From 1685 to 1901

Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Eubie Blake, Sonny Greer, Zutty Singleton, Baby Dodds, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong.

I don’t know where or when this photo of Eubie Blake was taken. But I know we play his music. The chronology below shows when the music he played was coming from.

Last weekend, in Hanover, New Hampshire, I played The Look of Love— music by Burt Bacharach, lyrics by Hal David, arrangements by Ethan Iverson, dance by Mark Morris— with the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Mark Morris Music Ensemble: Ethan Iverson, Jonathan Finlayson, Simón Willson, Blaire Parrin, and Clinton Curtis, our star singer Marcy Harriell out with illness and much-missed.

We’ve been doing The Look of Love since 2022. In the last few shows, I’m playing better, swinging the band with less effort and a deeper understanding of Bacharach’s music, Iverson’s arrangements, and Mark Morris’s choreography.

Burt Bacharach, Mark Morris, and Ethan Iverson, American artists through and through, all have deep roots in classical music. So, at the hotel between shows, at work on my book— thanks for all your incredible support!— I went on Wiki for a rough chronology of births and deaths, to see how the traditions of Bacharach, Morris, and Iverson—of classical music and American music, jazz, and the drumset— interact:

1685: Birth year of J.S. Bach and G.F. Handel.

1732: Joseph Haydn is born. Bach and Handel are both about 47 years old ¹.

1750: Death of J.S. Bach, age 65. Handel is 64 or 65; Haydn is 18.

1756: Birth of W.A. Mozart. Handel is 71; Haydn’s about 24.

1759: Death of G.F. Handel, age 74. Haydn, 27; Mozart a toddler.

1770: Beethoven is born. Haydn is nearly 38; Mozart about 15. Much of the percussion tradition in the orchestra is traceable to Mozart and Beethoven.

1791: Death of W.A. Mozart, age 35. Haydn now 59; Beethoven just 21.

1809: Death of Joseph Haydn, age 77. Beethoven is 39.

1813: Birth of Richard Wagner. Beethoven, quite deaf, is age 43.

1827: Death of Beethoven, age 56. Wagner is in his teens.

1833: Birth of Johannes Brahms. Wagner turns 20.

1854: John Phillip Sousa is born. Brahms is in his twenties, Wagner about 41 years old.

1866: Commonly given birth year of Dee Dee Chandler, drummer with John Robichaux’s band. Brahms is 33; Wagner 53.

1868: Scott Joplin is born. Brahms is 35; Wagner is 55.

1881: Birth of Joseph “King” Oliver. Chandler and Joplin are teenagers; Brahms is 49; Wagner is 69.

1883: Death of Richard Wagner, age 69. Brahms is just about 50; Chandler and Joplin are teenagers; Joe Oliver is a toddler.

1887: Eubie Blake is born.

1888: Birth of Irving Berlin. Brahms is in his fifties; Chandler and Joplin are about 20; Oliver just 5 years old.

1890: Most likely birth year of Jelly Roll Morton. Brahms is 57; Chandler and Joplin in their twenties; Oliver is an eight-year old.

1894: James P. Johnson is born. Brahms turns 61, Chandler and Joplin are in their mid-twenties, young Joe Oliver is now 13.

1895: Birth of Sonny Greer (according to Colin Larkin). Brahms is 62; Chandler and Joplin nearly thirty; Oliver a teenager; Morton a child.

1897: Birth year of Sidney Bechet, death year of Johannes Brahms. Eubie Blake is ten years old; Chandler and Joplin’s cohort are thirty; Joe Oliver is fifteen, Morton still a kid.

1898: Birth year of George Gershwin, Zutty Singleton, and Warren “Baby” Dodds. Joe Oliver is seventeen.

1899: Birth of Duke Ellington. Oliver an adult, Morton a kid;

1901: Birth of Louis Armstrong². Joe Oliver is age nineteen or twenty; Bechet is four years old, Ellington a toddler; Morton is ten or eleven years old.

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There it is, that’s the foundation.

In this country, the fine old traditions of Europe were Africanized and given new life. Seen through the lens of the drumset, that’s the story I’m telling.

Thank you all for your incredible support for my ambitious project. Chapter 2, which will take us into the 1920’s, will be published here on Monday, March 9th.

1. All these ages are “about”; I didn’t line up birth month, day, year and death day, month, year for precise ages; I find even a rough chronology tells the story I wanted.

2. Ricky Riccardi’s 2025 Stomp Off, Let’s Go contains a fascinating and even-handed account of the mystery of Armstrong’s birthday (basically, researchers have shown that whoever made out Armstrong’s baptismal record, dated August 25th, 1901, and listed his birthday as August 4th, 1901 seems to have transposed several birthdays to August that day) while concluding that the only thing that matters, fundamentally, is that Armstrong was born.