Scott Joplin    Maple Leaf Rag (1897)
Scott Joplin (p)

A side effect of the ragtime craze that swept through the US around the turn of the century was the popularization of one of the first forms of mechanical music reproduction, the player piano. Up to this time, the only way to hear music in your home was to play it yourself or, if you could afford it, to hire somebody to play for you. A player piano used a roll of paper with holes punched in it to control the keys, so if you had one of these you could hear an expert performance of the music, though with limitations, because the nuances of volume (that is, how hard the keys were pressed) was not reproduced. Since ragtime was fairly difficult music but also quite popular many Americans turned to player pianos as a way to hear it. From this point on the history of jazz is closely tied up with the evolution of recording technology.

We are fortunate to have this piano roll, cut in 1916, of Scott Joplin playing one of his most popular pieces. Joplin often complained that people played his music too fast, trying to show off, and you can hear that he takes it at a moderate tempo. This isn't exactly how he would have sounded, because we can't hear the variations in loudness that he played, but it gives a good sense of the rhythm and pacing.

Ragtime is fully-composed music with a somewhat complicated form. You don't need to memorize the details of the form, but you should know that it is modeled on dances and marches that were made up of a number of contrasting sections (with contrasting themes). You should also recognize the style of piano playing. Two key rhythmic elements of ragtime are the constant use of syncopation in the melody and the alternation of bass notes and chords in the left hand, which carries over into both stride piano and the two-beat rhythm of New Orleans jazz.

Jelly Roll Morton    Maple Leaf Rag (1938)
Jelly Roll Morton (p)

Jelly Roll Morton's style playing here was outmoded when this recording was made in 1938, it reflects a jazzed up version of ragtime that would have been cutting edge in the 20s. Morton's version of the Maple Leaf Rag is looser than Joplin's. The main differences you should notice are rhythmic. Morton plays it faster and with a swing feeling, compared to Joplin's slower, steadier rhythm. Morton's playing has more of a two-beat feel where Joplin's is closer to 4/4, especially at the beginning, when the stride pattern is not happening in the left hand.

Morton takes some liberties with the form, too. He starts in the middle of the A section, turning that into an introduction, instead of giving as two complete A sections as Joplin does. Morton also changes the way he plays each section as he repeats it. For a good example listen to the difference between the first and the second time through the D strain. The first has a tangoish flavor, while the second is swing.

Jelly Roll Morton    Tiger Rag (original quadrille) (1938)
Jelly Roll Morton (p)

This is one of the recordings made at the Library of Congress in which Alan Lomax had Jelly Roll Morton talk about the history of jazz and demonstrate some of the tunes and styles that he had come across. Here Morton is talking about how a tune called the Tiger Rag (a very popular ragtime-derived jazz piece) was an adaptation of a quadrille, which was a type of society dance popular in New Orleans.

The quadrille, like many dances (in fact, more so than many) is a series of different tunes strung together. Marches have a similar form, and dances and marches were the formal model for ragtime. The sections (each with its own tune) are also called strains. Morton explains clearly how the dance worked, and then plays the Tiger Rag so that you can hear the connection.

Jelly Roll Morton    Tiger Rag (1938)
Jelly Roll Morton (p)

This is what the quadrille turned into in the hands of jazz musicians.

the beat:      *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *
3-note pattern:   TA-da-da TA-da-da TA-da-da TA-da-da TA-da-da TA-da-da

Jelly Roll Morton    Demonstration of a break (1938)
Jelly Roll Morton (p)

Jelly Roll Morton    Demonstration of a riff (1938)
Jelly Roll Morton (p)

Jelly Roll Morton    Dead Man Blues (1926)
Morton (p, comp, speech); George Mitchell (t); Edward ("Kid") Ory (tb), Barney Bigard, Darnell Howard, Omer Simeon (cl); Johnny St. Cyr (bj, speech); John Lindsay (b); Andrew Hilaire (d). Soloists: Simeon, Mitchell, Ory.

This is an excellent example of New Orleans style playing. During the first and last blues chorus of this piece you can hear the three horns (trumpet, clarinet, and trombone) playing in a style called New Orleans polyphony. The interlocking, complimentary melodies are sometimes improvised and sometimes, as with this piece, worked out in advance. You can also hear the two-beat rhythm, with bass notes on the down beat and beat 3, and chords from the piano and banjo on the offbeats (beats 2 and 4).

What set Morton apart from many other New Orleans musicians was his keen sense for arrangement. There is interesting variety but at the same time a satisfying flow to the piece. The clarinet trio in the middle is an especially nice touch, all the better because of the way he brings it back for the cleverly abrupt ending.

You can also hear echos of the minstrel show in Morton's vaudevillian spoken introduction (Morton did have experience performing in minstrel shows).

James P Johnson    Carolina Shout (1921)
James P. Johnson (p)

You should be able to hear that Jelly Roll Morton's and James P. Johnson's piano playing have a lot in common with each other and with the ragtime of Scott Joplin. Johnson, however, was a considerably more skillful and subtle pianist than Morton.

At the beginning of the A section you can hear the boom-chunk pattern of stride piano (you can hear it even more clearly in the vamp-like beginning of the B section), but as the A section develops you can hear that he breaks up and reorganizes the pattern all the time. There will often be a series of bass notes (the on-the-beat "boom" part of the pattern) that move up or down a scale, occasionally broken by the left hand chords (the off-beat "chunk" part).

Section C is the "shout" part. The shout was an African American call-and-response idiom that combines African musical practices with the exchange between preacher and congregation in the Christian church.

I have labeled choruses 6, 7, and 8 as D, E, and F but in a way that misses the point, and I don't want you to think of this specific form (AABCCDEF) as having any special significance. Johnson was famous for being inexhaustibly inventive, for being able to come up with variation after variation, something that the 3 minute recording limit of 1920s technology could only capture a little taste of. All of the choruses after section C have some variation of a call and response, even though they do it in a different way and with different chords. The important thing to hear is all of the ways he finds to recast that basic idea, as well as the inventiveness, skill, and rhythmic vitality of his playing.

King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band    Dippermouth Blues (1923)
King Oliver, Louis Armstrong (c); Honoré Dutrey (tb), Johnny Dodds (cl); Lil Hardin (p); Bill Johnson (bj, voc break); Baby Dodds (d). Soloists: Dodds, Oliver

After a four bar introduction, this piece is in 12-bar blues form. This recording was made when the King Oliver band was in residence on the south side of Chicago, and is an outstanding example of the New Orleans style as it was practiced in Chicago. You can hear the collective improvisation as well as the bluesy solo style of Oliver. Musicians from all around, both white and black, came to hear and absorb what this band could do.

Bessie Smith    Lost Your Head Blues (1926)
Bessie Smith (voc); Joe Smith (c); Fletcher Henderson (p)

This is an outstanding example of the city blues style of the 1920s, to some extent an independent genre but also in many ways part of the bigger thing called jazz. It shows the how the AAB lyric form and the 12-bar musical form work hand in hand.

An important feature of the blues idiom that's easy to hear in this selection is the constant bending of notes. One aspect of this is the "blue note," a note that's played or sung a little bit below the standard, "in tune" pitch. Often a note will start in tune and then be bent down to a "blue" tuning. Both Bessie Smith and Joe Smith, the cornet player, do that quite a few times here. Blue notes are another of the many African carryovers in African American music. Through the device of the blue note, jazz musicians are constantly superimposing an African-derived sense of pitch onto a European sense of pitch. Tension between the two contributes to the vitality of the music. Here, as on many jazz recordings, the presence of a piano insures that the European tuning system will be heard, since that is the way pianos are always tuned and notes played on the piano cannot be bent.