James Reese Europe and the Infancy of Jazz Criticism

Abstract

During the second decade of the twentieth century, a new syncopated music for popular demand evolved that competed with the public attention to and popularity of ragtime. The music was jazz, and once the term became a means to describe this phenomenon, writers used it and freely and interchangeably until they fell into the habit of using the term almost exclusively, without being clear about what they meant. Of course, by 1917 the ragtime craze was a thing of the past. As one recent ragtime historian suggests, the circumstances had much to do with semantics in that replaced in newspapers, magazines, and popular thought because it was a new style and as a term was shopworn.1 What must be kept in mind about early criticism and jazz-related commentary is the commonly accepted notion that jazz history formally began in 1917, the year a quintet of New Orleans musicians, billed at Riesenweber's restaurant in New York as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, recorded. In the entertainment world they were the first band of their kind to record as a jazz band, not the first jazz band there ever was as is popularly purported. Being from New Orleans, they reaped honors for that city's supposed exclusive birthplace of jazz sometime at the turn of the century. Hence, a series of problems characterizes the early jazz criticism of the teens. One involves the historiography surrounding the ODJB; another its newness that generated public excitement; and last the fact that there hardly existed a journalism to clarify the kinds of definitions about jazz that are so vital to genuine criticism. Almost as a residue of this problem, no credence was given to early jazz-related music, as

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