‘Tiger Rag’
Composition origin
unknown
Performed by the
Original Dixieland Jazz Band
Recorded: March 25,
1918
3:11
Define jazz. Go ahead, give it a shot. Its very
slipperiness, its looseness, its inclusiveness, its constant evolution and convolution,
is perhaps a definition in itself. Robert Christgau termed it “inventing
meaning while letting loose,” and that’s close enough for me.
The birth of recorded jazz is here with this squawky recording
of five white guys playing music created by African- and Latin-Americans, an
appropriation familiar to students of this country’s cultural history. To the
uninitiated, it sounds like a riot in a music store – a raucous and random
compendium of blatts and squawks, trills and slides, polyphonic discoordination.
The mainstream initially characterized it as a fleeting novelty, nothing more.
Although the Original Dixieland Jass (later, Jazz) Band copyrighted
the tune, its origins are much older. “Tiger Rag” had long been considered a “standard”
by the early jazz bands in New Orleans, where it was born without historical
documentation. It went by various names – “Weary Weasel,” “Number Two Blues,” “Play
Jack Carey” (after the New Orleans trombonist who made his instrument growl),
and others. It’s a mashup – various cels of repeated phrases that serve as
templates, beds for improvisations, call and response, the fragmentation and
juggling of notes among the players. (The Band originally recorded the piece on
August 17, 1917, but they did so for Vocalion using a strange and soon to be
outmoded vertical-cut recording process, instead of the familiar lateral,
outside-in tracking that became standard.)
But there’s a through-line underneath, a strong, syncopated,
swinging motor that drives an aggressive assertion of unity through diversity,
a loose confederation of soloists sharing time and tempo. Jazz burst forth in a
tepid time musically, drugged with delicacy, sentiment, and the insipid
imitation of European song models. The only “stirring” music was written for
marching bands. The bold, insistent assertion of “Tiger Rag” made it a hit.
The bearers of these glad tidings were musicians from New
Orleans, brought up first to Chicago and then New York to capitalize on the
sudden demand for hot music to dance to in tony nightclubs. When Cornetist Nick
LaRocca, clarinetist Larry Shields, trombonist Eddie Edwards, pianist Henry
Ragas, and drummer Tony Sbarbaro began their gig at Reisenweber’s Café in Manhattan
in early 1917, they sparked a craze and started a musical revolution. Soon
trainloads of Crescent City musicians were headed north to make some money and
spread the new musical gospel.
It helped immensely that jazz was a vernacular music, rather
than an art music that required years of training and a submission to an academic
tradition and repertoire, dragged down into dullness through tradition and
politesse. It was rough, crude, participatory, and eminently replicable, something
you picked up “by ear” through participation and kept in unwritten “head
arrangements,” a trial-and-error ethos that’s stuck with it to this day and
kept it vital. With jazz there was freedom and a chance for the individual
voice to soar – even if it had to roar above the other creatures in its
pandemonious musical zoo.
“Tiger Rag,” covered countless times in countless ways since
its debut recording, became one of the foundations of jazz development, along
with other gems like “When the Saints Go Marching In,” “Indiana,” “Didn’t He
Ramble,” “Careless Love,” “St. Louis Blues,” “Keep A-Knockin’,” and other tunes
that would influence everything that came after them.
The National Recording Registry
Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the
National Recording Registry in chronological order. Up next: Mamie Smith sings Crazy Blues.
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