In the first part of our biography in Rhythm,
we covered the original primitive African
contribution to jazz, a contribution
based on rhythms rather than melodies.
Then we saw those drum and rhythms transplanted
from West Africa to the islands of the
Caribbean as the slaves carried their songs
and dances with them, along with their forms of
worship for the original rhythmic influence
was part pagan, part religious.
In the antiphonal.
[Joh] Pattern of the call and response to our
story, like African rhythm itself
develops in a double metered pattern.
[Will] The African has always been quick to
adapt himself to his immediate environs.
Early Negro slaves were no exception as they
fuzed their own complex musical patterns
with early American hymnal and marching band
(music)
Again, we hear from Bill Grauer.
They also brought from Africa the musical
tradition of the work song.
Remember the song of the Stonecutters of
Liberia, the call and response as they
strike that chisels in unison
on it.
Listen now to a group of prison laborers, a
chain gang on a Mississippi road doing hard
labor.
You know.
Norm.
(music playing)
Still slaves in effect, with chains on their
legs and armed guards on patrol,
they revert to their traditional work music,
which here, though, is melancholy instead of
joyous and free, as was the work music of the
stonecutters, the music of free men.
But the function of the form is still there, as
it was in the early 19th century, when the
slaves absorbed Christian religious music into
their lives and enriched it with the warmth and
fervor of their older pagan chants.
Remember them? Wesson’s call the call to prayer
and antiphonal form.
Listen again as Africans worship
the.
La la, la, la, la, la
la la la la
la la muezzin
calling his people, how little different is the
sound of the southern Negro preacher exhorting
his flock to walk in the paths of goodness?
What Dafoe
read up there might
be that we’ll
have to wait to see.
Oh,
hey, I
have to go to
my house
again, you have the call and response pattern,
the syncopated rhythms so typical of the
African musical patterns.
Listen, as the pace quickens, as the preacher
becomes, in effect, an African witch doctor,
as he harangues his people to do his bidding,
I have no
idea how new.
And ha ha
ha ha.
Here is a lighter and more sophisticated
example of gospel recorded in Washington
by Reverend Kelsi and his congregation,
the African heritage is still powerful.
The survival is still strong as Reverend Kelsi
and his people work themselves into a frenzy
with little boy
Televista loving
your mother and
man Bob.
Oh, yeah,
oh.
But remember that moment
when a view bootmaker.
You’ve got a little boy brain power
work songs, gospel singing,
these two and one other, well, the repositories
of the African musical and social heritage,
which will diverse other elements, will
eventually diffuse into jazz.
At one other important element was brass
band music.
Oh, oh, oh.
Mullinville Johnson Brass Band, a remarkably
primitive group, was recorded in the Deep
South.
This is an extraordinary example of African
isms in the earliest kind of Negro instrumental
(music)
The slaves were forced to give up their big
Congo drums early in the 19th century by
the plantation owners, who felt that the
rhythms were powerful enough to bolster the
spirits of the people they wish to subjugate.
So that with no tribal forms within which to
express their great musical energies, the
Negroes began to drift towards the European
classical instruments, trumpets, trombones,
bass, horns and reed instruments.
The music they heard was the parade music of
the brass band, and so they imitated it
in imitation. They naturally brought to the
music their own concepts of rhythm, harmony,
tonality and form.
As the years passed, they mastered these
complex horns and before long that was heard
in the South, and especially in New Orleans.
The results of the amalgam of African music,
slave adaptations and European instrumentation
and scoring this first primitive
jazz music was a swinging, marching
brass band.
Listen for a moment to a typical marching band
with a beat the Eureka brass band playing
an old him sing on.
Did you hear that marching beat at the start
and do you hear how they’ve begun to swing in a
powerful but primitive early jazz form?
Yes, Jessica had indeed arrived in
America.
With the end of slavery and their gradual
integration into southern life as free men,
the southern Negro really began to express
himself musically.
Work songs became blues.
Marching bands began playing the rags of the
90s. Church music became more and more
rhythmic, and European musical forms of
writing and harmony were being absorbed into
this musical melting pot.
The brass band is constituted in the late 19th
century, was too unwieldy for these musicians
bursting with creativity.
So they did the obvious.
They reduced mass trumpets to one or two.
They cut the trombone sections down to one
horn. They threw out all the reeds except one
clarinet. The out of the rhythm section from
the classic jazz band had been formed
with these instruments. They played blues
compositions which were simply development of
older work songs and out of the classical
African ingredient, improvization.
Here is King Oliver’s Creole jazz band in 1922
playing diplomatic blues.
Listen to the band form the trumpets playing
the lead melody, the trombone filling in on the
bottom and the clarinet weaving lovely melodies
on top.
Yes, jazz music was on its way.
From its start in New Orleans, jazz spread over
the entire country, following the courses of
rivers and the roots of railroads, it moved
and it changed when it went north to Chicago,
up the Mississippi and sounded something like
this.
That was the Chicago Rhythm Kings recording of
nobody, sweetheart, when
jazz hit Kansas City, Count Basie and dozens
of other great Kansas City musicians changed
jazz in other ways and early swing music
was heard. Here is the Basie band playing
Clap Hands. Here comes Charley.
Always change, always development, but
always there remain the basic elements of a
traditional African internation
African rhythms, syncopation and
above all, the freest African heritage of all
improvization within the form
Tin Pan Alley seized upon jazz and Paul
Whiteman brought many jazz immortals into
prominence.
Here he is with Bix Beiderbecke in the flapper
aged Mississippi mud.
Dr..
And Swing came along and with it, the real king
of the 30s, Benny Goodman.
Here he is playing Sugarfoot Stop.
You will note that this is the same tune that
King Oliver played earlier, diplomatic blues,
but under a new title.
And out of swing and Kansas City came the
phenomenon known as Botten, yes, call
it Bob.
Call it swing. Call it Dixie.
It’s all jazz.
Here is one of the earliest pop classics, Dizzy
Gillespie and Charlie Parker playing Groove in
High.
So.
Dr..
And then a remarkable thing began to happen.
Remember how we showed you how African music
went into Cuba, how powerful an influence
it had been in shaping the music of that
island, and how powerfully its rhythms can be
heard even today?
Well, with the passage of almost half a century
of change here and development there, jazz
was beginning to lose sight of some of its
basic heritage.
Beboppers seem to sense this because they began
to experiment with Afro Cuban forms in their
music. We told you earlier that
there had been three great drummers in Cuba,
Shorey and Mantega, you heard them and
Channel Pozole, a remarkable rhythm talent
who spoke more African dialect than he did
Spanish.
Dizzy Gillespie brought Pozzo from Cuba to join
his band. His rhythms with Dizzy acted like
a great shot in the arm for modern jazz.
Listen now as Channel Pozole with Dizzy
Gillespie pays tribute to our old friend at the
Bamboo Club in Havana, Mantega.
Here is Chano Pozo again in a fantastic
Afro Cuban jazz recording Cubano, but
another example of the coming together of the
parent and the child now quite grown up,
seemingly in need of direction and guidance.
Oh,
oh, by
the way,
I know
you get
my.
All right.
Ba ba ba
ba ba ba ba ba ba
ba ba
(non-speech sound)
and shonto started something when they teamed
up because the influence of the new Afro Cuban
beat on the thinking of the other modern jazz
musicians was tremendous.
This is Stan Kenton, the most imaginative of
the progressive’s modernizing and
sophisticating, the rumba rhythms in the old
familiar peanut vendor.
Fads in American music come and go, the
big fat today is rhythm and blues.
By and large, rhythm and blues is musically
quite shallow. But even out of this have come a
few recordings. Fascinating from a jazz and
musicological point of view, one
that is currently riding high and is most
interesting is called Bo Diddley and a song by
a blues singer named Bo Diddley.
The background to his vocal is pure African
in form and feeling in rhythm and intonation.
Listen to it for a few seconds and see how even
rock and roll or rhythm and blues can draw upon
the seemingly endless richness of our African
musical heritage.
Diamond rings
and that diamond ring don’t shine,
he gonna take it to a private eye.
That private eye can
see, but not to bring.
This sounds like the end of the story, because
we’ve come to the music of today, but that
couldn’t be more untrue because we are now
witnessing a remarkable phenomenon
of all of the musics of mankind throughout all
of recorded time.
No music until jazz could be regarded
as a truly universal music.
Its influence is spreading to every corner of
the world where people have radios of
phonographs. And whether you are on Leopold
Vilcabamba Oslo of Buenos Aires,
you will hear jazz either on records or played
by local musicians.
An example of the powerful effect Jazz is
having can be found again in Cuba.
The greatest Cuban band is that of Marquito and
his talented arranger, Chico O’Farrill.
Listen to a recent composition they play
entitled Afro Cuban Sweet.
But.
This is Marquito and his orchestra, a Cuban
band playing their Afro Cuban sweep,
but this is really a big switch because here
for the first time, you have a Cuban band
playing its own music, but using American
jazzmen to execute the new direction in which
it is going in a direction which seems to be
headed back to Africa.
Remarkably enough, the music which started in
Africa, which was nurtured in the slave ports
of the Caribbean in the United States and which
developed into American jazz, now seems
to be on the return trip.
It has returned to Cuba and it is also
headed back toward Africa via the Caribbean.
Thank you, Bill Grauer, for that history of the
African influence in jazz and for setting
us on the road back, I’d like to have
Arthur Albert set the mic now to tell us
whether the cycle back to Africa is complete.
Yes, it is partially complete, especially
in the cities of Africa, but in a different way
than you might expect.
It includes an appreciation of jazz,
but not yet a competence to perform in
the round trip of African rhythms, however, has
produced the Gumba in the Gold Coast.
Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba
ba ba ba
ba, you know.
(non-speech sound)
this is definitely in the Caribbean style with
African overtones and much that is African in
origin.
Call and response in three part harmony with
guitar accompaniment.
Africans have been playing the guitar, by the
way, for some 400 years.
And this is an important urban song style
in West Africa today.
(non-speech sound)
mean, I guess
you got a lot
of.
But the African can go just so far in this
modern style and Leopoldville, I
try to teach a leading Congolese band
a familiar American commercial jingle.
I gave them the melody on a soprano recorder
and their leader translated my French version
of the verses into their more familiar Lingala
dialect.
Five minutes later, they came up with their
Korngold version.
It’s almost a flashback to the style of the
religious brass bands we heard earlier,
traditional African drums with the brass,
but it was the most they could do.
It’s odd these people cannot grasp
our modern jazz rhythms, but
we’re more traditional patterns are involved,
especially in the Latin American style.
The effort is more successful.
Listen now to the Congo Cabbage Patch, typical
of contemporary urban African musical style
in a Latin American African dance
interpretation and in conscious interpretation
of our own Battle Hymn of the Republic
of.
Well, I think I
found.
The.
Contemporary urban African music
by the Congo keep accounts, and
that, as Arthur Alberts points out, brings
us practically to the full cycle in our tracing
of rhythmic patterns for modernized
rhythms are moving in now to play their
part and influencing African music, the
music that provided the original spark for the
Cuban and American jazz voicings.
In that move, we see further evidence of
Bill Brauer’s statement that jazz is the truly
universal music and in its return
toward Africa and ultimate proof of
its appeal throughout the world.
You’ve been listening to Biography in Rhythm,
a transcribed program of NBC News
produced by Joseph Myers, edited
and narrated by Arthur Wakely with commentary
by Arthur as Albats and Bill Grauer.
Mr Abbott, whose field recordings of West
African music were featured in the program, has
more complete material and two record albums,
African coast rhythms and new
songs of the African coast.
Mr. Grauer, an authority on jazz,
is the author of the forthcoming book, A
Pictorial History of Jazz, to be published
in October.
In coming weeks, as NBC News again
resumes its popular series of biographies
and sound during this time period,
listen for the stories of Clarence Darrow,
John Golden and Babe Ruth Tuesday
nights on NBC Radio.
A reminder that monitor,
yes, monitoring takes you everywhere
each and every weekend right here on NBC
Radio.