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History
Jazz is a musical art
form originally developed by African Americans from around the turn of
the 20th century. It is characterized by blue notes, syncopation,
swing, call and response, polyrhythms, and improvisation. As the first
original art form to emerge from the United States of America, jazz has
been described as "America's classical music".
Jazz has roots in the cultural and musical expression of West Africa
and the western Sahel, and in African American music traditions
including blues and ragtime, as well as European military band music.
After originating in African American communities near the beginning of
the 20th century, jazz gained international popularity by the 1920s.
Since then, jazz has had a profoundly pervasive influence on other
musical styles worldwide. Today, various jazz styles continue to
evolve.
The word jazz itself is rooted in American slang, probably of sexual
origin, although various alternative derivations have been suggested.
History
Roots of jazz
At the root of jazz is the blues,the folk music of former African
slaves in the U.S. South and their descendants, heavily influenced by
West African cultural and musical traditions, that evolved as black
musicians migrated to the cities. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning
African American composer and classical and jazz trumpet virtuoso
Wynton Marsalis:
Jazz is something Negroes invented, and it said the most profound
things, not only about us and the way we look at things, but about what
modern democratic life is really about. It is the nobility of the race
put into sound. Jazz has all the elements, from the spare and
penetrating to the complex and enveloping. It is the hardest music to
play that I know of, and it is the highest rendition of individual
emotion in the history of Western music.
Early jazz influences found their first mainstream expression in the
marching band and dance band music of the day, which was the standard
form of popular concert music at the turn of century. The instruments
of these groups became the basic instruments of jazz: brass, reeds, and
drums.
Black musicians frequently used the melody, structure, and beat of
marches as points of departure; but says "North by South, from
Charleston to Harlem," a project of the National Endowment for the
Humanities: "...a black musical spirit (involving rhythm and melody)
was bursting out of the confines of European musical tradition, even
though the performers were using European styled instruments. This
African-American feel for rephrasing melodies and reshaping rhythm
created the embryo from which many great black jazz musicians were to
emerge." Many black musicians also made a living playing in small bands
hired to lead funeral processions in the New Orleans African-American
tradition. These Africanized bands played a seminal role in the
articulation and dissemination of early jazz. Traveling throughout
black communities in the Deep South and to northern big cities, these
musician-pioneers were the Hand helping to fashion the music's howling,
raucous, then free-wheeling, "raggedy," ragtime spirit, quickening it
to a more eloquent, sophisticated, swing incarnation.
For all its genius, early jazz, with its humble, folk roots, was the
product of primarily self-taught musicians. But an impressive
postbellum network of black-established and -operated institutions,
schools, and civic societies in both the North and the South, plus
widening mainstream opportunities for education, produced
ever-increasing numbers of young, formally trained African-American
musicians, some of them schooled in classical European musical forms.
Lorenzo Tio and Scott Joplin were among this new wave of musically
literate jazz artists. Joplin, the son of a former slave and a
free-born woman of color, was largely self-taught until age 11, when he
received lessons in the fundamentals of music theory from a classically
trained German immigrant in Texarkana, Texas.
Also contributing to this trend was a tightening of Jim Crow laws in
Louisiana in the 1890s, which caused the expulsion from integrated
bands of numbers of talented, formally trained African-American
musicians. The ability of these musically literate, black jazzmen to
transpose and then read what was in great part an improvisational art
form became an invaluable element in the preservation and dissemination
of musical innovations that took on added importance in the approaching
big-band era.
The national music scene at the start of the 20th century
By the turn of the century, American society had begun to shed the
heavy-handed, straitlaced formality that had characterized the
Victorian era. Strong influence of African American music traditions
had already been a part of mainstream popular music in the United
States for generations, going back to the 19th century minstrel show
tunes and the melodies of Stephen Foster.
Public dance halls, clubs, and tea rooms opened in the cities.
Curiously named black dances inspired by African dance moves, like the
shimmy, turkey trot, buzzard lope, chicken scratch, monkey glide, and
the bunny hug eventually were adopted by a white public. The cake walk,
developed by slaves as a send-up of their masters' formal dress balls,
became the rage. White audiences saw these dances first in vaudeville
shows, then performed by exhibition dancers in the clubs.
The popular dance music of the time was not jazz, but there were
precursor forms along the blues-ragtime continuum of musical
experimentation and innovation that soon would blossom into jazz.
Popular Tin Pan Alley composers like Irving Berlin incorporated ragtime
influence into their compositions, though they seldom used the specific
musical devices that were second nature to jazz players—the rhythms,
the blue notes. Few things did more to popularize the idea of hot music
than Berlin's hit song of 1911,"Alexander's Ragtime Band," which became
a craze as far from home as Vienna. Although the song wasn't written in
rag time, the lyrics describe a jazz band, right up to jazzing up
popular songs, as in the line, "If you want to hear the Swanee River
played in ragtime...."
The early New Orleans "jass" style
A number of regional styles contributed to the early development of
jazz. Arguably the single most important was that of the New Orleans,
Louisiana area, which was the first to be commonly given the name
"jazz" (early on often spelled "jass").
The city of New Orleans and the surrounding area had long been a
regional music center. People from many different nations of Africa,
Europe, and Latin America contributed to New Orleans' rich musical
heritage. In the French and Spanish colonial era, slaves had more
freedom of cultural expression than in the English colonies of what
would become the United States. In the Protestant colonies African
music was looked on as inherently "pagan" and was commonly suppressed,
while in Louisiana it was allowed. African musical celebrations held at
least as late as the 1830s in New Orleans' "Congo Square" were attended
by interested whites as well, and some of their melodies and rhythms
found their way into the compositions of white Creole composer Louis
Moreau Gottschalk. In addition to the slave population, New Orleans
also had North America's largest community of free people of color,
some of whom prided themselves on their education and used European
instruments to play both European music and their own folk tunes.
By the end of the 19th century, the city was a regional center of Tin
Pan Alley popular music and the young style of ragtime, and a
distinctive, new musical style began to develop.
According to many New Orleans musicians who remembered the era, the key
figures in the development of the new style were flamboyant trumpeter
Buddy Bolden and the members of his band. Bolden is remembered as the
first to take the blues — hitherto a folk music sung and
self-accompanied on string instruments or blues harp (harmonica) — and
arrange it for brass instruments. Bolden's band played blues and other
tunes, constantly "variating the melody" (improvising) for both dance
and brass band settings, creating a sensation in the city and quickly
being imitated by many other musicians.
By the early years of the 20th century, travelers visiting New Orleans
remarked on the local bands' ability to play ragtime with a "pep" not
heard elsewhere.
Characteristics which set the early New Orleans style apart from the
ragtime music played elsewhere included freer rhythmic improvisation.
Ragtime musicians elsewhere would "rag" a tune by giving a syncopated
rhythm and playing a note twice (at half the time value), while the New
Orleans style used more intricate rhythmic improvisation often placing
notes far from the implied beat (compare, for example, the piano rolls
of Jelly Roll Morton with those of Scott Joplin). The New Orleans style
players also adopted much of the vocabulary of the blues, including
bent and blue notes and instrumental "growls" and smears otherwise not
used on European instruments.
Key figures in the early development of the new style were Freddie
Keppard, a dark Creole of color who mastered Bolden's style; Joe
Oliver, whose style was even more deeply soaked in the blues than
Bolden's; and Kid Ory, a trombonist who helped crystallize the style
with his band hiring many of the city's best musicians. The new style
also spoke to young whites as well, especially the working-class
children of immigrants, who took up the style with enthusiasm. Papa
Jack Laine led a multi-ethnic band through which passed almost all of
two generations of early New Orleans white jazz musicians (and a number
of non-whites as well).
Other regional styles
Meanwhile, other regional styles were developing which would influence
the development of jazz. African-American minister Rev. Daniel J.
Jenkins of Charleston, South Carolina, was an unlikely figure of
far-reaching importance in the early development of jazz. In 1891,
Jenkins established the Jenkins Orphanage for boys and four years later
instituted a rigorous music program in which the orphanage's young
charges were taught the religious and secular music of the day,
including overtures and marches. Precocious orphans and defiant
runaways, some of whom had played ragtime in bars and brothels, were
delivered to the orphanage for "salvation" and rehabilitation and made
their musical contributions, as well. In the fashion of the Fisk
Jubilee Singers and Fisk University, the Jenkins Orphanage Bands
traveled widely, earning money to keep the orphanage afloat. It was an
expensive enterprise. Jenkins typically took in approximately 125 – 150
"black lambs" yearly, and many of them received formal musical
training. Less than 30 years later, five bands operated nationally,
with one traveling to England — again in the Fisk tradition. It would
be hard to overstate the influence of the Jenkins Orphanage Bands on
early jazz, scores of whose members went on to play with jazz legends
like Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton and Count Basie. Among them were
the likes of trumpet virtuosos Cladys "Cat" Anderson, Gus Aitken and
Jabbo Smith.
In the northeastern United States, a "hot" style of playing ragtime
developed. While centered in New York City, it could be found in
African-American communities from Baltimore to Maryland. Some later
commentators have categorized it after the fact as an early form of
jazz, while others disagree. It was characterized by rollicking
rhythms, but lacked the distinctly bluesy influence of the southern
styles. The solo piano version of the northeast style was typified by
such players as noted composer Eubie Blake, the son of slaves, whose
musical career spanned an impressive eight decades. James P. Johnson
took the northeast style and around 1919 developed a style of playing
that came to be known as "stride." In stride piano, the right hand
plays the melody, while the active left hand "walks" or "strides" from
upbeat to downbeat, maintaining the rhythm. Johnson influenced later
pianists like Fats Waller and Willie Smith.
The top orchestral leader of the style was James Reese Europe, and his
1913 and 1914 recordings preserve a rare glimpse of this style at its
peak. It was during this time that Europe's music profoundly influenced
a young George Gershwin, who would go on to compose the jazz-inspired
classic "Rhapsody in Blue." By the time Europe recorded again in 1919,
he was in the process of incorporating the influence of the New Orleans
style into his playing. The recordings of Tim Brymn give later
generations another look at the northeastern hot style with little of
the New Orleans influence yet evident.
In Chicago at the start of the 1910s, a popular type of dance band
consisted of a saxophone vigorously ragging a melody over a 4-square
rhythm section. The city soon fell heavily under the influence of waves
of New Orleans musicians, and the older style blended with the New
Orleans style to form what would be called "Chicago Jazz" starting in
the late 1910s.
Along the banks of the Mississippi around Memphis, Tennessee to Saint
Louis, Missouri, another band style developed incorporating the blues.
The most famous composer and bandleader of the style was the "Father of
the Blues," W.C. Handy. While in some ways similar to the New Orleans
style (Bolden's influence may have spread upriver), it lacked the
freewheeling improvisation found further south. Handy, indeed, for many
years denounced jazz as needlessly chaotic, and in his style
improvisation was limited to short fills between phrases and considered
inappropriate for the main melody.
The national spread of ‘jass’ music
A number of educated "colored" New Orleanians left the South due to
increasingly restrictive Jim Crow laws, at first heading mostly to
California. One of these was musician Bill Johnson, who thought a good
New Orleans-style band would have commercial possibilities out West.
Johnson sent for some of the city's best hot musicians, including
Freddie Keppard, to join him at the start of the 1910s, forming the
Original Creole Orchestra. A vaudeville promoter caught the band
playing to enthusiastic crowds in between rounds at a boxing match and
booked the band to tour the nation on the Pantages Circuit. The members
of the Creole Orchestra wrote their colleagues back home that hot New
Orleans musicians could make much better money playing their style up
North and out West than they could at home, encouraging many to start
spreading the style around the nation.
Chicago was one of the first cities to embrace the new style, and from
some accounts it was here that the New Orleans style was first
popularly christened "jass." Back in New Orleans, it was called by such
names as "ratty music", "hot music," or simply "ragtime" (Sidney Bechet
often continued to call his music "ragtime" as late as the 1950s). The
style was so different from the ragtime and dance music of the rest of
the nation, that a new name was needed to distinguish it. Apparently,
the first band billed as playing "jass" was that of trombonist Tom
Brown. The term "jass" was rude sexual slang, related either to the
term "jism" or to the jasmine perfume popular among urban prostitutes.
One group that followed the Original Creoles and Tom Brown to Chicago
went North in 1916 as "Stein's Dixie Jass Band." These veterans of the
Papa Jack Laine bands made their way to New York City the following
year, calling themselves "The Original Dixieland Jass Band." In New
York, they had an opportunity to record phonograph records. The discs,
recorded as a novelty, were a surprise national hit, and "jass" quickly
became a national craze.
It was in New York where "jass" became "jazz" in the late 1910s,
purportedly because mischievous people were making a habit of
scratching out the "J"s on posters, which then, unfortunately,
advertised "ass band"s.
Jazz in the 1920's
Two disparate, but important, inventions of the second half of the
nineteenth century quietly had set the stage for jazz to capture the
spotlight in American popular music by the 1920s. George Pullman's
invention of the sleeping car in 1864 brought a new level of luxury and
comfort to the nation's railways; and Thomas Edison's invention, in
1877, of the phonograph record made quality music accessible to
virtually everyone.
Pullman's ingenious, rolling sleeping quarters provided employment to
legions of African-American men, who criss-crossed the nation as
sleeping car porters; and by the second decade of the twentieth
century, the Pullman Company employed more African-Americans than any
single business concern in the United States. But Pullman porters were
more than solicitous, smiling faces in smart, navy blue uniforms. The
most dapper and sophisticated of them were culture bearers, spreading
the card game of bid whist, the latest dance crazes, regional news, and
a heightened sense of black pride to cities and towns wherever the
railways reached. Many porters also shared, traded and even sold "race
records" to augment their income, speeding artistic innovations to
musicians eager to hear the latest; spreading among the general public
an awareness of and appreciation for this rapidly evolving musical
form; and, in the process, putting jazz on the fast track to first
U.S., then worldwide, acclaim.
With Prohibition, the constitutional amendment that forbade the sale of
alcoholic beverages, the legal saloons and cabarets were closed; but in
their place hundreds of speakeasies appeared, where patrons drank and
musicians entertained. The presence of dance venues and the subsequent
increased demand for accomplished musicians meant more artists were
able to support themselves by playing professionally. As a result, the
numbers of professional musicians increased, and jazz—like all the
popular music of the 1920s—adopted the 4/4 beat of dance music.
Another nineteenth-century invention, radio, came into its own in the
1920s, after the first commercial radio station in the U.S. began
broadcasting in Pittsburgh in 1922. Radio stations proliferated at a
remarkable rate, and with them, the popularity of jazz. Jazz became
associated with things modern, sophisticated, and decadent. The third
decade of the new century, a time of technological marvels, flappers,
flashy automobiles, organized crime, bootleg whiskey, and bathtub gin,
would come to be known as the Jazz Age.
Key figures of the decade
King Oliver was "jazz king" of Chicago in the early 1920s, when Chicago
was the national hub of jazz. His band was the epitome of the New
Orleans hot ensemble jazz style. Unfortunately, his band's recordings
were little heard outside of Chicago and New Orleans, but the ensemble
was a powerful influence on younger musicians, both black and white.
Sidney Bechet was the first master jazz musician to take up what
previously often had been dismissed as a novelty instrument, the
saxophone. Bechet helped propel jazz in more individualistic
personality- and solo-driven directions.
In this last point, Bechet was joined by a young protege of King
Oliver, Louis Armstrong, who was to become one of the major forces in
the development of jazz. Armstrong was an extraordinary improviser,
capable of creating endless variations on a single melody. Armstrong
also popularized scat singing, an improvisational vocal technique in
which nonsensical syllables or words are sung or otherwise vocalized,
often as part of a call-and-response interaction with other musicians
onstage. His unique, gravely voice and innate sense of swing made scat
an instant hit.
Arguably, Bix Beiderbecke was both the first white and the first
non-New Orleanian to make major original contributions to the
development of jazz with his legato phrasing, bringing the influence of
classical romanticism to jazz.
Paul Whiteman was the most commercially successful bandleader of the
1920s, billing himself as "The King of Jazz." Sacrificing spontaneous
improvisation for the sake of elaborate written arrangements, Whiteman
claimed to be "making a lady out of jazz." Despite his hiring Bix and
many of the other best white jazz musicians of the era, later
generations of jazz lovers have often judged Whiteman's music to have
little to do with real jazz. Nonetheless, his notion of combining jazz
with elaborate orchestrations has been returned to repeatedly by
composers and arrangers of later decades. It was Whiteman who
commissioned Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," which was debuted by
Whiteman's Orchestra.
Fletcher Henderson led the top African American band in New York City.
At first he wished to follow the lead of Paul Whiteman, but after
hiring Louis Armstrong to play in his band, Henderson realized the
importance of the improvising soloist in developing jazz bands.
Henderson's arrangements would play a significant role in the
development of the Big Band era in the following decade.
Young pianist and bandleader Duke Ellington first came to national
attention in the late 1920s with his tight band making many recordings
and radio broadcasts. Ellington's importance would grow in the coming
decades.
1930s to 1950s
While the solo became more important in jazz, popular bands became
larger in size. The Big band became the popular provider of music for
the era. Big bands varied in their jazz content; some (such as Benny
Goodman's Orchestra) were highly jazz oriented, while others (such as
Glenn Miller's) left little space for improvisation. Most were
somewhere inbetween, having some musicians adept at jazz solos playing
with section men who kept the rhythm and arrangements going. However
even bands without jazz soloists adopted a sound owing much to the jazz
vocabularity, for example sax sections playing what sounded like an
improvised variation on a melody (and may have originated as a
transcription of one).
Key figures in developing the big jazz band were arrangers and
bandleaders Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman and the man sometimes deemed
the most prolific composer in American history, Duke Ellington.
The influence of Louis Armstrong continued to grow. Musicians and
bandleaders like Cab Calloway — and, later, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie
and vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald, jumped on the scat bandwagon. Pop
vocalists like Bing Crosby embraced Armstrong's style of improvising on
the melody, and U.S. pop singers seldom since have rendered a tune
"straight," in the pre-jazz style.
In the early 1920s, popular music was still a mixture of things—current
dance numbers, novelty songs, show tunes. "Businessman's bounce music,"
as one horn player put it. But musicians with steady jobs, playing with
the same companions, were able to go far beyond that. The Ellington
band at the Cotton Club and the various Kansas City groups that became
the Count Basie band date from this period.
Over time, social strictures regarding racial segregation began to
relax in entertainment. White bandleaders, who tended to mold the music
more to orthodox rhythms and harmony, began to recruit black musicians.
In the mid-1930s, Benny Goodman hired pianist Teddy Wilson,
vibraharpist Lionel Hampton, and guitarist Charlie Christian to join
small groups. During this period, the popularity of swing (genre) and
big band music was at its height, making stars of such men as Glenn
Miller and Duke Ellington. Swing, the popular music of its time,
covered a broad spectrum from "sweet" to "hot" bands, with the jazz
content varying across the range.
A development of swing in the early 1940s known as "jumping the blues"
or jump music anticipated rhythm and blues and rock and roll in some
respects. It involved the use of small combos instead of big bands and
a concentration on up-tempo music using the familiar blues chord
progressions. Drawing largely upon the evolution of boogie-woogie in
the 1930s, it used a doubled rhythm—that is, the rhythm section played
"eight to the bar," eight beats per measure instead of four. Big Joe
Turner, a Kansas City singer who worked in the 1930s with Swing bands
like Count Basie's, became a boogie-woogie star in the 1940s and then
in the 1950s was one of the first innovators of rock and roll, notably
with his song "Shake, Rattle and Roll". Another jazz founder of rock
and roll was saxophonist Louis Jordan.
Development of bebop
The next major stylistic turn came in the 1940s with bebop, led by such
distinctive stylists as the saxophonist Charlie Parker (known as "Yardbird"
or "Bird"), Bud Powell and Dizzy Gillespie. This marked a major shift
of jazz from pop music for dancing to a high-art, less-accessible,
cerebral "musician's music." Thelonious Monk, while too individual to
be strictly a bebop musician, was also associated with this movement.
Bop musicians valued complex improvisations based on chord progressions
rather than melody. Hard bop moved away from cool jazz, incorporating
influences from soul music, gospel music, and the blues. Hard bop was
at the peak of its popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, and was
associated with such figures as Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Miles
Davis, Art Blakey and Charles Mingus. Later, bebop and hard bop
musicians, such as trumpeter Miles Davis, made more stylistic advances
with modal jazz, where the harmonic structure of pieces was much more
free than previously, and was frequently only implied -- by skeletal
piano chords and bass parts. The instrumentalists then would improvise
around a given mode of the scale.
Latin jazz
Latin jazz has two varieties: Afro-Cuban and Brazilian. Afro-Cuban jazz
was played in the U.S. directly after the bebop period, while Brazilian
jazz became more popular in the 1960s and 1970s.
Afro-Cuban started as a movement after the death of Charlie Parker.
Notable bebop musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Billy Taylor started
Afro-Cuban bands at that time. Gillespie's work was mostly with big
bands of this genre. While the music was influenced by Cuban and Puerto
Rican musicians like Tito Puente, there were many Americans who were
drawing upon Cuban rhythms for their work.
Brazilian jazz is, in North America at least, nearly synonymous with
bossa nova, a Brazilian popular style which is derived from samba with
influences from jazz as well as other 20th-century classical and
popular music. Bossa is generally slow, played around 80 beats per
minute or so. The music uses straight eighths, rather than swing
eighths, and also uses difficult polyrhythms. The best-known bossa nova
compositions are considered to be jazz standards in their own right.
The related term jazz-samba essentially describes an adaptation of
bossa nova compositions to the jazz idiom by American performers such
as Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd, and usually played at 120 beats per
minute or faster. Samba itself is actually not jazz, but being derived
from older Afro-Brazilian music it shares some common characteristics.
Free jazz
Free jazz, or avant-garde jazz, is a subgenre that, while rooted in
bebop, typically uses less compositional material and allows performers
more latitude in what they choose to play. Free jazz's greatest
departure from other styles is in the use of harmony and a regular,
swinging tempo: Both are often implied, utilized loosely, or abandoned
altogether. These approaches were rather controversial when first
advanced, but have generally found acceptance — though sometimes
grudgingly — and have been utilized in part by other jazz performers.
There were earlier precedents, but free jazz crystalized in the late
1950's, especially via Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, and probably
found its greatest exposure in the late 1960s with John Coltrane,
Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Sam Rivers, Leroy
Jenkins, Don Pullen and others.
While perhaps less popular than other styles, free jazz has exerted an
influence to the present. Peter Brotzmann, Ken Vandermark, William
Parker, Derek Bailey and Evan Parker are leading contemporary free jazz
musicians, and musicians such as Coleman, Taylor and Sanders continue
to play in this style. Keith Jarrett has been prominent in defending
free jazz from criticism by traditionalists in recent years.
Jazz and rock music: jazz fusion
With the growth of rock and roll in the 1960s, came the hybrid form
jazz-rock fusion, again involving Davis, who recorded the fusion albums
In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew in 1968 and 1969 respectively. Jazz
was by this time no longer center stage in popular music, but was still
breaking new ground and combining and recombining in different forms.
Notable artists of the 1960s and 1970s jazz and fusion scene include:
Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and his Headhunters band, John McLaughlin
and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Al Di Meola, Jean-Luc Ponty, Sun Ra, Soft
Machine], Narada Michael Walden (who would later enjoy huge success as
a music producer), Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius, the Pat Metheny Group
and Weather Report. Some of these have continued to develop the genre
into the 2000s.
Recent developments
The stylistic diversity of jazz has shown no sign of diminishing,
absorbing influences from such disparate sources as world music and
avant garde classical music, including African rhythm and traditional
structure, serialism, and the extensive use of chromatic scale, by such
musicians as Ornette Coleman and John Zorn.
Beginning in the 1970s with such artists as Keith Jarrett, the Pat
Metheny Group, Jan Garbarek, Ralph Towner, and Eberhard Weber, the ECM
record label established a new chamber-music aesthetic, featuring
mainly acoustic instruments, and incorporating elements of world music
and folk music. This is sometimes referred to as "European" or "Nordic"
jazz, despite some of the leading players being American.
However, the jazz community has shrunk dramatically and split, with a
mainly older audience retaining an interest in traditional and
"straight-ahead" jazz styles, a small core of practitioners and fans
interested in highly experimental modern jazz, and a constantly
changing group of musicians fusing jazz idioms with contemporary
popular music genres. The latter have formed such styles as acid jazz
which contains elements of 1970s disco, acid swing which combines 1940s
style big-band sounds with faster, more aggressive rock-influenced
drums and electric guitar, and nu jazz which combines elements of jazz
and modern forms of electronic dance music.
Exponents of the "acid jazz" style which was initially UK-based
included the Brand New Heavies, James Taylor Quartet, Young Disciples,
and Corduroy. In the United States, acid jazz groups included the
Groove Collective, Soulive, and Solsonics. In a more pop or smooth jazz
context, jazz enjoyed a resurgence in the 1980s with such bands as
Pigbag and Curiosity Killed the Cat achieving chart hits in Britain.
Sade Adu became the definitive voice of smooth jazz.
There have been other developments in the 1980s and 1990s that were
less commercially oriented. Many of these artists, notably Wynton
Marsalis, called what they were doing jazz and in fact strove to define
what the term actually meant. They sought to create within what they
felt was the tradition, creating extensions of small and large forms
initially pioneered by such artists as Louis Armstrong and Duke
Ellington. In the case of Wynton Marsalis these efforts met with
critical acclaim.
Others musicians in this time period - although clearly within the
tradition of the great spontaneous composers such as Charlie Parker,
John Coltrane, Fats Navarro and many others – choose to distance
themselves from the term jazz and simply define what they were doing as
music (this in fact was suggested by the great composer Duke Ellington
when the term jazz first began to be popular). Alternatively they
created their own names for what they were doing (such as M-Base). Many
of these artists agree with the creative guitarist Jean-Paul Bourelly
who feels that "You shouldn't categorize according to styles of music,
you should categorize in terms of creative levels". These musicians
feel that rhythm is the key for further progress in the music. Bourelly,
similar to M-Base, believes that the rhythmic innovations of James
Brown and other Funk pioneers can provide an effective rhythmic base
for spontaneous composition. However, the ideas of these musicians go
far beyond simply playing over a funk groove, extending the rhythmic
ideas in a way analogous to what had been done with harmony in previous
times. Some of the musicians involved in the approach called M-Base
even view this as Rhythmic Harmony. Others, like Wynton Marsalis,
disagree with this point of view, preferring instead to retain the
rhythmic base of swing for creating their music. However, all of these
artists participate in spontaneous composition and only differ in
creative focus and what could be called groove emphasis.
With the rise in popularity of various forms of electronic music during
the late 1980s and 1990s, some jazz artists have attempted a fusion of
jazz with more of the experimental leanings of electronica
(particularly IDM and Drum and bass) with various degrees of success.
This has been variously dubbed "future jazz", "jazz-house" or "nu
jazz". The more experimental and improvisional end of the spectrum
includes Scandinavia-based artists such as pianist Bugge Wesseltoft,
trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær (who both began their careers on the ECM
record label), and the trio Wibutee, all of whom have gained their
chops as instrumentalists in their own right in more traditional jazz
circles. The Cinematic Orchestra from the UK or Julien Loureau from
France have also gained praise in this area. Toward the more pop or
pure dance music end of the spectrum of nu jazz are such proponents as
St Germain and Jazzanova, who incorporate some live jazz playing with
more metronomic house beats.
In the 2000s, "jazz" hit the pop charts and blended with contemporary
Urban music through the work of artists like Jill Scott, Jamie Cullum,
Erykah Badu, Amy Winehouse, Diana Krall and Norah Jones, and the jazz
advocacy of performers who are also music educators (such as Jools
Holland and Courtney Pine). Some of these new styles may be light on
improvisation, a key characteristic of jazz. However, their
instrumentation and rhythms are similar to other jazz music, and the
label has stuck.
Improvisation
Jazz is often difficult to define, but improvisation is unquestionably
a key element of the form. Improvisation has been since early times an
essential element in African and African-American music and is closely
related to the pervasiveness of call and response in West African and
African-American cultural expression. The exact form of improvisation
has changed over time. Early folk blues music often was based around a
call and response pattern, and improvisation would factor into the
lyrics, the melody, or both. Part of the Dixieland style involves
musicians taking turns playing the melody while the others make up
counter lines to go with it. By the Swing era, big bands played
carefully arranged sheet music, but the music often would call for one
member of the band to stand up and play a short, improvised solo.
Finally, in bebop, improvisation takes center stage, as almost the
entire focus of the music is on clever, improvised solos, with little
attention given to the melody, or "head", of each piece.
When jazz musicians improvise, they usually use a chord progression —
the series of chords that define the harmonic structure of a piece of
music. For example, the Charlie Parker composition "Now's the Time" is
12 bars long and follows what jazz musicians call a twelve-bar blues
progression. Behind the melody, the rhythm section improvises an
accompaniment based on the chord structure of the piece. After the
melody, the rhythm section continues to play a similar accompaniment
based on the same chords, while each soloist in turn improvises new
melodies within the harmonic structure of the chords. It is possible to
get a better idea of what is happening musically by humming the melody
while listening to the solo. In this manner, it becomes clearer that
the improvised melody is closely related to the chord progression of
the piece. Fitting an improvised melody to the harmony is known as
"playing the (chord) changes."
As previously noted, later styles of jazz, such as modal jazz,
abandoned the strict notion of a chord progression, allowing the
individual musicians to improvise more freely within the context of a
given scale or mode. The best-known example of this is the classic
Miles Davis album Kind of Blue. When a pianist or guitarist improvises
chords while a soloist is playing, it is called comping or vamping
(also see ostinato).
Another technique in improvisation is finding key centers. When the
jazz musician approaches a song that does not have any kind of chord
progression (such as twelve bar blues or rhythm changes) and a mode
isn't easily identifiable, then he or she can look at specific areas of
the piece and identify chord changes that relate to a specific scale or
mode. This process can be repeated in such a manner that the musician
can improvise over the whole piece.
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