New York Jazz

            King Oliver left New Orleans in 1919, to be joined in Chicago three years later by Louis Armstrong (The Best of Jazz “King Oliver” 37). There, Oliver would develop a virtuosic paradigm of a soloist improvising in front of supporting musicians, while Armstrong would integrate melodicism into Oliver’s style (The Best of Jazz “King Oliver” 41). Meanwhile, local white groups like the Austin High School Gang helped to spread jazz into venues with prohibitory policies towards black musicians (The Best of Jazz “The Chicagoans” 154). Through a fusion of Creole, folk, and blues influences, Chicago jazz became a versatile music style suitable for both expression and entertainment.

            New York City, though, was the most important center in the development of jazz during the mid to late twenties. Jazz in Harlem was spawned from a drastically different set of influences than was the New Orleans-Chicago jazz heredity. Like in Chicago, musicians in New York drew inspiration from the blues, and New York jazz was even more influenced by ragtime than in Chicago—after all, the king of ragtime, Scott Joplin, lived in New York for the last decade of his life. Yet it was classical European music which outstandingly influenced jazz in New York. Harlem lent jazz the high class demographic needed for the music to jump from back alley blue collar entertainment to center stage as a viable mode of artistic output.

            The main force in mid-twenties New York jazz was stride piano. Stride blended ragtime with the influence of black migrants bearing the blues. However, European influence separated the auditory experience of stride from contemporaneous styles. James P. Johnson, the progenitor of stride piano, once commented, “The reason the New York boys became such high class musicians was because the New York piano was developed by the European method, system and style….The ragtime player had to live up to that standard” (Gioia 97). Johnson was known for ragging up canonical European works into “hot” versions worthy of a dance (The Best of Jazz “James P. Johnson” 25).

                        By the 1920’s, Harlem had developed a dualistic demographic consisting of poor migrants who were known for holding rent parties, and of middle class blacks who carried the artistic tastes associated with the Harlem renaissance (Gioia 94). Because of this duality, stride piano needed, simply for commercial viability, to seamlessly blend from appealing to those accustomed to “art music” to entertaining rent party-goers. To the date, ragtime and New Orleans-Chicago jazz had never managed (and perhaps even avoided) to find a moderate perch between high- and low-brow approbation (Gioia 96).

            Art Tatum’s music characterizes the relationship between stride piano and its ancestral styles. Tatum, a late entrant to Harlem stride, was continually in a dialogic discourse with multiple lineages of previous music. In congruence with Bakhtin’s literary theory, Tatum balanced his own desire for innovation with inspiration from previous composers. Tatum always adhered to the precedent by earlier stride artists like Johnson. Franz Liszt—the Entertainer of the classical era—motivated Tatum’s flashy technique (Gioia 102). Tatum’s repertoire was built on popular songs, connecting him to his audience (Gioia 104). The dialogism between Tatum and his contemporaries and precursors allowed his innovation to be socially relevant.

            New York jazz served as an antithesis to its Midwestern analogue—Chicago jazz specialized in expression and the brass solo instrument. New York jazz was fast, chromatic, highly technical, and required immense precision to effectuate daring leaps and dense harmonies. The later synthesis of New York jazz with the Chicago style would eventually yield the bebop era.