I find it strange that when you ask most people about music of the 1920s, they think that black people were the only ones producing Jazz. Even a lot of Jazz fans could only name Louis Armstrong, the Charleston, Duke Ellington and maybe King Oliver and Eubie Blake.They've bought into this revisionist myth that there were no White people playing "real Jazz" until the mid 1930s when Benny Goodman struck it big. The truth is that White Americans were heavily involved with the creation and development of Jazz since the very beginning. To start with, a lot of the musical skills and knowledge that produced proto-Jazz in the 1890s came from the Louisiana Creoles of Downtown New Orleans who were culturally distinct from the uptown blacks and got a lot of their musical training in Europe. Buddy Bolden and others fused the brass band music with the vocal proto-blues and later Ragtime to create Jazz around 1900. While it was looked down upon by the White elite, it gained popularity among all races of the city. It was a White band (the Original Dixieland Jass Band) that really codified the sound and were the first to bring it outside of New Orleans in 1917.Many White band leaders like Joseph C Smith and Art Hickman used this new sound to evolve their orchestral ragtime into the Big Band Jazz that would dominate the 1920s, chief among them was Paul Whiteman, the most commercially successful band leader in the world between 1920 and 1935. Even in the early 20s, White Jazz musicians heavily outnumbered the black ones, other examples include Isham Jones, Ray Miller, Ben Selvin, Benny Krueger, Ted Lewis, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and the California Ramblers.Cont. below
>>130517529>Race whining thread #973389
I mean, Duke Ellington in his prime in the late 20s and early 30s really didn't sound more ahead of the curve than his White contemporaries who really innovated Swing, such as Red Nichols, the Jean Goldkette orchestra (including Bix Beiderbecke, Eddie Lang and Steve Brown who really transformed the double bass into a solo instrument in and of itself on the 1925 recording of Dinah), Ben Bernie, or even British bandleaders like Bert Ambrose, Sid Phillips and Ray Noble.Since the 1960s, this entire era of the development of Jazz has been erased from our cultural memory in order to create this phony narrative that 'black people alone created modern music' as if they would have created it in Africa, had they not been transported to America, which they obviously wouldn't have done. It's a ridiculous and damaging example of cultural erasure
>>130517529Please, just stop.
>To me, this feels like virtue rewarded. I always considered my struggle with black music awkwardly moralistic, the white guilt trip, but as usual the real issue turned out to be aesthetic. To be blunt, black music is better. The apparent strength of white music in whatever present always seems to deteriorate. Stephen Collins Foster preferred his sentimental ballads to his "Ethiopian songs," and Paul Whiteman thought that he was doing the Muse a favor by whitening the "discordant jazz, which sprang into existence . . . from nowhere in particular," but we remember "My Old Kentucky Home," not "Poor Drooping Maiden," and listen to King Oliver while relegating Whiteman's music to the gramophone museum.>This time, though it really seemed as if we'd escaped fate. Only a year ago, the white rock fan who dismissed what was judiciously referred to as "the soul sounds"--as if only a stylistic preference, not a race or a culture, was involved--had some credible arguments. We know the wheezing pop of the early '50s was cured by that shot of rhythm-and-blues because R&B was realistic instead of sentimental, idiosyncratic instead of mass-produced, free of show biz nonsense, and rooted in a genuine community. But by the late '60s it was soul music, which was to R&B and gospel what black power was to civil rights, that seemed unrealistic, artificial and showy, although the paradox was that it sounded worst when it tried to assimilate white modes. The excesses of the soul myth proved that black people were far from immune to the pretentious floundering that so often accompanies new consciousness.
>>130517649>>130517569In the '20s probably not. A lot of the mythos around black music is more related to the early postwar years when white pop was slow to leave the big band/standards era behind.
>>130517529Let's be real anon few people truly care about 1920s music
>>130517529The best jazz music is made by black schizos and white dope addicts.
