The History of Jazz Read Free Page B

to Smith in her 1925 collaborations with Armstrong on “St. Louis Blues” and “Reckless Blues,” we can already hear the different aesthetic sensibilities that, even at this early date, were beginning to distinguish the jazz and blues idioms. Armstrong favors ornamentation and elaboration; Smith tends toward unadorned emotional directness. In contrast to Armstrong’s baroque accompaniment, Smith’s singing is built around drawn-out tones, sometimes bellowed with authority, occasionally betraying a tremulous vulnerability. Smith preferred languorous tempos, while jazz music of this period increasingly relied on faster, dance-oriented rhythms. On “St. Louis Blues,” the tempo lingers around sixty beats per minute. Compare this with Armstrong’s recording of the same piece from December 1929, which jumps along at well over twice this pace. Even a comparatively fast Smith performance, such as her “Gimme a Pigfoot” from November 1933, barely breaks above one hundred beats per minute. In the final analysis, Smith’s music celebrated an intensity of feeling, rather than demonstrations of technique. The blues idiom, as it has developed, has mostly stayed true to this inspiring vision, while the jazz world has evinced a more fickle temperament, with its methods and vocabulary constantly changing, sometimes mutating into surprising new forms. Yet the two styles, blues and jazz, have remained intimate bedfellows over the years, despite these many fluctuations—an intimacy so close that, at times, it is hard to determine where the one ends and the other begins.
    The most enduring myth of the blues culture is its fatalistic celebration of “dues paying,” of each musician’s need to internalize a blues ethos through the acceptance of—and ultimately the transcendence of—personal tragedy and disappointment. The details of Bessie Smith’s life fit in with this attitude, perhaps all too well; yet commentators have not been above embellishing the facts to accentuate its tragic dimensions. At the same time, the feisty, independent side of the singer’s personality is often minimized or ignored—this was, remember, a woman who flung society matron Fania Marinoff Van Vechten to the floor at a posh gathering, slugged pianist Clarence Williams in a dispute over cash, and, according to legend, stared down and ultimately intimidated the Ku Klux Klan when they tried to disrupt a performance.
    Yet ultimately Smith can be rightly viewed as, at least in part, the victim of the lifestyle excesses that she celebrated in her music. Alcohol and smoking coarsened her voice; her drinking binges led to violent outbursts, which made many in the industry wary of this temperamental star; her marriage to policeman Jack Gee developed into the type of exploitive personal relationship so often the subject of blues songs. While her career was in bloom, and the money was coming in, Smith was able to rise above these troubles, but the collapse in the recording industry during the early 1930s occurred at the same time that urban black audiences were turning to the faster-paced and slicker music of the larger jazz ensembles. Even so, a star of this magnitude can sometimes resist forces that would bring down a lesser artist, and in 1937 Smith seemed on the verge of a comeback. Recording and performing opportunities were on the rise, and even appearances in films—Smith had already been involved in a short movie in the late 1920s—were being discussed.
    These plans never came to fruition. During a tour in the Deep South, Smith was killed in a car accident on September 26, 1937. She was forty-three years old. Two years later, Ma Rainey would die from a heart attack at age fifty-three. The record industry would eventually recover from its troubles and enjoy unprecedented success in the 1940s and later decades, but the era of classic blues had ended with the passing of these two seminal figures. Their influence, however, continues to echo in the work