Tower Seminar Series – Ad te levavi and Dippermouth Blues: Modes of Transmission and the Question of Musical Identi-ty

Presenter: Professor Charles M. Atkinson

Chair: Dr Eleanor Giraud

As is well known, both “Gregorian” chant and American jazz were transmitted orally at their incep-tion, moving into written transmission only later in their history. Improvisation, or what Leo Treitler calls performance within a “generative system,” must have played a role in the early centuries of chant performance, and it plays a decisive role throughout the history of jazz. An important difference, though, is that if the earliest written sources are any indication, the chant was transmitted orally in a strikingly unified manner; in jazz, value has always been placed on originality and individuality. This paper examines a special case in jazz, however, that seems to contradict the “rule of individuality,” coming closer to the relative consistency of transmission in Gregorian chant. It examines the thesis that brass soloists from 1923 on imitated verbatim the solo of Joe “King” Oliver in performances of Oliver’s Dippermouth Blues, aka Sugarfoot Stomp.