JAZZ! On Thursday nights at the JD Bar

[moonjiver]

Jazz Organisation (Pete Burden and friends) are a regular feature on Thursdays at the JD Bar in Claremont (near the library). The line-up varies but the last few sessions have been sizzling, with Mike Hatchard last week on violin, clarinet AND vocals! And before that, fifteen year-old Harry Whitty on trombone - bewilderingly talented, I think he's been playing it since he was in a pram! Rebecca Mason is back after a short break - the Cleo Laine of Hastings.

The music gets going around 9pm and the venue is ideal - a cosy bistro type of atmosphere where you can hang out, just absorb the jazz rythms or make some new friends.

Here are a few shots of the last few thoroughly enjoyable evenings.

[moonjiver]

More photos - not forgetting Pete Burden himself and another brilliant guest performer, Jonas Larsson going wild on guitar.

[Geoff]

Wow, thanks for the photos MJ, sounds like a great night was had

[moonjiver]

Really glad the pics meet with approval! I felt the band deserved a bit more PR for what is always a very enjoyable evening, one of the best regular music events around. And the bar a great refuge for jazz lovers on those dark damp autumn nights.

[Richard]

hello moonjiver,
Can you explain what is meant by 'Jazz Music', as distinct from other forms of Jazz-based music like 'Dixie', 'Swing', 'Ragtime' and 'Blues' / 'Rhythm & Blues' 'Funk' and 'Skiffle' ?
I wouldn't know one from the other, except that they are all said to have Black-African origins, emanating from Slavery conditions in the Deep South of America, prior to American Civil-War times.
The intense 'Rock' and 'Pop Music' certainly developed much later (on the back of the above) as the more commercially fruitful development.
'Garage' and 'Hip-Hop' (Rap) leave me wondering and 'Indie' seems an alien life-form.

Look what you've started now!!

[moonjiver]

My God, Richard, you do ask Big questions! I am not a trained musican (tho I can still get half a tune out of a clarinet, even went up the scales on a sax once too). So I can only speak from a layman's position, but as I understand it "jazz" has always been rather a wide term. Got much wider in recent years with jazz fusion (nearer to pop in my opinion) and other cross-over styles.

I would say that it's a gross over-simplification to attribute the origins of jazz to imported black African music. Yes, the influence of tribal, percussive rythms was strong but it has to be remembered that early jazz was performed very much by blacks to entertain whites (hence the rise of copycat bands like the minstrels), so the resulting music absorbed many styles popular at the time - song and dance routines, fast instrumentals (there weren't any banjos in Africa!). But then if you are talking about blues, I suppose one could say that the often quite simple melodies and lyrics owe much more to the soulful expressions of poor or enslaved black workers. Some of it is almost near to gospel songs.

I'm happy to be shot down on some of this, I'm no expert, but certainly "jazz" has developed into all kinds of branches - I would say that bigband and swing (which I love) have very much absorbed the brash confidence and exhibitionism of WHITE Americans even though some of the best musicians were black!

R and B is surely more in the pop genre, I've heard things labelled "funky jazz" - often pretty electronic but sometimes very exciting. Garage is surely where you keep the lawnmower and hip-hop and rap I hate - very lazy music I feel. I could do it after a couple of whiskeys!

[Richard]

Thanks moonjiver,
I like to have a potted-history view:
As I understand it (from having a quick read on google) Jazz formed as a cultural clash, in the melting pot of New Orleans, between formally-trained and rather refined Creole musicians (and their descendants) and uneducated Black-African emancipated slaves.
The two cultures were thrown together by odious segregation laws, of 1894, pushing the Creoles into ever closer contact with the Blacks who were more at ease with such non-Jazz elements, the Blues, Ragtime, Dixie Band Music, Hymns and Spirituals.
The Creoles soon gained leadership over the Blacks, musically speaking.
An example is given by the story of 'Jelly Roll' Morton (of Creole ancestry) who played as a teenager in the Bordello's of Storyville (New Orleans's red-light district) and claimed to have invented Jazz in around 1902.
There is no doubt that Morton had developed a music-form not covered by the blues or ragtime and that he applied a swinging syncopation to ragtime, opera, and French and Spanish songs and dances. He also may have introduced the 2-bar break (the precursor to extended solos), scat singing and other improvisational ideas. Basically, the conversion of ragtime to Jazz was quite simple, involving application of a strong underlying 4/4 beat to 2/4 ragtime.
All great ideas are simple once understood. with this device, any music could be "played hot" as it was described in those days...

[moonjiver]

That's all quite interesting and I can't argue with the technicalities of beat or syncopation! But I have always felt that attempts to fix a date when jazz was "invented" are somewhat artificial. Yes, some of the musical forms and devices we know now were discovered or invented around the turn of the 19th century, but the various origins of what finally melled together into "jazz" go back atleast another hundred years. Maybe it's more accurate to say that jazz had a very long slow gestation. It was surely the improvisation particularly in instrumentals, from black African traditions, which was so revolutionary and put the stamp on jazz as a "new" genre separate from conventional written scores of the time.

Another important element was the long development of the instruments themselves. Banjos didn't exist in Africa but their primitive ancestors did, also in the Middle East and elsewhere. The techniques went to America along with the slaves and were modified over the years - the banjo was the baby that resulted, hard to imagine some forms of jazz without the banjo! However, it was the increasing availability of things like trumpets which gave free rein to improvisation and encouraged the new music trend..

[Richard]

Whatever the long history and origins leading to 'Jazz' or 'Hot Jazz', I guess that most of the bands( 'Big Bands' seem to feature large in the history of 'Jazz') playing 'Jazz' or 'Hot Jazz', were made up of one or two more talented members, who were given the freedom to experiment and improvise a piece, supported by the rest of the ensemble, who were well-versed in playing a mundane piece of background music which, of necessity, requiring basic formal training.

I haven't any ability to read music and would make an awful mess of playing an instrument 'free-form' as I have no training and, importantly, no inclination.
Africans, West Indians, and others somehow have a natural beat & rhythm and are good at improvisation and playing from memory alone.
I suggested earlier that the Creoles, who were better-educated were able to benefit from adapting the earlier forms of Dixie, Ragtime, Tin Pan, etcetera and providing a formal structure, sufficient to see their Band propelled from the Dance Halls of New Orleans to Chicago and New York, to gain fame and fortune, and this commercialisation is well-documented.
So, Jazz had an incubation inside New Orleans, among coloured and segregated immigrants, mainly finding expression inside Dance Bands / Brass Bands, it also had to travel around the country and become more 'exposed' to the general public before Record Labels would show interest, and from these commercialised 'discoveries' we have tunes/music we can easily identify today.

[Tony_MacDonnell]

Here is a link to a great video on Youtube. One of the best and most concise explanations (It's around 23 minutes) The Story of Jazz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATJX7gZ4D6w and if you have another hour try this one: Jazz Legends in their own words. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDoHo2lpDWU .

Please visit the Jazz Organisation at one of our Thursday Sessions at The JD Bar, Clarence Street. To stay informed about our guest musicians and what is offered each week you could go the our Facebook page and "like" it. https://www.facebook.com/JazzOrganisation/?fref=nf