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| Jazz Music |
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As Ross Russell observes in his classic Jazz Style in
Kansas City and the Southwest (1971), "the state of
Texas, the largest and most populous in the Kansas
City-Southwest area, [has] predictably yielded the
greatest number of musicians and bands." Throughout the
history of jazz, Texans have contributed to the
important movements in this native American music,
beginning with blues, ragtime, and boogie-woogie in the
early years of the twentieth century and continuing with
hot jazz in the 1920s, swing in the 1930s, bebop in the
1940s, cool, hard bop, and funk-soul in the 1960s, and
free jazz from the late 1950s into the 1980s. |
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| Not only have Texans participated at
crucial moments in the development of jazz, either as
composers, arrangers, or sidemen, but a number of Texas
musicians have figured as outstanding soloists and as
leaders of vital, innovative groups of their own.
Although Texas was the home to a large number of
territory bands, most of the significant performances by
Texans were recorded outside the state, principally in
Chicago, New York, Kansas City, and Los Angeles. Yet
wherever Texans have traveled, they have always taken
with them something of their own musical heritage. |
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| Historian Gunther Schuller remarks
that the Texas blues tradition is "probably much older
than the New Orleans idiom that is generally thought to
be the primary fountainhead of jazz." The transition
between the early forms of black and white folk music
and the blues is represented in Texas by the recordings
from 1927 to 1929 of Henry "Ragtime Texas" Thomas, a
"songster" who accompanied his versions of "rag"
ditties, "coon" songs, minstrel or vaudeville tunes, and
various square dances on both guitar and a reed
instrument known as the quills. Thomas's "Texas Easy
Street Blues" has been ranked "with the finest blues
ever recorded"; his "Cottonfield Blues" employs the
minor thirds and sevenths common to the form; his "Bull
Doze Blues" is an instance of the Texas tradition of
prison blues; and his "Railroadin' Some" draws on his
own experience of riding the rods throughout Texas and
the Midwest. All three of these sources-farm labor,
prison life, and railroading-also inspired much of the
blues of the two most famous male blues singers active
in Texas in the 1920s, Blind Lemon Jefferson, the "King
of the Country Blues," and Huddie "Lead Belly"
Ledbetter, the "King of the Twelve-String Guitar,"
whose "enormous reservoir of music...with its powerful
elements of the work song, the ring-shout, and the
field-holler" furnished, as Marshall Stearns has
observed, an "original mixture" to which "jazz and
near-jazz returned again and again" and without which
"jazz could never have developed." Jefferson's masterful
sound and vocal phrasing-the latter consisting of long,
unconventional lines-were matched by his instrumental
work, as on his "Long Lonesome Blues," in which he
performs so many inventive riffs on guitar that he
"comes close to setting a blues record." Although
recorded late in his career, Jefferson's songs contain
the kinds of "carefully knit blues breaks" that were the
basis of the greatest jazz. They inspired bluesmen in
his own day and have influenced bluesmen ever since. |
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More closely associated with the practice of jazz was
the work of a group of Texas female blues singers who
recorded with a number of the early jazz giants,
including King Oliver and Louis Armstrong. Three women
singers from Houston-Beulah T. (Sippie) Wallace,
Victoria R. Spivey, and Hociel Thomas-were among the
earliest successes in the field of urban blues, and
Maggie Jones of Hillsboro also made a group of important
recordings with major jazz musicians. All four of these
figures, "in using some of the finest jazz musicians of
the day as their accompanists,...made possible some of
the earliest recorded jazz breaks by [such] great
artists" as Armstrong, Oliver, Fletcher Henderson,
Sidney Bechet, Johnny Dodds, Henry "Red" Allen, and J.
C. Higginbotham. Sippie Wallace recorded with Armstrong
in November 1924 and Maggie Jones with the trumpeter in
December 1924, and on both occasions Armstrong was able
to "stretch out" and develop many of the breaks that
marked his revolutionary jazz style. Also performing
with Wallace on a February 1925 recording with King
Oliver was Sippie's brother Hersal Thomas (a Houston
native as well), who as a teenager had already mastered
a forward-looking form of blues piano, complete with
tremolos and the kinds of rips associated with
Armstrong's trumpet style and with the full-handed
chords of Jelly Roll Morton's piano. As a team, Sippie
and Hersal represented an outstanding example of urban
blues, and together with Oliver and Armstrong the two
Texans produced some of the classic blues recordings of
the 1920s. |
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Even before the blues recordings by country and urban
singers from Texas, another important ingredient in the
jazz mix was furnished by Scott Joplin of Texarkana.
From Joplin's ragtime-most notably his famous "Maple
Leaf Rag" of 1899-jazz inherited the formal structure
and the syncopated rhythms that lent the later music its
special infectious appeal. Combined with the freer
phrasing of the blues, with its spontaneous riffs and
breaks, ragtime provided jazz with a patterned but
driving design that made possible both form and freedom.
Through Joplin's influence on Jelly Roll Morton, whose
performances of Scott's Original Rags and "Maple Leaf
Rag" are especially revealing, the ragtime composer has
been credited in part with Morton's "invention" of jazz
as early as 1902. |
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| Another Texas rag composer, Euday L.
Bowman of Fort Worth, contributed a classic tune that
served jazz musicians in the making of some of their
seminal recordings. According to jazz critic Martin
Williams, Louis Armstrong's 1927 recording of Bowman's
"Twelfth Street Rag" was a precursor to the trumpeter's
"beautifully free phrasing on [his] 1928 recordings with
Earl Hines, West End Blues and Muggles." Williams
remarks, "We are prepared for the later passionate
melodies that swing freely without rhythmic reminders
and for the double-time episodes that unfold with poise.
We are prepared for a fuller revelation of Armstrong's
genius." Likewise, the Count Basie recording of Bowman's
rag from 1939 has elicited praise for the solos
performed by tenorist Lester Young, which have been
called "perhaps the very zenith of Lester's
greatness....one can sense instantly the detachment of
the aphorist and the presence of an original spirit."
Still other outstanding performances of Bowman's rag
include those by Bennie Moten from 1927, Duke Ellington
from 1931, Fats Waller from 1935, Andy Kirk from 1940
(with Mary Lou Williams as arranger and pianist), and
Sidney Bechet and his New Orleans Feetwarmers from 1941
(with Everett Barksdale playing a Charlie Christian-inspired
form of bop guitar). These recordings taken together
trace the history of jazz from hot and swing to bebop
and include both combos and big bands, as well as the
distinctive styles of Ellington and Basie and the
humorous touch of Fats Waller. |
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Boogie-woogie or barrelhouse-style piano, something
of a hybrid form of blues and ragtime, also
originated, according to some authorities, in Texas,
in particular in the lumber camps and along the
railroad lines of East Texas. The earliest recording
to use the boogie-woogie "intermittent walking bass"
was George W. Thomas's "The Rocks," recorded in
February 1923. This composition by the older brother
of Sippie Wallace and Hersal Thomas is also
considered the first recording to employ the
boogie-woogie structure, which is that of a
twelve-bar blues. In general, boogie-woogie is
highly percussive and is marked by a repeated
left-hand bass played usually with eight beats to
the bar; while "moving to the three blues-chord
positions (C, F and G in the key of C)," the right
hand improvises over the continuous bass figure "in
fascinating and varied polyrhythmic, polymetric
patterns." |
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Boogie-woogie further developed in the 1930s in
Chicago at the hands of such figures as Meade "Lux"
Lewis and Albert Ammons. However, it found its first
major practitioner in Hersal Thomas, who influenced
those later pianists by recording his own composition
entitled "Suitcase Blues" in February 1925. In addition,
Hersal and his brother George jointly composed "The
Fives," which consists of a number of characteristic
boogie-woogie bass patterns: stride ("in which a broken
octave is interposed between the on- and off-beats in
the left-hand part"), walking bass ("broken or spread
octaves repeated through the blues progression" that "provide[s]
the ground for countless improvisations"), and stepping
octave chords. Both Lewis and Ammons asserted that "The
Fives" "was instrumental in shaping ‘modern
boogie-woogie’." The influence of "The Fives," as well
as "The Rocks," was such that every boogie-woogie player
during the 1930s was judged by his performance of these
pieces by the Thomases: "In those days if a pianist
didn't know the Fives and the Rocks he'd better not sit
down at the piano at all." |
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| Territorial bands in Texas first
promoted the careers of many of the early jazz musicians
who later moved to Chicago, New York, and Kansas City.
Among these were Eddie Durham of San Marcos; Budd and
Keg Johnson, Oran "Hot Lips" Page, and Dan Minor of
Dallas; Henry (Buster) Smith of Alsdorf; Herschel
Evans of Denton; Carl Tatti Smith of Marshall; Joe
Keyes of Houston; W. L. (Jack) Teagarden of Vernon;
and Tyree Glenn of Corsicana. None of the bands in
Texas, however, achieved a national reputation, with the
possible exception of the Alphonso Trent Orchestra in
Dallas, which was composed almost exclusively of sidemen
from other states. Only late in the 1930s did a Texan
like Charlie Christian perform with the Trent band, but
at that time Christian was playing bass rather than the
electric guitar on which he subsequently made jazz
history. |
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After touring with a number of white groups in Texas
(among them R. J. Marin's Southern Trumpeters and Doc
Ross and His Jazz Bandits), Jack Teagarden headed for
New York, where in 1927 the trombonist immediately
revolutionized the solo jazz conception of his
instrument. After spending five years with the Paul
Whiteman Orchestra in the mid-1930s, Teagarden formed
his own band, which featured trombonist and fellow Texan
Ernesto Caceres, a reedman from Rockport. Teagarden's
trumpeter brother Charlie was also a fine Swing-Era
trumpeter. Both Teagarden and Tyree Glenn became members
of the Louis Armstrong All-Stars, the former with the
first group in the 1940s and the latter with the final
group in the late 1960s. Glenn, following a stint in the
early years with Eddie and Sugar Lou's band in Temple
(based in Austin at another date when Lips Page was a
member), traveled first to Los Angeles and then to the
East Coast, where he performed with various groups
before joining the Cab Calloway Orchestra in New York
and later in 1946 the Duke Ellington Orchestra. |
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Most of the Texas musicians of the first generation
of jazzmen ended up in Kansas City. The first to record
there was Lammar Wright of Texarkana, who probably
arrived as a teenager. On Bennie Moten's first
recordings of 1923, Wright is considered the most
outstanding musician of the Moten band, which cut two
sides entitled "Elephant's Wobble" and "Crawdad Blues,"
with Wright delivering on the former an Oliver-inspired
cornet solo in the same year that the King himself first
recorded his music. Before joining the Moten band,
guitarist-trombonist-composer-arranger Eddie Durham,
trumpeter Lips Page, who was later billed as the
"Trumpet King of the West," and altoist Buster Smith,
who later became an important influence on saxophonist
Charlie "Bird" Parker, were members of the Blue Devils,
an Oklahoma commonwealth unit that so threatened the
Moten band that the leader "raided" the Blue Devils and
hired away Durham first and later Page. Smith too threw
in with Moten, but not until after the Kansas City band
recorded in 1932 for RCA Victor what is considered one
of the all-time classic recordings of early big band
jazz. |
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| After Moten's sudden death in 1935,
the band was reorganized by Count Basie and Buster
Smith, and the trumpet section was composed of Lips
Page, Joe Keyes from Johnson's Joymakers in Houston, and
Carl Tatti Smith, who came by way of the Terrence Holder
band, and Gene Coy's Happy Black Aces from Amarillo.
Dan Minor, who also had been with the Blue Devils and
the Moten band, played trombone with the Basie
Orchestra. The Johnson brothers, Budd and Keg, also
worked with the Happy Black Aces in the late 1920s
before joining Jesse Stone in 1929 and heading for
Kansas City, where the brothers joined the George E. Lee
band, which at the time rivaled Bennie Moten's. In 1930
Keg left for Chicago, where he played trombone with the
Ralph Cooper band at the Regal Theatre and with the
Clarence Moore band at the Grand Terrace Ballroom, along
with pianist Teddy Wilson of Austin (later a star
member of Benny Goodman's trio). After Budd arrived in
Chicago in 1932, the brothers played in a combo with
Wilson, and by 1933 all three were members of the Louis
Armstrong Orchestra. Both Budd on tenor saxophone and
Keg on trombone take impressive solos on a recording
with Armstrong of "Mahogany Hall Stomp." Later Keg
became a sideman with the Cab Calloway Orchestra, along
with fellow Texans Tyree Glenn, who doubled on trombone
and vibraphone, and Lammar Wright. Meanwhile, brother
Budd performed several roles with the Earl Hines band at
the Grand Terrace Ballroom, serving as manager,
composer-arranger, section leader, and soloist in the
new "cool" style more closely identified with the work
of tenorist Lester Young. Budd also figured prominently
in the rise of bebop when, early in 1944, he organized
the first bop record date with Coleman Hawkins and Dizzy
Gillespie. |
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| During the Swing Era of the 1930s, Eddie
Durham contributed significantly to the bands of Jimmie
Lunceford, Count Basie, and Glenn Miller, primarily as a
composer-arranger but also with Lunceford and Basie as a
trombonist and guitarist. It was Durham who first recorded on an
amplified guitar, for a 1935 recording with Lunceford. Soon
thereafter Durham reportedly introduced Charlie Christian of
Dallas to the electric guitar. Christian, with his long-lined
single-string solos, went on to establish this new instrument as
a vehicle for jazz with the Benny Goodman Orchestra (trumpeter
Harry James of Beaumont having starred earlier with Goodman's
band) and with Goodman's Sextet, as well as with after-hours
groups devoted to the incipient bebop movement. Christian has
been called the greatest jazz guitarist of all time. Another
Texas guitarist, Oscar Moore of Austin, was a vital member of
the Nat King Cole Trio during the 1940s and is considered one of
the first important modern combo guitarists. Though not so
important as a soloist on guitar, Durham recorded on this
instrument as well as trombone for a historic recording with
Lester Young in 1938, for which Durham served both as leader and
arranger. Even before this, Carl Tatti Smith also performed with
Lester Young on a 1936 session that marked the tenorist's
recording debut, which included a rendition of "Oh, Lady Be
Good" that influenced countless jazz musicians during the
following decades. Yet another Texan to record with Young was
Herschel Evans, who, after early work in the late 1920s with the
Troy Floyd band of San Antonio, was featured in tandem with
Lester as a tenor soloist in the Count Basie band. |
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A later contingent of Texans to form part of the Basie
organization included Buddy Tateqv of Sherman, Gene Ramey of
Austin, Gus Johnson of Tyler, Henry Coker of Dallas, and
Illinois Jacquet of Houston. Tate, who had been with Herschel
Evans in Troy Floyd's San Antonio band (as well as with Eddie
and Sugar Lou's Austin band and Andy Kirk's Twelve Clouds of Joy
from Kansas City), took over the other tenor chair in the Basie
band when Evans died in 1939. Jacquet, another Texas tenorist,
got his start with the Milt Larkin outfit from Houston
(considered probably the last of the great Texas bands), which
included two other notable members, Arnett Cobb on tenor and
Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson on alto. Jacquet starred with the
Lionel Hampton orchestra in 1942, when he took one of the most
famous solos of the war years on "Flying Home," then joined
Basie in 1945. Bassist Gene Ramey and drummer Gus Johnson were
at first members of another Kansas City band, that of Jay
McShann, which featured at the time the early work of the great
saxophonist Charlie Parker. After serving as timekeepers for
Parker's revolutionary alto flights, Johnson joined Basie in
1948, and Ramey was with the Count briefly in 1953. Trombonist
Henry Coker had been with Buddy Tate in the Nat Towles band in
1937 before moving to Hawaii. On returning to the States, Coker
formed part of the Illinois Jacquet band in 1949 and then joined
up with Basie in 1952. |
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During the 1940s and 1950s, a number of Texas jazzmen
participated in various developments in jazz that were
associated with or grew out of the bebop movement. The first
recording of Thelonious Monk's "Round Midnight" dates from a
1944 session with the Cootie Williams Orchestra, in which
Houston altoist and blues singer Cleanhead Vinson is present.
Also participating in the 1944 Williams session was trumpeter
Harold "Money" Johnson of Tyler, who recorded with Duke
Ellington between 1968 and 1972. In 1947, Gene Ramey was a
member of Monk's first trio to record the pianist-composer's own
music for Blue Note Records, which between 1947 and 1952
produced what is considered Monk's "most powerful and lasting
body of work" and "among the most significant and original in
modern jazz." Also present for this Blue Note series was
trumpeter Kenny Dorham of Fairfield, who performed in 1952 with
Monk's sextet. Dorham had joined Charlie Parker as the
replacement for Miles Davis in Bird's quintet from 1948 to 1952.
Both Ramey and Dorham also took part in the first hardbop
recordings, made in 1953 by what later became Art Blakey's Jazz
Messengers, of which Dorham was a founding member. In addition,
during the early to mid-1950s Ramey recorded not only in the
last recording sessions of Lester Young's combo but participated
in a 1950 Miles Davis recording date known as "the birth of the
cool." |
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| Other Texans active during the postwar
period include Jimmy Giuffre, Gene Roland, and Harry Babasin of
Dallas and Herb Ellis of Farmersville. These students from North
Texas State University in Denton became members of several
outstanding jazz groups, including the orchestras of Stan Kenton
and Woody Herman, various ensembles formed in Los Angeles at
such clubs as the Lighthouse and the Trade Winds, and such
combos as those of Shorty Rogers and Oscar Peterson. Giuffre led
a number of his own groups, notably his Trio, which included Jim
Hall on guitar. Giuffre was a composer and multi-instrumentalist
(clarinet, tenor, baritone) who also made his mark as an early
exponent of so-called "third stream" music, a fusion of jazz and
classical traditions. Meanwhile, two other Dallas jazzmen, Red
Garland and Cedar Walton, were important members of two highly
popular jazz ensembles: Garland as pianist for the original
Miles Davis Quintet of the mid-1950s and Walton as pianist for
the Jazz Messengers of the 1960s. |
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At the end of the 1950s and during the first years of the
1960s, three prominent members of the Charles Mingus Jazz
Workshop ere also Texans: tenorist Booker Ervin of Denison,
altoist John Handy of Dallas, and trumpeter Richard Williams of
Galveston. A fourth Texan to perform at times with the Mingus
group was Leo Wright of Wichita Falls, who also worked with the
Dizzy Gillespie big band. Handy later organized his own
successful group, which at one time included Houston violinist
Michael White. Two other Dallas products, tenorists James Clay
and David "Fathead" Newman, were also active during this period,
Clay on the West Coast with Red Mitchell's first recording group
and Newman as a featured soloist with the Ray Charles big band.
Both Clay and Leo Wright were students of tenorist John Hardee
of Dallas, who in the 1940s had recorded in New York for Blue
Note. |
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| At the end of the 1950s, jazz underwent its
greatest revolution since the beginnings of the bebop movement
some twenty years before. In 1958 Ornette Coleman of Fort Worth
initiated what he labeled-through two of his albums from 1959
and 1960-the "Change of the Century" and "Free Jazz." As
multi-instrumentalist (alto and tenor saxophones, trumpet, and
violin), composer, and band leader, Coleman moved jazz away from
a dependence on chord changes and based the music instead on
what he called "harmolodics," a freer harmonic structure founded
on a musician's melodic conception. Coleman was aided and
abetted by a number of Texans who formed at one time or another
members of his various groups. Many of his protégés were also
natives of Fort Worth, where they attended I. W. Terrell
High School, as did Ornette. Among these were tenorist Dewey
Redman and drummers Charles Moffett and Ronald Shannon Jackson.
(An earlier generation of Fort Worth musicians had included
drummer Ray McKinley and tenorist Tex Beneke, both of the Glenn
Miller orchestra. Beneke was featured by Miller as a tenor
soloist and a singer, while McKinley took over as codirector at
Miller's death in 1944.) Other followers of Coleman from Fort
Worth who did not belong to his groups were altoist Prince Lasha
and clarinetist John Carter, both of whom formed their own
ensembles in California after Ornette had made his first
recordings there before moving on to New York in 1959. Another
Fort Worther influenced by Coleman was reedman Julius Hemphill,
who became a founding member of the Black Artists' Group in St.
Louis and in 1976 of the World Saxophone Quartet. Still another
member of a Coleman group was trumpeter Bobby Bradford of
Dallas, who later joined with John Carter in the early 1970s to
form the New Art Jazz Ensemble. |
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John Carter of Fort Worth brought the clarinet back to jazz
as a viable instrument, after it had lost out to the saxophone
following its heyday in the 1920s, 1930s, and early 1940s in the
hands of such musicians as Barney Bigard and Benny Goodman.
Performing with Bobby Bradford, with Houston pianist Horace
Tapscott, and as solo artist on an album entitled A Suite of
Early American Folk Pieces, Carter recorded his own version of
free jazz by means of his stratospheric, multiphonic clarinet.
His most significant contribution, however, came in the 1980s
with the five-album, five-suite recording of his Roots and
Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music, a
tracing of Afro-American history through jazz compositions
mostly played by an octet featuring Carter on clarinet
and Bobby Bradford on either cornet or trumpet. Carter's work
brings full circle the Texas contribution to jazz history,
especially in his fourth suite, entitled Fields. This
penultimate section of Roots and Folklore includes a spoken
narrative by Carter's great-uncle John, who talks of his life as
a field hand in North Central Texas while Carter and his group
weave modern jazz in and around the uncle's words. John, as well
as Carter's grandfather, had been a member of marching and dance
bands and remembered Carter's great-great-grandfather as a
virtuoso country fiddler at dances, suppers, wakes, funerals,
and the traditional celebrations following the graveside
obsequies of an earlier day. From the African diaspora to
slavery, emancipation, segregation, and integration, Carter
recounts the sad but inspirational story of jazz to which so
many Texans have made a profound and lasting contribution. In
the early twenty-first century numerous long-running jazz
festivals throughout the state honored the jazz legacy of Texans
and showcased new musical pioneers. |
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