Here are the notes for the second class, the one from the tenth of February.
Jews and Jazz
Part 1, Class 2: Blues and the Cantorial Style
Recap of SHMRG
If you take one thing away from this class, this is what I’d like it to be: A way of listening to music and being able to talk about it intelligently. Presumably if you’re taking this class you have the interest and desire to know more about jazz and to be able to listen to it and discuss it in a smart and logical manner. I’d like to think that most of you are beyond the “I don’t know music (or art or whatever) but I know what I like!” school of thought.
To this end I’d like to go over the concept of SHMRG again.
Invented by Jan LaRue, taught to me by Irving Godt, a student of LaRue’s. It’s a way of classifying thought about music and a way of intelligently thinking about it. This system works for all music of course, not just jazz. (I originally learned it as a part of a classical music history course, probably the one about early Medieval and Renaissance music up to early Baroque era music.)
Come gather ‘round the piano, children, and let’s dig in. I’m going to go slowly and try to illustrate what I’m talking about. Please let me know when you get confused or overwhelmed and I’ll try to talk you down.
To recap (from last week’s class):
(Description adapted from Texas Tech University’s Musicology Department web site, http://ttumusicology.wikispaces.com/SHMRG+details)
Sound
Texture, timbre, and dynamics
What’s making the sound? What instruments or voices? Thick texture or thin? Many voices? One voice? Everyone moving together (homophony) (play an example, Sun on the Treetops)? Everyone going every which way (polyphony) (play an example, a Bach invention)? Melody and accompaniment (play an example)? Some combination of them all? Is it loud or soft? Other contrasts in texture or sound? Is there a text? Does the text tell us anything about the music, or does the music have something to say about the text (play an example from my Hashkiveinu, the tick-tock figure in the vibes) (mention Fair Phyllis and the sexual baggage of three-four time, maybe Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites where the orchestra tells us that the brother and sister are more than just brother and sister…)?
Harmony
The “vertical” aspects of the music (show a score page, Hashkiveinu again?)
How many notes at a time? Standard tonal harmony (play something)? Atonal harmony (play something)? Diatonic construction (play)? Pentatonic, octotonic, hybrid scales (play)? Built on thirds, fourths, fifths, etc (play)? Chromatic harmony (play)? Cadences, tension and resolution, modulations, key schemes (in larger pieces), tonal centers? Major or minor?
Melody
The “horizontal” aspects of sequences of pitches in time (show score again)
Stepwise motion or leaps? Range of melody? Tessitura (range of melody in a given instrument or voice)? Shape? Diatonic, tonal, modal, pentatonic, atonal, implied harmony, etc?
Rhythm
The rhythmic aspects and division of time on the micro (beat by beat) and macro levels (over the whole piece)
Main subdivision of the beat? Prolation? Beat groupings: Consistent, repetitive, and predictable, or something unexpected or irregular? Odd or even meter? Steady tempo or rubato? Danceable rhythm or speech-like rhythm? Layered rhythm? Polyphonic (independent parts) or homophonic (unison rhythms)? Polymeter? Rhythmic contrast section to section?
Growth
The form or organization of the piece in time
Phrase length? Symmetrical, four square, or asymmetrical, unusual groupings of sections or beats or melodies? Repetition? Varied or contrasted? How is the structure conveyed to the listener, changes of harmony, modulations, texture changes, what?Familiar form (classical form) or something new? Is this being used to play with your expectations? How? Why?
Play one or two (short!) pieces from different periods to discuss the SHMRG aspects of them. Talk about one piece at a time. Listen for sound, discuss. Listen for harmony, discuss. And so forth. Leave blank space on the handout for note taking.
Examples: The Pineapple Rag, Scott Joplin (played live)
Sunny Side of the Street, Frank Sinatra arr Billy May
Early development, Blues
There are some identifiable characteristics of the blues. Some of these are melodic, some are harmonic, and some relate to the form.
Melodic
Talk about scale construction, diatonic scales, scale members and numerical designations. Mention solfege but don’t go into depth (Keep it simple! No parallels or relatives for now.)
Major-minor contrast, flat three and flat five, occasionally sharp four (rising four, a la Maria [West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein]), flat seven.
Melodies tend to be derived from the harmony and underlying structure.
Harmonic
Show how harmony is built on scale construction, I-IV-V-I (Simple!)
Major-minor conflict, often minor melody with major harmony. Constant sound of dominant sevens becomes standard, implying a certain level of unavoidable tension.
Form, musical and textual
Twelve bar form, three phrase lyrics:
I
Woke up this morning, feelin’ mighty bad.
IV
Woke up this morning, feelin’ mighty bad.
V
My baby done left me, I’m feelin’ oh so sad.
First phrase is a statement, second phrase is a repetition of the first phrase, the third phrase is a contrasting statement, sometimes ironic or humorous about the first two phrases. Rhyme scheme can be all over the map- it doesn’t even have to pretend to rhyme.
General matters
In blues construction, the twelve bar form is pretty much sacrosanct. The melody and text rise from the harmony and form. Even when the form is twisted (like a lot of sixties protest songs, even the occasional Dylan song that uses the blues) the three phrase structure stays intact.
Robert Johnson is an early example of country blues. This thread continued to develop down through the country-western historical threads. There’s not much country blues in the country music world these days, though. Occasionally you’ll find a three part lyric structure, but it’s not common and it’s never over the blues harmonic patterns.
Boogie-woogie piano is mostly blues based. Even when it’s not strictly a twelve bar form (Cripple Clarence Lofton) it’s still in the three part structure. These tended to be poor rural players in work camps along the railroad expansion and the logging operations in the Pacific Northwest. Boogie had its first real wave of popularity in the thirties, was briefly adopted by the big bands, but then disappeared again until more recent times.
Big band blues arose mostly in the Kansas City area, more or less contemporary with the rise of the big band. Lots of call and response, lots of pieces based on little riffs.
The blues tend to be a leather lunged style, with not much in the way of subtlety (especially the big band blues shouters, trying to compete against the horns and drums).
Example: The Jumpin’ Blues, Walter Brown with Jay McShann AHO
Listen for musical form, repetition of riffs, lyric formCantorial style
Melodic construction
Tends to be built from smaller phrases. Common sounds, built on distinctive scales.
Major-minor conflict, routine use of flat three, five, and seven. Often uses rising sharp four (Maria again). Repetition is common, call and response is common, often a cantor will line out a phrase or a section and then the chorus-congregation will sing it back.
Harmonic construction
No predictable harmony. Harmonies (if there are any) tend to be developed out of the melodic material.
Form
Again, rarely any predictable form beyond simple binary repetition. No standard forms or identifiable patterns song to song. What form there is tends to develop out of the melodic material and/or the form of the text. Texts tend to be sacred and liturgical, although later Yiddish secular songs used the same patterns and material.
Example: Hamav’dil, Yossele Rosenblatt and choir (1920?)
Klezmer
I wound up skipping this part in the actual class on 10 February for time reasons.
A lot of the early American Klezmer musicians were also early Jazz musicians, playing in the dance bands and jazz groups of their communities, but I don’t know if that’s evidence of an intermingling of cultures or simply clever musicians doing what they have to do to make a living.
The instrumental line ups of Klezmer groups and early jazz groups had a lot in common, being a portable style of music that would and would go all over the community. Like early jazz, the piano didn’t really come into Klezmer until it settled into dance halls and regular venues where a piano was available.
Many (if not most) Klezmer pieces are in similar (march, minuet, etc) forms to ragtime.
We’ll talk more about Klezmer and its relationship to early jazz in future classes.
Yiddish blues
Okay, here’s where it breaks down. My primary thesis in doing this class, the very thing I hoped to prove or disprove in my prep work for this class has eluded me. There are identifiable common threads in both types of music, cantorial style and blues style, and there are similar community uses and purposes for the music, but I can’t find the moment when they overlapped. I can see them, I can hear them, but I can’t find the common historical thread.
I can hear it, I can see it, but I can’t find record of where it happened. It’s maddening. Jewish Jazz is a bastard child, welcome in neither the Black community (“don’t need none of that junk here, it never happened, jazz and blues is the music of African Americans”) or the Jewish community (mostly racist crap that doesn’t really need to be repeated).
Where and when did they overlap? I don’t know. I don’t think they were like Darwin’s Galapagos insights, where they could have evolved separately but similarly in response to similar stimuli, but I don’t know. Did it happen in New Orleans? Did it maybe happen sometime earlier around the Mediterranean and around Northern Africa? Is it maybe some hard-wired, hard-coded element in the human psyche, akin to the sol-mi-la-sol-mi phrase in children?
A lot of the ways that cantors approach their improvisation is very similar to the way that jazz musicians learn to improvise, a catalog of typical licks and phrases that the artist then strings together to form a new piece of art. As the performer gains familiarity with the material, he/she can step further away from it and allow for personal imagination and creativity to take over.
In a class in this room last late summer with Rabbi Baruch he showed us a chart of characteristic “licks” for certain regional variants of chazzanic (is that a word?) improvisation. It looked an awful lot like the charts of characteristic licks that I made up from studying recorded solos of jazz players.
Jewish New Orleans is also a conundrum. As we’ll see below (and next week), there really wasn’t much in the way of a visible Jewish scene in New Orleans until some time after the period when jazz emerged. Of all the peoples that came through the port it seems like very few of them were Jewish, and Jewish people were banned from living in New Orleans until later. Most Yiddish speaking people seem to have gone through the Ellis Island/Northeastern US and settled in the greater NYC area.
(I’m finding more and more information, though, and we’ll talk about it as I read and discover more. There was a lot of Jewish and African American mixing in the region around where the Superdome and the [new] City Hall are located now. A Jewish pawn shop helped Louis Armstrong buy his first cornet.)
Of course, there were Jewish people there, but it seems like the first few waves of immigrants tended to assimilate into the culture at large. Like a lot of early American Reform Jews, they tended to ape the appearance of Christians while maintaining their Jewishness as best they could. As a result, they tended to melt into the larger society.
Those that didn’t assimilate kept to themselves and didn’t mix with society.
Many Spanish Jews fleeing the Inquisition came through, but few seemed to settle there, in large part due to the Code Noire of 1724 that formally expelled all Jews from the Louisiana French colony. Of course, the settlers in the region were more interested in surviving and developing their own trade rather than enforcing rules imposed by royal courts thousands of miles away in France.
Another wave of settlers came in early 19th century, arriving from western Europe, Germany and Alsace-Lorraine among others. The French speaking Alsatians found a niche in the fur trade with the Cajuns due to their common language.
Rural Louisiana has many stories of the itinerant Jewish peddler who came through town and eventually opened the “Jew store,” often the only dry goods store in a small town.
In fact, a lot of the new Jewish settlers took on more Louisiana flavor, eating the non-Kosher seafood of the region and forgoing kippot and other visible reminders of their heritage. (There’s the story of Hyman Salz who became an alligator fisherman, catching and selling treyf gator meat all over the town of Morgan City where his family owned the dry goods store.)
Intermarriage was common, although conversion to Christianity was not.
(Another person, Elaine Schlessinger, gave a regional variation of charoset that replaces the Manischewitz with Jack Daniels. Although it makes the dish technically non-Kosher, she feels it brings her closer to her southern roots.) (I just might have to try that this year.)
The ethos of “fitting in” succeeded so well that one urban legend tells of the Jewish merchant who was so accepted as a part of the larger community that he was asked to join the Klan. Supposedly he politely declined the invitation, but he knew that the boys buying white sheets were not suddenly taking an interest in helping out with the housework. Likewise, many of those good ol’ boys were unaware or uncaring that they were buying from a Jewish merchant. (Of course, like all good urban legends this happened to a distant relative or the friend of a friend of the person telling the story.)
The late 19th century wave from Eastern Europe Ashkenazi added a lot more Jewish people to the area, but these people really did keep to themselves and did not mix with the culture at large. They settled in small enclaves where they could walk to synagogue on Shabbat and they spoke Yiddish. This upset the earlier Reform members of the Jewish community because they considered them “too Jewish” for their taste, and worried about attracting anti-Semitism to their communities. In spite of the influx of the orthodox “German Uptown” Jews, the reform continued to dominate the community through the 20th century.
Touro Synagogue sponsors the Annual Jazz Fest Shabbat in April each year, but that’s a recent innovation. It’s one of the earliest synagogues in the region, but it has a pipe organ and many of the other trappings of 19th century American Protestantism. (It’s kind of gratifying to see that it’s a thriving congregation today, at least judging by its website.)
Ultimately, though, a lot of Jewish people were and are (understandably?) excluded from the Mardi Gras scene, although the first King of Mardi Gras was a Jewish man. Some krewes today actively forbid Jews from being members of them. (In retaliation a few years ago, a Jewish student group formed the Jieux Krewe that is still active in the scene.)
A black oriented Storyville with Jewish settlers? Maybe something else? I’m still reading. I’ll keep you posted as my thinking continues to evolve.
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