Birth of Harlem Jazz and its Significance

M.M. Bakhtin states, “The third party is a constitutive aspect of the whole utterance, who, under deeper analysis, can be revealed in it”. This notion of dialogue, not between the artist and the art, but of the role that the third party–audience– plays in the conversation, is why I believe New York jazz was more important to jazz than Chicago. The jazz birthed in 1920s Harlem is more directly a product of the human conditions at the time– social, economic, and racial.
Economically, at a time when “Harlem was becoming a slum” (Gioia 90), rent parties created both demand and environment for jazz development. The need of lower-class blacks to pay rent created a new type of social gathering, one requiring music to dance to. In this way, economic conditions invoked a social climate which influenced jazz. Socially, jazz developed primarily as dancing music. The popular dances and musics of the Northeast were augmented by the migration of Southern blacks to Harlem. These ‘Gullahs’, preferential to gospel-style piano and ring-shouts popular in the south, created a demand for a new type of dance music, one that would developed a new Harlem style. Rent parties also provided the stage for “cutting contests”, a social form of performance where jazz pianists tried to outplay one another which became an important part of “jazz pedagogy and practice” (Gioia, 93).

These contests had a profound effect on jazz style, most notably in the standard of technique: “It was the stress of competition from their peers, rather than any highbrow demands... that encouraged the [inclusion] of several classical selections” (Best of Jazz 25). As well, racial divides in music provided other incentives for pianists to develop technique, as white demand for European-style technical mastery exerted its influence on jazz. James P. Johnson states, “The reason the New York boys became such high class musicians was because the New York piano was developed by the European method, system, and style” (Gioia 92). Differences of race inevitably affected jazz negatively, marginalizing the music, denigrating it as low art. In clubs such as the Cotton Club, blacks were allowed in only as performers, never patrons.  

However, jazz faced its most serious marginalization by black Harlemites who considered the music too lowbrow– more at home in rent parties than “in the ‘other’ Harlem of high culture” (Gioia 90).  But it was in those rent parties that the quintessential New York styles of jazz– stride piano, boogie-woogie– were created. Players such as Willie Smith, Art Tatum, and Fats Waller extended the stride formula to a new level of technical jazz not previously heard in Chicago or elsewhere. Its distinctive rhythm and style were hard to pin down: “...like the word ‘shout’ in the same context, ‘stride’ simply exists to confuse the layman” (Best of Jazz 31).  However, what can be confirmed about stride is its massive impact on the Harlem music scene and subsequent jazz styles such as swing. 

No player of the era better represents the culture and ‘third-party’ dialogue of Harlem jazz than James P. Johnson. Considered the “Father of Harlem stride” (Best of Jazz 27), Johnson’s work is not derivative; it is original. As a participant of the cutting contests and rent party dances, Johnson’s music is directly representative of the array of social, economic and musical elements which formulated Harlem jazz– even the marginalization of the art form is exemplified by Johnson’s multiple rejections from conductors and benefactors (Gioia). By adapting to the desires for ring-shouts and gospel, for European melodies over ragtime rhythms, Johnson intertwined different musical ethos into a style which was directly birthed from the reality around him; a style which to its core responded to and represented the climate of Harlem.