The History of Jazz Read Online Free PDF Page B

the basis for a hit single. But most gratifying to Joplin would have been the eventual success of his opera Treemonisha . Some sixty-odd years after its failed debut, the work was successfully revived and recorded, and its composer posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
    Joplin’s single-minded determination to merge vernacular African American music with the mainstream traditions of Western composition prefigured, in many regards, the later development of jazz. By straddling the borders of highbrow and lowbrow culture, art music and popular music, African polyrhythm and European formalism, Joplin anticipated the fecund efforts of later artists such as Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, Benny Goodman, Charles Mingus, Stan Kenton, Art Tatum, and Wynton Marsalis, among others. In his own day, Joplin’s audience—both white and black— was ill prepared to understand the nature of such hybrid efforts; we can easily imagine them harboring a preconception that these different traditions were too radically opposed to allow a seamless merging. The idea of a ragtime ballet or opera must have seemed an oxymoron to most of those on both sides of the great racial divide that characterized turn-of-the-century American society. It required the development of a different aesthetic before such works could be appreciated on their own terms.
    In our own day, we have embraced just such a new aesthetic, one that allows audiences not only to accept, but often rush to praise, willy-nilly, various transformations of popular styles of entertainment into serious art. This tendency is evident not only—or even primarily—in jazz but in virtually every contemporary genre and style of creative human expression. But even in tolerant, liberal-minded times, the tension between these two streams of activity continues to seethe under the surface. This dynamic interaction, the clash and fusion—of African and European, composition and improvisation, spontaneity and deliberation, the popular and the serious, high and low—will follow us at virtually every turn as we unfold the complex history of jazz music.

2 New Orleans Jazz
    THE CELEBRATIONS OF A CITY IN DECLINE
    With the lifting of trade restrictions on the Mississippi River following the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the New Orleans economy entered a period of unprecedented prosperity that would last over half a century. The population of the city had already doubled by the time, less than a decade later, that the first steamboat—aptly named the New Orleans —was put into service on the Mississippi, facilitating upstream navigation and further enhancing New Orleans’s position as a major hub of commerce. The effect of this shift can be measured by the staggering growth in downriver cargo received at the port: between 1801 and 1807, an average of $5 million worth of goods came downstream each year, but in 1851 alone almost $200 million worth of freight was measured. Shipments of cotton constituted almost half of these receipts, but many other goods—grain, sugar, molasses, tobacco, manufactured items, and much more—as well as people passed through this New Orleans hub, creating a prosperous, cosmopolitan environment that few cities in the New World could match. 1
    This localized economic boom, built on the contingencies of geography, began to subside in the years following the Civil War. The city’s position on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line was only one small part of the problem. Even more pressing was an inexorable shift in the nation’s infrastructure. During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the railroad gradually replaced the steamboat as the major transportation industry in America. Trading hubs grew up elsewhere, and New Orleans’s position at the gateway of the major inland water system waned in importance. Economic woes were further aggravated by chronic political corruption. The result: by 1874, the state of Louisiana was insolvent, unable to pay either principal