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Jazz spans a range of music from ragtime to the present day—a period of over 100 years—and has proved to be very difficult to define. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions—using the point of view of European music history or African music for example—but critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt argues that its terms of reference and its definition should be broader.[6] Berendt defines jazz as a "form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of the Negro with European music"[7] and argues that it differs from European music in that jazz has a "special relationship to time defined as 'swing'", involves "a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role" and contains a "sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror the individuality of the performing jazz musician".[6] Double bassist Reggie Workman, saxophone player Pharoah Sanders, and drummer Idris Muhammad performing in 1978 A broader definition that encompasses all of the radically different eras of jazz has been proposed by Travis Jackson: he states that "it is music that includes qualities such as swing, improvising, group interaction, developing an 'individual voice', and being open to different musical possibilities".[8] An overview of the discussion on definitions is provided by Krin Gabbard, who argues that "jazz is a construct" that, while artificial, still is useful to designate "a number of musics with enough in common to be understood as part of a coherent tradition".[9] In contrast to the efforts of commentators and enthusiasts of certain types of jazz, who have argued for narrower definitions that exclude other types, the musicians themselves are often reluctant to define the music they play. Duke Ellington, one of jazz's most famous figures, summed up this perspective by saying, "It's all music".[10] Importance of improvisation Main article: Jazz improvisation While jazz is considered difficult to define, improvisation is consistently regarded as being one of its key elements. The centrality of improvisation in jazz is attributed to its presence in influential earlier forms of music: the early blues, a form of folk music which arose in part from the work songs and field hollers of the African-American workers on plantations. These were commonly structured around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, but early blues was also highly improvisational. Although European classical music has been said to be a composer's medium in which the performer is sometimes granted discretion over interpretation, ornamentation and accompaniment, the performer's primary goal is to play a composition as it was written. In contrast, jazz is often characterized as the product of group creativity, interaction, and collaboration, that places varying degrees of value on the contributions of composer (if there is one) and performers.[11] In jazz, therefore, the skilled performer will interpret a tune in very individual ways, never playing the same composition exactly the same way twice. Depending upon the performer's mood and personal experience, interactions with other musicians, or even members of the audience, a jazz musician may alter melodies, harmonies or time signature at will. The approach to improvisation has developed enormously over the history of the music. In early New Orleans and Dixieland jazz, performers took turns playing the melody, while others improvised countermelodies. By the swing era, big bands were coming to rely more on arranged music: arrangements were either written or learned by ear and memorized, while individual soloists would improvise within these arrangements. Later, in bebop the focus shifted back towards small groups and minimal arrangements; the melody would be stated briefly at the start and end of a piece, but the core of the performance would be the series of improvisations. Later styles such as modal jazz abandoned the strict notion of a chord progression, allowing the individual musicians to improvise even more freely within the context of a given scale or mode. In many forms of jazz a soloist is often supported by a rhythm section that accompanies by playing chords and rhythms that outline the song structure and complement the soloist.[12] In avant-garde and free jazz idioms, the separation of soloist and band is reduced, and there is license, or even a requirement, for the abandoning of chords, scales, and rhythmic meters. Debates Since at least the emergence of bebop, forms of jazz that are commercially oriented or influenced by popular music have been criticized by purists. According to Bruce Johnson, there has always been a "tension between jazz as a commercial music and an art form".[8] Traditional jazz enthusiasts have dismissed bebop, free jazz, the 1970s jazz fusion era, and much else as periods of debasement of the music and betrayals of the tradition; the alternative viewpoint is that jazz is able to absorb and transform influences from diverse musical styles,[13] and that, by avoiding the creation of 'norms', other newer, avant-garde forms of jazz will be free to emerge.[8] Another debate that gained a lot of attention at the birth of jazz was how it would affect the appearance of African-Americans, in particular, who were a part of it. To some African Americans, jazz has highlighted their contribution to American society and helped bring attention to black history and culture, but for others, the music and term "jazz" are reminders of "an oppressive and racist society and restrictions on their artistic visions".[14] Etymology Albert Gleizes, 1915, Composition pour Jazz, gouache on cardboard, mounted on Masonite, 73 x 73 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Main article: Jazz (word) The origin of the word jazz has had widespread interest—the American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Twentieth Century—which has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well documented. The word began [under various spellings] as West Coast slang around 1912, the meaning of which varied but did not refer to music. The use of the word in a musical context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune.[15] Its first documented use in a musical context in New Orleans appears in a November 14, 1916 Times-Picayune article about "jas bands."[16] Race Imamu Amiri Baraka argues that there is a distinct "white jazz" music genre expressive of whiteness.[17] Bix Beiderbecke was one of the most prominent white jazz musicians.[18] White jazz musicians appeared in the early 1920s in the Midwestern United States and other areas as well. An influential style referred to as the Chicago School (or Chicago Style) was developed by white musician including Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland. Frank Teschemacher, Dave Tough, and Eddie Condon. Others from Chicago such as Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa became leading members of big-band swing during the 1930s.[19] History Jazz originated in the late 19th to early 20th century as interpretations of American and European classical music entwined with African and slave folk songs and the influences of West African culture.[20] Its composition and style have changed many times throughout the years with each performer's personal interpretation and improvisation, which is also one of the greatest appeals of the genre.[21] Origins Blended African and European music sensibilities By 1808 the Atlantic slave trade had brought almost half a million Sub-Saharan Africans to the United States. The slaves largely came from West Africa and the greater Congo River basin. They brought strong musical traditions with them.[22] The rhythms had a counter-metric structure, and reflected African speech patterns. African music was largely functional, for work or ritual.[23] The African traditions primarily made use of a single-line melody and call-and-response pattern. Slave gatherings Dance in Congo Square in the late 1700s, artist's conception by E. W. Kemble from a century later. In the late 18th-century painting The Old Plantation, African-Americans dance to banjo and percussion. Lavish festivals featuring African-based dances to drums were organized on Sundays at Place Congo, or Congo Square, in New Orleans until 1843.[24] There are historical accounts of other music and dance gatherings elsewhere in the southern United States. Robert Palmer commented on percussive slave music: Usually such music was associated with annual festivals, when the year's crop was harvested and several days were set aside for celebration. As late as 1861, a traveler in North Carolina saw dancers dressed in costumes that included horned headdresses and cow tails and heard music provided by a sheepskin-covered "gumbo box", apparently a frame drum; triangles and jawbones furnished the auxiliary percussion. There are quite a few [accounts] from the southeastern states and Louisiana dating from the period 1820–1850. Some of the earliest [Mississippi] Delta settlers came from the vicinity of New Orleans, where drumming was never actively discouraged for very long and homemade drums were used to accompany public dancing until the outbreak of the Civil War.[25] Black church Another influence came from black slaves who had learned the harmonic style of hymns of the church, and incorporated it into their own music as spirituals.[26] The origins of the blues are undocumented, though they can be seen as the secular counterpart of the spirituals. However, as Gerhard Kubik points out, whereas the spirituals are homophonic, rural blues and early jazz "was largely based on concepts of heterophony."[27] Minstrel and salon music The blackface Virginia Minstrels in 1843, featuring tambourine, fiddle, banjo and bones. During the early 19th century an increasing number of black musicians learned to play European instruments, particularly the violin, which they used to parody European dance music in their own cakewalk dances. In turn, European-American minstrel show performers in blackface popularized the music internationally, combining syncopation with European harmonic accompaniment. In the mid-1800s the white New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk adapted slave rhythms and melodies from Cuba and other Caribbean islands, into piano salon music. New Orleans was the main nexus between the Afro-Caribbean and African-American cultures. African rhythmic retention In the opinion of jazz historian Ernest Borneman, what preceded New Orleans jazz before 1890 was "Afro-Latin music" similar to what was played in the Caribbean at the time.[28] A fundamental rhythmic figure heard in Gottschalk's compositions such as "Souvenirs From Havana" (1859), many different slave musics of the Caribbean, as well as Afro-Caribbean folk dances performed in New Orleans Congo Square, is the three-stroke pattern known in Cuban music as tresillo. Tresillo is the most basic and most prevalent duple-pulse rhythmic cell in sub-Saharan African music traditions, and the music of the African Diaspora.[29][30] Tresillo.[31][32] About this sound Play (help·info) The "Black Codes" outlawed drumming by slaves. Therefore, unlike in Cuba, Haiti, and elsewhere in the Caribbean, African drumming traditions were not preserved in North America. African-based rhythmic patterns were retained in the United States in large part through "body rhythms" such as stomping, clapping, and patting juba.[33] In the post-Civil War period (after 1865), African Americans were able to obtain surplus military bass drums, snare drums and fifes. As a result, an original African-American drum and fife music arose, featuring tresillo and related syncopated rhythmic figures.[34] With this emerged a drumming tradition that was distinct from its Caribbean counterparts, expressing a uniquely African-American sensibility. Palmer observes: "The snare and bass drummers played syncopated cross-rhythms," and speculates—"this tradition must have dated back to the latter half of the nineteenth century, and it could have not have developed in the first place if there hadn't been a reservoir of polyrhythmic sophistication in the culture it nurtured."[35] Tresillo is heard prominently in New Orleans second line music, and in other forms of popular music from that city from the turn of the 20th century to present.[36] Jazz historian Gunther Schuller commented on its retention in jazz: "by and large the simpler African rhythmic patterns survived in jazz ... because they could be adapted more readily to European rhythmic conceptions. Some survived, others were discarded as the Europeanization progressed."[37] "Spanish tinge"—the Afro-Cuban rhythmic influence African-American music began incorporating Afro-Cuban rhythmic motifs in the 19th century, when the habanera (Cuban contradanza) gained international popularity.[38] Habaneras were widely available as sheet music. The habanera was the first written music to be rhythmically based on an African motif (1803).[39] From the perspective of African-American music, the habanera rhythm (also known as congo,[40] tango-congo,[41] or tango.[42]) can be thought of as a combination of tresillo and the backbeat.[43] Habanera rhythm written as a combination of tresillo (bottom notes) with the backbeat (top note). About this sound Play (help·info) Musicians from Havana and New Orleans would take the twice-daily ferry between both cities to perform and not surprisingly, the habanera quickly took root in the musically fertile Crescent City. The habanera was the first of many Cuban music genres which enjoyed periods of popularity in the United States, and reinforced and inspired the use of tresillo-based rhythms in African-American music. John Storm Roberts states that the musical genre habanera "reached the U.S. twenty years before the first rag was published."[44] The piano piece "Ojos Criollos (Danse Cubaine)" (1860) by New Orleans native Louis Moreau Gottschalk, was influenced by the composer's studies in Cuba. The habanera rhythm is clearly heard in the left hand.[45] With Gottschalk's symphonic work "A Night in the Tropics" (1859), we hear the tresillo variant cinquillo extensively.[46] The figure was later used by Scott Joplin and other ragtime composers. Cinquillo. About this sound Play (help·info) For the more than quarter-century in which the cakewalk, ragtime, and proto-jazz were forming and developing, the habanera was a consistent part of African-American popular music.[47] Comparing the music of New Orleans with the music of Cuba, Wynton Marsalis observes that tresillo is the New Orleans "clave", a Spanish word meaning 'code,' or 'key'—as in the key to a puzzle, or mystery.[48] Although technically the pattern is only half a clave, Marsalis makes the point that the single-celled figure is the guide-pattern of New Orleans music. Jelly Roll Morton called the rhythmic figure the Spanish tinge, and considered it an essential ingredient of jazz.[49] 1890s–1910s Ragtime Main article: Ragtime Scott Joplin in 1903 The abolition of slavery in 1865 led to new opportunities for the education of freed African Americans. Although strict segregation limited employment opportunities for most blacks, many were able to find work in entertainment. Black musicians were able to provide entertainment in dances, minstrel shows, and in vaudeville, by which many marching bands formed. Black pianists played in bars, clubs, and brothels, as ragtime developed.[50][51] Ragtime appeared as sheet music, popularized by African-American musicians such as the entertainer Ernest Hogan, whose hit songs appeared in 1895; two years later Vess Ossman recorded a medley of these songs as a banjo solo, "Rag Time Medley".[52][53] Also in 1897, the white composer William H. Krell published his "Mississippi Rag" as the first written piano instrumental ragtime piece, and Tom Turpin published his "Harlem Rag", the first rag published by an African-American. The classically trained pianist Scott Joplin produced his "Original Rags" in the following year, then in 1899 had an international hit with "Maple Leaf Rag". The latter is a multi-strain ragtime march with four parts that feature recurring themes and a bass line with copious seventh chords. Its structure was the basis for many other rags, and the syncopations in the right hand, especially in the transition between the first and second strain, were novel at the time.[54] Excerpt from "Maple Leaf Rag" by Scott Joplin (1899). Seventh chord resolution.[55] About this sound Play (help·info). Note that the seventh resolves down by half step. African-based rhythmic patterns such as tresillo and its variants—the habanera rhythm and cinquillo—are heard in the ragtime compositions of Joplin, Turpin, and others. Joplin's "Solace" (1909) is generally considered to be within the habanera genre,[40][56] and both of the pianist's hands play in a syncopated fashion, completely abandoning any sense of a march rhythm. Ned Sublette postulates that the tresillo/habanera rhythm "found its way into ragtime and the cakewalk,"[57] while Roberts suggests that "the habanera influence may have been part of what freed black music from ragtime's European bass."[58] Blues Main article: Blues African genesis About this sound Play blues scale (help·info) or About this sound pentatonic scale (help·info) Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre[59] that originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads.[60] The African use of pentatonic scales contributed to the development of blue notes in blues and jazz.[61] As Kubik explains: Many of the rural blues of the Deep South are stylistically an extension and merger of basically two broad accompanied song-style traditions in the west central Sudanic belt: A strongly Arabic/Islamic song style, as found for example among the Hausa. It is characterized by melisma, wavy intonation, pitch instabilities within a pentatonic framework, and a declamatory voice. An ancient west central Sudanic stratum of pentatonic song composition, often associated with simple work rhythms in a regular meter, but with notable off-beat accents (1999: 94).[62] W. C. Handy: early published blues WC Handy age 19, 1892 W. C. Handy became intrigued with the folk blues of the Deep South while traveling through the Mississippi Delta. In this form, the singer improvised freely, and the melodic range was limited, sounding like a field holler. The guitar accompaniment was not strummed, but was instead slapped, like a small drum that responded in syncopated accents. The guitar was another "voice".[63] Handy and his band members were formally trained African-American musicians who did not grow up with the blues, yet he was able to adopt the blues to a larger band instrument format, and arrange them in a popular music form. Handy wrote about his adopting of the blues: The primitive southern Negro, as he sang, was sure to bear down on the third and seventh tone of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the cotton field of the Delta or on the Levee up St. Louis way, it was always the same. Till then, however, I had never heard this slur used by a more sophisticated Negro, or by any white man. I tried to convey this effect ... by introducing flat thirds and sevenths (now called blue notes) into my song, although its prevailing key was major ..., and I carried this device into my melody as well.[64] The 1912 publication of his "Memphis Blues" sheet music introduced the 12-bar blues to the world (although Gunther Schuller argues that it is not really a blues, but "more like a cakewalk"[65]). This composition, as well as his later "St. Louis Blues" and others, included the habanera rhythm,[66] and became jazz standards. Handy's music career began in the pre-jazz era, and contributed to the codification of jazz, through the publication of some of the first jazz sheet music. Within the context of Western harmony The blues form, ubiquitous in jazz, is characterized by specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues progression is the most common. The blue notes that, for expressive purposes, are sung or played flattened or gradually bent (minor 3rd to major 3rd) in relation to the pitch of the major scale, are also an important part of the sound. The blues were the key that opened up an entirely new approach to Western harmony, ultimately leading to a high level of harmonic complexity in jazz. New Orleans Main article: Dixieland The Bolden Band around 1905. The music of New Orleans had a profound effect on the creation of early jazz. Many early jazz performers played in venues throughout the city; the brothels and bars of the red-light district around Basin Street, called "Storyville"[67] was only one of numerous neighborhoods relevant to the early days of New Orleans jazz. In addition to dance bands, numerous marching bands played at lavish funerals, later called jazz funerals, arranged by the African-American and European American communities. The instruments used in marching bands and dance bands became the basic instruments of jazz: brass and reeds tuned in the European 12-tone scale and drums. Small bands mixing self-taught and well educated African-American musicians, many of whom came from the funeral-procession tradition of New Orleans, played a seminal role in the development and dissemination of early jazz, traveling throughout Black communities in the Deep South and, from around 1914 on, Afro-Creole and African-American musicians playing in vaudeville shows took jazz to western and northern US cities.[68] Syncopation The cornetist Buddy Bolden led a band often mentioned as one of the prime movers of the style later to be called "jazz". He played in New Orleans around 1895–1906, but became mentally ill and there are no recordings of him playing. Bolden's band is credited with creating the big four, the first syncopated bass drum pattern to deviate from the standard on-the-beat march.[69] As the example below shows, the second half of the big four pattern is the habanera rhythm. Buddy Bolden's "big four" pattern.[70] About this sound Play (help·info) Morton published "Jelly Roll Blues" in 1915, the first jazz work in print. Afro-Creole pianist Jelly Roll Morton began his career in Storyville. From 1904, he toured with vaudeville shows around southern cities, also playing in Chicago and New York. His "Jelly Roll Blues", which he composed around 1905, was published in 1915 as the first jazz arrangement in print, introducing more musicians to the New Orleans style.[71] Morton considered the tresillo/habanera (which he called the Spanish tinge) to be an essential ingredient of jazz.[72] In his own words: Now in one of my earliest tunes, "New Orleans Blues," you can notice the Spanish tinge. In fact, if you can't manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz.[49] Excerpt from Jelly Roll Morton's "New Orleans Blues" (c. 1902). The left hand plays the tresillo rhythm. The right hand plays variations on cinquillo. About this sound Play (help·info) Some early jazz musicians referred to their music as ragtime. Morton was a crucial innovator in the evolution from ragtime to jazz piano. He could perform pieces in either style.[73] Morton's solos were still close to ragtime, and were not merely improvisations over chord changes, as with later jazz. His use of the blues was of equal importance however. Swing Bottom: even duple subdivisions of the beat. Top: swung correlative—contrasting of duple and triple subdivisions of the beat. About this sound Play straight drum pattern (help·info) or About this sound Play swung pattern (help·info) Morton loosened ragtime's rigid rhythmic feeling, decreasing its embellishments, and employing a swing feeling.[74] Swing is the most important, and enduring African-based rhythmic technique used in jazz. An oft quoted definition of swing by Louis Armstrong is: "if you don't feel it, you'll never know it."[75] The New Harvard Dictionary of Music states that swing is: "An intangible rhythmic momentum in jazz ... Swing defies analysis; claims to its presence may inspire arguments." However, the dictionary does provide the useful description of triple subdivisions of the beat contrasted with duple subdivisions.[76] Swing superimposes six subdivisions of the beat over a basic pulse structure or four subdivisions. This aspect of swing is far more prevalent in African-American music than in Afro-Caribbean music. One aspect of swing, which is heard in more rhythmically complex Diaspora musics, places strokes in-between the triple and duple-pulse "grids".[77] New Orleans brass bands are a lasting influence contributing horn players to the world of professional jazz with the distinct sound of the city while helping black children escape poverty.[78] The leader of the Camelia Brass Band, D'Jalma Ganier, taught Louis Armstrong to play trumpet. Armstrong popularized the New Orleans style of trumpet playing, and then expanded it. Like Jelly Roll Morton, Armstrong is also credited with the abandonment of ragtime's stiffness, in favor of swung notes. Armstrong, perhaps more than any other musician, codified the rhythmic technique of swing in jazz, and broadened the jazz solo vocabulary.[79] The Original Dixieland Jass Band made the music's first recordings early in 1917, and their "Livery Stable Blues" became the earliest released jazz record.[80][81][82][83][84][85][86] That year numerous other bands made recordings featuring "jazz" in the title or band name, mostly ragtime or novelty records rather than jazz. In February 1918 James Reese Europe's "Hellfighters" infantry band took ragtime to Europe during World War I,[87] then on return recorded Dixieland standards including "Darktown Strutters' Ball".[88] Other regions In the northeastern United States, a "hot" style of playing ragtime had developed, notably James Reese Europe's symphonic Clef Club orchestra in New York which played a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall in 1912.[88][89] The Baltimore rag style of Eubie Blake influenced James P. Johnson's development of stride piano playing, in which the right hand plays the melody, while the left hand provides the rhythm and bassline.[90] In Ohio and elsewhere in the midwest, ragtime was the major influence until about 1919. Around 1912, when the four-string banjo and saxophone came in, the musicians began to improvise the melody line, but the harmony and rhythm remained unchanged. A contemporary account states that blues could only be heard in jazz, in the gut-bucket cabarets, which were generally looked down upon by the Black middle-class.[91] 1920s and 1930s The Jazz Age Main article: Jazz Age Jazz Me Blues MENU0:00 The Original Dixieland Jass Band performing "Jazz Me Blues", an example of a jazz piece from 1921. Problems playing this file? See media help. Trumpeter, bandleader and singer Louis Armstrong was a much-imitated innovator of early jazz. The King & Carter Jazzing Orchestra photographed in Houston, Texas, January 1921. Prohibition in the United States (from 1920 to 1933) banned the sale of alcoholic drinks, resulting in illicit speakeasies becoming lively venues of the "Jazz Age", an era when popular music included current dance songs, novelty songs, and show tunes. Jazz started to get a reputation as being immoral and many members of the older generations saw it as threatening the old values in culture and promoting the new decadent values of the Roaring 20s. Professor Henry van Dyke of Princeton University wrote "... it is not music at all. It's merely an irritation of the nerves of hearing, a sensual teasing of the strings of physical passion."[92] Even the media began to denigrate jazz. The New York Times took stories and altered headlines to pick at jazz. For instance, villagers used pots and pans in Siberia to scare off bears, and the newspaper stated that it was jazz that scared the bears away. Another story claims that jazz caused the death of a celebrated conductor. The actual cause of death was a fatal heart attack (natural cause).[92] From 1919 Kid Ory's Original Creole Jazz Band of musicians from New Orleans played in San Francisco and Los Angeles where in 1922 they became the first black jazz band of New Orleans origin to make recordings.[93][94] However, the main center developing the new "Hot Jazz" was Chicago, where King Oliver joined Bill Johnson. That year also saw the first recording by Bessie Smith, the most famous of the 1920s blues singers.[95] Bix Beiderbecke formed The Wolverines in 1924. Also in 1924 Louis Armstrong joined the Fletcher Henderson dance band as featured soloist for a year. The original New Orleans style was polyphonic, with theme variation, and simultaneous collective improvisation. Armstrong was a master of his hometown style, but by the time he joined Henderson's band, he was already a trailblazer in a new phase of jazz, with its emphasis on arrangements and soloists. Armstrong's solos went well beyond the theme-improvisation concept, and extemporized on chords, rather than melodies. According to Schuller, by comparison, the solos by Armstrong's bandmates (including a young Coleman Hawkins), sounded "stiff, stodgy," with "jerky rhythms and a grey undistinguished tone quality."[96] The following example shows a short excerpt of the straight melody of "Mandy, Make Up Your Mind" by George W. Meyer and Arthur Johnston (top), compared with Armstrong's solo improvisations (below) (recorded 1924).[97] The example approximates Armstrong's solo, as it doesn't convey his use of swing. Top: excerpt from the straight melody of "Mandy, Make Up Your Mind" by George W. Meyer & Arthur Johnston. Bottom: corresponding solo excerpt by Louis Armstrong (1924). Armstrong's solos were a significant factor in making jazz a true 20th-century language. After leaving Henderson's group, Armstrong formed his virtuosic Hot Five band, where he popularized scat singing.[98] Jelly Roll Morton recorded with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in an early mixed-race collaboration, then in 1926 formed his Red Hot Peppers. There was a larger market for jazzy dance music played by white orchestras, such as Jean Goldkette's orchestra and Paul Whiteman's orchestra. In 1924 Whiteman commissioned Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which was premiered by Whiteman's Orchestra. Other influential large ensembles included Fletcher Henderson's band, Duke Ellington's band (which opened an influential residency at the Cotton Club in 1927) in New York, and Earl Hines' Band in Chicago (who opened in The Grand Terrace Cafe there in 1928). All significantly influenced the development of big band-style swing jazz.[99] By 1930, the New Orleans-style ensemble was a relic, and jazz belonged to the world.[100] Swing Main articles: Swing music and 1930s in jazz Benny Goodman (1943) The 1930s belonged to popular swing big bands, in which some virtuoso soloists became as famous as the band leaders. Key figures in developing the "big" jazz band included bandleaders and arrangers Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw. Swing was also dance music. It was broadcast on the radio "live" nightly across America for many years especially by Earl Hines and his Grand Terrace Cafe Orchestra broadcasting[101] coast-to-coast from Chicago, well placed for "live" US time-zones. Although it was a collective sound, swing also offered individual musicians a chance to "solo" and improvise melodic, thematic solos which could at times be very complex and "important" music. Over time, social strictures regarding racial segregation began to relax in America: white bandleaders began to recruit black musicians and black bandleaders white ones. In the mid-1930s, Benny Goodman hired pianist Teddy Wilson, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and guitarist Charlie Christian to join small groups. An early 1940s style known as "jumping the blues" or jump blues used small combos, uptempo music, and blues chord progressions. Jump blues drew on boogie-woogie from the 1930s. Kansas City Jazz in the 1930s as exemplified by tenor saxophonist Lester Young marked the transition from big bands to the bebop influence of the 1940s. Jazz is a genre of music that originated in African-American communities during the late 19th and early 20th century. Jazz emerged in many parts of the United States of independent popular musical styles; linked by the common bonds of European American and African-American musical parentage with a performance orientation.[1] Jazz spans a range of music from ragtime to the present day—a period of over 100 years—and has proved to be very difficult to define. Jazz makes heavy use of improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation, and the swung note,[2] as well as aspects of European harmony, American popular music,[3] the brass band tradition, and African musical elements such as blue notes and ragtime.[1] A musical group that plays jazz is called a jazz band. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on different national, regional, and local musical cultures, giving rise to many distinctive styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, and it combined earlier brass band marches, French Quadrilles, biguine, ragtime, and blues with collective, polyphonic improvisation. Heavily arranged dance-oriented Swing big bands, Kansas City jazz, a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisational style and Gypsy jazz, a style that emphasized Musette waltzes, were important styles in the 1930s. Bebop emerged in the 1940s; it shifted jazz from danceable popular music towards a more challenging "musician's music" which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed in the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, linear melodic lines. Free jazz from the 1950s explored playing without regular meter, beat and formal structures. Hard bop emerged in the mid-1950s, introducing influences from rhythm and blues, gospel music, and blues, especially in the saxophone and piano playing. Modal jazz, which developed in the late 1950s, used the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Jazz-rock fusion developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments and rock's highly amplified stage sound. In the early 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called "smooth jazz" became successful and garnered significant radio airplay. Other jazz styles include Afro-Cuban jazz, West Coast jazz, ska jazz, Indo jazz, avant-garde jazz, soul jazz, chamber jazz, Latin jazz, jazz funk, loft jazz, punk jazz, acid jazz, ethno jazz, jazz rap, M-Base and nu jazz. Louis Armstrong, one of the most famous musicians in jazz, made this observation on the history of the music: "At one time they were calling it levee camp music, then in my day it was ragtime. When I got up North I commenced to hear about jazz, Chicago style, Dixieland, swing. All refinements of what we played in New Orleans... There ain't nothing new."[4] In a 1988 interview, jazz musician J. J. Johnson said: "Jazz is restless. It won't stay put and it never will."[5] |
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