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JAZZ PERSPECTIVES
A First Look Back - New Orleans Revival
Throughout the 1940's, Swing and BeBop continued to forge
their respective paths toward the future. Almost as a counterpoint to this, a
jazz revival began in earnest, focused mainly on the music of New Orleans from
the early 1900's. As in BeBop, the New Orleans combo was smaller than the Swing
band, but played music more closely related to Swing than Bop. The style once
called Dixieland used a banjo, tuba, drums rhythm section (sometimes including
piano, playing a steady 2 or 4 beat pulse), and a cornet, clarinet, trombone
lead section, which improvised around the melody in a theme and variations
format.
The New Orleans revival took two main forms: the
rediscovery of established artists, and the imitation of arrangements, usually
by young white middle class musicians. Rediscovered artists included Kid Rena,
Kid Ory, and trumpeter Bunk Johnson. A group of writers, researching the first
historical jazz study Jazzmen [Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939], found
Johnson working in a rice field outside New Iberia, Louisiana. Interest in the
elderly gentleman eventually led to a New York opening on September 28, 1945 at
the Stuyvesant Casino in Manhattan's Lower East Side. A small group of writers
loudly proclaimed this to be the last pure jazz band, and began a battle between
jazz purists and progressives which is still with us today.
The new artists revitalizing the music, now decades old,
included the Castle Band, specialists in Jelly Roll Morton's arrangements, Bob
Wilber Band, copiers of King Oliver, and Lu Walters and his Yerba Buena band,
who recorded King Oliver arrangements as early as 1941. According to historian
Marshall Stearns in The Story Of Jazz [p. 215], these recordings were an
important catalyst in the popularity and direction of the revival.
Musicians like Eddie Condon, owner of his own New York
club, developed a style of Dixieland more influenced by the Swing music of the
time, as did Phil Napoleon, Jimmy McPartland, Peewee Irwin and Muggsy Spanier.
The revival even reached South America, Asia and Europe, where the French band
of Claude Luter was said to have captured the King Oliver sound better than any
of the American bands. From this point forward, the process of revitalization
and renewal continued with each previously established style, and Jazz became an
encompassing description of a multitude of sub-styles, each with its own unique
characteristics. [top]
- article by Frank Singer ©2002
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JAZZ PERSPECTIVES
CONTENTS
Jazz
Origins
I - Beginnings
II - Jazz and Technology
III - Radio and the Industrial Beat
The
Swing Era
I - Precursors
II - The Decade of Swing
III - The
BeBop Strain
A
First Look Back
New Orleans
Revival
Jazz
Forms
The Blues
The 32 bar Song Form
The Latin Influence
Cool
Hard Bop
Evolution 1 - A New Dialogue
Evolution 2 - Into The Seventies
Evolution Of The Jam Session
Post Modernism
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