People crave novelty, excitement, beauty, and a feeling of wholeness. Three generations of Americans of various ethnic backgrounds and social classes have found these in the syncopated music of ragtime and jazz, often in preference to concert music. Ragtime and jazz were both a part of the popular dance and entertainment music of the United States and separate from it. They used many of the same conventions of musical vocabulary and form as popular music and were symbiotic with the vocal and dance styles of an age. But in exploring musical vocabulary and form, and in striving after artistic control and imagination beyond the requirements of a functional music, they transcended the limits we usually set to popular music and have proved durable in a way that most commercial, fashionable music is not. These two musics have exploded the three traditional pigeonholes of folk, popular, and art music; all three categories apply. This may be due largely to the preponderant role of black Americans in the creation and dissemination of the music; for them the three traditional categories do not hold and the cultural heritage of concert music is doubly distant.
Part of the American drama is the working out of frictions and conflicts in a socially, ethnically, and economically fragmented population. This can be seen in music and the theater arts, where the United States has for a long time depended on minorities to provide its diversion and therapy. Socially, ragtime and jazz are a metaphor of cultural synthesis in the guise of art.Their history is marked by repeated episodes in which black and white American musicians have bridged and blended — by no means always consciously or intentionally — their separate musics.
The present collection of performances recorded between 1913 and 1927 illuminates part of the early history of these long-term musical and cultural processes. (80235, Maple Leaf Rag, and 80260, Shuffle Along, document other phases.) To a certain extent it can be seen as an anthology of early jazz, or "pre-jazz," though such a view violates the meaning of many of the examples in their own time, when neither the word "jazz" nor the phenomenon was clearly defined.
Steppin' on the Gas: Rags to Jazz (1913-1927)
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Castle House Rag
James Reese Europe
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Castle Walk
Ford T. Dabney, James Reese Europe
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Memphis Blues
W. George Norton, W.C. Handy
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Clarinet Marmalade
H. Ragas, L. Shields
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Down Home Rag
Lew Brown, Roger Lewis, Wilbur Sweatman
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Stock Yard Strut
Unknown
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Ory's Creole Trombone
Edward "Kid" Ory
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Society Blues
Unknown
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Bogalousa Strut
Sam Morgan
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Steppin' on the Gas
Sam Morgan
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West Indies Blues
Clarence Williams, Edgar Dowell, Spencer Williams
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She's Cryin' for Me
Santo Pecora
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Bugle Blues
Robert Kelly
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Dunn's Cornet Blues
Johnny Dunn
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Old Fashion Love
James P. Johnson
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I Ain't Gonna Play No Second Fiddle
Perry Bradford
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