Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Creating Jazz Counterpoint: New Orleans, Barbershop Harmony, and the Blues

Creating Jazz Counterpoint: New Orleans, Barbershop Harmony, and the Blues

Hobson, Vic

Hardcover

Series: American Made Music

JazzMusic ReferenceRegional: South

ISBN10: 1617039918
ISBN13: 9781617039911
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: Feb 10 2014
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.96
Height: 0.56 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The book Jazzmen (1939) claimed New Orleans as the birthplace of jazz, and introduced the legend of Buddy Bolden, as the First Man of Jazz. Much of the information that the book relied on came from a highly controversial source: Bunk Johnson. He claimed to have played with Bolden and that together they had pioneered jazz. Bunk Johnson made many recordings talking about and playing the music of the Bolden era. These recordings have been treated with skepticism because of doubts about Johnson's credibility. Using oral histories, the Jazzmen interview notes, and un-published archive material, this book confirms that Bunk Johnson did play with Bolden. This, in turn, has profound implications for Johnson's recorded legacy in describing the music of the early years of New Orleans jazz. New Orleans jazz was different from ragtime in a number of ways. New Orleans jazz was a music that was collectively improvised and it had a new tonality-the tonality of the blues. How early jazz musicians improvised together and how the blues became a part of jazz has until now been a mystery. Part of the reason that New Orleans jazz developed as it did is that all the prominent jazz pioneers, including Buddy Bolden, Bunk Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Johnny Dodds, and Kid Ory, sang in barbershop (or barroom) quartets. This book describes in both historical and musical terms how the practices of quartet singing were converted to the instruments of a jazz band, and how this, in turn, produced collectively improvised blues inflected jazz.

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