As we come into the 20th Century with our
primordial ooze of folk music and work songs, they meld together to create
something new: American Popular Music, beginning with ragtime and the proto-big
band jazz of the 20s. Gershwin, Joplin,
Louis Armstrong all begin giving us the start of commercialized American
popular music. The forms take on the
work song format, but they include traditional orchestra instruments like
string bass, trumpet, and clarinet, and also the piano. This new outdoor clarinet from Belgium was
just coming onto the scene, although it would be clarinet and trumpet that we
would hear doing the counter melodies and solos in I Got Music. It would be the
big bands of the 1940s that would fully incorporate Adolphe Sax’s creation into
jazz and popular music. Grainger loved
the Sax for its tuning capabilities and used it in his contemporaneous music
almost to death, and in popular music today it is often relegated to be of a
more schmaltzy “love” nature (as well as an even more erotic nature), but it
would be the big bands that followed Gershwin that would use it to its best
ability.
The Tiger Rag is a
chart that has been around in many incarnations, much like Barbara Allen from last week’s listening. I’ve listened to it today on a calliope-like
instrument and from the Auburn Marching Band.
I played the “Tuba” Tiger Rag version
at University of Wisconsin. It’s a
jazzy, proto-big band rag with everything we’d expect from music of this
time. The bass gets stronger and more
prolific, and is soon to become what we know from jazz bands.
Much of the music of this time is thin to my ears because the string bass (and later the electric)
haven’t been fully appropriated from the orchestra halls. I can hear this clearly in My Blue Heaven. It’s a jazz ballad (indeed readily available
from stock arrangers for all level of public school big band), but the piano is
the main accompaniment with little or no percussion or other rhythm
section. When we get to the 30s and we
have this instrument fully integrated, my ears become much happier.