100 Years Of Jazz In One Small Blog

Music Director & 100 Years Of Jazz In 99 Minutes Concert Producer Richard Pite Takes Us On A Whirlwind Tour Of Jazz History.

2000 – 2015:  

Jazz has never been more varied or diverse.  So many different styles come under the jazz heading that listeners often wonder where the boundaries are.  What started off as a music that grew out of the melting pot of New Orleans at the turn of the century has now turned into a music of the world and because almost all the musicians who play it and the audiences who listen to it have access to everything on YouTube and Spotify every style is thrown into the mix and the barriers and boundaries have come down.  The big names include the Scandinavian trio EST, Americans Bad Plus and Diane Krall and from the UK Polar Bear and JamieCullum.

(Visit our 100 years Of Jazz In 99 Minutes concert pages.)

1980s - 2000:  

The 100 Years Of Jazz In 99 Minutes Band - Less Georgina Jackson

At the start of the 80’s many of jazz’s great names from the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s are still performing but by 2000 many have gone and a new generation replaces them and radically changes the music once again.  At the forefront of the new wave are jazz rappers and hip hoppers like Gang Starr and A Tribe Called Quest.  Continuing the more recognisably jazzy styles are new stars Joshua Redman, Roy Hargrove and Christian McBride and championing the jazz legacy of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong is the trumpeter, bandleader and composer Wynton Marsalis.  In the UK at the start of the 80’s there is a jazz revival with musicians Courtney Pine and Loose Tubes leading the way.

1960–1979:  

Work Song (1961) - from 100 Years Of Jazz In 99 Minutes

Performed By The Jazz Repertory Company at Boisdale Of Canary Wharf

The beginning of the 1960s heralds the jazz of Ornette Coleman - a radically new approach which delights the young hipsters and horrifies the rest!  Then the 60’s get ever more radical – particularly the musicians who are caught up in the civil rights campaign in America and the more extreme revolutionary black politics -musicians such as JohnColtrane, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and Max Roach encapsulate this era.  Miles Davis launches the jazz-rock of the 70’s with his album Bitches Brew.  Over the next decade Herbie Hancock, Weather Report, Donald Byrd, Freddie Hubbard bring the music popularity with rhythms borrowed from dance clubs mixed with the rhythms of the world.   In the UK jazz musicians such as Stan Tracey and Tubby Hayes become international stars.

1940-1959:  

It Don't Mean A Thing (1931) - from 100 Years Of Jazz In 99 Minutes

Performed By The Jazz Repertory Company at Boisdale Of Canary Wharf

WWII - During the war whilst the dancers in America and the UK are still jiving to the big bands a new music is developing in the clubs of New York.  It’s called Be-Bop and its three biggest names are Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk.  The music is difficult to play and doesn’t appeal to dancers but its importance in jazz history is immense.  After the popularity of swing the audience declines for the new jazz and rhythm and blues and later rock ‘n’ roll takes up the slack and brings the dancers back on to the floor.  In the 1950’s there is cool jazz from Chet Baker, jazz in strange time such as Take 5 by Dave Brubeck and an increasing influence of Latin American rhythms on modern jazz.

1920-1939: 

Cake Walkin' Baby (1924) - from 100 Years Of Jazz In 99 Minutes

Performed By The Jazz Repertory Company at Boisdale Of Canary Wharf

The Roaring 20s and the emergence of the first big stars in jazz and the greatest of them all, Louis Armstrong.  Other important names from the 1920s are Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Sidney Bechet and Bix Beiderbecke – the first white jazz star who played in the most successful band of the 1920’s, the Paul Whiteman Orchestra.  The 1930s saw the emergence of the Swing Era when jazz was at its most commercially successful – many thousands of dancers would go and see the greatest names of the day, Artie Shaw, Jimmy Lunceford, Glenn Miller and Cab Calloway.  The music business was still racially segregated but the King of Swing, Benny Goodman, began to change all that when he featured both black and white musicians on stage together for the first time.

1900-1919: 

The Original Dixiland Jazz Band 

At the turn of the century Ragtime was the new sensation in America and it soon spread throughout Europe too.  The most famous Ragtime composer was ScottJoplin but the biggest Ragtime hit came in 1911 with Irving Berlin’s Alexander’s Ragtime Band.  New Orleans was the birthplace of jazz – the unschooled black musicians would take popular songs, opera, polkas, ragtime and other styles and play them by ear and play around with the melodies.  Both black and white bands existed from the earliest days but they were strictly segregated – the most legendary name in this era was the black trumpeter Buddy Bolden but he never made a record.  The first jazz record was made by a white band called The Original Dixieland Jazz Band and it was released in 1917. 

The Jazz Repertory Company Concert Showreel

See our full list of concerts here.

A History Of Drummers In Film & An Irksome Example Of Health & Safety

In Anne Billson’s excellent round up of drummers on film in the Telegraph she mentioned Gene Krupa nifty matchbox percussion in a nightclub scene with Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire.   

Matchbox Boogie - Gene Krupa

Ball Of Fire, 1941

Back in 2009 when I put on the Krupa centenary concert at Cadogan Hall we wanted to reproduce this scene so in rehearsal I got out the matchbox and proceeded to play it with two matchsticks (this is actually more difficult than you’d think because of modern matchboxes having no rough striking surfaces so sandpaper had to be attached). 

Gene Krupa Centenary Concert At Cadogan Hall

The Jazz Repertory Company

Within seconds one of the hall’s staff appeared and said that there was no way he was going to allow us to do this.  I explained that the two matches would be lit for about two seconds and then blown out by me, but he wasn’t having any of it.   

Gene Krupa On Drums

This made me whine on to him for much too long about how in the history of British cinema up until 40 years ago a large percentage of the audience would have been happily puffing away and in all that time not one cinema burned down. (I was possibly wrong about this – does anybody know of any instances where cigarettes caused a cinema to go up in smoke?).

Richard Pite On Drums

Pete Long suggested an excellent compromise.  We introduce the number, issue a health and safety warning and explain we couldn’t exactly reproduce the scene in the film and then I donned hard hat, safety glasses, orange visibility jacket and waved two torches around during the feature.  I’m pleased to say it got a laugh (and also allowed me to rant on in pubs for a long while after about “elf and safety gone mad” – an essential part of the conversational repertoire of a grumpy old git).

Richard Pite On Drums

The post script was that at the Purcell Room the following year we did actually get grudging permission to go ahead and do the routine with the matchbox but I was so nervous about setting the esteemed venue on fire I couldn’t get the bloody matches to light.

A list of our www.jazzrep.co.uk concerts can be found here and our showreel is below.

Buy It Online: Benny Goodman And Glenn Miller's 1939 Carnegie Hall Concert - JRC Show CD

Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller At Carnegie Hall, The 1939 Concert - The JRC production live album recording is now on sale as a CD or Download.  Producer and drummer Richard Pite talks us through the history and the new recording.

In October 1939 ASCAP (the American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers) celebrated its 25th anniversary with a week of concerts at New York's Carnegie Hall. On the 6th of October the bill comprised four bands - those of Paul Whiteman, Fred Waring, Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller.  Waring's contribution featured his enormous choir and Whiteman's music was a potpourri of light music with little jazz content. What the younger element of the audience had come to see was the two biggest swing bands of 1939 slugging it out with Goodman going first and Miller winding up the evening.

(Buy the CD or Download here in our online store)

Because My Baby Don't Mean Maybe Now

Keith Nichols' Paul Whiteman Orchestra.  JRC Concert Production

Benny Goodman's Orchestra had made its famous debut at Carnegie Hall in January 1938 and that evening has become one of the most celebrated in jazz thanks to the double album of the music being released in 1951 and becoming a million seller. Goodman returned to Carnegie Hall three times in 1939 - firstly as a guest of the classical violinist Joseph Szigeti in the debut performance of Bartok's Contrasts, then with his orchestra for the ASCAP evening and finally on Christmas Eve with his sextet for John Hammond's second "From Spirituals to Swing" concert.

Benny Goodman's Famous Carnegie Hall Concert, 1938

A couple of weeks before Benny's Carnegie Hall debut Glenn Miller disbanded his orchestra and was disconsolate about his failure to achieve enough success to pay his musicians. It's not very often that Hollywood biopics about musicians have much truth to them but the story of Miller going off in search of a unique sound was right on the button. He found it with his unique voicings for four saxes and a clarinet (played by the highly distinctive Wilbur Schwartz).

Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller At Carnegie Hall, 1939.  JRC Concert Production

At Goodman’s Carnegie Hall debut in 1938 the band was nervous playing in such a grand venue and one can feel the tension in the first couple of choruses of that year’s opening number - Don’t Be That Way.  Eighteen months  later and Goodman’s Orchestra was back with all guns blazing as Benny wanted to show the new kids on the block just who was the King of Swing.  For this concert he once again started with the same opener but this time it was brasher, faster and full of confidence and set the tone for the rest of his set.  Goodman followed this up with a jokey version of T’aint What You Do (a massive hit for Jimmie Lunceford in ’39) in which he poked fun at the so called “Mickey Mouse” bands of the day such as Kai Kaiser and Guy Lombardo - names that mean precious little today.  So rather than repeat the gags we’ve done the hip version by Lunceford with Enrico Tomasso taking the vocals. One O’Clock Jump was up next and the fact that Miller had also programmed it didn’t bother Benny (he also stole Miller’s current hit Sunrise Serenade and played that before Miller got a chance to do his own version  a little later in the evening – Benny was playing dirty!).

Enrico Tomasso - T'aint What You Do

JRC's Goodman & Miller 1939 Concert at The Radlett Centre

The 1939 version of Sing Sing Sing is shorter and much faster than the famous version of the year before and in Gene Krupa’s place the band was driven by the irrepressible Lionel Hampton and boy does he go at a lick!

Richard Pite - Sing, Sing, Sing

JRC's Goodman & Miller 1939 Concert at The Radlett Centre

The Goodman Miller concert was notable too for the inclusion of the pioneer of the electric guitar in jazz – Charlie Christian.  Dave Chamberlain captures the Christian magic superbly in the Goodman Sextet’s Flying Home.

1939 was the year Miller’s orchestra broke through and became a million selling band and they were on cracking form on this evening with the hits keeping on coming.  They weren’t scared off by Sing, Sing, Sing either and retaliated with a closer that went even faster – the manic Bugle Call Rag.  Besides the Goodman and Miller selections we’ve also added Louis Armstrong’s What Is This Thing Called Swing (Louis appeared earlier in the ASCAP week at Carnegie – the evening over ran so badly he only had time to do two songs and this was one of them).  

Benny Goodman's Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Concert - Sing, Sing, Sing

The Jazz Repertory Company at Cadogan Hall, London

Pete Long has been directing and fronting a recreation of the 1938 Carnegie Hall concert for quite a few years now and there had been talk about a possible follow up show. The answer was pretty obvious - go forward a year, stay in the same esteemed venue, and add the most successful name in the history of swing music to the bill and, voilà, a hit show.

Richard Pite.  The Jazz Repertory Company.

(Buy the CD or Download here in our online store)

The Concerts Of The Jazz Repertory Company Showreel

Buy It Online: Jazz At The Philharmonic - The 70th Anniversary Tribute Show CD

Jazz At The Philharmonic.  Newly available as a CD or download purchase, vintage jazz meets the modern age and isn't found wanting.  Producer and drummer Richard Pite talks us through the music:

All bar one track on the CD was recorded on a Sunday afternoon in September 2014 at London's Cadogan Hall. My Jazz Repertory Company has presented a dozen or so shows at this venue and I like it because of its intimacy (900 seats) and its fairly lively acoustic is perfect for our largely acoustic performances.

(Purchase the Album as a CD or download here)

Jazz At The Philharmonic 70th Anniversary Tribute Concert 

at Cadogan Hall, London.  Part I

We try to celebrate anniversaries at the Jazz Repertory Company (in the misguided belief that this will interest the media in running an article about what we do)  and 2014 marked the 70th anniversary of Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic.  The reason it’s so called was that he used The Philharmonic Hall in Los Angeles for the first concert in 1944 - on a Sunday afternoon when the symphony players and staff, who would have recoiled in horror at the noise emanating from the hallowed venue, were a safe distance away.

70th Anniversary JATP Concert At Cadogan Hall, London

The first concert was an instant hit and for the next forty years JATP toured the world bringing some of the greatest names in jazz to audiences whose delight and excitement are palpable in the many recordings of the live concerts that Granz's record labels Verve and Pablo released during and after the glory years. Granz managed the careers of Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald who were regulars on the JATP shows alongside greats such as Stan Getz, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Illinois Jacquet, Flip Phillips, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Brown, Billie Holiday, Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Les Paul, Nat Cole, ClarkTerry, Ben Webster, Fats Navarro and many more.

Jazz At The Philharmonic 70th Anniversary Tribute Concert 

at Cadogan Hall, London.  Part II

The concerts mixed the stars of the swing era with the modernists and Granz was keen to get his musicians to play to the gallery and produce the kind of excitement that could be had when a couple of heavyweights would take each other on - louder, faster and higher!  I remember hearing, as a kid, the recording of Gene Krupa's drum battle with Buddy Rich (recorded in 1952 at Carnegie Hall) and thinking that the crowd was reacting as if they were watching Rocky Marciano slugging it out with Jersey Joe Walcott.   As Les Paul wrote about being on stage at the very first concert "I looked into the audience and I saw them standing on their seats. I said wow!... when it reached a climax I saw hats up in the air - they were screaming and shouting." In these days of more esoteric, cerebral modern jazz a response like that would be unthinkable!

Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich - Drum Battle

At Cadogan Hall the audience definitely were with Les Paul as you can hear.   However don't fret about the lack of audience response on Sweet Georgia Brown - that's the one studio track on the album , recorded at Angel Studios in Islington, North London on the evening of October 20^th. This was added to  give us the chance to feature some players who weren't present at our concert - James Pearson on piano, Tony Barnard on guitar, Alex Garnett and Sammy Mayne on saxophones and the bravura trumpet playing of Ryan Quigley battling in the last choruses with George Hogg.   Perhaps they should be introduced as "In the left corner, the Glasgow bruiser Rucking Ryan - in the right corner Pretty Boy Hogg - the Boy Wonder".

Georgina Jackson - He's Funny That Way

70th Anniversary JATP Concert At Cadogan Hall, London

There were many great moments at the concert - I was able to watch from the front stalls whilst Elliott Henshaw pounded his Slingerlands and I loved the three tenors wailing on Rifftide – Tom Walsh's solo on I Can't Get Started was superb and let's not forget our two ladies amongst that sea of testosterone. - Georgina Jackson and Nicola Emmanuelle paying respective tributes to Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald.

70th Anniversary JATP Concert At Cadogan Hall, London

Pete Long and I now wish to use the JATP formula to try and entice a younger audience to come and experience the excitement that jazz can offer. Watch out for us in the coming years and we hope the age of our audience will be as diverse as that of the talent on stage.

The Jazz Repertory Company Showreel 

JATP Drum Battle At London's Cadogan Hall

Richard Pite, The Jazz Repertory Company

- Purchase the Album as a CD or download here.