Blues Meets Jazz
Blues and Jazz have been intertwined since either style had a name. The first description of jazz music appeared in the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1915 under the headlines "Blues in Jazz and Jazz Is Blues," and when the first jazz record appeared a year and a half later, it was a twelve bar instrumental title "Livery Stable Blues."
Most historians think that rural blues songs were a major contributing source to early jazz. This could be the moaning, hollering with not so subtle African roots. Blues phrasing - the tonal subtleties that sound slurred or off-pitch to European ears and the relaxed command of intricate rhythms - has always been a hallmark of jazz. Others say that the specific tonal approaches are less important than a more generalized blues spirit. The pianist Bill Taylor said, "It's not the fact that a man on certain occasions would flat a certain note, bend a note or do something which is strictly a blues type device. It's just that whatever this nebulous feeling is - the vitality they seem to get in the blues - . . . it makes the difference between Coleman Hawkin's "Body and Soul" and a society tenor player's "Body and Soul."
When jazz became a national craze, New Orleans blues formed a large portion of its core repertoire. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, a group of white New Orleanians, set off the jazz recording boom with "Livery Stable Blues" in 1917, and its success spawned a flock of imitators, both black and white. Relatively few African American bands were recorded until Mamie Smith's success led to the creation of Race record lines in the early 1920's, and it may be due to the dominance of the blues queens that those bands' records include so much blues material. King Oliver, the New Orleans cornetist who led Chicago's most influential black orchestra in this period, devoted roughly a third of his early records to twelve bar blues. Louis Armstrong, who came north to join Oliver in 1922, moved to New York in 1924 and introduced the New Orleans blues flavor to Fletcher Henderson's sophisticated ballroom orchestra. Armstrong's work with Henderson, especially on pieces like the twelve bar "Sugarfoot Stomp," helped to make this band the main laboratory for the riff oriented, ferociously danceable style that would become known as swing.
