jazz & audiences

November 10, 2007 6:11 AM

When did jazz audiences start sitting down?

I don't know too much about the history of jazz, but it seems to me that like most popular music, it started off as dance music and then ended up as listening music with audiences sitting down to appreciate it. Can anyone put a date on when audiences on the whole started sitting down to listen to jazz?

posted by dydecker to media & arts (13 comments total)

I don't have a citation, but an informed guess would be around the end of WWII, when dance bands faded away (thanks to cabaret laws and fickle public taste) and Charlie Parker & Co. broke away from the whole concept of "good time music" and emphasized complex harmonies and rhythms that encouraged concentrated listening rather than shaking your booty. The '50s were the era of bebop and cool jazz, music you sat down and listened to with a serious frown. (Not making fun of the music, which I love; maybe making a little fun of the guys at the tables, with the berets and Gauloises and copies of Sartre/Kerouac/Ginsburg, though I would have been one of them had I been old enough.)
posted by languagehat at 6:21 AM on November 10, 2007

Yeah, no citation here either, but I would guess bebop too.
posted by Rykey at 6:23 AM on November 10, 2007

This quote from Downbeat kinda answers your question, kinda doesn't:

As improvisation became more challenging to the best young musicians, it also became more bewildering to audiences raised on big band jazz. The intricacies of Parker's music also had the effect of making jazz more of a closed musical culture as the large general audiences backed away from the new jazz to more simple forms. The cult of hipness became something of an article of faith among Parker's followers. But as the pressures of the popular market were lifted from jazz, the music thrived playing to smaller but far more permissive audiences who appreciated the new freedom as much as the players.
posted by jbickers at 6:57 AM on November 10, 2007

From Grover Sales's Jazz: America's Classical Music (an excellent book, by the way):

White audiences weaned on big band swing were shocked and disoriented by the strange behavior of the beboppers, on stage and off. These young rebels rejected outright the minstrel tradition of joke-telling, tap dancing clowns. Aside from the atypical put-ons of Dizzy Gillespie, beboppers went to extreme lengths to spurn the conventions of 'old showbiz;' they did not announce tunes and acknowledged audience applause, if at all, with a curt nod. Harbingers of a new black awareness, they demanded recognition as artists than as entertainers. Their cool aloofness signaled , "Either you accept our music as a statement that speaks for itself, without all that Uncle Tom shuck-and-jive, or forget it."

posted by languagehat at 7:06 AM on November 10, 2007 [4 favorites]

The Boppers actually tried to make the music undanceable and unappealing to white folk. I can't remember where it comes from but I have also heard the Bop cats referenced as the first punks. Really well dressed punks.
posted by 4Lnqvv at 11:29 AM on November 10, 2007

From Hard Bop by David H. Rosenthal, quoting from the novel The Sound by Ross Russell:

Bernie could well remember the 'alligators' of the late swing period, those serious types, self-styled students of American jazz, who used to edge up to the orchestra shell and remain there all night, indefatigably listening...They formed a cordon several ranks deep around the orchestra shell, cutting dancers off from the source of the music...They gave the impression that they had never danced a step in their lives, nor had any intention of so doing...

Rosenthal notes that the alligators became the dominant jazz audience during the bebop era, beginning around 1945.
posted by A Long and Troublesome Lameness at 12:11 PM on November 10, 2007

They were laying down, upstairs, in Storyville whorehouses for Red Hot jass (jazz) by 1917 (and probably as early as 1905, although the music that early was more ragtime and early blues, than jass (jazz)). And at the same time, in the same houses, they were sitting up in the parlors and music rooms on the lower floors of the brothels, while they waited for girls, smoked, drank, gambled, spit, told lies, and occasionally danced. And there was more sitting and listening than dancing to early jazz on the crowded riverboats of that era, which still plied traffic from New Orleans as far north as Illinois, before America entered WWI. Only the garrison of troops in Army camps around New Orleans, headed for Europe, caused Federal pressure to clean up Storyville by 1918, or they might still be operating today (despite Katrina). So when the whorehouses got rousted, the musicians went north to Chicago, or got work on the boats, or got work playing in dance halls. Enforced morality is what made people really start dancing to jazz, not tempos or styles.

When Louis Armstrong followed King Oliver north to Chicago in 1922, he found King Oliver's band playing at Lincoln Gardens, which was kind of combination restaurant, beer garden and small ballroom, but the place was often so crowded on weekends, the Fire Marshall couldn't get in to shut the place down for over occupancy, and had to resort to barring the door, and waiting for the crowd inside to thin on its own accord. Not much room for dancing when Louis and King were wailin' ...

I think your premise is flawed dydecker. Jazz was always listened to, seriously, by people sitting down, and some people also always danced to it, dreamed to it, drank to it, lied to it, and made love to it.

And some of us still do all those things when jazz is playing, according to how fancy, friends, space, and the fits take us, in any given moment :-)
posted by paulsc at 12:39 PM on November 10, 2007

Oh, bullshit. The fact that some people have always listened without dancing is irrelevant; in the bebop era that became the normal response, which is what the poster is asking about.
posted by languagehat at 12:49 PM on November 10, 2007

"Oh, bullshit. ..."
posted by languagehat at 3:49 PM on November 10

I think you'd get some argument from the thousands of operators of '20s era speakeasies, the majority of which were drinking establishments, first and foremost, that featured small jazz groups and had tiny dance floors, if they had dancing at all. Many didn't, simply because booze and dance floor space invited fights. No dance floor = fewer brawls.

Some flappers were kickin' up their heels in movie newsreels then, but millions more were gettin' their loads on in small basements, to hot jazz, and then, later showing up at ballrooms for Paul Whiteman's Orchestra, and his danceable competitors. Although Paul Whiteman respected the drawing power of jazz, billed himself as "The King of Jazz," and gave many jazz musicians jobs and connections when he could, he never made any pretense that what he was playing was really jazz. Neither did the Dorsey boys, or Benny Goodman, or Glenn Miller, or any of the other groups and big bands playing the ballrooms in the late 30s and early 40s, as bebop was getting started.

20 years before bebop, hundreds of thousands of people were sitting at tables, every night, all over New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris, listening to Hot Five and Hot Seven imitators, and drinking, with nary a thought they were missing much, slugger. Art Tatum and Fats Waller weren't generally playing dance music, either, and neither were the boogie woogie guys, like Pine Top Smith and Meade "Lux" Lewis.

So, bullshit yourself.
posted by paulsc at 1:27 PM on November 10, 2007

The Boppers actually tried to make the music undanceable and unappealing to white folk.

That statement definitely needs some kind of supporting reference.
posted by sic at 2:00 PM on November 10, 2007

I don't think Bop musicians were looking to make their music "undanceable and unappealing" but I don't think they wanted to see their artform directed by the market driven expectations of club owners and record labels. If you do want to play the race card, I'm sure 85% of those labels and clubs were owned by White men. What I think is key, and what was alluded to in the references to Parker above is Jazz was really opening up as a new frontier for experimentation.

A good point of reference in post-bop jazz politics would be Archie Shepp, he is/was quite the activist. Impulse! Records was also pretty influential as a label that opened up the format of jazz full lengths.

Outside of the dancing/listening binary a really great reference on politics (and critical theory) in jazz is Ajay Heble's excellent text Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance, and Critical Practice.
posted by serial_consign at 6:50 PM on November 10, 2007

Here's 2 cents from a friend:

i think there are a few ways to approach this. the idea of audience already presumes or prescribes a kind of interaction or consumption of music, already assumes a kind of listening. radio broadcasts, esp. the live coast to coast that began in, i think '35, with goodman and palomar created one kind of listening where audiences were certainly consuming jazz more with ears than bodies (dancing)--hear it was live music and it'd be interesting to consider if there were differences in styles of consumption depending on live vs. recorded (david stowe's work and lewis erenberg). then there are records, how were these audiences consuming--with ears or dancing. think of brett's (pyper) great work on listening clubs in south africa. think of the hot clubs in the US and all around europe in the 20s and 30s--i mean the record clubs that formed to listen together. they were probably dancing too. finally, and probably more to the spirit of the question, you've the spaces of live music--whether ballroom, night club, honky tonk, or any number of other places iterations of jazz were popular. seems perhaps faulted to try and make generalizations about a homogeneous "jazz audience". what's more interesting might be to consider regional practice of jazz as social activity and consider consumption habits in particular historical moments.

when did jazz in the U.S. become a listening activity--the simple answer i guess would be with it's instituionalization --as "Culture", as "Music." so the carnegie halls concerts in 38, the spirituals to swing concerts in '40 (?) "elevated" jazz to concert music. another kind of institutionalization perhaps occured with the beboppers in the mid '40s in midtown making music making music not for dancers, not for audiences, but for themselves (though people still did dance to it--but not really the social daces that grew out of swing). this made sitting and listening certainly a more "appropriate" form of engagement.

what did the questioner mean by "jazz"? i think the common usage indexes the idea of the bebopish small group in a club. so maybe generally the answer is when jazz became "art" rather than "popular"?

posted by billtron at 6:48 AM on November 11, 2007

Another friend:

A simpler answer may be the New York centric realm of the Jazz scene and the Cabaret Laws of the City, which were developed to combat Jazz. By outlawing dancing in clubs to combat Jazz, it may have instead forced audiences to sit and listen. And I quote:

"1926 The cabaret law is created to crack down on multiracial Harlem jazz clubs. "Most of the jazz in 1926 was being played in clubs in Harlem where there were mixed groups. And a lot of people considered jazz to be a mongrelized, degenerate music," says Paul Chevigny, author of Gigs: Jazz and the Cabaret Laws in New York City. The law defines a cabaret as "any room, place or space in the city in which any musical entertainment, singing, dancing or other form of amusement is permitted in connection with . . . selling to the public food or drink, except eating or drinking places, which provide incidental musical entertainment, without dancing, either by mechanical devices, or by not more than three persons." In other words, a venue can't have dancing without a license."

Here's me again. Jazz is still danced to these days, but mainly Big Band Jazz. The split from Big Band Jazz (Damn you Coleman Hawkins!!!) took Bebop, Hard Jazz, Acid Jazz, Jazz Fusion, etc. into the realm of the New York nightclub, with strict enforcement of the Cabaret Laws. The Cabaret Laws are still in effect, but it is interesting to note that while Iridium, Blue Note and such still won't allow dancing and offer small combo jazz groups, the larger Latin Jazz bands and Big Bands still play in NY venues with Cabaret licenses and huge dance floors. I would argue that throughout this time, even with the influence of radio (good point Usner), Big Bands were (and still are) playing to huge halls of couples dancing the night fantastic.

Now how about polka bands? Ah wahnderful wahnderful. [Is anyone old enough to catch this reference?]

posted by billtron at 8:27 AM on November 12, 2007