The Blues and Gospel Music

Jazz

Подводя краткий итог характеристике музыки народного театра, можно отметить, что она отражает разные исторические эпохи, принадлежит к разным песенным и инструментальным жанрам и выполняет в большинстве случаев служебную роль, поддерживая раз­витие сюжета, помогая игре народных актеров. Зачастую песни как бы поясняют, оттеняют смысл происходящего перед зрителем. Они обычно не допеваются до конца, обрываясь там, где комментирую­щее их значение по словам исчерпано.

Со стороны музыкальной стилистики песни и инструментальные наигрыши в народной драме составляют чрезвычайно пеструю кар­тину, они не имеют определенно выдержанной стилевой направлен­ности. Музыка народного театра целиком зависит от соответствую­щего словесного и драматического контекста.

^[1] Полуштоф — сосуд для вина определенного объема.

Jazz reached the height of its popularity with the American public during the Swing era, beginning in the dark days of the Depression and continuing through the victorious end of World War II. Also known as the Big Band sound, Swing jazz was characterized by its strong rhythmic drive and by an orchestral 'call and response' between different sections of the ensemble. The rhythm section – piano, bass, drums and guitar – maintained the swinging dance beat, while trumpets, trombones and woodwinds, and later, vocals, were often scored to play together and provide the emotional focus of the piece. This arrangement resulted in a 'conversational' style among sections that arrangers exploited to maximum affect. By performing their music with increasingly complex arrangements for ever larger orchestras, Swing musicians helped erode the wall between our definitions of popular music and the art music generally labeled “classical.”

The first great artists of Swing were African American. By the early 1930s, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and Jimmy Lunceford had begun to blend the “hot” rhythms of New Orleans into the dance music of urban America in the black jazz clubs of Kansas City and Harlem. Although white jazz musicians had been taking inspiration from African American artists for at least three decades, by the 1940s a new generation of white musicians and dancers were deeply invested in the music that Duke Ellington christened “Swing” with his 1932 hit record, “It Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing.” In 1935 white bandleader and clarinetist Benny Goodman led swing into the popular mainstream, but only after he began playing the arrangements he purchased from Fletcher Henderson. Goodman would go on to gather an extraordinary group of performers into his high-profile band, including Henderson, Gene Krupa, Lionel Hampton, Peggy Lee and Stan Getz. His decision to integrate his group with black musicians helped begin the slow process of integrating the music industry.

At its height in the years before World War II, Swing jazz was America's most pervasive and popular musical genre. If Ken Burns' documentary series Jazz, is correct in its interpretation of the story of Swing as a music that helped America remake the world during and after World War II, then the history of Swing must also be seen as preparing the way for the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s. Knowing that a wider and increasingly diverse population of Americans was taking African American musicians seriously fueled a growing conviction that equality was a real possibility. As black soldiers shipping off to Europe and the Pacific during World War II were demanding greater respect and tolerance in the armed forces, black Americans at home called for a “Double V” – Victory abroad for America over Germany and Japan and Victory over racism for black Americans at home.

As Americans danced to Swing bands during the 1940s, a new space for female musicians also opened up. Sherrie Tucker, author of Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s, and Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, directors of The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, demonstrate how the outbreak of World War II gave women the unprecedented opportunity to perform music publicly for large audiences. The International Sweethearts of Rhythm was one of many “all-girl” bands that toured the country when most of their male peers were in the military. For the first time, female musicians in America consistently proved that they could play trumpets, saxophones, and drums with as much expertise as men. Sadly, many of the great jazzwomen of the 1940s and 1950s were written out of all but the most recent jazz histories. Thanks to Tucker's book and the film by Schiller and Weiss, we now know their unique and historically important stories.

Not all Americans were enchanted by the widespread success and influence of Swing jazz and the challenges to social norms it represented. For example, although the races were generally kept separate at Swing performances, there were consistent expressions of outrage at the energetic dancing that accompanied concerts and persistent criticism of the influence of Swing music on young people. Young white women were especially targeted by those who considered Swing a “mulatto” music and wanted to preserve a fantasy of white purity on the dance floor and the bandstand.

White America's conflicted response to the rise of Swing and its connection to black culture is clearly articulated in The Benny Goodman Story (1955), a Hollywood film aimed at whites with fond memories of the Swing Era. This film presents a set of common myths about jazz. In an early scene, the teenaged Benny is playing with a mediocre white dance band on a riverboat. Wandering to another part of the boat, he hears a band of black New Orleans musicians under the direction of the Creole trombonist Kid Ory (played in the film by the real Kid Ory). Benny has never heard such compelling music, and when he quizzes Ory, the trombonist says, “We just play what we feel,” a statement that perpetuates the myth that the pioneers of jazz were not trained musicians but primitive people who naively expressed their feelings through music. Endowed with the license to play from his feelings, young Benny immediately becomes an accomplished jazz improviser as he plays along with Ory's group. Later in the film, after Benny has become a successful bandleader, Ory reappears to tell him that he has “the best band I ever heard anyplace!” Like many other films about white jazz musicians, The Benny Goodman Story found a way to diminish the real achievements of black jazz artists, who were most definitely not playing a music that was an unmediated expression of their feelings. The film also suggests that white artists like Goodman created a music that surpassed anything created by their African American predecessors.

Jazz historians today consistently celebrate Ellington, Henderson, and other African American musicians as the most sophisticated and compelling musicians of the Swing Era. But white Swing musicians like Goodman also contributed to the evolution of the genre. There is no denying the authenticity and appeal of Swing jazz, even if that appeal ended with the new affluence of the post-war years. While many jazz musicians broke away from Swing to develop Bebop jazz, the young white denizens of the Swing dance halls in the 1940s married, raised children, and moved to the suburbs. They would soon prefer a night in front of the black-and-white television set to a night dancing to black or white Swing bands. And just as Swing dancers had scandalized their parents with their commitment to 'mulatto music', these same people would be scandalized in turn when their children began dancing to the 'dangerous' rock and roll music of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry.

Jazz and Equality. Since its earliest days on the streets of New Orleans, jazz has bridged communities with diverse ethnic, cultural, and social backgrounds, speaking a common musical language that anyone can understand. Jazz has crossed national borders and challenged the status quo and it is an example of how an art form contributes to changing social, economic and class relationships.

The History of Women Musicians. Swing during the World War II era offered female jazz musicians (and vocalists) unprecedented opportunities as part of a time period when women also had unprecedented opportunities in other jobs and professions because of the shortage of labor on the home front from men serving in the war effort.

Jazz as an Art Form. Jazz has been considered as “art music” and as a part of popular music, especially in the era of Swing jazz. Can jazz be understood as an art as strong as European classical music? Can classical genres of music have an influence on popular music and visa versa.

Jazz as it Intersects with Other Art Forms. The importance of Swing dancing to the World War II era generation – particularly dancing by women with a new sense of freedom– is a key element in the history of popular music in the 20th century. How did jazz music influence other forms of art in the 20th Century.

If American music is unique, it is largely due to its bedrock foundation of blues and gospel music, two forms of music that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century. Anchoring the sounds of African America, these styles underlay the musical innovations of the century: jazz, rhythm and blues, rock, soul and hip hop. They are known and cherished around the world and in every corner of the US It would be impossible to imagine American music without them.

The story of black music is also the tale of the enduring social struggles of American history. Blues and gospel, the secular and sacred songs of everyday black folk, are both bound up in sorrow, loss, despair, hope, redemption, resilience and dreams. While remaining recognizable over many decades, the spirit and musical forms of these styles have influenced much of the American music that has followed. The “blue notes” that are characteristic of the form became prominent in country music, rock and roll and jazz. The simple 12 bar AAB form of blues became the template for the first rock and roll songs, from “Good Rockin' Tonight” to “Rocket 88" to “Hound Dog” to “Johnny B Goode.” And the world wide interest in American blues inspired such musicians as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and others abroad to not only take up their own instruments, but to re-influence American popular music, borrowing the beat, the form and the sound of the blues and infusing them with new sensibilities.

Blues greats such as Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Muddy Waters, Son House, T-Bone Walker, and BB King, and gospel stars such as Mahalia Jackson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Gold Gate Quartet, Sam Cooke, the Staple Singers and Clara Ward all occupy prominent places in the pantheon of great American artists. Their music marks one of the great contributions of Americans to world art. But, like other folk art forms, blues and gospel came from the experiences of everyday life.

“The blues was born behind a mule,” said the great Mississippi Delta bluesman Muddy Waters. Blues and gospel music originated in the oppressive experiences of African Americans in the post-emancipation South. When the United States Congress ended Reconstruction in 1877, the political gains and civic protections African Americans had gained after the Civil War were suppressed, and millions of blacks were economically and politically disenfranchised. In the cotton South, African Americans endured harsh conditions: an endless cycle of debt in farm tenancy and sharecropping, peonage, curfews, and lynchings. The daily humiliations of Jim Crow and the constant threat of violence made life difficult and often dangerous. Those who migrated to northern cities in great numbers after 1910 faced different difficulties: segregation, substandard housing, subsistence wages, second class status and discrimination. But rural or urban, African Americans wrought their lives in music that stemmed from their daily experiences.

Blues music characteristically features musical tones that differed from the Western diatonic scale (do re mi). The blues features notes that fall between the intervals of the scale, microtones that flattened the pitch of conventional music, creating powerful tensions and resolutions. The blues also feature a heavily accented and often irregular beat. Simple blues forms follow an AAB structure over twelve bars; a form that has become the bedrock of jazz, pop, country and rock and roll over the years. Blues music drew on numerous African American sources. In Southern plantations, lumber camps, prisons and fields, black work songs, field hollers, chants, and ballads all combined to shape a unique new music with strong ties to African antecedents.

Blues songs first emerged in the Mississippi Delta, the Piedmont Southeast, Texas and Appalachia, around the turn of the twentieth century. Soon after, urban-based blues appeared in cities such as Memphis, St. Louis, Chicago, Dallas, New Orleans and New York. Itinerant songsters, stage artists, vaudeville singers and schooled musicians all performed blues using the brass and string instruments of marching bands and orchestras. But whether with the simplest of instruments - a one string “diddly bo” or “quills” cut from sugar cane, or on guitars, pianos, and brass, blues musicians played a variety of styles that captured sadness, elation, resignation, despair and hope, perhaps more evocatively than any other form of indigenous music the US had yet witnessed.

Among the most powerful resources that sustained African Americans through adversity and difficulty was strong religious faith. The “sorrow songs” sung in slave times gave birth to religious songs known as spirituals. After emancipation, black religious music - dignified, respectable, and powerful - galvanized audiences around the world thanks to the touring of the Fisk University Jubilee Singers in the late 19th century. By the 1920s storefront churches throughout black America had moved away from the staid spirituals to an unrestrained, emotive and fervent form of religious music, often sung and played by the whole congregation instead of a choir. In the 1930s Thomas Dorsey, a former blues musician, married a blues sensibility to religious themes, pioneering the style known as gospel music. With such collaborators as Sallie Martin, Willie Mae Ford Smith and Mahalia Jackson, the sounds of Gospel resonated in black churches throughout the US

Blues and gospel proved empowering for the artists who made the music as well as the audiences who embraced it. Many of the traveling blues artists of the 1920s and 30s eagerly took to that life as one of the few alternatives to the heavy and unremunerated labor of farm or factory. Similarly, women found a prominence and influence in gospel as singers, choir leaders and composers that gave them a say equal to the male preachers who dominated black churches. Gospel gave black women a public prominence in church that they seldom enjoyed elsewhere in black America. Music offered freedom to those who pursued it - the promise of freedom and money.

Blues artists became heroes and legends in the black community. One of the most enduring tales concerns the elusive bluesman Robert Johnson. Johnson's music was so powerful, many of his listeners believed the myth that he had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for it. Similar tales of other musicians made clear that African Americans saw music as a spiritual, deeply powerful art. Such tales resonated with African stories and myths kept alive in the black community, and were embraced as well by a wider world eager to understand the source of blues music's appeal. Similarly, gospel music's deep connection to religious faith often transported both performers and audiences: trances, speaking in tongues and ecstatic emotional outbursts often accompanied the gospel music and services. This music could and did change lives.

Over the 20th century, gospel and blues music gained acceptance around the world. The revivals of the 1950s and 60s introduced new audiences to the work of forgotten musicians from decades earlier. Since then, scholars, fans and audiences have engaged in a permanent revival, with a continuing round of festivals, new film, radio and recording projects, to preserve the music of the past and document current practice for the future. And while newer styles emerge and hold commercial interest for a time, blues and gospel remain the bedrock of black music.

Blues as an expression of social conditions. From the earliest days, the blues offered deeply felt, graphic expressions of African Americans' exploitation and their determination to survive.

Blues, Gospel and economic freedom. Both the blues and gospel offered performers, composers and entrepreneurs an alternative to the harsh manual labor conditions of plantation, lumber, and factory. Performing and composing enabled scores of African Americans to earn a greater degree of self sufficiency and autonomy than if they had remained in other work.

Gospel music and women's empowerment. Their participation and leadership in gospel music allowed women much greater power and authority in the black churches that were otherwise the domain of male preachers.Blues and American folk tradition. With its strong rooting in folk tales, myths and legends, the blues is one of American's most distinctive and enduring folk forms, one that has survived and thrived into the present.

Дата добавления: 2015-06-29