The Spanish Tinge Hypothesis

"Now in one of my earliest tunes, New Orleans Blues, you can notice the Spanish tinge. In fact, if you can't manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz" - Jelly Roll Morton

When Morton spoke these words to Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress in 1938, his career had been relegated to a footnote in jazz history.It would take the rehabilitative efforts of Lomax, Lawrence Gushee, Bill Russell and others to restore him to his rightful place as a seminal figure in the music.

These forms became tremendously popular and were heard outside of Cuba in Europe and the Americas from about 1850 on, first when New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk assisted the Cuban nationalist composer Nicholas Ruiz Escardero in publishing his work in Europe, and later when visiting European composer Sebastian Yradier incorporated the habanera in his compositions "El Arreglito" and "La Paloma." "La Paloma," in particular, quickly entered the repertoire of many popular orchestras. "Its influence transcended the years. It was heard in the 1850s in Havana, the 1860s in Mexico, and still heard by the turn of the century in New Orleans" (Smith, p. 55).

Social Dancing As an Agent of Change in Popular Music

Jazz, in its emerging phase in the early part of the 2e century, moved from a ceremonially functional music to a social one. It was employed chiefly for social dancing and for the community-based ritual of the "jazz" funeral and the jazz parade. Thus the style of dancing popular at any given time will have had significant influence on the music being played, since musicians playing for dancers are concerned less with creating art music than with enticing couples onto the dance floor. "The role of exotic and erotic dance in the emergence of ragtime and jazz deserves more consideration than it has yet received. Shifting musical styles were invariably linked with new dancing trends" (Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895, University Press of Mississippi, 2002, p. 285).

Processional Drumming and Dance Drumming

The latter part of the 19" century saw the United States in the grip of a brass band craze and New Orleans was certainly no exception. The large brass bands of this period typically used three percussionists: a snare drummer, a cymbal player and a bass drummer. New Orleans brass bands usually reduced this number to two, a snare drummer and a bass drummer, who also played cymbal. (The logistical problems involved in crashing two cymbals together while playing bass drum at the same time were solved by beating one cymbal with a stick, a system which persists to the present day). This combination of two percussionists was also used when slightly smaller, 10 piece versions of street marching bands were hired for ballroom jobs. Eventually this two-man percussion section evolved into the single-player "trap drum set" arrangement, which persists to this day. Here we have a situation where the drummer's instrument itself (and the techniques necessary to play it effectively) undergoes a profound and rapid evolution at the same time that musical style and performance practice is also quickly changing.

Since the music contains so many elements that resist accurate notation, it is probably safe to say that without the "fossil record" of recordings of early jazz our understanding of the style would be very limited, and in fact the limitations of early 20th century      recording techniques present formidable obstacles to research. Tulane professor John Joyce, Jr., who has done extensive transcription work in this area, has written that. "the notation of 'drum' parts in early jazz recordings is particularly challenging, for several reasons. The first is their sheer audibility, which is fitful, at best, on earlier recordings...