[Dixielandjazz] New Armstrong biography/ Two beat rhythm

[D and R Hardie]

Dear Charles,
                         Its always good to find a contribution with 
some meat on the DJML.
                         I believe you are correct about the early two 
beat style. Johnny St Cyr, Pops Foster and Baby Dodds all left clear 
cut accounts of the early jazz two beat rhythm. Dodds stated that the 
four beat rhythm  appeared on the Streckfuss line boats around 1920 as 
a response to the needs of dancers, probably with the foxtrot that 
appeared after 1917.  He said it came 'down the river with Davey 
Jones'. They called it Memphis time.
                      Jack Stewart has shown that the four beat style 
appeared with the ODJB (1917) in Chicago  and quotes Virgil Thompson 
calling it the 'monotonous foxtrot rhythm'.
                      Our own experiments playing Bolden repertoire show 
the importance of the written rhythms   of contemporary pop songs, 
especially the songs played for dances like the two step, (originally 
performed to 6/8 but in Bolden's time to ragtime 2/4 tunes). 
Unfortunately there's not much information about the slow drag. 
Joplin's own performances of the Real Slow Drag are ragtimey as you 
might expect. I deal with this in my new book. I think the resolutely 4 
beat style of the Revival players in the 1940's was a product of their 
experiences through the 20's and 30's, not a reminiscence of the early 
jazz style.
Great review
Dan Hardie
website:
http://tinyurl.com/nqaup

On Saturday, December 23, 2006, at 08:46  AM, Charles Suhor wrote:

> Hey, Listmates--
>
> Below is a review of Thomas Brothers' second book on Louis Armstrong. I
> liked the book both because and in spite of the fact that it's
> controversial. The review appears in the December issue of JAZZ NOTES,
> the journal of the Jazz Journalists Association (JJA). For more on JJA
> visit their website, www.jazzhouse.org
>
> Charlie Suhor
>
>
> LOUIS ARMSTRONG’S NEW ORLEANS
> By Thomas Brothers
> W.W. Norton, New York, 2006
> 386 pp.; $26.95 hardcover
>
> Review by Charles Suhor
>
> The word “entertaining” doesn’t usually show up in reviews of deeply
> researched works, but Thomas Brothers’ book is an exception. His new
> volume (following the excellent "Louis Armstrong: In His Own Words") is
> a good read for literate squares, jazz fans, and scholars alike.
>
> Part of this broad accommodation is a brisk, journalistic writing style
> and dozens of well-placed photos and other graphics. Brothers’ method
> of citation is also refreshing—no clutter of footnotes, superscribed
> numbers, or names and dates parenthesized in the text. Instead, the
> notes section at the end gives a virtually line-by-line accounting of
> the sources, reflecting Brothers’ knowledge of traditional materials
> and intensive work at major oral history archives (Tulane, Rutgers,
> Queens College, and others).
>
> Brothers’ goal is to go beyond conventional biography and take a
> wide-lens view of the larger environment that helped to shape
> Armstrong’s consciousness and his music. He calls it a “decentered”
> biography “…organized around the flow of his [Armstrong’s] life.” (p.
> 6)
>
> Some of the personal, sociocultural, and musicological influences that
> Brothers traces are familiar, others less so. But through creative (and
> sometimes risky) selection of supportive quotes and interpretive leaps,
> Brothers redistributes the weight of the influences. Among his topics
> are:
> •	childhood—street quartet, Waif’s Home, etc.
> •	the downtown creoles and uptown blacks
> •	music of the Sanctified Church
> •	street musicians, especially tinhorn players
> •	music as a passport to white sections of town
> •	music/social clubs/parades as assertions of masculine dignity
> •	musical influences from black migrations from the plantations
> •	ragging the melody, heterophony, “monkeyshines,” “freak music”
> •	in earliest jazz, prevalence of a “flat four” feeling (vs. two-beat)
> •	Armstrong’s lack of interest in musical assimilation
>
> Possibly, Armstrong biographers could raise some fine-grained questions
> about the details of Brothers’ presentation. I’m not in that rarified
> number, so my two concerns are broader. First, Brothers adopts the
> now-fashionable position that the rhythmic pulse of the earliest jazz
> (by which he means the music of the uptown black musicians before
> recordings were made) wasn’t the oom-pah two-beat but a “flat 4/4—a
> steady background pulse of four undifferentiated beats per measure.”
> (pp. 43, 285-86) This is plausible for the “slow drag” blues introduced
> by Bolden but not for moderate and fast tempos, where the needs of
> dancers called for a bouncier “in 2” feeling. Also, the persistence of
> march influences in the early repertoire and the presence of tubas and
> drumsets suggest the dominance of two-beat rhythms.
>
> Absent conclusive oral testimony, a both/and  (or a
> sometimes-but-not-always) view seems right. In recordings of 1920s New
> Orleans bands, the guitar, banjo, and piano often laid down a solid
> four even as the tuba and drums played an engaging two-beat.
> (Exceptions like the wonderfully stomping Andrew Morgan Band are
> sometimes cited as the rule.) It’s inferable that the earliest
> musicians had it both ways, adapting at will for different tempos,
> audiences and acoustical settings.
>
> My larger concern relates to Brothers’ execution of his premise. The
> contextual “flow of Armstrong’s life” that he presents is limited to
> descriptions of the African and African-American influences on his
> music. Certainly, focusing on particular aspects of a subject is a
> common and legitimate research goal, and Brothers’ introduction does
> indeed emphasize Armstrong’s immersion in the black vernacular music of
> New Orleans. But a well-wrought rationale for “highlighting the African
> legacy” doesn’t appear until the middle of the book (pp. 138-39).
>
> Parts of the last chapter might have been presented up front, as they
> give the clearest notice of Brothers’ perspective, and perhaps his
> bias. His criticism of simplistic “melting pot” and “gumbo”
> characterizations of jazz is both fair and familiar, but he goes on to
> categorically deny that European influences significantly affected
> Armstrong’s art. After acknowledging that “marches, hymns, and
> ragtime—even Italian opera, ritual singing of Jewish cantors, and
> French folk songs…unquestionably put Eurocentric harmony in Armstrong’s
> ear,” he leaps to the dismissive conclusion that “Armstrong’s musical
> development would not have been one whit different had he never heard
> an Italian aria or a French folk song.” (p. 303) Clearly, Armstrong’s
> genius involved a brilliant interaction of African-American vernacular
> elements and European harmony and song structure. Also, ample
> scholarship has shown particular links with various idioms.
>
> Elsewhere, Brothers rightly describes the culture of oppression in
> which jazz arose but makes needless stretches of inference along stale
> Marxian or Freudian lines. The two-bar jazz “break” is an assertion of
> “class values.” Bolden's music and manners “waged a kind of class
> warfare” in the interest of “the plantation immigrants who were looking
> for common ground in the dance halls.” Bolden’s risk-taking music is
> fancifully compared to balloon flights of a notorious pimp named Buddy
> Bartley. Freddie Keppard’s manner of pointing his cornet in the air is
> read as “mimicking erection,” a sign of masculine power.
>
> But these interpretive excesses don’t, as Holden Caulfield said, ruin
> everything. Brothers’ book is fun to read, painstakingly researched,
> and well stocked with provocative ideas. His treatment of heterophony
> in black church music as an early model for improvisation is
> beautifully argued. His descriptions of tinhorn street musicians,
> “freak music,” and “monkeyshines” smartly underline the radical
> differences between European and African-American conceptions of how
> musical instruments can function expressively. And he throws new light
> on the importance of black migrations into New Orleans and on the
> neglected influence of the Sanctified churches. If Brothers sometimes
> over-reaches it’s because he has the vision to reach. And that’s a good
> reason to add Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans to your collection.
>
>
> Charles Suhor is a former Down Beat writer and author of “Jazz in New
> Orleans—The Postwar Years Through 1970” (Scarecrow Press/Rutgers
> Institute of Jazz Studies, 2001).
>
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