[Dixielandjazz] just a question, help greatly appreciated

[Ken Mathieson]

Rob wrote:
>snip ",,,I would like to do an essay on the effect that either duke ellington or paul whiteman had on
20th century popular music, ellington in the way he brought structure to jazz or whiteman in how everything was very tightly arranged etc."

Hi Rob,

I'd suggest that Ellington didn't bring structure to jazz - it was already there. Structure has to be inherent in any performance, whether played from written charts or improvised. Great soloists from Morton, Armstrong, Bechet etc onwards have a strong intuitive sense of structure, which is what makes their solos sound logical and interesting while being innovative. 

>From the start of his career, Jelly Roll Morton's music was largely through-composed and therefore highly-structured long before Duke Ellington appeared on the scene. Morton's greatest pieces were often conceived as competition showcases designed to see off other pianists he encountered on his travels from about 1905 to the early/mid 1920s. He recorded some of these pieces several times throughout his 17-year-long recording career and there is remarkable consistency in terms of theme structure and inner voicings. On the Library of Congress recordings from 1938, he plays longer versions of some of these tunes than was possible on 78rpm records and piano rolls. The structures remain largely consistent with previous recordings, but he injects additional improvised choruses, especially to bring the pieces to a climax. Morton's best arrangements for his small bands also demonstrate a remarkably strong sense of structure as well as endlessly changing textures.

My view is that Ellington only caught up with Morton in the early 1930s, by which time Morton's fortunes were on the wane. However my view is that Ellington, once he hit his stride, was by far the superior composer and orchestrator whose work exhibits a strong sense of structure. And once Billy Strayhorn joined the Ellington fold in 1939, these strengths were even more apparent.

On the other hand, my view is that Whiteman's own personal impact on the development of jazz was relatively minimal. He was a musician, but above all he was a business man with strong commercial instincts and was in the right place at the right time to exploit his concepts. The musical impact of his band was effectively shaped by his team of arrangers, of whom Bill Challis was perhaps the one with the most acute ear for jazz, and by his star soloists (Bix, Tram, Teagarden, Venuti etc).

Snce youre studying music and will have to provide technical analysis in essays, I'd recommend 2 books by Gunther Schuller: Early Jazz and The Swing Era. Both are available in paperback (Oxford University Press), are painstakingly researched and are packed with technical analysis, transcriptions etc, so are ideal for your purposes and cover all the major figures of jazz up to about 1945. They are also books you'll return to again and again for the rest of your life. It's a matter of great regret that Schuller abandoned his plan to write a third volume covering bop and beyond, but I guess he recognised that he could never keep pace with the headlong changes in the music from 1970 onwards. 

To get a flavour of the change from Swing to Bop, I'd recommend Ira Gitler's book Swing to Bop (also by Oxford University Press), which tells the story in the words of the musicians themselves, so it is realistic, accurate and readily understandable by musicians. It isn't a scholarly book like the Schuller books and doesn't have transcriptions and analysis, but it is full of cross-references to important recordings by the protagonists themselves, so you can go straight to the crucial records and do your own analysis.

Good luck!

Ken Mathieson
www.classicjazzorchestra.org.uk