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This chapter re-examines the circumstances and events leading up to Paul Whiteman's celebrated historic Aeolian Hall “Experiment in Modern Music”, at which was premiered Gershwin's seminal jazz inspired work, the “Rhapsody in Blue”. The public and most critics were ecstatic; the chapter offers insights as to why some euro-centric music critics remained deeply divided for generations. It then details Whiteman's respect and passion for jazz, and for Ellington; and the role of skilled arrangers. The challenges faced by the author in recreating the Aeolian Hall event “same day, same hour, same block, sixty years later”, are described. Sleuthing out the scores and parts; assembling a replica band that included several unusual instruments such as hecklephone, sopranino saxophone, a serious slide whistle and 1920's drum kit; and relearning how to play ragtime style are explained. The recreated concert sets off a media storm, triumph and is repeated in cities elsewhere starting in Rome, Italy. The chapter finishes with a rethinking of the whole event as but a part of a very rich and textured American music story.

On February 12, 1924, Rhapsody in Blue, composed by George Gershwin (1898-1937), premiered at Aeolian Hall in New York City. Soon a group of other composers joined him in a brief but intense movement to produce “highbrow jazz”, including John Alden Carpenter, Aaron Copland, Louis Gruenberg, and William Grant Still. The first three made their careers in concert music, and the last straddled both popular music and concert music. At the same time, parallel forays were being made by European modernists seeking a means of mediating between the rarefied aesthetic terrain of high modernism and the more accessible plains of jazz. Gershwin may have taken his biggest artistic leap of the mid-1920s with another work, the Concerto in F, which represented a more ambitious attempt to bridge independent musical categories. One of the trendsetters in the crossover movement was the jazz-band conductor Paul Whiteman (1890-1967).

This chapter notes the rise in fame of both Paul Whiteman and Louis Armstrong, noting how the title of “King of Jazz” affected their careers, how Whiteman was dethroned in 1949 by Louise Armstrong as the “King of Jazz,” and how Shakespeare's line, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” resounded within the respective careers of Armstrong and Whiteman between around 1930 and 1949. The chapter tells the story of Armstrong's career amidst the Great Depression and segregation—both of which were themes that were evident in Armstrong's 1929 recordings of “I Can't Give You Anything But Love” and “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?” The chapter explores just how the “laboring of American culture” and the international crises affected the careers of Armstrong and Whiteman.

This chapter explores the memory that the cultures surrounding jazz music creates. Though these two kings of jazz, Paul Whiteman and Louis Armstrong, were sovereign in their respective kingdoms, their rule was of a domain with open borders. This domain was composed of various influences, sidemen, and sundry movers and shakers that all came together to be a part of a collective experience—one that transcended religion, race, class, and category, with a shared memory of common personal relationships with one another, and the unifying factor of their appreciation of music. It would be the events of the terror tactics of the Ku Klux Klan, and the allegation by Connie and George Immerman and Tommy Rockwell that Armstrong was guilty of breach of contract, that would spur these two giants to speak of such serious issues in their recordings. This chapter thus explores such a concept of shared memory and what events, people, and prominent figures contributed to that collective experience.

This chapter focuses on the life of Paul Whiteman, beginning with Wilberforce Whiteman's disgust for his son's “laziness” and the eventual departure of Paul from his home in Denver, and his move to San Francisco, and his eventual arrival at Atlantic City. Louis Armstrong's story, on the other hand, begins in New Orleans, where segregation based on race and class was a part of life. Whiteman anticipated finding work in San Francisco as a symphony musician, a journey and goal that he hoped would gain his father's respect. He was fortunate enough to acquire a position in the viola section of the eighty-piece San Francisco Exposition Orchestra. Armstrong, on the other hand, would somehow find a way to lift himself out of his family's history of slavery and privation. Thus, the chapter marks all the significant steps and events in Paul Whiteman's and Louis Armstrong's lives that would place them in the timeline of jazz music.

This chapter looks at Paul Whiteman's success in Atlantic City, and Louis Armstrong's landing of a part in King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band as second cornet. It notes that for all the dynamic modernism of the Jazz Age, there still remained the proliferation of racial bigotry and intolerance. The rioting and bloodshed of the “Red Summer” of 1919 that began in Chicago and spread throughout other U.S. cities was still a fresh memory. Also to be noted is the closing of the Ku Klux Klan and the Passage of the Immigration Act of 1924. This, along with many other events throughout history, would greatly affect the content and mood of jazz at the time, especially in the dominant figures of Paul Whiteman and Louis Armstrong.

Another distinctive trend was the all-star revue film, as produced by most of the major studios. Each would serve as a guidepost to its company's reigning aesthetic as it addressed the new world of sound films. With The Hollywood Revue, MGM triumphed through a wise use of stars and production knowhow. With Show of Shows, Warner Bros. failed through a misspent budget and indifferent material. While Fox's Happy Days was tepid, Paramount on Parade was witty and resourceful. Universal's King of Jazz, by far the most spectacular of the revues, found artistic success at the expense of diminished audience favor. Seldom, after 1930, would such work ever be tried again.

This chapter considers Louis Armstrong's association with Lil Hardin's band, after his split from Fletcher Henderson's band. His next four years in Chicago were to be spent composing a body of work in the form of the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings. Armstrong then followed a traditional New Orleans formula, and this “New Orleans groove” was the kind of hot jazz that was in Armstrong's blood. It differentiated him from the likes of Paul Whiteman and symphonic jazz. His collaboration with Lil Hardin helped Armstrong to make this brand of hot jazz what it was. The chapter also mentions Armstrong's attendance of a performance of Bix Beiderbecke and Paul Whiteman at the Chicago Theater in July 2, 1928. It also notes Whiteman's hiring of Bing Crosby, and how Whiteman's association with Beiderbecke and Crosby brought the worlds of Paul Whiteman and Louis Armstrong closer together than ever before.

About the time that Sweet Little Devil went into rehearsal, Gershwin started work on a composition—the Rhapsody in Blue—for Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra, a piece which became an important milestone in terms of not only the composer's career, but American music in general. The Rhapsody evokes not only the blues, but, quite generally, the sounds of New York: the hurdy-gurdies of the Lower East Side, the calliopes of Coney Island, the player pianos of Harlem, the chugging of trains leaving Grand Central Station, the noisy construction of midtown skyscrapers, and so forth. It combines elements of classical music with jazz-influenced effects.

This chapter discusses the first mention of George Gershwin's most well-known concert work titled Rhapsody in Blue. It states that the report in the January 1924 issue of the New York Tribune titled “Whiteman Judges Names: Committee Will Decide What Is American Music” reminded Gershwin about his commitment to the Paul Whiteman concert scheduled for February 12, 1924.

This chapter presents the text of an article about the success of the revival of George Gershwin's one-act jazz opera Blue Monday, which was published in the December 30, 1925, issue of the New York Times. The article describes the show as the most vivid grand opera ever provided from native and local materials by an American composer and lauds the performance of Paul Whiteman's Orchestra. It also notes that unlike its 1922 version, Blue Monday had become the main feature of the show.

This chapter focuses on how both Paul Whiteman and Louis Armstrong affected the culture of America after the war, during the rush of modernism. It talks about how Armstrong, for one, helped shape modern lingo—words like cat, gig, jive, dig, hustle, chick, and many more emerged from him. Armstrong also took his cue from his early New Orleans mentor, King Oliver, whose words brought Armstrong to transform the very nature of jazz from a simple music of ensemble improvisation to one defined by a theme (head)—solo choruses—theme format. Whiteman's focus, on the other hand, would be on the ensemble and arrangements, wherein his legacy was based primarily on his epitomizing of the savvy dance band or orchestra leader. This chapter thus chronicles the prime of the careers of these two great figures in jazz, up to their decline in the public eye.

Arthur Hand had an orchestra of his own which was incorporated into Kirkeby's California Ramblers and which he would co-lead with Ed Kirkeby. In April 1922, Kirkeby arranged for the first of countless record dates for almost any label. The band did not have a bass player and Adrian Rollini decided to fill the gap and quickly learned to play the bass saxophone. In just a few months, he developed a new style of playing, both for the bass line and for solo work. His sound would identify the California Ramblers for years to come. The band was fully employed from its start and one of their engagements was as a replacement for Paul Whiteman's band at the Palais Royal. However, Kirkeby and Hand preferred to have their own place where their band would perform regularly. They found it North of the City of New York and called it the California Ramblers Inn.

This chapter begins with the answer to the elusive question of: what is jazz? Duke Ellington, in 1969, once said that jazz could mean—if it means anything at all—what it had once meant to musicians fifty years previously: freedom of expression. This chapter thus outlines goals and aims of the book and its process of revisiting the world of early jazz to see just how Paul Whiteman and Louis Armstrong dominated a period in jazz's history. The chapter analyzes the work of both artists, revealing a significant overlap and reciprocity. It notes the need to confront certain issues as well, such as race and class, and how these figured in the nature of jazz historiography.

This chapter presents an excerpt from Paul Whiteman's autobiography titled Paul Whiteman and Mary Margaret McBride about the premiere of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue in his concert at the Aeolian Hall in New York in February 1924. Whiteman noted the difference between Rhapsody in Blue and Livery Stable Blues and stated that Gershwin's composition was regarded by critics as the most significant number of the program. This was because it was the first rhapsody written for a solo instrument and a jazz orchestra.

The technological advance of the gramophone allowed consumers to hear the performers of Broadway in their living rooms. But the tunes from the Great White Way were more persuasive than the impulse to record original performers in the roles they performed nightly on the stage; the technical limitations of the 78 rpm record only allowed for three minutes of music, so the overwhelmingly popular dance band orchestras of the period were, by and large, the most effective purveyors of Broadway music. The notion of an “original cast performance” was not a commercial imperative and the early decades of recorded music reveal an arbitrary and confounding legacy of original performances; the music of Broadway itself, however, was the most influential and revered genre in American popular culture.

This chapter recounts the history of several jazz concerts and audiences that took precedence before Benny Goodman’s 1938 concert in Carnegie Hall, which was the primary concert venue in New York City. James Reese Europe, along with other black musicians and composers, founded the Clef Club in 1910, an entertainment society and venue for African-American musicians. The Clef Club Orchestra initially performed in Harlem, and then eventually played at Carnegie Hall in 1912. The chapter also cites Paul Whiteman, who displayed the evolution of jazz beginning in his “Experiment in Modern Music” concert at the Aeolian Hall. The progression of listening to jazz music was said to have been exemplified by Benny Goodman’s career as a bandleader; and the fact that swing performances occur in theatres and not in ballrooms further influenced the growth of jazz.

Music critic Irving Kolodin was tasked to produce the program notes for the Carnegie Hall concert. Kolodin balanced the distinctive elements of swing with quasi-analytical descriptions of each piece while his Foreword emphasizes the role of improvisation and the significance of performers and arrangers in swing. This chapter describes how the program was arranged into ten sections, with Goodman putting his most comedic piece (Twenty Years of Jazz) second on the bill, while his most spectacular act (Sing, Sing, Sing) was placed on the penultimate slot. George Gottlieb stated that comparing the eleven sections of Paul Whiteman’s Experiment in Modern Music with the design of a typical vaudeville program is relevant to understanding the structure of Goodman’s concert.

The Carnegie Hall further established its position as a venue for popular music performance following Goodman’s concert, as evidenced by the subsequent performances of W. C. Handy, Paul Whiteman, and a recital by Ethel Waters. There have been various re-creations of the Carnegie Hall concert which contributed to its distribution beyond the limits of the audience members present at the event. A concert tour was held at the Symphony Hall in Boston where the audience reaction was indicative of its success, much like the one at Carnegie Hall. The program for the Boston concert revealed some changes in the repertoire, and members of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band were guests on this broadcast. Re-creating “Twenty Years of Jazz” was an appropriate way of capturing and preserving the Carnegie Hall concert. Another notable re-creation of the concert was presented as part of the film The Benny Goodman Story.