This is another in my series on promising young musicians who keep old traditions alive. Links to YouTube are scattered throughout — click to listen. I do not embed them to save space. Most pictures are also from YouTube.
The History part
Jazz is a uniquely American type of music. It is one of our (few) cultural innovations that is appreciated everywhere from Moscow to Tatooine (not what you expect). It was developed from a blend of classical, African, and Caribbean influences in New Orleans at the beginning of the 20th Century, first put together by cornet player Buddy Bolden (1877-1931).
In the hundred plus years since then jazz has evolved into many different strands and styles but I am only going to follow an early portion of that history here.
New Orleans
Funerals in New Orleans are like nowhere else: they have brass bands. During the procession to the burial the band plays very slow and sad Blues, but coming back they play lively dance music.
The key to the New Orleans style of music is collective improvisation of music intended for dancing. The ensemble as a whole is improvising and solos are short. The improvisation is important so that dances can continue for a longer period of time than the original tune would have supported, and especially when some of the musicians could not read music notation.
One of the best groups playing this kind of music today is Tuba Skinny, led by multi-instrumentalist Shaye Cohn, granddaughter of Al Cohn, a saxophone player from the Swing era that we get to next. Though educated in classical piano, Shaye discovered that jazz is a lot more fun and now plays plays cornet, stride piano, accordion, and violin. Hear Tuba Skinny playing on a street corner in New Orleans. They have released over 10 albums, available at their web site. The Tuba Skinny musicians carefully recreate this music the way it was played one hundred years ago, and sometimes contribute new pieces in the same style.
Swing
People like to dance and the idea evolved to have even more people dancing at once (for an entrance fee) in large dance halls built for the purpose. To fill such large rooms, holding several hundred people at a time, larger musical resources were required. Bands grew to 16 or 20 musicians and you can’t reasonably have that many people trying to improvise all at once so the music was typically written out and arranged in advance, with only short segments of solo playing by a featured player. This was the rise of the Big Bands, and they soon adopted a swing style of playing. If you watch the Jimmy Stewart movie The Glenn Miller Story (1954) you can see this evolution happening.
In the 1930s, swing style dancing became very popular. The big band swing sound used the musical techniques from New Orleans but arranged in a large and lush style, with call and response going on between brass and reed instruments. Call and Response had its origins in African music, then brought to North America by the slave trade.
The names of the people leading these bands are well known today: Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller.
The big band style fell out of favor during WW2 due a variety of factors. It was expensive to pay and transport a group of 16 or 20 musicians around the country, a lot of the musicians (as well as potential dance partners) were in the Army, and “ballroom” dancing was becoming less popular.
Bebop
But in 1940 a completely new style of jazz was being developed in New York City. Here is how Ted Gioia describes it in his book The History of Jazz:
Early modern jazz, or bebop as it soon came to be called, rebelled against the populist trappings of swing music. The simple riffs, the accessible vocals, the orientation toward providing accompaniment to social dancing, the thick big band textures built on interlocking brass and reed sections—these trademarks of prewar jazz were set aside in favor of a more streamlined, more insistent style.
Saxophone player Charlie Parker (known as “Bird”) was experimenting one day and found that by playing higher notes in the chord structure he could take the melody in entirely new directions while not being jarring to the listener.
This marked the beginning of jazz moving away from being dance music to being a more intellectual art form. Bebop is for listening, with less emphasis on the “beat” and more on innovative melody, advanced harmony, and virtuosic technique. You are not supposed to dance to it — in fact the tempo is so fast you probably couldn’t anyway. Solos became longer compared to the early years.
It only takes a few people to play Bebop, four or five, so it is much less expensive to put on and can be performed in smaller facilities and clubs than the big dance halls of the Swing era.
Bebop again makes extensive use of the Call and Response pattern where one soloist will play an elaboration on the basic melody, usually of some old “standard” like Fly Me to the Moon and then a different soloist will play an elaboration on that, maintaining the same chord progression. The trick is that this entire exchange is improvised on the spot and it requires a very good ear and fast thinking. It also requires familiarity with hundreds of the basic standards as everything is done without sheet music, following a standard pattern:
- Everyone plays through the melody once or twice, usually in unison. This is called the “head”.
- Each soloist then takes a turn with their own variation, following the harmonic structure of the original song, not necessarily the melody. Sometimes there is a bit of competitive “try to beat this” going on. A new melodic composition written over the chord progression of a preexisting tune is called a contrafact. You can copyright song lyrics and you can copyright a melody but you can’t copyright just a chord progression.
- Everyone plays the head again.
The tempo is very fast, sometimes exceeding 200 beats per minute. Bebop is pretty unique among jazz styles for its speed and this was intentional; they wanted to make it difficult for players from “downtown” to “sit in” on their sessions and steal their ideas. As pianist Thelonius Monk said “We're going to create something they can't steal, because they can't play it.”
AFTer Bebop
Jazz continued to develop into more and more esoteric forms after Bebop, generally slower, some more traditionally melodic and some much less so, but those are not the subject of this article. If you are interested, see the reading list at the end. Bebop is still being performed today but it is difficult to play well and it places demands on the listener. Definitely not child’s play.
Or is it?
The Next Generation
In 2010 a girl was born in the Republic of Korea named Dakyung Kwak (in Korean 곽다경). I wrote briefly about her before. She started playing the trumpet when she was four, aided by her father’s teaching and she having perfect pitch. This talent will prove essential because she soon became interested in Bebop. See videos in that previous diary. She takes lessons and practices a lot, assisted by her father — more on this at the end.
Meeting Wynton
In 2019 famous jazz/classical trumpeter Wynton Marsalis was on tour in Korea. Dakyung’s father had a contact though one of the musicians in the band and managed to get back stage with Dakyung carrying a compact trumpet. Before Marsalis knew what was happening, this little nine year old girl was playing “Billie’s Bounce” for him, which stopped him in his tracks.
Clearly impressed, he promised to send her some material which turned out to be a bunch of CDs and an autographed copy of his book Moving to Higher Ground, which is about the history of jazz as well as how to play it. Here she is opening the package. Notice that she can already read English (slowly), which says something about Asian educational systems.
Clubs
Dakyung and her father, who plays bass, often perform at small jazz clubs around Seoul. Here they are playing Anthropology, by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, the inventors of Bebop. She can improvise and play nearly as fast as Bird did. Remember, she is just twelve years old here.
Just this summer (2023) she performed with several older jazz professionals at an outdoor concert, playing some more relaxed styles. Here they are playing On the Sunny Side of the Street and the audience is large considering that it is raining. (You do not see it in the video but there is a large tent over the stage.) Her playing is smooth and professional.
Classical
If you can master Bebop, everything else is easy. Besides jazz idioms, Dakyung also studies classical performance and she has played as a soloist with symphony orchestras. Here she is this past January accompanying singer Hyun-jung Yoon in Handel’s Let the Bright Seraphim from his oratorio Samson. She is using a piccolo trumpet, which sounds an octave higher than the usual Bb trumpet and is often employed in Baroque pieces. For comparison, here is Wynton Marsalis playing the same piece.
Dakyung has played at state occasions commemorating the Korean War, as here when she was 11. That is the president greeting her.
She also plays the piano and likes to sing as you see here doing Someone You Love.
Wynton again
In March of 2023 Wynton Marsalis was again in Korea. Dakyung met him and showed him pictures from their first meeting and he asked for a copy. He had evidently been following Dakyung on YouTube and said, “I want you to get ready to get into Julliard.” He told Dakyung and her father that he would send lessons and advice on what to practice. “I want to get you in. We’ll talk about stuff to work on. We need you. We need a higher consciousness. You have it; we need it.”
Can you imagine what it is like for a thirteen year old girl to hear that from one of the most famous trumpet players in the business?
By the way, Wynton Marsalis is director of the Jazz program at the Julliard School of Music, considered by many to be the best music school in the world. It is very hard to get into and there is an audition requirement. The school admits only 7% of applicants.
Well, she has a few years to prepare for that.
Which brings up again my concern about climate change and the international complications that will happen as a result. The world will be very different in five years. Will Dakyung be able to fulfill her dream of going to Julliard? How about if both countries have fascist governments? The main campus is in downtown New York, a long way from Korea and very expensive.
Further reading
Here is Dakyung Kwak’s YouTube channel, where you can watch her practicing in her father’s enviously well equipped studio. She plays along with recordings, sometimes with her father and sometimes multi-tracking. I particularly like this version of The House of the Rising Sun - her solo in the middle gives me goosebumps. Always relaxed, she makes it look so easy. You can also see her many public performances.
Some books I referenced:
- The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia. Very detailed at 250,000 words, academic, gets rather technical, but complete.
- Moving to Higher Ground; How Jazz can Change Your Life by Wynton Marsalis and Geoffrey Ward. It covers the same period but in a personal style. Not so technical and only 53,000 words. Marsalis has his definite opinions about things and makes it clear that he does not care for some of the later developments in jazz.
There is a biographical movie about Buddy Bolden titled Bolden, produced by Wynton Marsalis. Here is an interview where he explains what Bolden did musically and here is a review of the movie.
The fascinating interactive Timeline of African American Music web site has a section on the history of Bebop as well as other styles.
The WIkipedia entry on Bebop is extensive.