Tin Pan Alley

"Tin Pan Alley was a real alley on East Fourteenth Street near Third (in New York). But it was never just a place, Tin Pan Alley has come to be known for an era of songwritting when many musical ideas mixed together to form American Popular Music. Tin Pan Alley brought together many styles, blues, jazz, musical scores and ragtime." - --Burton Lane, 1995.

A new breed of popular music publishers were established in New York in the 1890s. These publishers were, essentially, salesmen who didn’t sit in their offices waiting for performers to come to them, but went out to the entertainment palaces and badgered not only the singers but also the orchestra leaders, dances, and comedians to use their numbers. This act developed into the profession of song-plugging. They hustled themselves, as well as their hired singers and whistlers into the finest theaters and lowest dives. After a few years on creation, Tin Pan Alley published its first song in 1892, "After The Ball" by Charles Harris, selling six million copies of sheet music!

This sale of millions of copies marked a significant development in the publishing industry and in the way music was being presently to the public. Music publishers were surprised to learn that popular tunes were being sold to individuals with the hopes of playing the songs at home. Up to that point, sheet music was almost exclusively sold to professional performers. Beginning around 1910, Tin Pan Alley found a great resource in sheet music, resulting in the sales of millions of copies. Not only was the Music Chart created (A tracking system of the country’s most popular songs), but the sale of sheet music put enormous resources (cash) into Tin Pan Alley. Music publishing companies skyrocketed and, as Johnny Mercer once recalled, "those composers all whistle a happy tune on the way to the bank, because America was whistling their some tune!"

American Popular Music had arrived!

Within a year, Irving Berlin published "Alexander’s Ragtime Band," which mixed the popular beat of the day along with the legend of Ragtime. The song gave Tin Pan Alley its crowning achievement and Berlin his first million. The song also changed the way America listened to music, "Alexander’s Ragtime Band" has often been credited, in part, for the increase in the sales of radios and phonographs, both rather new to the buying public.

Soon the attention of Tin Pan Alley shifted from Ragtime to other popular topics such as dances (The Charleston, the Fox Trot) and other music forms (Blues, jazz).

Towards the end of World War I, Tin Pan Alley’s publishing companies moved closer to the Broadway and vaudeville districts. Once the American Society of Composers,Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) was formed, Tin Pan Alley became a mega force in popular music, producing over 90% of the commercial songs and inspiring the sales of millions of copies of both sheet music and 78 recordings.

Within just a few short years a shift occurred in the make-up of composers and performers of American Popular Music. Inspite of the terrific interest in African American music, ASCAP’s membership remained predominantly white, there were only a half dozen African Americans in the organization by 1925. Dr. Billy Taylor once referred to this era as, "the first concert example of musical segregation in American Popular Music." As the boon of jazz and blues crept into the consciousness of America, a number of African American composers gained their long awaited recognition. Among these composers some of the best known were, Eubie Blake, W. C. Handy, Clarence Williams, James P. Johnson, Cecil Mack, Perry Bradford and Henry Creamer.

These and other African American song writers respected their musical heritage and referred to black oral traditions of themes, melodies and song structures. In doing so, their white counterparts gained their techniques and generated a mix of pop-culture and the traditions of jazz and blues. A number of white members of ASCAP emerged as the first to combined these mixes, songwriters such as George Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Arlen.

Tin Pan Alley became a melting pot for culture and musical tastes, despite racial lines, and although limitations still existed, the art of the music was still able to emerge!Oleh:meltingpot.fortunecity

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Dixieland

Dixieland is an umbrella to indicate musical styles of the earliest New Orleans and Chicago jazz musicians, recorded from 1917 to 1923, as well as its developments and revivals, beginning during the late 1930s. It refers to collectively improvised small band music. Its materials are rags, blues, one-steps, two-steps, marches, and pop tunes. Simultaneous counterlines are supplied by trumpet, clarinet, and trombone, accompanied by combinations of piano, guitar, banjo, tuba, bass, and drums. Major exponents include; Joe King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Kid Ory, Johnny Dodds, Paul Mares, Nick LaRocca, Bix Beiderbecke, and Jimmy McPartland.

Major developers and revivalists include Bob Crosby's Bobcats, Lu Watters Yerba Buena Jazz Band, Bob Scobey, Bob Wilber, Yank Lawson and Bob Haggart (World's Greatest Jazz Band), The Dukes of Dixieland, Turk Murphy, and James Dapogny's Chicago Jazz Band. Aficionados make distinctions between various streams of traditional New Orleans jazz, the earliest Chicago jazz, and the assorted variations that are performed by revivalist bands. Some historians reserve Dixieland for white groups playing traditional jazz. Some restrict it mostly to disciples of the earliest white Chicagoans.

Early New Orleans Dixieland (1900-1917)

As rural music moved to the city and adopted new instruments, the polyphony typical of the African- American singing tradition found an expression in the style now identified as Early New Orleans Dixieland. It differed from the later Chicago Dixieland and the even later revival Dixieland in its instrumentation and rhythmic feeling. These first groups used a front line of a cornet, clarinet, and a trombone. The rhythm section was made up of banjo, tuba, and drums. The origin of these instruments was in the marching bands reflected the need to move while playing.

The rhythm section accompanied the front line on a flat-four fashion, a rhythmic feeling that placed equal emphasis on all four beats of the measure. This equal or flat metric feel was later replaced by Chicago groups with a measure that emphasized the second and fourth beats and was referred to as 2/4 time (accents on 2 and 4).

Chicago Style Dixieland (The 1920s)

The merger of New Orleans Style Dixieland with ragtime style led to what is now referred to as Chicago Style Dixieland. This style exemplified the Roaring Twenties, or to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, "the jazz age." Chicago was exciting at this time and so was its music. In 1917 with the closing of Storyville in New Orleans, Chicago became the center of jazz activity. Many workers from the south migrated to Chicago and brought with them a continued interest in the type of entertainment they had left behind.

The New Orleans instrumentation was augmented to include a saxophone and piano and the influence of ragtime added 2/4 backbeat to the rhythmic feeling. The banjo moved to guitar and the tuba moved to string bass. The tempos were generally less relaxed than New Orleans Dixieland, and the music seemed more aggressively performed.

There was jazz activity in other cities as well, mainly New York and Kansas City. These centers would later claim center stage as they moved toward a definition of swing, but during the 1920’s Chicago remained the hub of jazz.

During this time in Chicago, Louis Armstrong’s influence as a soloist was influencing the fabric of otherwise democratic ensemble. His individual style started the trend toward the soloist being the primary spokesperson for jazz.Oleh:meltingpot.fortunecity

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Ragtime

Piano ragtime began to be published in the late 1890s. It was immediately successful and subjected to various kinds of popularization, almost all of which have continued. It was (and is) sometimes played fast and shallow, with deliberately still rhythms, on a jangling prepared piano -- so much so that it is difficult to convince some listeners that the early ragtime composers were highly gifted melodists and serious craftsmen who produced an admirable body of musical art.

Ragtime was basically a piano keyboard music that Gilbert Thomas said was an "Afro- American version of the Polka." Somewhere in the background of the music is the Sousa style march, thus the first great ragtime composition, Maple Leaf Rag, by the first great ragtime composer, Scott Joplin, was built on four melodies, or themes. If we assign a letter to each theme, the structure of Maple Leaf Rag comes out to ABACD. In ragtime, these themes were sixteen measures like their European counterparts.

There is every reason to believe that a rich body of Afro-American inspired music preceded ragtime, although there are no recordings from those years. Certainly the cakewalk, an Afro-American dance initially based on an elegant, stylized parody of Southern white courtly manners, preceded it, and there was published cakewalk music, although publishers in those days were not quite sure how to indicate its rhythms properly. But ragtime introduced, in the accents of its right-hand melodies, delightful syncopation onto the heavy 2/4 oompah rhythm of its cakewalk-derived bass line and almost immediately became a kind of national, even worldwide craze.

The first true ragtime composition was published by William Krell called "The Mississippi Rag" in 1897. Tom Turpin, the first published African American composer wrote "The Harlem Rag" the same year. Over the cores of Ragtime’s initial popularity, a number of composers merged as the voice of this musical form, namely James Scott, Louis Chauvin, Joseph Lamb and Scott Joplin.

Little is known of the early development of Ragtime, however it is clear that it surfaced after years of evolution in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Ragtime has been traced to minstrel shows and cakewalks as early as 1895. The cakewalk, originated in the Caribbean’s, arrived in the United States as a syncopated music form based on a march, the polka and a two-step. Once Ragtime emerged as a unquiet musical form, it became a strong base for the music that lay ahead of it, jazz.

By the early 1900s, Ragtime was no longer being performed by a solo pianist. Small orchestras, military bands and piano-banjo combos were among the earliest recordings of Ragtime, which added elements that alluded to popular dance bands of the Dixieland, New Orleans and Swing styles yet to be developed. An individual musical voice was being established in America, it was an exciting era of development and change.Oleh:meltingpot.fortunecity

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