Jazz History: "Pre-Jazz"
Jazz as a style didn’t come into its own until around 1920. Before that there were such prejazz forms as band and piano ragtime, jug bands, banjo groups, country blues, European marching bands and pop songs, street calls, and African percussion music. Good examples of this early American music can be heard on the Smithsonian Folk Collection. Most good jazz texts run the history and descriptions down. One such book is Jazz Styles by Mark Gridley.
Jazz came about due to the inevitable confluence of ragtime and the blues. Of course, one could make a semantic argument which would confuse what the salient characteristics of jazz are (much of what they presented on BET Jazz I wouldn’t call jazz, for example). Similarly, I would not call the Original Dixieland Jass Band’s barn animal and slide-whistle gimmicks jazz. (Many contemporaries called their stuff jive hokum.) Jazz didn’t really swing until Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, and simply because Louis and Jelly played ragtime before they evolved their great jazz groups does not make what they played before that jazz.
Certainly the music had been gradually evolving towards jazz for quite some time, but because the ODJB first used the term Jass (not Jazz) in their title isn’t that much of a big deal to me. I’m sure they thought it would help with sales and popularity (and it worked for them, too), since these terms–and others–were already in the air. And musicians did not uniformly refer to whatever music they played at that time as jazz by any means; these were loose terms. Many scholars do, however, acknowledge that the ODJB was the first recorded jazz band, and that is where I differ with them.
I cringe when I hear about ODJB in this regard: Having played their recordings for many Jazz History classes over the years, and compared their music to Louis, Jelly, and many others, I think they are an embarrassment. To me they are insufferably corny and they couldn’t swing their way out of a paper bag! Worst of all, they are the recorded caricature of the less-talented whites stealing the black man’s music–and doing it poorly.
By: Ed Byrne