in 1970 offered an eventual refutation of this notion, by a couple of the music’s most rigorous thinkers, Derek Bailey and Evan Parker. So, the work of preservation continues, and I aspire to be a part of this ongoing process.