#1 "Dead Man Blues" (=3:11

by Jelly Roll Morton (Recorded Sept. 21, 1926)

Perf. by Jelly Roll Morton and His Red Hot Peppers: Morton (piano), George Mitchell (trumpet), Edward Kid Ory (trombone), Omer Simeon (clarinet solo), Barney Bigard, Darnell Howard (clarinets), Johnny St.Cyr (banjo), John Lindsay (bass), and Andrew Hilaire (drums).

RCA Victor 09026-68500-2

The first "jazz" bands to make commercial recordings were made up of white performers. (A fact which may help explain the minstrel-like spoof that opens this recording and that was probably a "humourous" gambit used in live shows.) Morton, an African-American who claimed during a series of Smithsonian interviews to be the inventor of jazz, is considered to be among the finest early jazz composers and performers. Dead Man Blues quotes Chopin’s "Funeral March" in the opening trombone line. This piece is an excellent of the early New Orleans "polyphonic" style of jazz. In a nutshell, polyphonic means "many voiced" and refers to the fact that the cornet, clarinet, and trombone each play an independent melody at the same time.

#2 "Hotter Than That" 3:01
Lil Hardin (Armstrong) [Recorded Dec. 13, 1927]
Louis Armstrong (The Hot Fives with Lonnie Johnson)
Columbia 44422

Armstrong and his Hot Fives began to transform jazz from an ensemble music into a series of solos. Although vitally important to his ensemble as a composer, pianist, and manager, Lil Hardin has been continually devalued as an artist by jazz critics, in part at least, because she is/was a woman.

#3 Rhapsody in Blue (excerpt ca. 4 mins.)
George Gershwin (1924)
Mauress Peress Orchestra with Ivan Davis, piano
Music Masters Jazz 01612-65144-2

Commissioned by Paul Whiteman, the leading white bandleader of the day, Rhapsody in Blue was to be the crowing achievement of Whiteman’s 1924 Aeolian Hall concert in New York. Having invited the premiere classical musicians and critics to the concert, Whiteman hoped to use Gershwin’s jazzy piano concerto to prove jazz to be among the highest forms of musical art.

#4 "Moderato Assai" (1931) excerpted from the Afro-American Symphony
William Grant Still (1895&emdash;1978) [ca. 4 mins.]
Detroit Symphony Orchestra under Neeme Järve
Chandos 9154 ©1993

Probably the most popular piece written during the Harlem Renaissance, Still’s first symphony uses a blues-influenced theme as the first subject of a traditional sonata-allegro form (the most common of classical first movement symphonic structures). The black artists of the Harlem Renaissance argued for social equality through cultural excellence. Still’s symphony accomplishes this by integrating black musical practice with elite European traditions.

#5 "Bloomdido" 3:24
Written by Charlie Parker (recorded June 6, 1950 in NYC)
Performed by Parker (alto sax), Dizzy Gillespie (tpt.), Thelonious
Monk (piano), Curly Russell (bass), and Buddy Rich (drums).
Verve 833 288-2

While working in big bands during the early evening, Parker, Gillespie, and others spent the early morning hours working out a new style of jazz that would be called bebop. Bebop’s emphasis on virtuosity and complexity made it an elite music that aspired to the status of art rather than entertainment. Note the fast tempo and how Parker and Gillespie perform the challenging opening melody or "head" in a tight unison.

#6 "Things Aint What They Used to Be" 2:29
by Mercer Ellington, recorded 1964 in NYC
Duke Ellington (speaking) with Billy Strayhorn (piano)
Music Masters 01612-65122

After World War Two big band jazz began to die out as performance fees could not keep pace with the expenses of these large ensembles. Ellington, as well as Count Basie, managed to continue performing for awhile. Here we see one way in which Ellington helped perserve audience interest. His music may now be considered pure art, but it’s clear from this recording that his audience wanted to be entertained, not edified. Do you hear echoes of racial tension in the Duke’s stage banter?

#7 "Song X" 2:59
Ornette Coleman
Geffen

Extending Parker’s experiments with bebop, alto-saxophonist Ornette Coleman further pushed the thesis of jazz as art. His recordings repeatedly broke down the barriers of convention, leading to the invention of Free Jazz, a form of collective group improvisation. "Song X" is much more recent that the late 50s and early 60s experiments that made both champions and enemies for Coleman, but this work demonstrates Coleman’s combination of virtuosity and compositional freedom.

#8 "Bitches Brew" (ca. 5 min. excerpt)
by Miles Davis (ca. 1965)
Columbia 40577

Although considered the greatest living master of straight-ahead bebop, in the mid 60s and early 70s, Davis experimented with Fusion &endash; a mixture of jazz and rock. (Davis even opened for the Grateful Dead!) Considered one of his masterpieces, "Bitches Brew" makes use of electronic keyboards and signal processing (Davis is effectively playing an "electric trumpet"). The free, unpulsed opening section of "BB" is not far from Coleman’s conception of Free Jazz. Can you hear elements borrowed from rock in either the opening or the subsequent metered section?

#9 "Soul for Sale" from Blood on the Fields (1994)
Wynton Marsalis
Music Masters 67113

Beginning in the early 1980s, Wynton Marsalis became known as the leader of the Young Lions, a group of young instrumentalists who espoused a traditional repertoire of jazz standards by such composers as Morton, Armstrong, Parker, Gillespie, and Monk. As evidence of jazz’s increasing acceptance as art and of the establishment of a canon of jazz masterpieces, critics and scholars borrowed a term from classical music history to describe this return to taditional repertoire: neoclassicism.

Winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in music, the jazz oratorioBlood on the Fields marks a landmark achievement in the history of the award as the first jazz composition to win. (Marsalis was not the first black composer to win as both Scott Joplin (posthumous) and George Walker (1996) had received the award.)