Read e-book online Creating Jazz Counterpoint (American Made Music Series) PDF

The ebook Jazzmen (1939) claimed New Orleans because the birthplace of jazz and brought the legend of blood brother Bolden because the "First guy of Jazz." a lot of the data that the publication trusted got here from a hugely arguable resource: Bunk Johnson. He claimed to have performed with Bolden and that jointly they'd pioneered jazz.

Johnson made many recordings conversing approximately and enjoying the tune of the Bolden period. those recordings were handled with skepticism due to doubts approximately Johnson's credibility. utilizing oral histories, the Jazzmen interview notes, and unpublished archive fabric, this e-book confirms that Bunk Johnson did play with Bolden. This affirmation, in flip, has profound implications for Johnson's recorded legacy in describing the song of the early years of latest Orleans jazz.

New Orleans jazz was once assorted from ragtime in a few methods. It was once a tune that used to be jointly improvised, and it carried a brand new tonality--the tonality of the blues. How early jazz musicians improvised jointly and the way the blues turned part of jazz has previously been a secret. a part of the explanation New Orleans jazz built because it did is that each one the widespread jazz pioneers, together with blood brother Bolden, Bunk Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Johnny Dodds, and child Ory, sang in barbershop (or barroom) quartets. This publication describes in either ancient and musical phrases how the practices of quartet making a song have been switched over to the tools of a jazz band, and the way this, in flip, produced jointly improvised, blues-inflected jazz, that particular sound of recent Orleans.