Creating a central site for Chicago Jazz for the Chicago community, the nation and the world. Jazz History in Augmented Reality coming soon.
Ragtime: The Music That Gave Birth To Jazz In 1893, Scott Joplin was in Chicago at the time of the World’s Fair, leading a band and playing cornet, probably somewhere outside the fair grounds.
Ragtime pianists, important precursors of jazz, gravitated to the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893, where they set in motion a grand procession of twentieth-century popular-music styles associated with Chicago. Whereas New York's Tin Pan Alley dominated the music publishing business, Chicago tended to attract performers rather than professional songwriters, and these musicians tended to excel at nightclub work. As early as 1906, such influential performers as pianists Tony Jackson and Ferd La Menthe “Jelly Roll” Morton were experimenting with fresh improvisational possibilities that did much to transform ragtime into jazz. So too did Chicagoans listen to a series of cornetists/bandleaders, such as Freddie Keppard, Manuel Perez, and especially Joseph “King” Oliver.
Milton Mesirow, better known as Mezz Mezzrow (November 9, 1899 – August 5, 1972) was an American jazz clarinetist and saxophonist from Chicago, Illinois.[1] Mezzrow is well known for organizing and financing historic recording sessions with Tommy Ladnier and Sidney Bechet. Mezzrow also recorded a number of times with Bechet and briefly acted as manager for Louis Armstrong. However, he is remembered as much for being a colorful character in his autobiography Really The Blues as for his music. It takes its title from a musical piece by Sidney Bechet. The book was co-written by Bernard Wolfe and first published in 1946.
Afro-Creole pianist Jelly Roll Morton began his career in Storyville. From 1904, he toured with vaudeville shows around southern cities, also playing in Chicago and New York. His "Jelly Roll Blues", which he composed around 1905, was published in 1915 as the first jazz arrangement in print, introducing more musicians to the New Orleans style.[26] In the northeastern United States, a "hot" style of playing ragtime had developed, notably James Reese Europe's symphonic Clef Club orchestra in New York which played a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall in 1912.[27][28] The Baltimore rag style of Eubie Blake influenced James P. Johnson's development of "Stride" piano playing, in which the right hand plays the melody, while the left hand provides the rhythm and bassline.[29
Joe Oliver is one of the most important figures in early Jazz. When we use the phrase Hot Jazz, we are really referring to his style of collective improvisation (rather than solos). He was the mentor and teacher of Louis Armstrong. Louis idolized him and called him Papa Joe. Oliver even gave Armstrong the first cornet that Louis was to own. Oliver was blinded in one eye as a child, and often played while sitting in a chair, or leaning against the wall, with a derby hat tilted so that it hid his bad eye. Joe was famous for his using mutes, derbies, bottles and cups to alter the sound of his cornet. He was able to get a wild array of sounds out of his horn with this arsenal of gizmos. Bubber Miley is said to have been inspired by his sound. He often worked in Kid Ory's band and in 1917 he was being billed as "King" by the bandleader. In 1919 he moved to Chicago with Ory and played in Bill Johnson's The Original Creole Orchestra at the Dreamland Ballroom. He toured with the band, but when he returned to Chicago in 1922 he started King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band at Lincoln Gardens (459 East 31st Street).
In 1922, Armstrong joined the exodus to Chicago, where he had been invited by his mentor, Joe "King" Oliver, to join his Creole Jazz Band and where he could make a sufficient income so that he no longer needed to supplement his music with day labor jobs. It was a boom time in Chicago and though race relations were poor, the “Windy City” was teeming with jobs for black people, who were making good wages in factories and had plenty to spend on entertainment.
Hot Jazz Circa 1925, Louis Armstrong recorded his first Hot Five records - the first time he recorded under his own name. The records made by Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven are considered to be absolute Jazz classics and speak of Armstrong's creative powers. The band never played live, but continued recording until 1928. The music was characterized by collective improvised solos, around melodic structure, that ideally built up to an emotional and "hot" climax. The rhythm section, usually drums, bass, banjo or guitar supported this crescendo, many times in the style of march tempo. Soon, larger bands and orchestras began to emulate that energy, especially with the advance of record technology, that spread the "hot" new sound across the country.
Always an opera lover, Capone expanded his patronage to the jazz world. With the opening of the Cotton Club in Cicero, Al became a jazz impresario, attracting and cultivating some of the best black jazz musicians of the day. Unlike so many other Italian gangsters, Al did not seem to have the deep-seated racial prejudice and he gained the trust and respect of many of his musicians. Al extended his generosity and personal concerns to everybody who worked for him, black or white.
Jazz pioneer, bandleader, mystic, philosopher, and consummate Afro-Futurist, Sun Ra, (born Herman Poole Blount 1914, Birmingham, Alabama, died 1993) and his personal mythology have grown increasingly relevant to a broad range of artists and communities. "Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-1968" presents a collection of paintings, drawings, prints, manuscripts, ephemera, and video produced by and about Ra and his associates—much of it previously unseen. This exhibition examines how Ra and his dynamic, continually-evolving ensemble, the Philadelphia-based Arkestra, crafted both their otherworldly image and fiercely independent approach to self-production. Highlights of the exhibition include original drawings for their 1960's albums Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow and Other Planes of There, and five newly discovered typed and annotated broadsheets. Until recently, only one such broadsheet was known to exist—the one that Ra gave saxophonist John Coltrane in 1956. The show will also include the unpublished manuscript, The Magic Lie, a book of Ra's poetry, which has become influential in the nascent Black Islamic movement. In addition to these documents, the film Spaceways, by Edward English, will be on view. The film documents Ra and his Arkestra (a deliberate re-spelling of "orchestra"), in 1968, as they prepare to perform at Carnegie Hall.
Joe Segal began his career booking bands for Roosevelt University in 1947. By the 1950s, he had become one of the premiere figures in the Chicago jazz scene, hosting shows in venues throughout the city, including the C&C Lounge, which held an annual memorial concert in honor of jazz great Charlie Parker beginning in 1955 on the day of Parker's death
The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is a non-profit organization, founded in Chicago, Illinois, United States, by pianist/composer Muhal Richard Abrams, pianist Jodie Christian, drummer Steve McCall, and composer Phil Cohran. The AACM is devoted "to nurturing, performing, and recording serious, original music," according to their charter. They support and encourage jazz performers, composers and educators. Their motto is, "Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future." Early members included Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Jack DeJohnette, Chico Freeman, Wadada Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago: Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Famoudou Don Moye, and Malachi Favors. The AACM was formed in May 1965 by a group of musicians centered around pianist Muhal Richard Abrams who had organized an Experimental Band since 1962. The musicians were generally steadfast in their commitment to their music, despite a lack of performance venues and sometimes indifferent audiences. From 1969 the AACM organised a music education program for inner city youths.[1] In the 1960s and 1970s AACM members were among the most important and innovative in all of jazz, though the AACM's contemporary influence has waned some in recent years. Many AACM members have recorded widely: in the early days on the Delmark Records Avant Garde Jazz series [1] and later on the Black Saint/Soul Note and India Navigation labels, and to a lesser extent on the Arista Records and ECM labels.
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