It might be surprising to know that Edmonton was at the forefront of the jazz scene in Canada, and a performance of a musical group here in 1914 was one of the very first performances of jazz outside the U.S. It was so early that jazz was not even known as jazz at that time. Musical authorities date the start of jazz in Canada as Sept. 21, 1914. That was when the "Original Creole Orchestra and Ragtime Band" performed at the Pantages Theatre in Winnipeg. A look at old newspapers tells us that that same band also performed only a week later at the Pantages Theatre in Edmonton. The performances were not regarded as the turning-points that they now are known to be. The report in the Edmonton Bulletin does not mention that this was the first appearance of jazz in Canada, as later historians now say it was. And newspaper coverage reveals that in fact the term jazz had not yet actually been coined.
The newspaper of the time noted that the band - described as "half a dozen coloured gentlemen with trombone, cornet, clarinet, violin, guitar and bass viol" - performed as a leading attraction on a vaudeville variety program that also included an eccentric dancing/singing troupe and a fancy roller-skating act. the type of music that became known as jazz sprung from a variety of sources. These include songs of African plantation slaves and Mississippi River songs. Some of these river songs actually used the phrases hi-de-hi and ho-de-ho that a century later would thrill viewers of the film The Blues Brothers. As well, jazz grew from popular French tunes, which had morphed into Creole tunes of Louisiana. These tunes perhaps harkened to the days when Acadians were shipped out of Canada, to re-settle in Louisiana, spawning the term Cajuns. So there may be a bit of the New France of eastern Canada in the jazz we hear today. Added to these elements was the rhythm of the Congo Square tradition of New Orleans. To know what the old Congo Square sound was like, give a listen to the history of jazz as composed by jazz icon Duke Ellington. It is available on Youtube under its strange-sounding title A Drum is a Woman. Two years after its first appearance in Edmonton, the Creole Ragtime Band came back again. And it was in 1916 that that kind of music took a new name. Still the name was not jazz - the new name was jass. Edmonton may be thought to be slow off the mark, to be a kind of northern backwater, but not only did Edmontonians hear a ragtime band in 1914 but also they heard the music of a jass band, when still the term jazz was not yet. In 1916, the "Jass Band," of "Way and Morris, Geo. McCoy," performed in the Pendennis Concert Hall (on Jasper Avenue East) in conjunction with ragtime songsperformed by "Smiling Lena McCoy." The word jazz first appears in Edmonton newspapers almost a year later in October 1917. By then, the jazz phenomena was such that someone in the Edmonton Bulletin office set down to define jazz music. The writer first said "jazz was not a lot of peculiar and noisy sounds without rhyme or reason, that instead it consisted chiefly of syncopation, peculiarly accentuated, variations by some of the instruments, improvisations by others, mingled with odd sound effects." And the writer saw jazz as music played by blacks formerly of the Africa continent. "...As jazz music is originally Ethiopian, the banjo and saxophone are used to lend negro character to it." The Negro being of black Africa, while Ethiopia is of North Africa/Middle East. The skin-colour of jazz musicians was often remarked on, and the jazz scene was perhaps one of the early ways that the darker race overcame the prejudices that had led many Albertans to sign a petition to ban them from coming to Alberta only a few years earlier. The Bulletin writer observed that jazz "really requires good musicians, who must also be endowed with the swing or knack of performing it...." And he saw the beauty of jazz, saying "Jazz music is rhythmical and inspiring. It is declared the best antidote to the blues." It would not be until 1925 that the word "blues" itself came to be used to describe a form of music. But ragtime and jazz had been born in the poor black neighbourhoods of New Orleans. And many looked down on it for its poor origins. Social commentators though noted that poor neighbourhoods had also been the birth-place of theatre - Shakespeare and that - and the surrealist school of poetry, which found acceptance among hip listeners. The Creole band of 1914 and 1916 was an import from the U.S. But only a scant couple years later, such Canadian groups as the Clar-Ra Ladies Jazz Orchestra and the Jazz Baby Vaudeville, of Winnipeg, were filling dance halls across the Prairies, including in Edmonton. Edmonton later became the home of jazz great Big Miller. Born in the U.S. and tracing his ancestry to both a slave and a Lakota Native, "Big" was a respected "blues shouter," performing with such luminaries as Duke Ellington and the great Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson. On tour in Canada in 1970, he ran out of money and that prolonged his stay in our fair country. He got to know Edmonton and liked it. He became a giant in Edmonton's jazz scene from 1971 to his death in 1992. The Big Miller Park, in Old Strathcona, is located near the Yardbird Suite, one of the many Edmonton venues where he made his mark. Big Miller was just one of many who played their part in Canada's jazz scene over the last hundred or so years, the scene that started back in 1914 in Winnipeg and Edmonton. ========== Sources Robert Goffin, Jazz From the Congo to the Metropolitan (1943) Mark Miller, Such Melodious Racket - The Lost History of Jazz in Canada, 1914-1949 (1997) Peel's Prairie Provinces website online: Edmonton Capital, September 30, 1914. p. 3 Edmonton Bulletin, July 22, July 28, 1916, p. 10 Edmonton Bulletin, December 11, 1916 Edmonton Bulletin, Oct. 6, 1917 The Gateway (UofA), Oct. 24, 1922 "What is Jazz?" (Cedric Edwards) Wikipedia online: Canadian Jazz Clarence Horatius Miller ======================
originally published in Millwoods Mosaic August 2022
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