Introduction: the 1910 - 1919 era
Minstrel shows, the late 19th-century
American equivalent of British music-hall, featured knockabout
comedies, skits and songs in ‘blackface,’ as the
performers parodied black plantation workers. Negroes, in their
turn, parodied whites taking their snobbish promenades with the
'cake-walk,' mincing along while bowing left and right and
twirling their parasols and walking-canes. Some of this music
made its way on to early records, and would have an influence
on both blues and jazz.
A nation-wide craze for expressive (and
suggestive) forms of dancing such as the Turkey Trot, the Fox
Trot and the Black Bottom gripped America just prior to the
First World War. The mania was largely driven by the notoriety
of Vernon and Irene Castle, a British/American pair of
dance-instructors who also led the way in clothing fashion.
Their success led to the popularity of the instrumental dance
band.
In homes and parlours, piano-player
machines, controlled by perforated paper
rolls, played jaunty melodies known as
'rags' by composers such as Jelly Roll Morton and Scott Joplin.
This genre would also influence 'Dixieland' jazz.
In 1914 the world blundered unsuspectingly
into total war. Troop-trains, jammed with soldiers singing
patriotic songs, took phonographs along with them for a touch
of 'home, sweet home' in the back trenches. For the families
back home, there were synthetic accounts of battles being
fought, with whistles and kettle-drums evoking the terrifying
sound of machine-guns and shellfire.
In early 1917, while the European armies
were deadlocked in trench warfare, five young American
musicians were busy creating musical insanity. The Original
Dixieland Jass Band were the first to record 'jazz' music. When
the Americans crossed the ocean to participate in the last six
months of the war, jazz would accompany them by way of the
'Hellfighters,' the band
of the 15th New York (black) regiment. They
astonished onlookers by reinterpreting the plodding, even-beat
tempo of European marches with syncopated, up-tempo African
rhythms.
The onset of war had a disruptive effect on
international and intercontinental trade relations. The
German-owned Fonotipia recording empire suffered loss, many of
its subsidiary British labels disappearing. However, the Okeh
label, led by the German-American Otto Heineman, was to become
one of America's premier labels.
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