The mysterious origins of jazz
BBCThe mysterious origins of jazz EJ Bellocq The anniversary of the first jazz recording 100 years ago also marks the beginning of debates that are still ongoing, writes Christian Blauvelt. Wikipedia The Original Dixieland Jass Band’s Livery Stable Blues was the first jazz recording but their later song Tiger Rag would be more influential That would be a remarkable milestone in its own right, but embedded into Livery Stable Blues are issues that have haunted jazz, and popular music as a whole, ever since. When they recorded Livery Stable Blues the all-white Original Dixieland Jass Band borrowed to the point of plagiarism from the African-American musicians they’d heard in their native New Orleans. As jazz historian Gary Giddins puts it, “LaRocca turned racist, and proceeded to make horrible statements about how whites invented jazz, and how they were there before the black guys, and so forth, scurrilous stuff — a cartoon cliché of the Southern bigot.” Louis Armstrong was more charitable in his 1936 book Swing That Music, calling the Original Dixieland Jass Band “the first great jazz orchestra” and that LaRocca “had an instrumentation different from anything before, an instrumentation that made the old songs sound new.” But LaRocca’s later statements follow a long tradition in the US of white artists dependent on African-American culture publicly degrading it in order to justify their exploitation of it. And Edward Baxter Perry wrote in the popular music magazine The Etude that ragtime, into which he was lumping early jazz songs like Livery Stable Blues and the Original Dixieland Jass Band’s even more popular 1917 follow-up Tiger Rag, “is syncopation gone mad.
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