Famous as much for his gargantuan appetite (for food, drink and female company) as for his musical abilities, Waller’s success as a popular entertainer and singer tended to mask his brilliance as a pianist and organist, let alone as the composer of dozens of tunes, many of which became hit songs.
Blake was a significant ragtime and early jazz composer, initially writing formal rag compositions but subsequently turning his band to popular songs.
Beiderbecke made a tremendous impression on everyone who heard him in the flesh from the beginning of 1924 onward, when he began working throughout the Midwest with the Chicago-based Wolverines. Eddie Condon, for example, initially heard him playing piano; “For the first time I realized that music isn’t all the same”, he wrote. When he finally heard Beidersbeck’s cornet, “The sound came out like a girl saying yes”.
Somehow, Armstrong manages the almost impossible feat of continuing to provide a swinging, forceful lead while actually holding the excessive zeal of his rhythm section in check. What Armstrong brought to small-group jazz was a sense of swing ; a relaxed, yet even more dramatic and original way of interpreting a melody than that of trumpeters like Keppard and King Oliver.
Prior to 1920, the jazz development was taking place in many parts of the United States. However, as the new decade began, for a few years the main center in which the music moved forward became the lakeside city of Chicago.
About fifty thousand African Americans from the Southern states arrived in Chicago in the years [...]
We only called the music “jazz” after someone in the audience one night in Chicago kept holdering at us to “Jazz it up”! and it seemed to fit for the music. No, I never heard the word in New Orleans. I found out later it was a fould word in Chicago, but I guess we [...]