The Penguin Jazz Guide Read Online Free PDF Page B

recorded by Hodes. Inevitably, some of the anecdotal detail in George’s ghost-written autobiography is suspect, but the inconsistencies aren’t as damaging as has sometimes been made out, and like the conversation with Hodes it remains a valuable memoir of the early days of jazz, and the spirit of a great survivor shines through the factitious stuff. Pops plays in his elemental style, grumbling away with the bow on ‘Closer Walk With Thee’, slapping on the others; they open and close with ‘Mahogany Hall Stomp’, which he always said was his favourite piece of music.

THE ’20s
    Two wonderful things happened for jazz in the 1920s. Electrical recording happened, and Louis Armstrong happened. The music’s greatest master emerged in the middle of the decade with a series of recordings that some consider unmatched to this day, the pinnacle of jazz art. After 1925, despite the resistance of some companies, most studios switched to electrical recording, in which sound vibrations were encoded as an electrical signal and then decoded by the playback machine, giving a far higher level of audio fidelity. Curiously, perhaps, the greatest advantage of electrical recording fell to the other members of the ensemble, particularly pianists and bass players, though percussionists, too, who henceforward could be captured with a degree of fidelity. The jazz combo was always a flexible format, by no means fixed to one or two horns plus a ‘rhythm section’ of piano (or guitar), bass and drums. This became the convention for small-group jazz during the swing, bebop and hard-bop era, only to dissolve again in more recent years, where drummerless groups, or ensembles with stringed instruments, or with no harmony instrument, again became common.
    After a slow start, jazz recording became a substantial and geographically widespread business, with a large number of subsidiary and specialist labels emerging, and in 1924 the first African-American recording company, Black Swan. Perhaps most important of all, though, was the beginning of jazz recording in New Orleans, recording some of the early masters of the music in their own unique cultural environment. Even at a time when many musicians were leaving the city to move north to Chicago and New York or West to California, it remained the cradle of jazz and its most important single centre, though again one has to wait until the revival to hear some aspects of New Orleans music in ‘authentic’ form. The 1920s was a paradoxical period in jazz history. The so-called ‘Jazz Age’ established a white, middle-class jazz audience (the novels and stories of Scott Fitzgerald capture some of its values) and reinforced a certain gap between the production and consumption of jazz music, and between the kinds of black music enjoyed by white and black audiences, with the latter somewhat favouring blues over sophisticated instrumental jazz.
    Production and consumption of another sort became a major social issue in the 1930s. The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on 16 January 1919 and enforced via the Volstead Act (which President Woodrow Wilson unsuccessfully attempted to veto) exactly a year later, prohibiting the manufacture, sale and consumption of alcohol. ‘The Noble Experiment’ wrought significant changes in American leisure, forcing alcohol underground, warping drinking habits and creating an ideal environment for organized crime. The ironic outcome was that jazz, which had developed in the brothel houses and shebeens of Storyville, was increasingly associated with Mob-run ‘speakeasies’ or ‘blind pigs’ in the northern cities. Among wealthier socio-economic groups, illicit drinking was largely confined to cocktail parties – the familiar backdrop of Fitzgerald’s tales of the ‘beautiful and damned’ – and this in turn had the effect of sharpening class and ethnic differences, even above the Mason–Dixon line.
    The 1920s was also the period of the ‘Harlem