Kansas City Jazz - A Little Evil Will Do You Good - Con Chapman

Kansas City Jazz - A Little Evil Will Do You Good - Con Chapman

From Stomp to Swing: From Tuba to Bull Fiddle

Kansas City Jazz - A Little Evil Will Do You Good - Con Chapman

Con Chapman [+-]
Music writer
Con Chapman is the author of Rabbit’s Blues: The Life and Music of Jonny Hodges (Oxford University Press, 2019), winner of the 2019 Book of the Year Award by Hot Club de France, and a 2020 Certificate of Merit for Best Historical Research from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. His writing on jazz has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, Syncopated Times, and Brilliant Corners, among other publications.

Description

African-American music of the Southwest was described by its composers and those who danced to it as having a “stomp” rhythm, a term that occurs in New Orleans jazz, particularly in works by “Jelly Roll” Morton, whose travels through the region—including Kansas City—has been largely overlooked in the past. This rhythm came to characterize Kansas City jazz as the bass horn as the “bottom” voice in brass band music gave way to the string bass, also known as the double bass or “bull fiddle.” Walter Page, whose band Bill Basie heard out his hotel window, is generally credited with the development of this instrument as the foundation of the jazz that would originate in the region, and in shifting the rhythmic structure of the region’s jazz from the two-beat foundation of New Orleans to a four-beat structure that would underlie the music that came to be known as “swing.”

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Citation

Chapman, Con. From Stomp to Swing: From Tuba to Bull Fiddle. Kansas City Jazz - A Little Evil Will Do You Good. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 21-44 Mar 2023. ISBN 9781800502826. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=42618. Date accessed: 29 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.42618. Mar 2023

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