The Prehistory of Jazz Notes

Congo Square and the Preservation of African Ritual\n\n* Congo Square: A New Orleans site (now Louis Armstrong Park) where slaves performed African dances and music, documented as early as 1819 by Benjamin Latrobe.\n* Cultural Resistance: Ned Sublette characterizes these performances as acts of memory and resistance against the erasure of African culture in the United States.\n* Syncretism: The blending of African and Western cultural elements, such as the eradication of the performer-audience division and the congruence of song and dance.\n* Ring Shout: A circular, counterclockwise ritual ceremony pervasive in Africa and carried over to the New World; scholars like Samuel Floyd suggest it evolved into the \"Second Line\" of jazz funerals.\n* Collective Memory: Oral histories of Congo Square, shared by figures like Sidney Bechet, shaped the self-image of early jazz performers like Buddy Bolden.\n\n# Cultural Syncretism and the Latin Influence\n\n* Moorish Legacy: The North African conquest of the Iberian peninsula (8th century) left a cultural impact that Benjamin Gibbon and others argue created a lingering affinity between African and Latin cultures.\n* The Spanish Tinge: Jelly Roll Morton famously asserted that jazz requires \"tinges of Spanish\" for proper seasoning, referencing New Orleans' complex history under French and Spanish rule.\n* Latin-Catholic Tolerance: Unlike English-Protestant colonies that banned drums (e.g., South Carolina after the 1739 Stono Rebellion), the New Orleans environment fostered unorthodox hybrids and permitted slave gatherings.\n* Early Compositional Links: Composers like Basile Barès and Louis Moreau Gottschalk (Bamboula) utilized Caribbean rhythms like the habanera long before the emergence of jazz.\n\n# African Performance Traditions and Musical Evolution\n\n* Work Songs: Functional music used to coordinate labor (field hollers, prison songs) that preserved African traditions like rhythmic discipline and social integration.\n* Call-and-Response: A fundamental African form that transcends the artist-audience separation, appearing later in work songs, blues, and jazz.\n* Instrumental Innovation: Slaves fashioned instruments from items like cow's jaws, hollowed tree trunks, and gourds, mirroring the African practice of extracting music from daily objects.\n* Polyrhythms: The layering of different time signatures and rhythmic patterns, described by Henry Edward Krehbiel in 1893 as a complex exchange of syncopations more advanced than Western polyphony.\n\n# The Blues Tradition: From Delta Roots to Classic Divas\n\n* Catharsis and Structure: The blues provided an individual statement of pain and mastery; characterized by a 12-bar form (tonic, dominant, subdominant chords) and a three-line lyric stanza (AAB).\n* Blue Notes: The use of \"bent\" notes, specifically at the third, fifth, and seventh intervals, creating tonal ambiguity between major and minor scales.\n* Country Blues: Rural, male-dominated tradition featuring solo voice and guitar (e.g., Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, and Robert Johnson).\n* Robert Johnson: (1911–1938) A pivotal figure who codified Delta blues techniques like turnarounds and boogie patterns, influencing modern popular music.\n* Classic Blues: A commercial, urban variant featuring female vocalists fronting bands (e.g., Mamie Smith's 1920 \"Crazy Blues\").\n* Key Figures: Gertrude \"Ma\" Rainey (the \"Mother of the Blues\") and Bessie Smith (the \"Empress of the Blues\"), who merged blues with jazz and mass entertainment.\n\n# Ragtime and the Compositions of Scott Joplin\n\n* Ragtime Form: A structured four-theme form, typically AABBACCDD, with each theme comprising 16 bars and a modulation for the C section.\n* The Missouri Centers: Sedalia and St. Louis served as hubs for ragtime composers including Scott Joplin, James Scott, and Tom Turpin.\n* Scott Joplin: (1868–1917) The foremost figure of the genre; his \"Maple Leaf Rag\" (1899) was the first piece of sheet music to sell one million copies.\n* Artistic Ambition: Joplin sought to elevate ragtime to serious art, composing orchestrations like the opera Treemonisha and the ballet The Ragtime Dance.\n* Keyboard Style: Characterized by a steady \"striding\" bass in the left hand and syncopated melodies in the right; Joplin cautioned players never to play ragtime fast.