The art of the subhuman. Joseph Goebbels
Louis Armstrong is the single most influential singer American music has ever produced. Gary Giddins, critic
He had the most virile sound I’ve ever heard on the tenor saxophone ... But Hawkins took the tenor saxophone and he made art on it. Gary Giddins
Jazz expresses the hope of a free people. Who hunger for a better life. It is based on individuality. Which is contrary to the very fundamentals of Nazism. Earl Hines
I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have from reading novels. The understatements in the tenor saxophone of Lester Young, the crystal, haunting, forever searching sounds of John Coltrane, and the softness and violence of Count Basie’s big band – all have fired my imagination as much as anything in literature. Ernest J Gaines
The Swingos think that Swing is marking an indelible notation on the evolution of jazz. For them it is a creed, a code. Eva Green, Variety 1st January 1936
Jazz is America’s own. It is played and listened to by all peoples. In harmony together. Pigmentation differences have no place. As in genuine democracy. Only performance counts. Norman Grant
The whole thing is about freedom. About American freedom. So why would I ever want to free it? Because the whole idea of art is to create a form that is a bulwark against entropy or chaos. That’s the function of jazz. It’s not to be formless and self-indulgent ... You cannot embrace entropy, you cannot embrace chaos. Albert Murray, writer
March 1935: Benny Goodman and his Let’s Dance Band are a great medicine. A truly great outfit. Fine arrangers and musicians who are together all the time. They phrase together. They bite together. They swing together. Metronome
Do you remember what it was like? Maybe you do. Maybe you were there. Maybe you were there in New York two-thirds the way through the 1930s. When there were so many great bands playing. You could go to the Manhattan Room of the Pennsylvania where Benny Goodman was playing with his great band complete with Gene Krupa. Maybe you’d rather go to some other hotel room. Like the Palm Room of the Commodore, for Red Norvo and Mildred Bailey and their soft subtle Swing. Or to the Green Room from the Lexicon for Bob Crosby and his Dixieland Bobcats. And then there were the ballrooms. The Roseland with Woody Herman. And the Savoy with Chick Webb. George T Simon, Metronome
Amid this seething bubbling turmoil jazz hurried along its course, writhing exultantly on the eddying stream. Nevertheless, the end of civilisation is not yet. And jazz will either be trained and turned to artistic success, or else vanish utterly from our midst as a living force. But even if it disappears altogether it will not have existed in vain. For its record will remain as an interesting human document, the spirit of the age written in the language of the people. R W S Mendl, The Appeal of Jazz
The Professor [Thelonious Monk] with the cat who did strange things at the piano. He was able to conjure out the keys some strange thing, and looks at what he’s done and chuckles, ‘You know that’s good.’ Ossie Davis, actor
It’s been a long time now. And not many remember how it was in the old days. Not really. Not even those who were there to see and hear it as it happened. And who shared night after night the mysterious spell created by the talk. The laughter, greasepaint, powder, perfume, sweat, alcohol and food all blended and simmering like a stew on the restaurant range. And brought to a sustained moment of illusive meaning by the timbers and accents of musical instruments at Minton’s Playhouse. It was an exceptional moment. And the world was swinging with change. Ralph Ellison
Usually music gives resonance to memory. But not the music then in the making. Its rhythms were out of stride and seemingly arbitrary. Its drummers frozen-faced introverts dedicated to chaos. And in it the steady flow of memory, desire and defined experience summed up by the traditional jazz beat and blues mood seemed swept like a great river from its own beat bend. We know better now. And recognised the old moods in the new sounds. But what we know is that which was then becoming. Ralph Ellison
While Charlie Parker slowly died like a man dismembering himself with a dull razor on a spotlighted stage, his public reacted as though he was doing much the same thing as those saxophonists who hoot and honk and roll on the floor. In the end he had no private life. And his most tragic moments were drained of human significance. Ralph Ellison
It is America’s music. Ken Burns, Jazz: The Gift: Gumbo: Beginnings to 1917, PBS 2001
It is an improvisational art. ibid.
Above all, it swings. ibid.
Jazz grew up in a thousand places but it was born in New Orleans. ibid.
Every aspect of daily life for African-Americans became segregated. ibid.
Ragtime – and it would be America’s most popular music for the next quarter century. ibid.
About the same time New Orleans’ musicians began to hear the Blues. ibid.
Buddy Bolden, the first musician celebrated for playing jazz music, was born in 1877. ibid.
Jelly Roll Morton was born ... in 1890 ... An exceptional piano player. ibid.
The twentieth century was not even two decades old when the first jazz record reached the public in 1917. Ken Burns, Jazz: The Gift 1917-1924
The story of jazz became the story of two great American cities: Chicago, where black New Orleans’ musicians found fame and a new white audience, and New York where two very different neighbourhoods – Time Square and Harlem – played host to a group of dedicated musicians each struggling to find his own distinctive voice. ibid.
With Armstrong in the group, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band never sounded better. ibid.
The musical heroes of Harlem were the masters of a dazzling virtuoso piano style – Stride. ibid.
His [Paul Whiteman] first big hit was had come in 1920 with Whispering. Soothing, heavily orchestrated, it sold two and a half million copies, more than two hundred and fifty times what Armstrong and Oliver’s Chimes Blues would sell. Paul Whiteman’s orchestra would soon become the most celebrated and most imitated in America, launching a whole new trend in society dance music ... Whiteman himself always acknowledged the debt he owed. ibid.
Jazz continued to change. An exuberant collective music now came to place more and more emphasis on the innovations of supremely gifted individuals. Ken Burns, Jazz: The Gift 1924-1929
By 1925 Louis Armstrong had become the biggest star in Fletcher Henderson’s great band, playing nightly for white dancers at Roseland. ibid.
Her name was Bessie Smith. And her public overwhelmingly black, mostly poor, always looked to her to say what they could not. ibid.
One sweltering July night in 1927 Smith and her troop were performing under a tent in Concorde, North Carolina. When a member of the band slipped out for a breath of fresh air, he spotted half a dozen members of the Ku Klux Klan headed their way. The musician ran inside and told Bessie to run. Bessie wouldn’t hear of it. She stormed out of the tent, ran toward the Klansman instead, shaking her fist and cursing. ‘I’ll get the whole damn tent out here!’ she shouted. ‘You just pick up them sheets and run.’ Faced with Bessie Smith and a tent full of her loyal fans the Klansmen fled. Smith returned to the bandstand and began again to sing. ibid.
Leon Bix Beiderbecke, one of the most promising and one of the most tragic figures in the history of jazz, emerged not from the great cities of New Orleans, Chicago or New York but from the rural heartland. ibid.
But Bix Beiderbecke would never get the chance to record or to play in public with Louis Armstrong. Even at the height of the jazz age the musical world remained strictly segregated. ibid.
The musicians with whom he surrounded himself mattered less now. Louis Armstrong was the star. Ken Burns, Jazz: The Gift 1929-1934
But when speakeasies re-opened as legal nightclubs business was poor. With neighborhood liquor stores now open people could save money by drinking at home. ibid.
In 1933 Ellington went on tour in Europe and England. It was a triumph. One critic declared that Ellington’s music possessed a truly Shakespearean universality. Girls wept, he said, and young chaps sank to their knees. ibid.
Things did not go well. In Denver the manager of one dancehall demanded they leave after hearing them for just half hour. ‘I hired a dance band,’ he told Goodman. ‘What’s the matter; can’t you boys play any waltzes?’ ibid.
The sound of Swing that had begun with Louis Armstrong and had been milchered in the dancehalls of Harlem was now echoing across the country. The Swing era was about to begin. ibid.