Jazz

For other article subjects named jazz see jazz(disambiguation) .

Jazz is a musical art form, commonly characterized by blue notes , syncopation , swing , call andresponse , polyrhythms and improvisation . It has been called the first original art form to develop in the United States of America .

Jazz is rooted in West African cultural and musical expression and in African American music traditions, in folk blues and ragtime . Originating in African American communities near the beginning of the 20th century , by the 1920s it had gained international popularity. Since then, jazzhas had a profoundly pervasive influence on other musical styles worldwide.

Rather than being a single, narrowly definable style, in the early 21stcentury jazz is an ever-growing family of musical styles, many of which continue to develop.

World-renowned African-American composer, trumpeter and jazz historian Wynton Marsalis has called jazz "the musical expression of the nobility of the race."

History

Roots of jazz

At the root of jazz is the blues , the folk music of former African slaves in the U.S. South andtheir descendants, heavily influenced by West African cultural and musical traditions that evolved as black musicians migrated tothe cities.

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 theturn 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 ofdeparture; but, says "North by South, from Charleston to Harlem," a project of the National Endowment for theHumanities : "...a black musical spirit (involving rhythm and melody) was bursting out of the confines of European musicaltradition, even though the performers were using European styled instruments. This African-American feel for rephrasing melodiesand reshaping rhythm created the embryo from which many great black jazz musicians were to emerge." Many black musicians alsomade a living playing in small bands hired to lead funeral processions in the New Orleans African-American tradition. TheseAfricanized bands played a seminal role in the articulation and dissemination of early jazz. Traveling throughout blackcommunities in the Deep South and to northern big cities, these musician-pioneers were the Hand helping to fashion the music'showling, raucous, then free-wheeling, "raggedy," ragtime spirit, quickening it to amore eloquent, sophisticated, swing incarnation.

One unlikely player in this phenomenon was African-American minister Rev. Daniel J. Jenkins ofCharleston, South Carolina, who in 1891 established The Jenkins Orphanage for boys . In 1895, Jenkins instituted a rigorousmusic program in which the orphanage's young charges were taught the religious and secular music of the day, including overturesand marches. Precocious orphans and defiant runaways, some of whom played ragtime in bars and brothels, were delivered to theorphanage for "salvation" and rehabilitation and made their contributions, as well. In the fashion of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and Fisk University , the Jenkins Orphanage Bands traveled widely, earningmoney 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 onetraveling to England--again in the Fisk tradition. It would be hard to overstate the influence of the Jenkins Orphanage Bands onearly 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 .

For all its genius, early jazz, with its humble, folk roots, was the product of primarily self-taught musicians. But animpressive postbellum network of black-established and -operated institutions, schools and civic societies in both the North andthe South -- of which Jenkins' orphanage was only one -- plus widening mainstream opportunities for education, producedever-increasing numbers of young, formally trained African-American musicians, some of them schooled in classical Europeanmusical 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 lessonsin 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 ( racial segregation ) laws in Louisiana in the 1890s , which caused the expulsion from integrated bandsof numbers of talented, formally trained African-American musicians. The ability of these musically literate, black jazz men totranspose and then read what was in great part an improvisational art form became an invaluable element in the preservation anddissemination of musical innovation and increasingly important in the approaching big-band era.

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 tobe 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 ofAfrica, 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 theProtestant colonies African music was looked on as inherently "pagan" and was commonly surpressed, while in Louisiana it wasallowed. African musical celebrations held at least as late as the 1830s in New Orleans' "Congo Square" were attended byinterested whites as well, and some of their melodies and rhythms found their way into the compositions of white Creole composer LouisMoreau Gottschalk . In addition to the slave population, New Orleans also had North America's largest community of free peopleof color, some of whom prided themselves on their education and used European instruments to play both European music and theirown folk tunes.

By the end of the 19th century, the city was a regional center of Tin PanAlley 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 wereflamboyant trumpeter Buddy Bolden and the members of his band. Bolden isremembered 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 themelody" (improvising) for both dance and brass band settings, creating a sensation in the city and quickly being imitated by manyother musicians.

By the early years of the 20th century, travelers visiting New Orleans remarked on the local bands' ability to play ragtimewith a "pep" not heard elsewhere.

Characteristics which set the early New Orleans style apart from the ragtime music played elsewhere included freer rhythmicimprovisation. Ragtime musicians elsewhere would "rag" a tune by giving a syncopated rhythm and playing a note twice (at half thetime 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 ScottJoplin ). The New Orleans style players also adopted much of the vocabularity of the blues, including bent and blue notes andinstrumental "growls" and smears otherwise not used on European instruments.

Key figures in the early development of the new style were FreddieKeppard , a dark Creole of color who mastered Bolden's style; JoeOliver , whose style was even more deeply soaked in the blues than Bolden's; and KidOry , a trombonist who helped crystalize the style with his band hiring many of the city's best musicians. The new style alsospoke 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 almostall of two generations of early New Orleans white jazz musicians (and a number of non-whites as well).

20th century

By the turn of the century, American society had begun to shed the heavy-handed, straitlaced formality that had characterizedthe Victorian era. Public dance halls, clubs, and tea rooms opened in the cities; and black dances like the cakewalk and the shimmy were eventually adoptedby a white public. White audiences saw them first in vaudeville shows, thenperformed by exhibition dancers in the clubs.

Much of the music for this dancing was not jazz, but it was new, and the fashion for new music did involve enthusiasm for someidea of jazz. Popular composers like Irving Berlin made attempts at jazzywriting, though they seldom used the specific musical devices that were second nature to jazz players--the rhythms, the bluenotes. Nothing did more to popularize the idea of jazz 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 uppopular songs, as in the line, "If you want to hear the Swanee River played in ragtime...."

The national spread of "jass"

A number of educated "colored" New Orleanians left the South due to increasingly restrictive Jim Crow laws, at first headingmostly to California. One of these was musician Bill Johnson , who thought agood 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 CreoleOrchestra . A vaudeville promoter caught the band playing to ethusiasticcrowds in between rounds at a boxing match, and booked the band to tour the nation on the Orpheum Circuit . The members of theCreole Orchestra wrote their colleagues back home that hot New Orleans musicians could make much better money playing their styleup 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 someaccounts it was here that the New Orleans style was first popularly christened "jass." Back in New Orleans, it was called by suchnames as "ratty music", "hot music," or simply "ragtime" (Sidney Bechet often continued to call his music "ragtime" as late asthe 1950s). The style was so different from the ragtime and dance music of the rest of the nation, that a new name was needed todistinguish it. Apparently, the first band billed as playing "jass" was that of trombonist Tom Brown ; the term "jass" was rude sexual slang (relatedto the term " jism ").

One group that followed the Original Creoles and Tom Brown to Chicago went North in 1916 as "Stein's Dixie Jass Band." Theseveterans 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, theyhad 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 ofscratching out the "J"s on posters, which then, unfortunately, advertised "ass band"s.

1920s

Two disparate, but important, inventions of the second half of the nineteenth century quietly had set the stage for jazz tocapture the spotlight in American popular music by the 1920s. GeorgePullman '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 music accessible to virtually everyone.

Pullman's ingenious, rolling sleeping quarters provided employment to legions of African-American men, who criss-crossed thenation 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, regionalnews and a heightened sense of black pride to cities and towns wherever the railways reached. Many porters also sold "racerecords" to augment their income, speeding artistic innovations to musicians eager to hear the latest; spreading among thegeneral public an awareness of and appreciation for this rapidly evolving musical form; and, in the process, putting jazz on thefast track to first U.S., then worldwide, acclaim.

With Prohibition , the constitutional amendment that forbade the sale ofalcoholic beverages, the legal saloons and cabarets were closed; but in their place hundreds of speakeasies appeared, where patrons drank and were entertained by musicians. The presence of dance venues and thesubsequent increased demand for accomplished musicians meant more artists were able to support themselves by playingprofessionally. As a result, the numbers of professional musicians increased, and jazz--like all the popular music of the1920s--adopted the 4/4 beat of dance music.

Radio , came into its own in the 1920s, after the first public radio station in theU.S. began broadcasting in Pittsburgh in 1922. Radio stations proliferated at a remarkable rate, and with them, the popularity ofjazz. Jazz became associated with things modern, sophisticated and decadent. The second decade of the new century, a time oftechnological marvels, flappers , flashy automobiles, organized crime, bootlegwhiskey 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 Chicagowas the national hub of jazz. His band was the epitome of the New Orleans hot ensemble jazz style. Unfortunately, his band'srecordings 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 whatpreviously 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 anextraordinary improviser, capable of creating endless variations on a singlemelody. Armstrong also popularized scat singing , an improvisational vocaltechnique in which nonsensical syllables or words are sung or otherwise vocalized, often as part of a call-and-responseinteraction 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 firstnon-New Orleanian to make major original contributions to the development of jazz with his legato phrasing, bringing theinfluence of classical romanticism to jazz.

Paul Whiteman was the most commercially sucessful bandleader of the1920s, billing himself as "The King of Jazz." Sacrificing spontaneous improvisation for the sake of elaborate writtenarrangements, Whiteman claimed to be "making a lady out of jazz." Despite his hiring Bix and many of the other best white jazzmusicians 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 andarrangers of later decades.

Fletcher Henderson led the top African American band in NewYork 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 asignificant role in the development of the Big Band era in the following decade.

Young pianist and bandleader Duke Ellington first came to nationalattention in the late 1920s with his tight band making many recordings and radio broadcasts. Ellington's importance would grow inthe comming 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 (suchas Glenn Miller 's) left little space for improvisation. Most were somewhereinbetween, having some musicians adept at jazz solos playing with section men who kept the rhythm and arrangements going. Howevereven bands without jazz soloists adopted a sound owing much to the jazz vocabularity, for example sax sections playing whatsounded 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 sometimesdeemed the most prolific composer in American history, DukeEllington .

The influence of Louis Armstrong continued to grow. Musicians and bandleaders like Cab Calloway -- and, later, trumpeter DizzyGillespie and vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald , jumped on the scatbandwagon. Pop vocalists from Bing Crosby embraced his style of improvisingon the melody, and U.S. pop singers would seldom ever again be heard to render 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, wereable to go far beyond that. The Ellington band at the Cotton Club and thevarious Kansas City groups that became the Count Basieband date from this period.

Over time, social strictures regarding racial segregation began to relax in entertainment. White bandleaders, who tended tomold 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, thepopularity 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 known as "jumping the blues" anticipated rhythm and blues and rock and roll in some respects. Itinvolved the use of small combos instead of big bands and a concentration on up-tempo music using the familiar blues chordprogressions. One brief variation, known as boogie-woogie , used a doubledrhythm--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 with bebop in the 1940s , led by such distinctive stylists as the saxophonist Charlie Parker (known as "Yardbird" or "Bird") and Dizzy Gillespie . This marked a major shift from music for dancing towards a complex art form of the firstrank. Bop valued complex improvisations based on chordprogressions rather than melody . Hardbop was a move away from cool jazz , an attempt to make bop more appealing toaudiences by incorporating influences from soul music, gospel music, and the blues. Later, bebop and hard bop musicians, such astrumpeter Miles Davis , made more stylistic advances with modal jazz , where the harmonic structure of pieces was much more free than previouslyand frequently only implied by skeletal piano chords and bass parts. The instrumentalists then would improvise around a givenmode of the scale. Soul jazz was a development of hard bop which centred on the Hammond organ .

Latin jazz

Main article: Latin jazz

Latin jazz comes in two varieties: Brazilian and Afro-Cuban. Afro-Cuban jazz was played in the states directly after the bebop period, while Brazilianjazz became more popular in the 1960s and 1970s.

Brazilian jazz can befurther subdivided into two most popular types bossa nova and samba . Bossa is generally slow, played around 80 beats per minute or so, while Samba is played at120 beats per minute or faster. The music uses straight eighths, rather than swing eighths, and also uses difficult polyrhythms.Certain sambas and bossas are considered to be part of the modern day jazz players gig-bag.

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 musicians like Tito Puente,there were many Americans who were drawing upon Cuba's fascinating rhythms for their work.

Jazz and rock music: jazz fusion

Main article: Jazz fusion

With the growth of rock and roll in the 1960s , came the hybrid form jazz-rock fusion, again involving Davis, who in 1968 released the fusion albums In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew . Jazz at this stage was no longer center stage inpopular music, but was still breaking new ground and combining and recombining in different forms. Notable artists of the 1960sand 1970s jazz and fusion scene include: Carlos Santana , Chick Corea , Herbie Hancock , JohnMcLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra , Joni Mitchell , Sun Ra , Peter Skellern , Soft Machine , Caravan , Narada Michael Walden , who would later enjoy huge success as a music producer, Wayne Shorter , JacoPastorius , and Weather Report . The only band that has developedcontinuously from the late 1970s until the present day (2004) and has known an unusual popular reception for a jazz band is the Pat Metheny Group .

Recent developments

Since then, the stylistic diversity of jazz has shown no sign of diminishing, absorbing influences from such disparate sourcesas 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 or JohnZorn .

However, jazz's audience has shrunk dramatically and split somewhat, with a mainly older audience retaining an interest intraditional, "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, forming styles like acidjazz, which contains elements of 1970s disco , acid swing which combines 1940s stylebig-band sounds with faster, more aggressive rock-influenced drums and electric guitar.

Starting in the 1970s with artists like Keith Jarrett , Pat MethenyGroup, Jan Garbarek , Ralph Towner and Eberhard Weber , the ECM record label established a new chamber-music aesthetics, preferably on acoustic instruments, headingto a world-music concept, also sometimes referred to as the European leg of jazz.

Jazz enjoyed a resurgence in the 1980s with bands like Pigbag and Curiosity Killed the Cat achieving chart hits in Britain. Sade Adu became the definitive voice of smooth jazz.

In the 2000s we have seen "jazz" hit the pop charts with artists like Diana Krall and Norah Jones .These artists are light on the improvisation, a key characteristic of jazz. However, their instrumentation and rhythms aresimilar to other jazz music, and the label has stuck.

Improvisation

It is difficult to define precisely what jazz is; but, clearly, a key element of the form is improvisation. Improvisation hasbeen since early times an essential element in African and African-American music and is closely related to the pervasiveness ofcall and response in West African and African-American cultural expression. The exact form of improvisation has changed overtime. 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 upcounter lines to go with it. By the Swing era, big bands played carefully arranged sheet music, but the music often would callfor one member of the band to stand up and play a short, improvised solo. Finally, in Bebop, improvisation takes center stage, asalmost the entire focus of the music is on clever, improvised solos, with little attention given to the melody, or "head", ofeach piece.

When jazz musicians improvise, they usually use a chord progression - the series of chords that define the harmonic structureof a piece of music. For example, the Charlie Parker composition "Now's the Time" is 12 bars long and follows what jazz musicianscall a "twelve-bar blues" progression. After the melody, the rhythm section keeps playing the same 12 bars of music, while eachsoloist in turn improvises new melodies within the harmonic structure of the chords. It is possible to get a better idea of whatis happening musically by humming the melody while listening to the solo. In this manner, it becomes clearer that the improvisedmelody is closely related to the chord progression of the piece. Fitting an improvised melody to the harmony is known as "playingthe (chord) changes." As previously noted, later styles of jazz, such as modal jazz, abandoned the strict notion of a chordprogression, allowing the individual musicians to improvise more freely within the context of a given scale or mode. When apianist or guitarist improvises chords while a soloist is playing, it is called comping.

Styles

• Dixieland
• Swing
• Bebop
• Hard bop
• Soul jazz
• Acid jazz
• Free jazz
• Cool jazz
• Jazz-rock fusion
• Jazz Funk
• Modal jazz
• Nu jazz
• Latin jazz
• Smooth jazz

See also

• List of jazz musicians
• List of jazz bands
• List of jazz bassists
• List of jazz clarinetists
• List of jazz drummers
• List of jazz guitarists
• List of jazz organists
• List of jazz pianists
• List of jazz trombonists
• List of jazz trumpeters
• List of jazz festivals
• Jazz standard

External links

• The African-American influence on traditional marching band music ( http://northbysouth.kenyon.edu/1998/music/marches/marches.htm/)
• The Jenkins' Orphanage Bands ( http://northbysouth.kenyon.edu/1998/music/jenkins/jenkins-orphanage.htm/)
• The Influence of Africa: Syncopation, Call and Response and Timbre ( http://northbysouth.kenyon.edu/1998/music/rhythm/rhythm.htm/)
• The BBC's online jazz radio station ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/jazz/)
• NPR's online jazz station ( http://www.nprjazz.org/)
• Jazz Discography Project ( http://www.jazzdisco.org/)
• JazzFM online jazz station ( http://www.jazzfm.com/general/index.php)
• Jazz Institute Darmstadt - Europe's largest public research archive on jazz ( http://www.darmstadt.de/kultur/musik/jazz/us.htm)
• Smithsonian Jazz ( http://www.smithsonianjazz.org/)