Week 2

As we come into the 20^th 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.