Historic Jazz Fotos

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Historic Jazz Fotos

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George Lewis

Alcide «Slow Drag» Pavageau, 1888-1969, der Bassist der George Lewis Band

Alcide Pavageau

New Orleans Bass Players - history

George Lewis

Die Good Time Jazz Five mit Manfred Banjo Jim Walz am Banjo spielen am 11.2.1967 für George Lewis in einem Stuttgarter Krankenhaus

Der gesamte Zeitungsartikel aus den Stuttgarter Nachrichten

Bunk Johnson Band

Alton Purnell

Jim Robinson, tb

Baby Dodds, dr

Baby Dodds

Lawrence Marrero, bj

Preservation Hall Band

Preservation Hall

King Oliver Band

Louis Armstrong

Cottonclub

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The music called Jazz was born sometime around 1895 in New Orleans.

It combined elements of Ragtime, marching band music, and Blues.

What differentiated Jazz from these earlier styles was the widespread use of improvisation, often by more than one player at a time.

Jazz represented a break from Western musical traditions, where the composer wrote a piece of music on paper and the musicians then tried their best to play exactly what was in the score.

In a Jazz piece, the song is often just a starting point or frame of reference for the musicians to improvise around.

The song might have been a popular ditty or blues that they didn't compose, but by the time they were finished with it they had composed a new piece that often bore little resemblance to the original song.

Many of these virtuoso musicians were not good sight readers and some could not read music at all, never the less their playing thrilled audiences and the spontaneous music they created captured a joy and sense of adventure that was an exciting and radical departure from the music of that time.

The first Jazz was played by African Americans and Creole musicians in New Orleans.

The cornet player, Buddy Bolden is generally considered to be the first real Jazz musician.

Other early players included Freddie Keppard, Bunk Johnson, and Clarence Williams.

Although these musicians names are unknown to most people, then and now, their ideas are still being elaborated on to this day.

Most of these men could not make a living with their music and were forced to work menial jobs to get by.

The second wave of New Orleans Jazz musicians like Joe "King" Oliver, Kid Ory, and Jelly Roll Morton formed small bands, that took the music of these older men and increased the complexity and dynamic of their music, as well as gaining greater commercial success.

This music became know as "Hot Jazz", because of the often break neck speeds and amazing improvised polyphony that these bands produced.

A young virtuoso cornet player named Louis Armstrong was discovered in New Orleans by King Oliver.

Armstrong soon grew to become the greatest Jazz musician of his era and eventually one of the biggest stars in the world. The impact of Armstrong and other Jazz musicians altered the course of both popular and Classical music.

African American musical styles became the dominant force in 20th century music.

History of New Orleans Bass

New Orleans has had a strong tradition of producing great bass players from the last century up to the present day.

The career of the late string bass great Chester Zardis and some other string bass players of Zardis's generation and the generation before, musicians who helped change the musical style of the entire nation.

During the time when Chester Zardis was keeping busy with jobs that seldom took him more than a couple hundred miles from New Orleans, other New Orleans bass players were making a national name for themselves. A new sound was becoming prevalent in the rhythm sections of both large and small bands during the late 1920's and early 1930's.

The string bass, plucked and slapped, was filling the role more usually filled by the tuba. Many of the leading national dance bands added slap bass players to their rhythm sections--whenever possible, New Orleans musicians. Although musicians from elsewhere soon started imitating this style, it was clear that the leading exponents of slap string bass were all New Orleanians.

Wellman Braud (born 1891, died 1967) may have been the most important single popularizer of the slap style during his long stay with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, making numerous recordings and frequent radio broadcasts.

The string bass work of Steve Brown (c. 1890-1965) rivaled the cornet work of Bix Biederbecke in amazing listeners to the Jean Goldkette Orchestra. Wellman Braud said that Brown was the greatest of all bass players. The great George "Pops" Foster (1892-1969) gave rhythmic drive to the bands of Luis Russell and Louis Armstrong while teaching the slap style to some of the best northern musicians.

John Lindsay (1894-1950) was originally a trombonist (he recorded on that instrument with the A.J. Piron Orchestra) who switched to sting bass in order to get more jobs. His bass is heard on the classic Chicago 1926 Jelly Roll Morton Red Hot Pepper records, and in the '30's Lindsay was one of the group of New Orleans and Mississippi musicians in the Harlem Hamfats, a band which kept one foot in the New Orleans tradition while pointing the way towards the Rhythm & Blues style of a decade and a half later. The youngest of the pioneers who popularized slap style for the national audience,

Al Morgan (1908-1974) recorded with Fats Waller and with the Jones & Collins Astoria Hot 8 in 1929. Morgan provided the slap bass backing for Cab Calloway's Orchestra in theearly '30's. He developed a number of acts with Calloway (some of which were later continued by his successor Milt Hinton), including a routine on "Reefer Man", an abbreviated version of which is preserved on film in the W.C.Fields movie "International House".

What was the origin of this new instrumental style? In tracing the history of slapping the bass, it is important to note that early recording simply couldn't pick up the string bass.

Before the mid 1920's, records were made by the pre-microphone "acoustical" process, where musicians played into the large end of a megaphone-like recording horn, the small end of which was attached to a diaphragm which caused a needle to vibrate, tracing the sound waves into the grooves of the master record.

While this proved satisfactory for recording most mid range frequencies (such as the human voice, trumpets and trombones), picking up other sounds, particularly string instruments and high and low frequencies, presented difficulties for the phonograph's "tin ear". Bass response was particularly problematic.

The worst part of the problem was that bass sounds loud enough to be clearly recorded tended to knock the recording stylus right out of the groove (Electric microphones did not totally solve this-- as late as 1943 Chester Zardis' slap bass knocked out the stylus in a George Lewis recording session).

While various experiments were tried, bass response was not a high priority with the record companies since most home phonographs of the time were inadequate to reproduce what little bass response could be picked up.

While some of the better studios of the time could pick up some semblance of tuba, drummers were usually limited to snares, sock cymbals, and woodblocks, and string bass players were usually told to sit and wait during the recording session.

1925 saw the biggest single leap forward in recording technology of the pre-digital era.

The American recording industry's big two, Victor and Columbia, adopted the new Western Electric recording process. Despite compression of dynamics, this new process provided much wider frequency response and improved overall fidelity compared with the old acoustical process.

Most other record companies followed the lead and brought electric microphones into their studios in the next few years. Improved home phonographs, both acoustical and electric, came on the market in order to allow record buyers to hear the fuller range of the new records. In the recording studios, bands were able to use their regular instrumentation and play in a manner much closer to how they played live.

At first recording engineers were loathe to feature instruments inaudible only a few years before, but in 1926 and 1927 Victor let Steve Brown record some slap-bass solos with the orchestras of Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman.

The records of these popular bands sold well. The string bass revolution now had the mass media of the time behind it, and spread rapidly. From the descriptions of ear-witnesses of the time, we know that some New Orleans musicians were already slapping the bass at least half a decade before the phonograph and the radio gave the style national exposure.

Steve Brown had been playing with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings (Some people with either keen ears or keen imaginations say there are moments when Brown can actually be heard on the band's 1922 acoustical recordings--some where behind the louder banjo, piano, drums, surface noise, and turn-table rumble). While Brown's replacement with the Rhythm Kings,

"Chink" Martin Abraham (1886-1981), is mainly remembered as a tuba player, he also played slap string bass. Simon Marrero (1897-1935) apparently recorded only on brass bass (with Papa Celestin and Dave Nelson), but was one of the best regarded string bass players of his generation. He gave lessons to Al Morgan and to his own younger brother Eddie Marrero.

Simon Marrero earned many job offers on his trips up North; he played for a time with the Blue Rhythm band in New York. Ed Garland (whose birth date is given as 1895, but who may have been somewhat older; died 1980), bass player with Kid Ory's Band for decades, said he introduced slap style to California in 1917.

Other fine bassists such players as Chester Zardis, and Sidney Brown (1894-1968), played professionally during this time while seldom venturing far from New Orleans. When did this manner of playing originate? Albert Glenny (1870-1958) said that he almost exclusively bowed during his early career in New Orleans. He was somewhat disdainful of the pluckers and slappers, "that ain't no bass playing...pick pockpick", but said he had to learn the style in order to keep playing professionally.

By the time that Chester Zardis (1900-1990) started playing professionally a different attitude had developed. Zardis said that bowing was little used except on waltzes and slow tunes; slapping and plucking were necessary togive the music a real jazz feeling.

Apparently the new bass styles took hold sometime between the time when Albert Glenny learned to play string bass and when Chester Zardis learned to play string bass. This was only one of many changes taking place in New Orleans music in the early years of this century, the years which saw the development of the music we now know as"jazz". Who invented slap style? The answer is not clear.

Pops Foster, Steve Brown, and Wellman Braud all either claimed to have invented slap style or had such a claim made for them by others. Many other bass players made the same assertion. Jazz historian William Russell, who has been interviewing musicians since the 1930's, commented "It seems every bass player I've talked with claims to have started the slap style". Some of these New Orleans musicians had been playing professionally for years before the national popularizers of the style mentioned above.

One of the most important senior claimants was Bill Johnson (1872-1975?).

Bill Johnson claimed to have invented slap style while playing a job up in Shreveport, when his bow broke and he was temporarily unable to get a replacement. Johnson's musical travels took him throughout the U.S.A. in the early part of the century. He led bands in California around 1910, and was a co-leader of Freddy Keppard's Creole Band which toured vaudeville in the mid teens, giving the nation an early sample of that music which was not yet known as "Jazz".

The Creole Band played at the Winter Garden in New York City about December of 1915. Johnson said the northern musicians stared at him uncomprehendingly while he drove the band with his fancy slapping. (This is a rather early date for slap style; photographs from 1916 show other New Orleans bass players such as Dandy Lewis of Petit's Eagle Band and young Wellman Braud using bows--although the poses in photographs may not be indicative of these musicians usual playing style.)

After returning briefly to New Orleans, Bill Johnson moved to Chicago, where many considered him the city's best bass man throughout the '20's. He helped King Oliver put together his great Creole Jazz Band, made up mostly of musicians a generation younger than Johnson. Because of the recording limitations of the time Johnson recorded with Oliver only on banjo, not his primary instrument.

Bill Johnson made a number of fine recordings on string bass in Chicago in the late 1920's where he demonstrates not only masterful plucking and slapping, but also uses bow work effectively on hot numbers.

Another noted string bass players of Johnson's generation, Henry Kimball (1878-1931) was praised by Ed Garland, Wellman Braud, and Pops Foster. Kimball is said by some to have been mainly noted for his bow work early on; a 1920 photograph of him with the Fate Marable band shows Kimball plucking the bass strings while holding the bow in his hand.

Jimmy Johnson (c.1876-c.1937?) played string bass with the legendary Buddy Bolden at the turn of the century. Wellman Braud recalled that Jimmy Johnson was a good bow man, but used the bow less than Kimball. In 1936 Johnson provided the up-to-date sounding bass work on the recordings made by Don Albert's swing band in San Antonio.

Billy Marrero (1874-c.1920) was Simon Marrero's father and taught younger players such as Chester Zardis. Zardis gave conflicting answers at different times when asked whether Billy Marrero played slap style.

Another of Billy's sons, Eddie Marrero, took up bass after his father's death; Eddie remembered his father mainly as a bower. Others have said that Billy Marrero plucked but did not slap the bass.

Johnny Prudence (or Predonce) was a contemporary of Billy Marrero. Information on Prudence is scarce; Albert Glenny said that Prudence was the first to pick the bass.

Eddie Dawson (1884-1972) started out playing guitar and banjo, switching to string bass in 1912. In his later years he said he believed he "started (plucking) that 4/4 rhythm" behind bands, and that Pops Foster copied from Dawson when he was in the Magnolia Band.

"Chink" Martin also claimed to be the first in New Orleans to replace the two beats of ragtime with a four beat bass line, filling out the chord. Some other early New Orleans bass players from the turn of the century and before may have been of equal or greater importance in their own day to the musicians mentioned, but are less well remembered simply for being less well documented.

Music historians will note that pizzicato, or picking strings with the fingers, has a long history in the classical tradition. Pizzicato is usually reserved for occasional passages for special effect instead of the more usual bowing, and is technically different from the more vigorous plucking of the New Orleans musicians.

The technically difficult musical slapping of the bass seems to have been completely foreign to the musical world outside of the deep south when the first New Orleans players were demonstrating a mastery of it.

Documentation of Southern bass styles is sketchy for these years, but if New Orleans musicians were not exclusive in their use of the style in the years of its development, they were certainly pre-eminent. Like jazz itself, the general consensus is that no one musician can be wholly credited with inventing slap style bass.

Again like jazz, it can however be said that slap style bass was a New Orleans innovation to which many fine musicians made important contributions. This new rhythmic voice found its way not only into jazz and swing, but had also diffused by the middle of the century into such diverse music as country, bluegrass, Caribbean, and marimba.

Even when the upright double bass itself is not present, the vigorous New Orleans bass line has influenced subsequent rhythm & blues and other popular musical styles. Thus we see that the New Orleans musical pioneers who developed their styles of playing the string bass without the bow imparted both specific and broad musical influences on future generations.

Research into the evolution of the double bass reveals a tangled web of several hundred years of changes in design and fashion in the dimensions of the instrument and consequently in its stringing and tuning.

The picture is further complicated by the simultaneous use during any one period of different forms of bass in different countries. The earliest known illustration of a double bass type of instrument dates from 1516 but in 1493 Prospero wrote of 'viols as big as myself.' Planyavsky (1970) pointed out that it is more important to look for an early double bass tuning rather than for any particular instrument by shape or name.

A deep (double- or contra-) bass voice is first found among the viols. There existed simultaneously two methods of tuning - one using 4ths alone, the other using a combination of 3rds and 4ths ('3rd-4th' tuning).

Agricola wrote of the contrabasso di viola as being the deepest voice available. He was referring to an instrument comparable with that made by Hanns Vogel in 1563 and now in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg.

This ornately and beautifully decorated bass is fitted with gut frets like other viols and tuned G'-C-F-A-d-g. This high '3rd-4th' tuning was given by Praetorius (Syntagma musicum, 2/1619) for a six-string violone (a name also confusingly used in the 16th century to denote the bass of the viol family).

He listed several other tunings, both high and low, for five- and six-string violoni. Most interesting of all is the low tuning D'-E'-A'-D-G, only one step removed from the modern E'-A'-D'-G instrument. Orlando Gibbons scored for the 'great dooble base' in two viol fantasias. Whether a low '3rd-4th' tuning was used or a higher one cannot be certain.

Some fine basses, many of which were probably converted from their original form in to three- or later four-string instruments, date from the late 16th century and early 17th. A notable three-string bass, originally built as such, is that by Gasparo da Sal˜, owned by Dragonetti and now in the museum of St. Mark's, Venice.

A beautiful six-string violone of much lighter construction by Da Sal˜'s apprentice Giovanni Paolo Maggini is in the Horniman Museum, London. This is of violin shape, with a flat back, and makes interesting comparison with the viol shaped violone by Ventura Linarol (Padua, 1585) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

During the early 17th century the five-string bass was most commonly used in Austria and Germany. Leopold Mozart referred in the 1787 edition of his Violinschule to having heard concertos, trios and solos played with great beauty on instruments of this kind.

The earliest known playing instructions, by Johann Jacob Prinner (Musicalischer Schlüssl, 1677, autograph US-Wc) are for an instrument tuned F'-A'-D-F#-B. Much more usual, however, is the tuning F'-A'-D-F#-A cited in 1790 by Albrechtsberger, for a violone or contrabass with thick strings and frets tied at every semitone round the fingerboard.

Michel Corrette's 1773 Methode throws much light on the bass techniques and tunings in use during the 18th and early 19th centuries when the bass was enjoying some popularity as a solo instrument. Many of the virtuoso pieces from the Viennese school of that period and later abound with passages of double stopping and, in view of the tunings required, were thought by early 20th-century authorities not to have been written for the bass at all.

Later research revealed that the instrument has in the past been tuned in some 40 or 50 different ways; although the repertory is quite practical with the tunings the composers envisaged (e.g. one of the '3rd-4th' tunings), much is unplayable on the modern conventionally tuned instruments. There are in fact numerous solo concertos from this period.

In Italy an early tuning (cited by Planyavsky, 1970) is Adriano Banchieri's of 1609 for his 'Violone in contrabasso', D'-G'-C-E-A-d. Later the number of strings was reduced, and three-string instruments were preferred. Even during the early 18th century a three-string bass tuned A'-D-G or G'-D-G was normal.

It had no frets and with the growth of the symphony orchestra it was logical that his more powerful instrument should supersede earlier models. Not until the 1920s was the additional E' string expected of most professional players. Until then any passages going below A' were transposed up an octave, resulting in the temporary disappearance of the 16' line.