This week we look at the beginnings of Jazz music, the dance craze and mania that it spawned across the country, and Tin Pan alley, the birthplace and wellspring of what we now call "standards," the songs that have become a part of the tribal memory of most of us. I would venture a guess that you have heard at least one of the thousands of songs produced by the songwriters who wrote, plugged, and published their songs. Last week's post introduced the area in New York City that became known as Tin Pan Alley and a few of the songwriters who slaved there. This week's post will show the work of three of the most successful, if not artistically than certainly commercially, composers of their day : Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and the ground-breaking Broadway musical "Show Boat" by Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers.

This first clip comes from the documentary "The Great American Songbook" and deals with possibly the most diverse, prolific, and popular writers of the 20th century - Irving Berlin. His songs covered so many styles and eras that there was a rumour floating around for years that he kept a black man chained to his piano in the basement because people couldn't believe he could write so well in so many idioms. His work ranges from "Alexander's Ragtime Band, one of the most successful songs of  the Ragtime era, to "White Christmas," a Yuletide standard still recorded today. He is a fascinating character and you can find many versions of his songs all over the Internet. Do some searching and I am sure you will be surprised at how many of them you already know.

Also from "The Great American Songbook" comes this clip looking at George Gershwin, who moved the tawdry and sentimental songs of Tin Pan Alley into the realm of Art. Not only were his commercial songs beautiful, smart, and touching, but his later orchestral work is considered some of the finest music ever composed in America. Watch this clip and then go to the YouTube sites I have linked and see a gorgeous short film (in two parts) that brings his "Rhapsody in Blue" to life.

Here is the first part - check it out by cutting and pasting this URL into your browser"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cocB-DHzTU

Part Two:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlSVMNd0veI

Finally, here is a short clip that looks at "Show Boat," a Broadway musical that broke many of the boundaries over what was acceptable subject matter for Broadway shows.

As always, comments are encouraged . . .

Baby Steps

Last week we looked at the cauldron that American Pop Music springs from: the sounds and songs, the folk tales and melodies, the emotions and the longings brought to the North American shores by wave after wave of immigrants. Many of these people came searching for a new life, broader horizons and vistas, more promising futures. Others, of course, had no choice in the matter. Over two millions Africans were brought across the ocean to work the fields and farms as slaves, bought and paid for. This friction and resentment will run as a steady chasm through American life culturally, politically, socially, spiritually from its earliest days to the present. Race is the elephant in the living room in America and has been both a source of shame and a source of pride. What is heartening for us, however, is the music that grows out of this experience.

This week, we look at the "baby steps" of the music we hear today. We get introduced to Stephan Foster, America's first real songwriter. His songs are still performed today and some, for example "Hard Times Come Around No More", have as much power as they did when they were first performed. His work is a part of our collective memory and I will venture a guess that each and everyone of us has heard a Stephan Foster song somewhere in our past. Unfortunately, most of his songs were written for minstrel shows, a misunderstood, though rightfully shameful, form of entertainment that sprung up mostly after the Civil War. Minstrel shows were a great deal more complicated than they would appear on the surface and you owe it to yourself to do a little research on them. The Internet is full of resources you can garner information from.

The following is a short clip from a series entitled "The Great American Song Book," which tells the history of American pop music through the use of movies clips from the 30s and 40s. It is enlightening, to a degree, but it is hard to look at the footage showing minstrel shows without thinking "What the hell were they thinking???"

  

Shortly after this period, in the American South, Ragtime gets invented and Ragtime will dominate popular music for decades. It was developed as a dance rhythm and spread across the country like a virus. Ironically, one of the most popular dances that emerged from this rhythm was "the Cakewalk," a dance that white Americans saw black people doing and quickly expropriated it. The irony is that blacks developed the dance as a way of making fun  of how white people danced and the millions of whites dancing "The Cakewalk" had little idea of its origins. Sweet revenge in a way, eh? Here is another clip from "The Great American Song Book."

Finally (because this must be as exhausting to read as it is to write . . .lol), here is another clip from "The Great American Song Book" that deals with Tin Pan Alley - a form of music that without which, Michael Buble would be just another hapless Canadian singer performing as the opening act at Casino Rama.

 

As always, post your comments - I want to hear them . . .  

Let the Discovery Begin . . .

Here is a clip from Ken Burn's amazingly insightful and comprehensive documentary series "Jazz:." In it, we can see the beginnings of Popular Music in America and how the diversity of influences are still heard today. Clearly, as this clip illustrates, the African-American stream in American music is strong, vibrant, and wide-reaching, turning New Orleans into the epicentre of much of the music to follow. When you watch the clip, can you hear the roots of any of the music we listen to today? Can you hear the echoes of the past in the sounds of today?

The flip side of this, of course, is the huge influence the European immigrant experience has given to the cultural and musical landscape of America. This is a clip from a wonderful four-part documentary entitled "American Roots Music." In it, we see the early roots of country music and how each group that arrived on the shores of America brought their music with them and they blend together to form something different and unique. Again, does this music sound alien and strange to you? Is it too far in the past to move or interest you today? Post your responses and let's see where the dialogue takes us.

Although, at the beginning of our journey, these two streams seems so widely apart, by the end of the semester, we will watch how they merge together and feed off of each other. As the blues artist Muddy Waters once proclaimed "The blues and country music got married and the baby's name was rock 'n roll."