1918: Jazz Crisis—White Appropriation

When we think about jazz, we may listen to them at a café, drinking a cup of ice latte and talking casually about jazz’s demise.
(You may have this kind of leisure experience, I guess.)

It is hard to describe how jazz will progress over the next decade, let alone estimate the course of the whole century. Many themes and riff jazz have been tried. It was the most prominent of the hip-hop and rap music, the most popular of which was the Cantaloupe Island, which was created by Herbie Hancock. Definitely, jazz is facing a crisis of disappearance today. However, we believe it will survive and develop in the future, because even confronted the crisis of appropriation in 1918, it still thrived under such severe circumstance.

We all know that jazz originated from the work songs among black people. Those songs conveyed their emotional confirmation when they were free from the slavery. At the beginning, jazz was only an oral art form. In 1917, jazz eventually recorded their own record. At the same time, the United States joined the World War, but there are two things that need to be corrected before triumphing over the black culture of New Orleans. One is that the record was not recorded in New Orleans, but in New York. The other was that the five members of the band, though small, were white.

(1620 Cotton blues “work songs”)

In 1916, when jazz faced a crisis, white musicians have set foot on the jazz stage, copied the original style of the black band. Many record companies are planning to record recordings for this new music, but these companies are far in the northern cities, while more than the hand is concentrated in the south. A sought-after phonetic hand worked in Chicago and New York - But he was afraid that someone would plagiarize, so he refused the recording, and missed the chance to become the first person to record jazz in the history. Therefore, under such a circumstance, the first band to record the record was a white band derived from it.

(Freddie Keppard)

The first recorded white jazz quintet band in 1917 was The Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The five original members all were born in New Orleans: Nick LaRocca (leaders, cornet), Larry Shields (clarinet), Eddie Edwards (trombone), Tony Sbarbarl (drum) and Henry Rags (piano). ODJB moved to New York City and made a splash in Chicago. But the lack of creativity, the appeal to popular tastes, was quickly challenged by the new generation of talented jazz musicians. Their performance and later music to think of ratio, appear too artificial, the skill is naive. Perhaps because they were derived from the black music, they were dissolved in the mid-1920s, into the history of jazz.

(The First Jazz Recording Was Made by a Group of White Guys:The Original Dixieland Jazz Band)

In 1917, the United States entered world war I, which closed the gates of the city and ended many of the music streets in New Orleans. Yet Europe still needed music. In 1918, attached to the 369th infantry regiment, "Jim European hell warrior band" blow at the French cities show a whirlwind. Even though jazz lost an audience, a wider audience has been attracted.

In 1918, the cornet player Joe. King. Oliver, with all the men from New Orleans band, moved north to Chicago. In 1922, he sent people to the south to hire a gifted young cornetist, Louis Amstrong, to join the band, which changed the jazz in New Orleans. Before that, jazz was mostly an ensemble, with only a few odd harmonies and a little improvisation on the details. And when two of the orchestra's front musicians had two cornetists, King Oliver could try it out. He himself followed the music, and Armstrong was allowed to stray from the theme. Unexpected and creative playing decorated the music. It wasn't until 1922 that Oliver recorded the record, and he made immortal contributions to jazz music.

(Louis Armstrong And King Oliver)

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