Chicago Jazz

Chicago Jazz

            In class, we have been discussing the dialogic interaction between community and jazz musicians. This give-and-take between community and performer transformed jazz, and made it “America’s language” (Lecture 2/5/13). Applying the Bakhtin theory to jazz, we can see that jazz is a conversation between the performer and the listener. The reason jazz flourished in Chicago during this time period is due to the community, technology, and “dialogue” that ensued. While both cities are important, Chicago is most important during this time period because the style it creates then influences all later jazz—including that in New York.

            Chicago was a melting pot of culture where any and all nationalities could be found in their respective blocks throughout the city. While this is also true of New York, racial communities were a heavier factor in Chicago jazz—black people were mainly all located on the South side, where many jazz clubs popped up, versus whites on the North. While there is the stigma that only white people influenced jazz during the 1920’s, this is simply not the case. In fact, “the finest African American musicians from New Orleans and elsewhere…had already gravitated to Chicago by the mid-1920s” (Gioia, 71). People were coming to Chicago due to money. There were more opportunities to record and to perform in a big city in the North like Chicago and the pay was much better than in New Orleans (Gioia, 73).

In fact, there was dialogue that was happening between the blacks and whites. Because of the segregation of neighborhoods in Chicago, this meant that jazz clubs were segregated as well. However, while blacks were not welcome to go to nice “white” hotels or bars where white jazz musicians played, these white jazz musicians were free to walk into the black clubs to listen and take from the music being played there. This is the concept of white appropriation—taking and incorporating black musical elements into their own music: so, black influence even reached the more white or white-influenced jazz performers of the time, such as the all-white Austin High School Gang. As Gioia says well, “Black jazz, white jazz, hot jazz, sweet jazz, New Orleans jazz, Dixie jazz: no matter what you call it or how you define it, it all became part of Chicago jazz during these formative years” (Gioia, 71). There were an enormous variation of jazz styles at that point and they all converged in one city, Chicago, which is why is most important to jazz during this time.

            Chicago jazz is extremely important because it was the original and dominant jazz in Chicago that later influenced New York (Gioia, 69). “Chicago style” was many different types of playing, appropriation, and innovation coming together. Applying Bakhtin, dialogue via dance halls contributed immensely to this because this was occurring during a time of great industrialization, and combined with the appropriation occurring within these halls, jazz was molded by both blacks and whites. Many greats were in Chicago during this time period that contributed greatly to its style—“Armstrong, Hines, Morton, Oliver, Noone, Dodds” as well as white performers like the Austin High Gang (Gioia, 71). They created a Chicago style that differed from other jazz with its “certain restless energy [that] begins to reverberate in the music” (Gioia, 71). It had a great vital aliveness—from “cheeky attitude on the horn” to “the shuffle rhythm, which conveyed the feel of double time” to the break when the band held back for the soloist to step forward “to proclaim a hot phrase” (Gioia, 72). It is important to recognize one of the most important components of Chicago jazz—the solo. And there is one man who best represents the culture, community, and “solo” of Chicago jazz.

           Louis Armstrong is the epitome as well as founder of Chicago jazz as we think of it, especially with the emphasis on solos and improvisation that he created and perfected. When Armstrong first entered a recording studio in Chicago in the 1920s, he established himself “as the dominant jazz instrumentalist of his generation, perhaps of all time” (Gioia, 57). And Armstrong deserves this recognition as he had a key role in “transforming the focus of jazz from the ensemble to the soloist” (57). But additionally, it was just his creative, musical genius that allowed him to mold and shape jazz. He had “advanced melodic ideas [that] simply did not exist in jazz before” (Gioia, 57). Gioia even goes on to say that “Armstrong’s improvisational style must have been a revelation to other players of that era” (57). Armstrong’s innovation led to the innovative style of Chicago, and he was the leader in that transition. It is through Armstrong that not only ‘Chicago jazz’ was created as a style, but that he molded the “Jazz Age” as well.

            With the help of Armstrong and many others, Chicago definitely had its own style in the 1920s. Socially, the segregation of blacks and whites and accompaniment therefore of white appropriation contributed to style in interesting ways. Financially, the economic times and situation was better in the North as well, which drew a crowd of talented, hopeful musicians who populated the jazz halls. Combining a time of industrialization with all of these factors, “no town or city in the forty-eight states had the talents or the spirit to generate the kind of jazz that caused toe-tapping rhythm to course through the veins and arteries of Chicago, ‘the city with the big shoulders’” (Travis, 75). If it were not for Chicago and all of the factors it contributed during the 1920s, jazz as we know it today would not be the same, and for this reason I believe it to be more important than New York’s influences, simply because it came first and laid down the foundations for later jazz.