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.

It is important to note that, as in the relationship between music and social dance, the function of parade music in New Orleans at the end of the 19^th century had a cross-fertilizing effect on musical style, and transformations occurred in the music of the (primarily, but by no means exclusively) black and Creole bands. The "old tradition of strict reading bands, rigorously schooled to play 'legitimate' concert music and highly proper dance tunes, gave way to... a younger generation of musicians who were essentially dance-band oriented and for whom street-band playing was secondary" (William J. Schafer, with assistance from Richard B. Allen, Brass Bands and New Orleans Jazz, Louisiana State University Press,1977, p. 50). Yet it would be a mistake to underestimate the influence of the street band, with its two-man percussion section, on dance band single-player trap drumming. In many cases players worked in both styles and in both contexts, and "all this new dance music was sewn together, like a patchwork quilt, of the practices, repertoire, and social functions of older brass bands" (Schafer, p. 50). By around 1910 these various elements had coalesced into an identifiable, discrete style, with a distinctive rhythmic underpinning. Rhythm patterns played by dance drummers influenced the entire melodic and harmonic shape of the music in much the same way that the Cuban claw does in Afro-Cuban style. An analysis of early New Orleans jazz drumming vocabulary would seem to be a good place to search for Jelly Roll's "Spanish Tinge."