All language subtitles for JAZZ - 01 - Gumbo (Beginnings to 1917)

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]