Leaving Chicago: A Primer (Part 01)

Various art forms achieve similar ends at different times. Much as radical politics in any nation develops without it being perceived by straight society, visual art and music at varying times extend concepts beyond the understanding of a staid society.

Abstract painting, which could be figured to begin its codification in the first few decades of the twentieth century, needs to be considered the forbearer of group improvisation, free jazz and free improvisation. While painters might represent any number of organic figures in terms of shapes or obtuse brush strokes, both visual art and improvisation aims to relate some sense of place or feeling through the use of non-traditional conception of a medium. There are detractors of both, but at the same time each unique approach to painting and music has worked to engender change in mainstream art works, aural and visual.

With complete abstraction of landscapes accomplished by the 1920s, jazz improvisation still had a few decades to catch up to its visual brethren (1). Of course, Australian composer Percy Grainger had conceived of free music by this time, but its practice as rendered by machines the composer built, did not have an audience (2). Its lack of fan-base doesn’t relegate Grainger’s work to dismissal, but Kandinsky and other painters working in difficult terms achieved a wide acceptance as the norm in subsequent years. Grainger, in contrast to his American peers, has never been embraced by people too detached from academia.

Chicago, during the 1920s, was fast becoming as important a jazz center as New Orleans, where the genre was arguably birthed from a mélange of Creole, Native American and European forms. As the promise of a robust recording industry and regular gigs lured players away from the south, Chicago presented itself as a town with easy access from the Gulf Coast. With scores of players making it up the Mississippi River, King Oliver and eventually Louis Armstrong called the Second City home.

At the time of this migration, the pervasive jazz idiom was Dixieland with a burgeoning Big Band configuration becoming more and more popular through the thirties. Oliver, upon his arrival in the north at the tail end of the teens, exerted his prowess by leading a variety of combos, all of which made use of group improvisation. Maintaining a coherent structure, Oliver allowed for passages when each player soloed independently of one another, but remained within the predetermined chord changes (3).

Summoning Louis Armstrong, who took Oliver’s spot in Kid Ory’s group down in New Orleans, strengthened the band leader’s outfit to the point that a move to New York was necessitated. Though both would return to Chicago, even during the earliest years of Chicago’s jazz scene players found moving to America’s most important cultural center beneficial to one’s career.

While the music that Oliver and Armstrong played can not be considered as experimental as the Kazimir Malevich’s work dating from the second decade of the twentieth century, Armstrong’s ability effortlessly improvise around Oliver’s solos changed the way that jazz players conceived of song craft. The remainder of the cornet and trumpet player’s career, though, had little to do with Chicago.

01: http://www.vogueidea.com/abstract-paintings.html

02: http://www.theremin.info/-/viewpub/tid/12/pid/23

03: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:0iftxqy5ldje~T1

04: http://www.furious.com/perfect/sunra.html

05: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:39ftxqtgld0e~T1

06: http://philcohran.com/pc_wr_fr.htm

07: http://homepage.uab.edu/moudry/ra&aacm.htm

08: http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-06-10/music/steve-albini-is-built-for-the-long-haul

09: http://www.elrarecords.com/

10: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:wifwxqt5ld6e~T2

11: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:f9fexqe5ld6e~T1