The Birth of the Uncool part 1

In the beginning
Michael Oakeshott once wrote that history is a place where we trace our opinions like Whippets exercising in a park. What I am about to do here is no more than that. Imagine the history of "jazz" music as a huge park through which we could draw many different lines.  I am going to draw a line connecting various bits of that big park into a particular history that I will call "The Birth of the Uncool"

As I do so, I will be drawing distinctions between the line I am drawing and some other lines already drawn. Most of these lines were drawn by people hoping to find the one and only true history of jazz music. Others were drawn by people who care little about the music but love to play racial politics with history (the just awful Jazz by Ken Burns being only the latest example). Finally, and most importantly, there is an alternative history within jazz known as the history of cool jazz.

The story I am bout to tell is none of those. I should only add that while there is some creativity in drawing the line all the territory it covers is real; this is not a fictional story.

The story begins with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band because it has to. If we want to do history in anything vaguely resembling a serious way we have to work with documents and artefacts and, for better or for worse, the history of jazz begins here:



Now we could have a stupid argument about who was or was not playing jazz before this but we won't. Somebody undoubtedly was. Who exactly and where or how is a something we do not know and never will. Yes, lots of people made claims but but none of them can be accepted at face value.

Besides which, the whole argument about who did or did not come up with jazz first will distract us from the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's (hereafter ODJB) one unquestionable achievement: they made the question worth arguing about. They did this by proving that you could make money playing jazz. They took a kind of music that was just lying around and proved that the whole world was interested. For New Orleans musicians, this was a little like proving that those rocks everyone had in their backyard were really gold.

A big part of this was the way they marketed themselves. Lots of people have noted that there is something a little presumptuous in the  "original" in the ODJB's name. What is not so often noted that it was not unusual for the time.  Blackface troupes called themselves by names like "Original Ethiopian Serendaders" and had done so for a long time. The ODJB name may stand out as odd to us but it would not have to the audience of the time. What would have stood out was that the men in the band were not in blackface and they did not claim to be playing anybody else's music but their own.

The ODJB did a Minstrel show performance without blackface and that was a considerable innovation. It opened a door for hundreds of others. Through that door would come jazz both hot and cool.

And it left an odd challenge. For all it's racial connotations, blackface was primarily a role for performers. It was a mask they put on and the performance they gave while wearing that mask was narrowly proscribed by the expectations that went with the shows. The performer disappeared into the role.

For many African-American performers this must have been very inviting. It opened the door to performing as themselves. It wasn't a  completely clear road: the first performances of Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, for example, are little more than a glorified minstrel show.

For others, there was a challenge in that the role playing that went with jazz now became something they couldn't take off at the end of the day. Once you were a jazz musician, that was what you were; no matter what you "really" were. It was still role playing but the stakes had changed.