Original subtitles

Jazz music objectifies america.

You know, it's an art form that can give us a painless way of understanding ourselves.

The real power of jazz, and the innovation of jazz,

is that a group of people can come together

and create art, improvised art.

And can negotiate their agendas with each other.

And that negotiation is the art.

Like you'll hear all the time that bach improvised,

and he did improvise.

But he wasn't going to look at the second viola and say,

"ok, let's play Eine feste burg."

they were not going to do that.

Whereas in jazz, you-- I could get together,

I could go to Milwaukee tomorrow,

and there'd be 3 musicians, I'd walk into a bar

at 2:30 in the morning and say,

"what would you want to play, man? Let's play some blues."

Well, all 4 of us are going to start playing.

And I might say, ♪♪ doo doo da Lee dooly do ♪♪

And they might say, ♪♪ bot Bo Bo bodoo bodoo ba Lee ba doo doo ♪♪

[Continues scatting]

Everybody would just start copying and playing and listening, and the bass,

you never know what they're going to do.

So, that's our art.

The 4 of us can now have a dialog.

We can have a conversation.

We can speak to each other in the language of music.

[Take the a-train Playing]

Narrator: It is america's music.

Born out of a million American negotiations--

betwbetween happy and sad;Ing;

country and city;

between black and white, and men and women;

between the old Africa and the old Europe--

that could only have happened in an entirely new world.

Making itself up it is anas it goes along,art,

just like the country that give it birth.

It rewards individual expression,

but demands selfless collaboration.

It is forever changing,

but nearly always rooted in the blues.

It has a rich tradition

and its own rules,

but it is brand-new every night.

It is about just making a living,

and taking terrible risks,

losing everything and finding love,

making things simple,

and dressing to the nines.

It hand survived hard times,ty

but it has always reflected Americans,

all Americans,

at their best.

"Jazz," the drummer art blakey liked to say,

"washes away the dust of everyday life."

Above all, it swings.

Jazz music celebrates life.

Human life, the range of it.

The absurdity of it. The ignorance of it.

The greatness of it. The intelligence of it.

The sexuality of it. The profundity of it.

And it deals with it.

In all of its-- it deals with it.

You know, it's the ultimate in rugged individualism.

It's going out there on that stage and saying,

it doesn't matter how anybody else did it.

This is the way I'm going to do it.

When you see a jazz musician playing,

you're looking at a pioneer, you're looking at an explorer,

you're looking at an experimenter,

you're looking you'at all those thingsentist.

Because it's the creative process incarnate.

[Body and soul Playing]

Narrator: The remarkable men and women who created jazz

came from every part of the country and every walk of life.

But they could all do something

which most people can only dream of,

create art on the spot.

A sometime pimp and full-time ladies man from New Orleans,

a pianist of startling originality,

who falsely claimed to have invented jazz,

but who really was the first to show that it could be written down.

The pampered son of middle-class parents

who turned a whole orchestra of extraordinary musicians

into his own personal instrument,

wrote nearly 2,000 pieces of music for it to play,

and in the process became america's greatest composer.

A Russian Jewish immigrant's boy from the Chicago slums,

who was taught the clarinet just to keep him out of trouble,

but who grew up to teach a whole country how to dance.

The troubled daughter of a Baltimore house maid,

whose distinctive style of singing transcended

the limitations of her own voice,

and routinely transformed mediocre music into great art.

The son of a Pullman chef from Kansas City, Missouri,

who came to New York to launch a musical revolution,

proudly led it for a time,

and then destroyed himself at 34.

A dentist's difficult son from east St. Louis, Illinois,

whose lifelong search for new ways to sound

made him the most influential musician of his generation.

And then there was the fatherless waif from the streets of New Orleans,

whose unrivaled genius helped turn jazz into a soloist's art,

who influenced every singer, every instrumentalist,

every artist, who came after him.

And who, for more than 5 decades,

made everyone who heard him

feel that no matter how bad things got,

everything was bound to turn out all right, after all.

Man: And yet, who knows very much of what jazz is really about?

Or how shall we ever know until we are willing to consider everything

which it sweeps across our path?

Ralph Ellison.

Man: People from all over the world came to New Orleans...

Pirates, adventurers, gamblers, exiles, criminals,..

Frenchmen, Spaniards, Germans, englishmen, irishmen,

Indians, Chinese, Italians, west Indians...

Africans...

In the hundreds of tenements in the rear of the front-street buildings,

there were people of all nationalities, living side by side,

and there was a whole lot of integrating going on.

Danny barker.

Narrator: Jazz grew up in a thousand places.

But it was born in New Orleans,

whicthe most cosmopolitan800s,

and the most musical city in america.

But New Orleans was also a major center of the slave trade,

still tolerated in a country that had just proclaimed

that all men were created equal.

And the descendants of the human beings

who were its living currency

would eventually create the most American of art forms,

jazz.

[Louisiana Playing]

W. Marsalis: The whole conception of improvisation

is a part of all of American life.

If you were a slave, you had to learn how to improvise.

You came on the land, you couldn't speak the language,

you had all kinds of foods and stuff you weren't used to eating.

You have another whole system to deal with.

If you can't improvise, you're going to be in a world of trouble.

You're not going to be able to survive.

Man: Jazz is about freedom.

It's about a certain kind of liberation.

There have been other people of course have been oppressed in the United States,

or gone through brutal treatment in the United States,

but only African-Americans were enslaved,

only African-Americans were legally a people

who have a legacy and history, historical consciousness

of having been UN-free in a free country.

[Atsiagbekor Playing]

Narrator: Beginning in 1817,

slaves in New Orleans were permitted to sing and dance

every Sunday afternoon in a place called Congo square.

To the curious whites

who sometimes turned out to see and hear them,

the slaves' music,

filled with complex percussive rhythms,

seemed to provide an authentic glimpse of Africa.

[Caribbean tune playing]

But most of the slaves in Congo square

had never seen Africa.

Many were recent arrivals from the west indies,

their music filled with the infectious pulse

of the Caribbean.

[Sign of judgement Playing]

Other slaves had been brought to the city from the interior of the American south.

Bringing with them works songs, spirituals,

and the call and response of the baptist church.

New Orleans was also home to a unique and prosperous community of free people,lays]

Who called themselves "creoles of color."

Many were the light-skinned descendants of French and Spanish colonists

and their black wives and mistresses.

They identified with their European,

not their African ancestors,

and they looked down on the darker-skinned blacks around them.

Some owned slaves.

Many creole musicians were classically trained

and prided themselves on being able to play music

for every kind of dancing.

[Palmyra schottische Playing]

"There is a mania in this city,"

the new orleans Picayune Reported in 1838,

"for horn and trumpet playing."

Citizens of every color and nationality marched to the music of brass bands.

City streets were filled with parades of every kind.

Weddings, funerals, feast days, and the 6-to-8 week carnival season

that each spring led up to mardi gras.

[Hungarian rhapsody #15 Playing]

Narrator: In the decades before the civil war,

New Orleans had 3 flourishing opera companies

and two full-fledged symphony orchestras,

one white and one creole.

There was so much music, so much dancing going on

that a northern visitor called New Orleans

"one vast waltzing and gallopading hall."

[La Donna e mobile Playing]

W. Marsalis: It's a romantic city.

The vendors in the streets would sing arias.

People are really integrated in the way that they live.

One block you have an Italian family, various types of negroes.

You have some creoles, you have Germans.

You know, you have everybody all intermingled.

And they can't escape each other.

And also, you had a tradition of wildness in New Orleans,

like gambling and people showing their behinds in different various ways.

But you also had a lot of churches and religious fervor. You had voodoo.

You know, you have all these things coming together now.

And you have people who don't like each other but they have to deal with each other

because they're living together and they share in this culture.

They share in all this like gumbo.

You know, everybody's gonna eat some gumbo.

[Cakewalk Playing]

Narrator: New Orleans theaters also featured minstrel music...

So-called "plantation songs" written by white and black songwriters,

performed by whites blacked-up as blacks

and sometimes in later years by blacks blacked-up as whites playing blacks.

On the surface, minstrelsy seemed simply to reinforce ugly racial stereotypes.

Giddins: Minstrelsy was the most popular form of American entertainment

for about 80 years in the united states beginning in the 1840s.

It produced the first body of serious pop songs--Stephen foster, James bland, others.

Songs that we still, all of us, to this day know.

It produced a national humor that we all know.

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Who was that woman I saw you with last night?

Because you had minstrel troupes very much codified,

all doing the same kinds of songs, same kinds of humor,

crisscrossing the whole country,

not just into major cities, but to all kinds of towns,

anyplace where there was a hall where they could perform,

it was the first entertainment form that everybody in it wthe United States knew.N.

Everybody heard the same songs, everybody heard the same jokes.

This had never happened before and it wouldn't really happen again until the movies.

[St. Louis tickle Playing]

Narrator: Despite its overt racism, the minstrel show was a blend of lively music,

knockabout comedy and sophisticated elegance--

a bizarre and complicated ritual in which blacks and whites alike

would interpret and misinterpret each other for decades.

W. Marsalis: I think that there's something that was so resilient in the black people

and that everyone in america could recognize that resilience.

And even though it was masquerading as farce and comedy and dance and a form of music,

and it seemed like it was uncomplimentary,

actually, there was something centrally American about it.

And that was the beginning of a long relationship between blacks and whites

and black entertainment and white appropriation of it,

and this strange dance that we've been doing with each other

since really the beginning of our relationship in america.

It's too close, it's too deep a story, so you have to degrade the relationship.

You have to do degrading things so that you can live with

the tremendous affront to humanity that slavery was.

Narrator: The first big minstrel hit was written down and performed

by a white man known as daddy rice,

who said he'd first heard it being sung by a black stable hand.

Rice named the tune after the man...

Jim crow.

on January 26, 1861, the state of Louisiana seceded from the union.

But just 15 months later, a federal fleet steamed up the Mississippi river

and forced New Orleans, the largest city in the confederacy, to surrender.

[Plantation Instrumental Playing]

Union occupation signaled a new birth of freedom for the city's black population

and unleashed a burst of creative energy.

W. Marsalis: It's the fact of the abolition of slavery that made jazz music possible.

It comes from a consciousness of those who are outside of something

but in the middle of it.

These are people who are American in the realest sense

but they've been denied access to recognition as Americans.

But that doesn't alter the fact that they are American.

And the fact that they have access to all of the information that Americans have access to.

Narrator: For 12 years after the civil war, in the period known as reconstruction,

federal troops occupied the south, enforcing civil rights

and overseeing america's first attempt at integration.

But in 1877, in a corrupt back room deal

between northern Republicans and southern democrats,

the troops were withdrawn, and reconstruction collapsed overnight.

White rule was brutally reimposed.

Sharecropping replaced slavery.

The ku klux klan was ascendant.

And lynchings became routine.

Every aspect of daily life for African Americans became segregated

under a system that someone named for daddy rice's minstrel hit--"Jim crow."

For a time, Cosmopolitan New Orleans escaped the worst of it.

[Sunflower slow drag Playing]

Man: Suddenly, I discovered that my legs were in a condition of great excitement.

They twitched as though charged with electricity

and betrayed a considerable and rather dangerous desire to jerk me from my seat.

Gustav kuhl.

Narrator: In the 1890s, two new styles of music reached New Orleans,

two styles without which there could have been no jazz.

The first, created by black piano players in the cities of the midwest,

was jaunty, propulsive, irresistible.

It drew from everything that had gone before--

African-American spirituals and minstrel songs,

European folk melodies and military marches,

all set to fresh, insistent, syncopated rhythms.

It was called ragtime,

and it would be america's most popular music for the next quarter of a century.

Spread first by itinerant musicians and then by the sale of sheet music,

it was instantly popular with young dancers all over the country,

who loved it all the more because their parents did not.

Man: Ragtime is syncopation gone mad.

And its victims, in my opinion, can be treated successfully

only like the dog with rabies, with a dose of lead.

Whether it is simply a passing phase of our decadent art culture

or an infectious disease which has come to stay, like leprosy, time alone can tell.

Edward Baxter Perry.

[Old original blues Playing]

Narrator: About the same time, New Orleans musicians began to hear the blues.

A steady stream of refugees from the Mississippi delta

was now pouring into New Orleans in flight from Jim crow laws.

People for whom laboring on the city docks promised a better life

than any they could hope to have back home chopping cotton

or cutting cane for someone else's profit.

The blues was part of their baggage.

Early: The blues is about sculpting meaning out of a situation

that seems to defy your being able to find meaning in it.

Black people since the end of the civil war are searching for an aesthetic.

They're searching for an aesthetic that will free them of minstrelsy.

Free them of the burden of minstrelsy.

Free them of the degradation of minstrelsy.

What emerges from that is a form called the blues.

And it's a very useful form.

It's elastic--you can do a lot with it because it's simple.

Narrator: The blues is an utterly American form--

built on just 3 chords, most often arranged in 12-bar sequences called choruses--

that allows for an infinite number of variations.

Early: And it's a form that in order for you to really be able to pull it off well

involves more than just technique.

You have to have a certain kind of Feeling With it.

So you create this kind of basic language,

through which and on which they can construct all kinds of things.

W. Marsalis: You have to have that blues.

If you don't have roux, it's you don't have gumbo.Mbo.

Now you might have a soup and it might be killin',

but if you don't have that roux, you cannot have no gumbo.

[Death comes a-creepin' In my room Playing]

Narrator: The blues was the profane twin

of the sacred music of the black baptist church,

filled with call and response, shouts, moans,

exhortations and signifying.

"One was praying to god and the other was praying to what's human,"

a New Orleans musician said.

"One was saying, Oh god, let me go,

and the other was saying, Oh mister, let me be."

there was a big difference between having the blues and playing the blues,

because playing the blues was a matter of getting rid of the blues.

The lyrics may have been tragic in their orientation

but the music was about having a good time.

So the music was really a matter of stomping the blues away.

[Rolled and tumbled Playing]

Narrator: The blues could be about anything.

A beautiful woman, a mean boss, the devil himself.

But they were always intensely personal,

meant to make the listener feel better, not worse.

Recording: ♪♪ gonna stand here and wring ♪♪

♪♪ gonna wring my hands and cry ♪♪

Narrator: And each performer was expected to tell a story.

Woman: When we sing the blues, we're singing out our feelings.

Maybe we're hurt and just can't answer back.

Then we sing or maybe even hum the blues.

Yes, to us the blues are sacred.

When I sing, what I'm doing is letting my soul sing out.

The blues are about freedom.

The blues are about freedom.

Yeah, there's liberation in reality.

And when they talk about these songs, when they talk about being sad.

The fact that you recognize, the fact that you recognize that which pains you

is a very freeing and liberating experience.

It's just--it must be strange for other cultures

where you spend most of your time trying to pretend

like you don't have any of these problems or any of these, you know, situations.

When I hear the blues, the blues makes me smile.

Man: Blues came along and said, "now, our honest experience

is nothing like old black Joe," you know.

But at the same time, out of our own resources, we can make a life.

"I'm going to lay my head on some lonesome railroad track

"and when the train come along,

I'm gonna snatch my damn head back."

[Dunn's cornet blues Playing]

Narrator: In New Orleans, musicians would find a way

to deepen the message of the blues by playing it on their horns.

They have all these instruments that are left over from the civil war,

like military instruments, and the trumpets are played in a militaristic style:

♪♪ Boom-boom ba boomboom boom boom boom boom boom ♪♪

In a straight military style or a hymn or a beautiful melody,

now they're imitating the sound of the people in the church singing.

They have the vibrato at the end of the note.

♪♪ Doe-oo-oo-oo Dee-ee Dee theboodeedle loo-Dee-ee ♪♪in:

Then the music gets another power in feeling.

In the way that profound things almost always happen,

a thing and the opposite of that thing are mashed together.

Now you have the people getting the spiritual sound of the church,

and they also are getting that secular sound of the blues.

And the musicians who could understand both of those things

and put both of them in their horns side-by-side,

so they could represent that angel and that devil,

that was the ones that could play.

Narrator: Over the next century,

the blues would become the underground aquifer

that would feed all the streams of American music--

including jazz.

Man: There are differences between the colored man and the white man

which neither education nor law can abrogate.

To sit by a negro's side at a hotel table or a concert hall

would be, in the opinion of the white people,

to ignore the truth.

New orleans Daily picayune.

narrator: Eventually, Jim crow conquered New Orleans as well.

In 1890, the Louisiana legislature decreed

that blacks and whites must occupy different cars

on trains traveling within the state.

Two years later, a New Orleans creole of color

named homer Adolph plessy

set out to test the new law,

boarding an excursion train and insisting on sitting in the "whites only" car.

He was arrested, tried, and convicted.

In 1896, in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson,

the supreme court of the United States upheld his conviction.

"Separate but equal facilities," it said, were constitutional.

That decision would govern life in the American south--

and in New Orleans--

for nearly 60 years.

City theaters and restaurants were now strictly segregated.

Black and white boxers and bicycle racers and baseball teams

were forbidden to compete against one another.

The state legislature then passed a law

barring all would-be voters

whose grandfathers had been slaves.

Where 95 percent of the city's black men had been registered to vote,

just one percent was now eligible to go to the polls.

And the world of the creoles was turned upside down, too.

By law, they now found themselves classified with blacks

as second-class citizens.

B. Marsalis: And all these creole people suddenly became black people overnight,

and these creole orchestras which existed at one point suddenly disappeared,

and these clarinetists had no work,

so they were essentially forced to go into the black community.

And that level of technical fluency

forever changed the nature of the music.

Narrator: Creole musicians merged their classical virtuosity

with the blues-inflected music of black bands.

Together, they would transform

every kind of music played in New Orleans.

[Smokehouse blues Playing]

Davis: The blues had a strict kind of beat,

and they were often slow,

and they said exactly what they meant,

and they meant exactly what they said.

And the musicians sometimes had to fill in space

from one phrase to the next one,

and so it was that they began to fill in that space,

and little by little, they began to embellish it,

and little by little, it began to take on

a distinctive life of its own.

It was that moment, where, in a group effort,

an individual might just shine on his own.

You know, he had that space, he had that time, so fill it.

And the individual began to fill the space with inventions

that still stayed within the spirit of the piece.

Other musicians in the same band,

hearing one trumpet do it--

"well, the trombone will do it."

And so, the spirit of improvisation--

as a means of expressing who I am and how clever I am,

all within the bounds and bonds of the song--

grew up.

Narrator: There was, as yet, no name

for the music black and creole musicians began to play together

at the dawn of the new 20th century.

Some older musicians would call what they played "ragtime" to the end.

But the eventual result would be a brand-new music--

"not spirituals or the blues or ragtime,"

or any of the other kinds of music heard

in the streets of New Orleans, one musician remembered,

"but everything all at once,

each one putting something over on the other."

Like the city that gave it birth,

like the country that would soon embrace it,

this new music would always be more than the sum of its parts.

Giddins: Jazz is the quintessential American music.

And the important thing that you have to begin with

is that it could only happen in america.

It's not an African music, obviously.

It's not a European music, obviously.

It's something that comes right out of this soil,

out of influences that come from different, all different kinds of cultures.

And all of those come together in jazz.

But in jazz, unlike all of the other folk musics of the world,

it blossoms into an authentic art.

[Make me a pallet Playing]

Man: When you come right down to it,

the man who started the big noise in jazz

was buddy bolden.

Yes, he was a powerful trumpet player,

and a good one, too.

I guess he deserves credit for starting it all.

Mutt Carey.

W. Marsalis: And out of all of this comes buddy bolden,

a dark-skinned negro from the church.

Buddy bolden's innovation was one of personality.

So instead of playing all this fast stuff,

he would bring you the sound of buddy bolden.

Narrator: Buddy bolden, the first musician celebrated for playing jazz music,

was born in 1877, the year reconstruction ended.

Only one dim photograph of him survives,

and little is known about his tragic life,

but from the first, bolden seems to have been different

from every other cornet and trumpet player--

louder, bolder, more innovative--

and eager always to surprise and delight his listeners

with the richness of his musical ideas.

W. Marsalis: Buddy bolden invented that beat that we call the big four:

That skip on the fourth beat, or so legend has it.

The big four is when you accent the second fourth beat of a march.

In a straight, strict march, you'll be going

doom-chi doom-chi doom-chi doom-chi doom-chi doom-chi.

With the big four, you go doom-chi doom-chi doom-chi

ka-doom Boom

chi doom-chi doom-chi ka-doom Boom.

so on that fourth beat, the drum and the cymbal hit together.

And that point is where jazz music started to really get its lilt.

Before this, the trumpets, they were playing...

[Plays straightforward rendition of Stars and stripes forever]

but now, I have the big four--

boom, boom, boom, ta-boom Boom,

boom boom, boom boom boom boom Boom,

so when I phrase it, I'm gonna make it sound like me,

and I'm gonna play with another entire feeling and groove,

and use all the different growls and shouts and cries,

so now it becomes:

[Plays jazz rendition of Stars And stripes forever]

you're playing to make it sound not like trumpet,

but like buddy bolden.

Now, you're also listening to the clarinet,

so the clarinet might play a little something and you have to stop playing,

so you might say:

[Plays Stars and stripes Forever ]

♪♪ Doo be be be doo be doobie doobie do doodle do ♪

[Plays]

♪♪ Dee doobie doobie do ♪♪-- he's playing at the same time.

Everything is organized a certain way,

but at every second, all of you are making a decision

to make that music stronger,

and to organize that music more and more.

That's jazz music.

[Make me a pallet Playing]

Narrator: Like other New Orleans musicians in the first years of the 20th century,

buddy bolden played everything--

waltzes, mazurkas, schottisches,

but he was best remembered polfor his "hot" music,tuals.

And he played it all over town--

perseverance hall, masonic hall, Jackson hall,

and the union sons hall, which at night became

the funky butt dance hall.

Man: Nobody took their hats off.

It was plenty rough.

You paid 15 cents and walked in.

The band, 6 of them, was sitting on a low stand.

They had their hats on and were resting, pretty sleepy.

All of a sudden, buddy stomps,

knocks on the floor with his trumpet to give the beat,

and they'd all sit up straight.

They played Make me a pallet.

everybody Rose and yelled out,

"oh, Mr. Bolden, play it for us, buddy, play it!"

And I'd never heard anything like that before.

George baquet.

[Careless love Playing]

Man: But after midnight, the night people took over.

And that's when the blues and the slow drags really begin to predominate,

and bolden gets away and from the polite,e changes,

and he gets into some of the more impolite.

It's a different kind of frenzy.

It's one that's kind of

internalized with a hot, humid,

everyone's kind of moving languorously on the dance floor.

No one's trying to wear it out and spend their energy too quickly

because they literally want it to last all night long.

Narrator: "On those old, slow, low-down blues," a fellow musician recalled,

"bolden had a moan in his cornet that just went through you,

just like you were in church or something."

[Buddy bolden's blues Playing]

By 1906, buddy bolden had become

the best-known black musician in New Orleans,

now hailed as king bolden by the children

who gathered in front of his house each morning,

just to hear him practice.

Bolden was especially beloved in the black section

of the wide-open, red-light district of New Orleans

called storyville.

There was nothing like it anywhere else in america.

W. Marsalis: New Orleans was the hotbed of that type of sexual activity,

and we weren't puritan.

In jazz music it says: This is what we do, and it's beautiful.

And it's also terrible.

And jazz is real:

It deals with that man and that woman.

It deals with depraved things because the musician saw all of these things.

That's what gives our music its bite and its feeling,

and that's what the world wanted from our music.

It didn't hide what went on under the sheets.

Raeburn: The apogee of bolden's career

coincides with the best years of storyville.

Everybody wanted to come to storyville

and sort of check this thing out.

It was like the casbah in North America.

Well, there was a sporting life associated with storyville,

and bolden lived it.

But there was a cost to be paid,

and bolden drank heavily.

He began to miss gigs.

Narrator: Bolden had always been a heavy drinker,

but now he started to develop headaches,

began talking to himself,

quarreled with the members of his band,

and worried constantly that other musicians' innovations

would overshadow his own.

He seemed frightened of everything--

even his cornet.

In September of 1906,

he set out to play in another parade,

just as he had done for years.

But somewhere along the way,

he abruptly walked away from the other marchers.

His mother did what she could to calm his fears,

but nothing seemed to help.

6 months later, she was forced to call the police,

afraid her son would hurt her--or himself.

Buddy bolden, the man who had led the first jazz band,

would never play his horn in public again.

He would spend the rest of his life

in the Louisiana state insane asylum at Jackson.

When you hear jelly roll Morton

singing Stars and stripes Forever,

I think the way he did it was something like

he says that--instead of saying:

♪♪ Doo Dee dah doo Dee dah doo Dee ♪♪

He said: ♪♪ ep poo doo boo do Bo dooden dit doo Dee, dit doo Dee ♪♪

♪♪ eh boo boo bee boo bee bah, doo Dee doo Dee, dah doo Dee ♪♪

And that's it. That's it.

When you hear that, you know what that is.

Every group of people has figured out something

that defangs the wolf at the door, as it were.

You know, the Irish had their way of doing it,

the Russians do it another way,

the Chinese do it their way,

Jews got their way of doing it.

See, that negro, though,

there's something about the idea that,

well...here we are.

What choice do we have?

Well, we can sit up and say, "boy, these white folks

sure is doin' some terrible to us today."

Or we can say ♪♪ ep poo deh boo dooden deh boo dooden ♪♪

♪♪ dit doo Dee, dit doo Dee, eh boo boo bee boo bee dah ♪♪

You know, you do, you got a choice.

[The pearls Playing]

Man: The piano was known in our circles

as an instrument for a lady,

and I didn't want to be a sissy.

I wanted to marry and raise a family and be known as a man among men.

So I studied other instruments.

Until one day I saw a gentleman play a very good piece of ragtime,

and I decided then that the instrument was good for a gentleman

same as it was for a lady.

Jelly roll Morton.

W. Marsalis: His music has the flavor of New Orleans in it.

He was aware of everything that was going on around him.

He took the feeling of what buddy bolden brought to the music,

and he put that in his music.

And he put the sound of the street vendors--

♪♪ got your watermelon, 25 to the rind ♪♪--

you know, whatever they would say, he'd have all that in there.

And even though he was a creole,

unlike a lot of creoles who would be dicty,

he wasn't that type of person.

He was attracted to the night life.

And they always say, you know, the night people are out to get the day people.

And that's how he was-- he was a night person.

Narrator: Jelly roll Morton was born ferdinand Joseph lamothe

in New Orleans in 1890,

and he claimed that "all my folks came directly from the shores of France."

But he was really the son of an unwed creole mother

who traced her ancestry back only as far as Haiti.

He was raised for a time by his conservative great-grandmother,

who favored the formality and tradition of French opera.

But her great-grandson had something altogether different in mind.

[Mamamita Playing]

Morton was only a teenager when he secretly took a job

playing for whores and their free-spending clients in storyville.

W. Marsalis: So he loved being in the sporting houses.

He loved being in the clubs.

He loved being around the roughhouse people.

He loved to pull his knife out.

He loved to talk, yeah,

and he loved to play the funerals and the parades and sing in them.

That's what he liked to do.

Narrator: He told his great- grandmother that he couldn't come home at night

because he was working as a night watchman.

W. Marsalis: Well, you know, jelly roll told his grandmama

that he was a night watchman, and he wasn't lying.

But he didn't tell her what he was watching.

Because he worked in these houses of prostitution,

he had the best seat in the house.

They had a little peephole, and he would play

to the choreography of the prostitute.

And he would get tips based on how successful he was.

So if he really came up with something hip

when they do a little twist or turn there...

They give him a little extra money.

Narrator: Morton quickly became an exceptional piano player,

effortlessly blending ragtime, minstrelsy, and the blues

into a new, complex, improvised hybrid.

No one thought more highly of Morton than he did.

"I'm the master," he liked to say.

"Anything you play on your horn, you're playing jelly roll."

And in later years, he happily told anyone willing to listen

that he had, in fact, invented jazz.

He hadn't, but he did write a host of tunes

that would become jazz standards,

and he was the first to put his compositions down on paper.

Some of his music incorporated habanera dance rhythms from the Caribbean,

which he called the "Spanish tinge."

Without that beat, he said, you don't have the "right seasoning...For jazz."

Morton became an all-around entertainer.

He played piano, he sang, he danced,

and insisted that everyone call him

by the distinctive nickname he'd adopted.

Crouch: It's a description of a certain kind of erotic motion.

You know, in other words, jelly roll means...

Jelly roll means exactly the kind of erotic motion and pressure

that you would prefer above all others.

So that's what that means.

Morton: ♪♪ in New Orleans, in new Orleans, Louisiana town ♪♪

♪♪ there's the finest boy for many miles around ♪♪

♪♪ lord, mister jelly roll ♪

♪♪ your affection he has stole ♪♪

♪♪ he's tall and chancey ♪♪

♪♪ he's the lady's fancy ♪♪

♪♪ everybody knows him, certainly do adore him ♪♪

Narrator: Morton's great-grandmother

eventually got wind of where he was working

and threw him out of the house forever.

He took to the road at 17,

and never again left it for long.

Morton traveled everywhere-- Memphis, Chicago, New York,

Kansas City, Oklahoma city, and Los Angeles.

To support himself, he blacked up and performed

as a vaudeville comic,

gambled at cards,

hustled pool,

pimped,

and peddled a cure for consumption door-to-door:

A sticky-sweet elixir

made up of salt and Coca-Cola.

But he also continued to play the piano.

As a result, everywhere jelly roll Morton went,

his music went, too.

Morton: ♪♪ when you seen him strolling ♪

♪♪ everybody opens up ♪♪

♪♪ he's red-hot stuff ♪♪

♪♪ friends, you can't get enough ♪♪

♪♪ play it soft, don't abuse ♪♪

♪♪ play those jelly roll blues ♪

[Kinklets Playing]

Man: Why is the jass music and, therefore, the jass band?

As well ask why is the dime novel

or the grease-dripping doughnut.

All are manifestations of a low streak in man's tastes

that has not yet come out in civilization's wash.

In the matter of jass, New Orleans is particularly interested,

since it has been widely suggested

that this particular form of musical vice

had its birth in this city.

We do not recognize the honor of parenthood,

but with such a story in circulation,

it behooves us to be the last to accept the atrocity in polite society.

New orleans Times-picayune.

narrator: The music that buddy bolden and jelly roll Morton had played in New Orleans

was sometimes called "ratty music,"

or "gut-bucket music."

To others, it was just "hot music"--

filled with energy and fire.

But some soon began to call it "jass,"

claiming the name came from the Jasmine perfume

supposedly favored by prostitutes in storyville.

"Jass" eventually became "jazz,"

though no one is absolutely certain why.

W. Marsalis: It used to be j-a-s-s, and, you know,

you scratch the "j" off and it would just say "ass."

So, they changed it to j-a-z-z.

But I think that the original meaning of jazz was procreation.

And you can't get no more deeper or profounder than that,

unless you're contemplating the creator.

Early: There's been a lot of debate of what the word jazz means.

Was an African word that means "speed it up" or something like that

because the thing that struck people early about jazz,

the earliest listeners to jazz,

was that it seemed fast.

It seemed like a speeded-up music.

It came along at the time that film came along,

and film kind of speeded up pictures, speeded up photography,

so you had this music that seemed sort of speeded up.

Narrator: By 1910, there were bands of every kind and color in New Orleans.

The best-known white groups were led by papa Jack laine,

a drummer, blacksmith, and sometime boxer

who began organizing his reliance brass bands while still in grade school,

and kept at it for more than 40 years.

New stars began to emerge:

Freddie keppard,

kid ory,

Joe Oliver,

and a child prodigy whose huge, aggressive sound

would astonish everyone who played with him

for the next 50 years--

Sidney bechet.

[St. Louis blues Playing]

W. Marsalis: Well, with Sidney bechet,

you have the poet of New Orleans music.

He knew he was a genius from the beginning

because he could just play.

He's one of those type of prodigies.

And he could just play better than grown men.

So he'd be taking lessons and he'd be like,

"well, what can we say? How do you play it?"

And he just was hot and fiery, and it would come out through his horn.

Narrator: Sidney bechet's creole family

had hoped music would be a hobby for him,

not a profession.

But he seems never even to have considered anything else.

Too impatient to take instruction from anyone for long,

bechet taught himself the clarinet,

stunning his parents by keeping up with Freddie keppard's band

when he was just 10 years old.

[Wildcat blues Playing]

At 16, bechet left school

and devoted himself full-time to music.

He soon earned a reputation

as a musician unlike any other in New Orleans.

You always are talking about the personalities,

and how they brought their personality to their instrument.

First, he played with a lot of vibrato.

♪♪ Deeee doooo deeeeee dooo deee ♪♪

But he also had a real biting attack.

♪♪ Loo bee doo Dee doodly Dee bee doo do de be do ♪♪

He loved the blues,

Sidney bechet loved to moan some blues out his horn.

Giving the musician the freedom and power to have their own voice

was really very innovative when jazz first emerged in New Orleans...

Because the way things were usually done,

a composer would tell the musician what to do.

In the teens, when Sidney was first getting a reputation for himself,

all the New Orleans musicians looked to him as the real prodigy.

He could take a clarinet that was on its last legs

and find notes that no one even suspected might be inside that thing.

Narrator: Like jelly roll Morton,

Sidney bechet eventually left his hometown

and began playing with vaudeville shows and carnivals

throughout the south and midwest.

Jazz music was moving out from New Orleans--

across the country--

one musician, one performance at a time.

[Stars and stripes forever Playing]

Narrator: After the Victor talking machine company

had introduced the victrola in 1901,

the recording industry had become big business.

The artists who sold the most records were

the operatic tenor enrico caruso

and the band leader John Phillip sousa.

No one had yet thought of recording jazz.

Audiences would have to be there--in person-- to hear and appreciate it.

In the trumpet lineage, after buddy bolden,

you have Freddie keppard, who was a creole trumpet player,

and he did a lot of things like laughing,

and he was a... He played with a mute,

it was a certain type of mute that we call a wah-wah mute,

and...see I have one right here.

This is the laugh that I use all the time.

I got this from a Freddie keppard record.

And Freddie keppard, he'd be playing either like he was going...

♪♪♪♪♪♪

[Laughing sound]

[Stomp time blues Playing]

Narrator: In 1914, Freddie keppard,

one of the best jazz musicians in New Orleans,

left his hometown and carried his big brass sound with him

all the way west to Los Angeles

where he and 6 other refugees from New Orleans

played in a band called theoriginal creole orchestra.

They toured in vaudeville for 4 years, then settled in Chicago,

where keppard was billed as "king keppard."

"He hit the highest and the lowest notes on a trumpet

that anybody...Ever did," jelly roll Morton remembered.

And it was said that patrons who sat too close to the bandstand

asked to move back when he began to blow.

Man: Freddie keppard? He was very big and very strong.

One night, he played his trumpet and he blew,

if you could understand,

blew and the mute, his mute flew out of his horn onto the dance floor.

And the next morning, it was in the newspaper in Chicago.

Nobody ever did anything like that.

Narrator: But for all his power and artistry,

keppard was so fearful other cornetists would copy his fingering

that when he played, he was said sometimes to drape a handkerchief over his hand.

In December of 1915, the Victor talking machine company

offered to record keppard and his band.

Jazz had yet to be recorded

and no one knew if it would sell.

It was keppard's big chance,

but unexpectedly, he turned them down.

He was said to have been frightened that other musicians

would buy his records just to steal his stuff.

Freddie keppard passed up the opportunity

to become the first jazz musician to make a record.

Narrator: A little more than a year later,

on February 26, 1917, jazz was finally recorded.

A group calling themselves the original dixieland jazz band

assembled in the Victor studio in New York City.

[The livery stable blues Playing]

The band consisted of 5 white musicians from New Orleans,

led by the cornetist Nick larocca.

The son of an Italian shoemaker,

larocca was ambitious,

hard-driving and unconventional.

He had taught himself to play jazz by practicing in the outhouse,

away from his father's disapproving ears.

Once they got to the Victor studio,

the band played two well-known New Orleans tunes--

dixieland jazz band one-step And Livery stable blues.

the engineer had insisted the they play especially fast

to fit the whole tune on one side of a record.

Released on march 7, 1917, the record was an immediate hit.

The emphasis was on comedy.

Larocca made his cornet whinny like a horse.

Larry shields crowed like a rooster with his clarinet.

It was the first jazz most Americans had ever heard.

Man: I was 6, living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,

and I can still recall my sensations as I heard for the first time

the sardonic, driving horn of Nick larocca,

the impudent smears and growls of daddy Edwards,

the barnyard crowings and whinnyings of Larry shields...

I must have played it 100 times before I remembered to breathe.

For better or worse, I qujazz had entered my life..

Ralph berton.

Narrator: The record sold more than 250,000 copies at 75 cents each--

more than any single record had ever sold,

more than John Phillip sousa or enrico caruso.

[Playing Dixieland Jass band one-step]

Collier: Within weeks, you had 6 songs using the word jazz in them.

Irving Berlin was writing songs to catch on to this new fad.

Americans almost immediately were jazz crazy.

As it began to spread across the country,

it was clear that this was the kind of music

that people wanted for dancing.

So that if you were going to be a dance band musician at all,

you had to play jazz,

but what was really important about this

was the way that the young people all over the United States

were simply swept up by this new music.

Narrator: The new music, whose roots ran back beyond Congo square,

was at last being heard by all Americans.

New bands sprang up everywhere.

The Louisiana five,

the original Memphis five,

the New Orleans rhythm kings,

the New Orleans kings of rhythm,

and the original New Orleans jazz band,

organized by a ragtime piano player

born and bred in Brooklyn named Jimmy durante.

Raeburn: It was a new century and there were high hopes

and young people really wanted that kind of freedom

to create a culture of their own.

This is really the first time in American history that that happened.

It was a way for people to break with the old.

It was a way to break from Europe.

It was a way to break from old victorian mores.

It was a way to break from a whole bunch of other stuff.

It was, it was sort of clean in that respect,

and america no longer had to look back to its past,

no longer had to look back to Europe, or anything else.

Black people, when they invented this music,

weren't looking back to Africa.

Looking at the future and looking at what they they were as Americans.,

Europeans who came to this country and became Americans

and were attracted to this music

found in this music a way to break from Europe.

Finally, the emersonian doctrine

of "create your art here" from The American scholar

finally came to fruition with this music.

[Margie Playing]

Man: Jazz is the assassination, the murdering,

the slaying of syncopation.

I even go so far as to confess that we are musical anarchists.

Nick larocca.

Narrator: The original dixieland jazz band now billed itself as the creators of jazz

and undertook a tour of england.

They were a sensation there, too.

But the band slowly fell apart.

Eddie Edwards, the trombone player,

was drafted into the army in 1918.

The pianist, Henry ragas, died of influenza in 1919.

Larry shields, the clarinet player,

quit in 1921, weary of the road.

And in 1925, Nick larocca himself

would suffer a nervous breakdown,

abandon the road, and return to the construction business in New Orleans

as if he had never been a musician.

But until the day he died,

larocca would insist that his music--and all jazz music--

had been an exclusively white creation.

Black people, he said, had had nothing to do with it.

Man: Many writers have attributed this rhythm that we introduced

as something coming from the African jungles

and crediting the negro race with it.

My contention is that the negroes

learned to play this rhythm and music from the whites.

The negro did not play any kind of music equal to white men at any time.

Nick larocca.

Well, race is a...

Race is like-- for this country it's like the thing in the story,

in the mythology that you have to do for the kingdom to be well.

And it's always something you don't want to do.

And it's always that thing that's so much about you confronting yourself.

That it's tailor-made for you to fail dealing with it.

And the question of your heroism and of your courage

and of your success at dealing with this trial,

is can you confront it with honesty and do you confront it

and do you have the energy to sustain an attack on it?

And since jazz music is at the center of the American mythology,

it necessarily deals with race.

The more we run from it, the more we run into it.

It's an age-old story, you know.

If it's not race, it's something else.

But in this particular instance,

in this nation, it is race.

[Stardust Playing]

Narrator: Shortly after midnight on January 1, 1913,

the New Orleans police made an arrest.

An 11-year-old boy had been caught firing his step-father's .38 revolver

into the air in celebration of the new year.

He was not unknown to the police,

and the next morning a judge sentenced him to an indeterminate term

in the colored waif's home.

His name in the neighborhood was little Louie.

But his full name was Louis Armstrong,

and he would one day transform American music.

[Perdido street blues Playing]