298 PART 3 | FROM WORLD WAR I THROUGH WORLD WAR II
It was no accident that the fi rst legendary jazz musician was white. (The
memory of an even earlier fi gure—Buddy Bolden, a turn-of-the-century black
New Orleans musician—also became the object of a mythologizing cult, but that
came later.) In the 1930s the general public would hardly have looked on a black
fi gure as a symbol of the tortured, romantic genius. Armstrong and Oliver could
claim by birthright the African American folk traditions whose reservoir of
melody and rhythm nourished their performances; the same was true, though
somewhat more complicated, for Morton, a Creole. But a white who became a
jazz musician had to make a more self-conscious break with his social and musi-
cal background; he had to construct his own artistic base.
By the late 1930s, when the Swing Era had pulled big-band jazz into the
forefront of popular music (see chapter 15), work for white jazz musicians was
plentiful. But big-band work, based on written arrangements, lacked the spon-
taneity of the small New Orleans and Chicago jazz ensembles. Jazz musicians
who improvised well and resisted popular formulas were now looked on not just
as entertainers but as artists. As the audience for swing-band music grew, so—
among some afi cionados—did the belief that it was artistically inferior to earlier
jazz. And Bix Beiderbecke became a symbol of one who had taken the artist’s
path, in spite of limited technique and a disorderly personal life.
The Beiderbecke legend has continued to evolve. One view has the cornetist
actually refusing a musical education and aspiring to a kind of downward mobility,
while another fi nds him more a victim of isolation than one who chose it, unable to
connect with any tradition that spoke to his own sensibilities. There is no denying
the power of Beiderbecke as a symbol of bohemian artistry crushed by the music
business’s commercial demands, even though, on closer inspection, he looks more
like a remarkable intuitive artist who lost faith in the instinct that fi rst sustained
him. Yet whatever the truth of the Bix legend, its existence suggests that by the latter
1930s some white jazz musicians were fi nding it useful in helping them shape their
own artistic identities, and fans of jazz were taking the music seriously.DUKE ELLINGTON: JAZZ BANDLEADER
W hereas jazz in New Orleans and Chicago focused on relatively small ensembles,
the New York scene was dominated by larger dance orchestras, beginning before
the jazz age with groups such as James Reese Europe’s Society Orchestra (see
chapter 10) and continuing into the 1920s with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra,
which drew Bix Beiderbecke to New York, and the Fletcher Henderson Orches-
tra, which did the same for Louis Armstrong. Henderson’s orchestra began
a long-term engagement at the Roseland Ballroom in midtown Manhattan in
1924: a black band playing for white audiences. Thanks to arrangements by Don
Redman and soloists like Armstrong and tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins,
Henderson could include hot jazz numbers in a menu of waltzes, popular songs,
and more conventional dance music. Henderson’s is considered the fi rst dance
orchestra that, while playing written arrangements, achieved the rhythmic lilt,
or swing, of the blues tradition. But by the end of the decade, another New York
jazz orchestra had gained even more prominence. Led by Duke Ellington, this
group was to be a presence on the music scene from the 1920s into the 1970s.
Edward Kennedy Ellington, born in Washington, D.C., in 1899, once wrote:
“When I was a child, my mother told me I was blessed, and I have always takenthe Beiderbecke legendWashing ton, D.C.172028_12_280-304_r3_ko.indd 298 23/01/13 8:41 PM