music genre
A music genre is a conventional category that identifies some pieces of music as belonging to a shared tradition or set of conventions. It is to be distinguished from '' musical form'' and musical style, although in practice these terms are som ...
that originated in the
African-American
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ensl ...
Louisiana
Louisiana , group=pronunciation (French: ''La Louisiane'') is a state in the Deep South and South Central regions of the United States. It is the 20th-smallest by area and the 25th most populous of the 50 U.S. states. Louisiana is bord ...
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in
blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the ...
and
ragtime
Ragtime, also spelled rag-time or rag time, is a musical style that flourished from the 1890s to 1910s. Its cardinal trait is its syncopated or "ragged" rhythm. Ragtime was popularized during the early 20th century by composers such as Scott J ...
. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in
traditional
A tradition is a belief or behavior (folk custom) passed down within a group or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. A component of cultural expressions and folklore, common examples include holidays or ...
and
popular music
Popular music is music with wide appeal that is typically distributed to large audiences through the music industry. These forms and styles can be enjoyed and performed by people with little or no musical training.Popular Music. (2015). ''Fu ...
. Jazz is characterized by
swing
Swing or swinging may refer to:
Apparatus
* Swing (seat), a hanging seat that swings back and forth
* Pendulum, an object that swings
* Russian swing, a swing-like circus apparatus
* Sex swing, a type of harness for sexual intercourse
* Swing ri ...
and
blue note
In jazz and blues, a blue note is a note that—for expressive purposes—is sung or played at a slightly different pitch from standard. Typically the alteration is between a quartertone and a semitone, but this varies depending on the musical c ...
s, complex
chords
Chord may refer to:
* Chord (music), an aggregate of musical pitches sounded simultaneously
** Guitar chord a chord played on a guitar, which has a particular tuning
* Chord (geometry), a line segment joining two points on a curve
* Chord ( ...
polyrhythm
Polyrhythm is the simultaneous use of two or more rhythms that are not readily perceived as deriving from one another, or as simple manifestations of the same meter. The rhythmic layers may be the basis of an entire piece of music ( cross-rhyt ...
s and
improvisation
Improvisation is the activity of making or doing something not planned beforehand, using whatever can be found. Improvisation in the performing arts is a very spontaneous performance without specific or scripted preparation. The skills of impr ...
. Jazz has roots in European
harmony
In music, harmony is the process by which individual sounds are joined together or composed into whole units or compositions. Often, the term harmony refers to simultaneously occurring frequencies, pitches ( tones, notes), or chords. Howeve ...
and African rhythmic rituals.
As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French
quadrille
The quadrille is a dance that was fashionable in late 18th- and 19th-century Europe and its colonies. The quadrille consists of a chain of four to six '' contredanses''. Latterly the quadrille was frequently danced to a medley of opera melodie ...
s,
biguine
Biguine ( , ; gcf, label=Antillean Creole, bigin) is a rhythm-centric style of music that originated from Saint Pierre, Martinique in the 19th century. It fuses Bèlè and 19th-century French ballroom dance steps with African rhythms.
History
...
, ragtime and blues with collective
polyphonic
Polyphony ( ) is a type of musical texture consisting of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody, as opposed to a musical texture with just one voice, monophony, or a texture with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords, ...
improvisation
Improvisation is the activity of making or doing something not planned beforehand, using whatever can be found. Improvisation in the performing arts is a very spontaneous performance without specific or scripted preparation. The skills of impr ...
. But jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented
swing
Swing or swinging may refer to:
Apparatus
* Swing (seat), a hanging seat that swings back and forth
* Pendulum, an object that swings
* Russian swing, a swing-like circus apparatus
* Sex swing, a type of harness for sexual intercourse
* Swing ri ...
big band
A big band or jazz orchestra is a type of musical ensemble of jazz music that usually consists of ten or more musicians with four sections: saxophones, trumpets, trombones, and a rhythm section. Big bands originated during the early 1910s ...
s, Kansas City jazz (a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisational style), and
gypsy jazz
Gypsy jazz (also known as gypsy swing, jazz manouche or hot club-style jazz) is a style of small-group jazz originating from the Romani guitarist Jean "Django" Reinhardt (1910–53), in conjunction with the French swing violinist Stéphane G ...
(a style that emphasized
musette
Musette may refer to:
Music
* Musette de cour, or baroque musette, a musical instrument of the bagpipe family
* Musette bechonnet, a type of French bagpipe
* Musette bressane, a type of French bagpipe
* Oboe musette, or piccolo oboe, the smalles ...
waltzes) were the prominent styles.
Bebop
Bebop or bop is a style of jazz developed in the early-to-mid-1940s in the United States. The style features compositions characterized by a fast tempo, complex chord progressions with rapid chord changes and numerous changes of key, instrumen ...
emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging "musician's music" which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation.
Cool jazz
Cool jazz is a style of modern jazz music that arose in the United States after World War II. It is characterized by relaxed tempos and lighter tone, in contrast to the fast and complex bebop style. Cool jazz often employs formal arrangements an ...
developed near the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, linear melodic lines.
The mid-1950s saw the emergence of
hard bop
Hard bop is a subgenre of jazz that is an extension of bebop (or "bop") music. Journalists and record companies began using the term in the mid-1950s to describe a new current within jazz that incorporated influences from rhythm and blues, gospe ...
, which introduced influences from
rhythm and blues
Rhythm and blues, frequently abbreviated as R&B or R'n'B, is a genre of popular music that originated in African-American communities in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly ...
,
gospel
Gospel originally meant the Christian message (" the gospel"), but in the 2nd century it came to be used also for the books in which the message was set out. In this sense a gospel can be defined as a loose-knit, episodic narrative of the words a ...
, and blues to small groups and particularly to saxophone and piano.
Modal jazz
Modal jazz is jazz that makes use of musical modes, often modulating among them to accompany the chords instead of relying on one tonal center used across the piece. Although precedents exist, modal jazz was crystallized as a theory by compos ...
developed in the late 1950s, using the
mode
Mode ( la, modus meaning "manner, tune, measure, due measure, rhythm, melody") may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* '' MO''D''E (magazine)'', a defunct U.S. women's fashion magazine
* ''Mode'' magazine, a fictional fashion magazine which is ...
, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation, as did
free jazz
Free jazz is an experimental approach to jazz improvisation that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s when musicians attempted to change or break down jazz conventions, such as regular tempos, tones, and chord changes. Musicians duri ...
, which explored playing without regular meter, beat and formal structures. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with
rock music
Rock music is a broad genre of popular music that originated as " rock and roll" in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, developing into a range of different styles in the mid-1960s and later, particularly in the United States a ...
's rhythms, electric instruments, and highly amplified stage sound. In the early 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called
smooth jazz
Smooth jazz is a genre of commercially-oriented crossover jazz and easy listening music that became dominant in the mid 1970s to the early 1990s.
History
Smooth jazz is a commercially oriented, crossover jazz which came to prominence in the ...
became successful, garnering significant radio airplay. Other styles and genres abound in the 21st century, such as
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
and
Afro-Cuban jazz
Afro-Cuban jazz is the earliest form of Latin jazz. It mixes Afro-Cuban clave-based rhythms with jazz harmonies and techniques of improvisation. Afro-Cuban music has deep roots in African ritual and rhythm.{{cite web, Cuba: Son and Afro-Cuban ...
.
Etymology and definition
The origin of the word ''
jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a m ...
'' has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well documented. It is believed to be related to ''jasm'', a slang term dating back to 1860 meaning "pep, energy". The earliest written record of the word is in a 1912 article in the ''
Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the ...
'' in which a minor league baseball pitcher described a pitch which he called a "jazz ball" "because it wobbles and you simply can't do anything with it".
The use of the word in a musical context was documented as early as 1915 in the ''
Chicago Daily Tribune
The ''Chicago Tribune'' is a daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States, owned by Tribune Publishing. Founded in 1847, and formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" (a slogan for which WGN radio and television are ...
.'' Archived at Observatoire Musical Français,
Paris-Sorbonne University
Paris-Sorbonne University (also known as Paris IV; french: Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV) was a public research university in Paris, France, active from 1971 to 2017. It was the main inheritor of the Faculty of Humanities of the Universit ...
. Its first documented use in a musical context in New Orleans was in a November 14, 1916, ''
Times-Picayune
''The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate'' is an American newspaper published in New Orleans, Louisiana, since January 25, 1837. The current publication is the result of the 2019 acquisition of ''The Times-Picayune'' (itself a result of th ...
'' article about "jas bands". In an interview with
National Public Radio
National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other n ...
, musician
Eubie Blake
James Hubert "Eubie" Blake (February 7, 1887 – February 12, 1983) was an American pianist and composer of ragtime, jazz, and popular music. In 1921, he and his long-time collaborator Noble Sissle wrote '' Shuffle Along'', one of the first B ...
offered his recollections of the slang connotations of the term, saying: "When Broadway picked it up, they called it 'J-A-Z-Z'. It wasn't called that. It was spelled 'J-A-S-S'. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, you wouldn't say it in front of ladies." The
American Dialect Society
The American Dialect Society (ADS), founded in 1889, is a learned society "dedicated to the study of the English language in North America, and of other languages, or dialects of other languages, influencing it or influenced by it." The Society p ...
named it the Word of the 20th Century.
Jazz is difficult to define because it encompasses a wide range of music spanning a period of over 100 years, from
ragtime
Ragtime, also spelled rag-time or rag time, is a musical style that flourished from the 1890s to 1910s. Its cardinal trait is its syncopated or "ragged" rhythm. Ragtime was popularized during the early 20th century by composers such as Scott J ...
to rock-infused fusion. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions, such as European music history or African music. But critic
Joachim-Ernst Berendt
Joachim-Ernst Berendt (20 July 1922 in Berlin – 4 February 2000 in Hamburg) was a German music journalist, author and producer specialized on jazz.
Life
Berendt's father, Ernst Berendt, was a Protestant pastor belonging to the Confessing ...
argues that its terms of reference and its definition should be broader,Joachim E. Berendt. ''The Jazz Book: From Ragtime to Fusion and Beyond''. Translated by H. and B. Bredigkeit with Dan Morgenstern. 1981. Lawrence Hill Books, p. 371. defining jazz as a "form of
art music
Art music (alternatively called classical music, cultivated music, serious music, and canonic music) is music considered to be of high phonoaesthetic value. It typically implies advanced structural and theoretical considerationsJacques Siron, ...
which originated in the United States through the confrontation of the Negro with European music" and arguing that it differs from European music in that jazz has a "special relationship to time defined as 'swing. Jazz 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".
A broader definition that encompasses different eras of jazz has been proposed by Travis Jackson: "it is music that includes qualities such as swing, improvising, group interaction, developing an 'individual voice', and being open to different musical possibilities". Krin Gibbard argued that "jazz is a construct" which designates "a number of musics with enough in common to be understood as part of a coherent tradition".
Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra from 1923 through the rest of his life. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Ellington was bas ...
, one of jazz's most famous figures, said, "It's all music."
Elements
Improvisation
Although jazz is considered difficult to define, in part because it contains many subgenres,
improvisation
Improvisation is the activity of making or doing something not planned beforehand, using whatever can be found. Improvisation in the performing arts is a very spontaneous performance without specific or scripted preparation. The skills of impr ...
is one of its defining elements. The centrality of improvisation is attributed to the influence of earlier forms of music such as
blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the ...
, a form of folk music which arose in part from the
work song
A work song is a piece of music closely connected to a form of work, either sung while conducting a task (usually to coordinate timing) or a song linked to a task which might be a connected narrative, description, or protest song.
Definitions and ...
s and
field holler
The field holler or field call is mostly a historical type of vocal work song sung by field slaves in the United States (and later by African American forced laborers accused of violating vagrancy laws) to accompany their tasked work, to commun ...
s of African-American slaves on plantations. These work songs were commonly structured around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, but early blues was also improvisational.
Classical music
Classical music generally refers to the art music of the Western world, considered to be distinct from Western folk music or popular music traditions. It is sometimes distinguished as Western classical music, as the term "classical music" al ...
performance is evaluated more by its fidelity to the musical score, with less attention given to interpretation, ornamentation, and accompaniment. The classical performer's goal is to play the composition as it was written. In contrast, jazz is often characterized by the product of interaction and collaboration, placing less value on the contribution of the composer, if there is one, and more on the performer. The jazz performer interprets a tune in individual ways, never playing the same composition twice. Depending on the performer's mood, experience, and interaction with band members or audience members, the performer may change melodies, harmonies, and time signatures.
In early
Dixieland
Dixieland jazz, also referred to as traditional jazz, hot jazz, or simply Dixieland, is a style of jazz based on the music that developed in New Orleans at the start of the 20th century. The 1917 recordings by the Original Dixieland Jass Band ...
, a.k.a. New Orleans jazz, performers took turns playing melodies and improvising countermelodies. In the
swing
Swing or swinging may refer to:
Apparatus
* Swing (seat), a hanging seat that swings back and forth
* Pendulum, an object that swings
* Russian swing, a swing-like circus apparatus
* Sex swing, a type of harness for sexual intercourse
* Swing ri ...
era of the 1920s–'40s,
big bands
A big band or jazz orchestra is a type of musical ensemble of jazz music that usually consists of ten or more musicians with four sections: saxophones, trumpets, trombones, and a rhythm section. Big bands originated during the early 1910s and ...
relied more on arrangements which were written or learned by ear and memorized. Soloists improvised within these arrangements. In the
bebop
Bebop or bop is a style of jazz developed in the early-to-mid-1940s in the United States. The style features compositions characterized by a fast tempo, complex chord progressions with rapid chord changes and numerous changes of key, instrumen ...
era of the 1940s, big bands gave way to small groups and minimal arrangements in which the melody was stated briefly at the beginning and most of the piece was improvised.
Modal jazz
Modal jazz is jazz that makes use of musical modes, often modulating among them to accompany the chords instead of relying on one tonal center used across the piece. Although precedents exist, modal jazz was crystallized as a theory by compos ...
abandoned
chord progressions
In a musical composition, a chord progression or harmonic progression (informally chord changes, used as a plural) is a succession of chords. Chord progressions are the foundation of harmony in Western musical tradition from the common practice ...
to allow musicians to improvise even more. In many forms of jazz, a soloist is supported by a
rhythm section
A rhythm section is a group of musicians within a music ensemble or band that provides the underlying rhythm, harmony and pulse of the accompaniment, providing a rhythmic and harmonic reference and "beat" for the rest of the band.
The rhyth ...
of one or more chordal instruments (piano, guitar), double bass, and drums. The rhythm section plays chords and rhythms that outline the composition structure and complement the soloist. In
avant-garde
The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretica ...
and
free jazz
Free jazz is an experimental approach to jazz improvisation that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s when musicians attempted to change or break down jazz conventions, such as regular tempos, tones, and chord changes. Musicians duri ...
, the separation of soloist and band is reduced, and there is license, or even a requirement, for the abandoning of chords, scales, and meters.
Traditionalism
Since the emergence of bebop, forms of jazz that are commercially oriented or influenced by popular music have been criticized. According to Bruce Johnson, there has always been a "tension between jazz as a commercial music and an art form". Regarding the
Dixieland jazz
Dixieland jazz, also referred to as traditional jazz, hot jazz, or simply Dixieland, is a style of jazz based on the music that developed in New Orleans at the start of the 20th century. The 1917 recordings by the Original Dixieland Jass Band ...
revival of the 1940s, black musicians rejected it as being shallow nostalgia entertainment for white audiences.Baraka, Amiri (1999). ''Blues People: Negro Music in White America''. Harper Perennial. .Davis, Miles & Troupe, Quincy (1990). Miles: The Autobiography. Simon & Schuster. . On the other hand, traditional jazz enthusiasts have dismissed bebop, free jazz, and jazz fusion as forms of debasement and betrayal. An alternative view is that jazz can absorb and transform diverse musical styles. by Andrew Gilbert, ''
Metro Times
The ''Detroit Metro Times'' is a progressive alternative weekly located in Detroit, Michigan. It is the largest circulating weekly newspaper in the metro Detroit area.
History and content
Supported entirely by advertising, it is distribute ...
'', December 23, 1998. By avoiding the creation of norms, jazz allows avant-garde styles to emerge.
Diversity in jazz
Jazz and race
For some African Americans, jazz has drawn attention to African-American contributions to culture and history. For others, jazz is a reminder of "an oppressive and racist society and restrictions on their artistic visions".
Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka (born Everett Leroy Jones; October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014), previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays and music criticism. He was the author of numerous bo ...
argues that there is a "white jazz" genre that expresses whiteness. White jazz musicians appeared in the midwest and in other areas throughout the U.S. Papa Jack Laine, who ran the Reliance band in New Orleans in the 1910s, was called "the father of white jazz". The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, whose members were white, were the first jazz group to record, and
Bix Beiderbecke
Leon Bismark "Bix" Beiderbecke (March 10, 1903 – August 6, 1931) was an American jazz cornetist, pianist and composer.
Beiderbecke was one of the most influential jazz soloists of the 1920s, a cornet player noted for an inventive lyrical app ...
was one of the most prominent jazz soloists of the 1920s. The Chicago Style was developed by white musicians such as
Eddie Condon
Albert Edwin Condon (November 16, 1905 – August 4, 1973) was an American jazz banjoist, guitarist, and bandleader. A leading figure in Chicago jazz, he also played piano and sang.
Early years
Condon was born in Goodland, Indiana, the son of J ...
Dave Tough
Dave Tough (April 26, 1907 – December 9, 1948) was an American jazz drummer associated with Dixieland and swing jazz in the 1930s and 1940s.
Biography
Born in Oak Park, Illinois, United States, Tough was a friend of Bud Freeman, who was p ...
. Others from Chicago such as
Benny Goodman
Benjamin David Goodman (May 30, 1909 – June 13, 1986) was an American clarinetist and bandleader known as the "King of Swing".
From 1936 until the mid-1940s, Goodman led one of the most popular swing big bands in the United States. His conc ...
and
Gene Krupa
Eugene Bertram Krupa (January 15, 1909 – October 16, 1973), known as Gene Krupa, was an American jazz drummer, bandleader and composer who performed with energy and showmanship. His drum solo on Benny Goodman's 1937 recording of " Sing, Sing, ...
became leading members of swing during the 1930s. Many bands included both black and white musicians. These musicians helped change attitudes toward race in the U.S.
Roles of women
Female jazz performers and composers have contributed to jazz throughout its history. Although
Betty Carter
Betty Carter (born Lillie Mae Jones; May 16, 1929 – September 26, 1998) was an American jazz singer known for her improvisational technique, scatting and other complex musical abilities that demonstrated her vocal talent and imaginative inte ...
,
Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917June 15, 1996) was an American jazz singer, sometimes referred to as the "First Lady of Song", "Queen of Jazz", and "Lady Ella". She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing, timing, in ...
,
Adelaide Hall
Adelaide Louise Hall (20 October 1901 – 7 November 1993) was an American-born UK-based jazz singer and entertainer. Her long career spanned more than 70 years from 1921 until her death and she was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Hal ...
,
Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan; April 7, 1915 – July 17, 1959) was an American jazz and swing music singer. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and music partner, Lester Young, Holiday had an innovative influence on jazz music and pop s ...
,
Peggy Lee
Norma Deloris Egstrom (May 26, 1920 – January 21, 2002), known professionally as Peggy Lee, was an American jazz and popular music singer, songwriter, composer, and actress, over a career spanning seven decades. From her beginning as a vocalis ...
Anita O'Day
Anita Belle Colton (October 18, 1919 – November 23, 2006), known professionally as Anita O'Day, was an American jazz singer and self proclaimed “song stylist” widely admired for her sense of rhythm and dynamics, and her early big band app ...
,
Dinah Washington
Dinah Washington (born Ruth Lee Jones; August 29, 1924 – December 14, 1963) was an American singer and pianist, who has been cited as "the most popular black female recording artist of the 1950s songs". Primarily a jazz vocalist, she performe ...
, and
Ethel Waters
Ethel Waters (October 31, 1896 – September 1, 1977) was an American singer and actress. Waters frequently performed jazz, swing, and pop music on the Broadway stage and in concerts. She began her career in the 1920s singing blues. Her no ...
were recognized for their vocal talent, less familiar were bandleaders, composers, and instrumentalists such as pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong, trumpeter
Valaida Snow
Valaida Snow (June 2, 1904. Other presumed birth years are 1900, 1901, 1903, 1905, and 1907 – May 30, 1956) was an American jazz musician and entertainer who performed internationally. She was also known as "Little Louis" and "Queen of the Tr ...
Dorothy Fields
Dorothy Fields (July 15, 1904 – March 28, 1974) was an American librettist and lyricist. She wrote over 400 songs for Broadway musicals and films. Her best-known pieces include "The Way You Look Tonight" (1936), "A Fine Romance" (1936), " On t ...
. Women began playing instruments in jazz in the early 1920s, drawing particular recognition on piano.
When male jazz musicians were drafted during World War II, many
all-female bands An all-female band is a musical group in popular music that is exclusively composed of female musicians. This is distinct from a girl group, in which the female members are solely vocalists, though this terminology is not universally followed. While ...
replaced them.The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, which was founded in 1937, was a popular band that became the first all-female integrated band in the U.S. and the first to travel with the USO, touring Europe in 1945. Women were members of the big bands of
Woody Herman
Woodrow Charles Herman (May 16, 1913 – October 29, 1987) was an American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, singer, and big band leader. Leading groups called "The Herd", Herman came to prominence in the late 1930s and was active until his dea ...
and
Gerald Wilson
Gerald Stanley Wilson (September 4, 1918 – September 8, 2014) was an American jazz trumpeter, big band bandleader, composer, arranger, and educator. Born in Mississippi, he was based in Los Angeles from the early 1940s. In addition to being a ...
. Beginning in the 1950s, many women jazz instrumentalists were prominent, some sustaining long careers. Some of the most distinctive improvisers, composers, and bandleaders in jazz have been women. Trombonist Melba Liston is acknowledged as the first female horn player to work in major bands and to make a real impact on jazz, not only as a musician but also as a respected composer and arranger, particularly through her collaborations with Randy Weston from the late 1950s into the 1990s.
Jews in jazz
Jewish Americans played a significant role in jazz. As jazz spread, it developed to encompass many different cultures, and the work of Jewish composers in
Tin Pan Alley
Tin Pan Alley was a collection of History of music publishing, music publishers and songwriters in New York City that dominated the American popular music, popular music of the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It origin ...
helped shape the many different sounds that jazz came to incorporate.
Jewish Americans were able to thrive in Jazz because of the probationary whiteness that they were allotted at the time. George Bornstein wrote that African Americans were sympathetic to the plight of the Jewish American and vice versa. As disenfranchised minorities themselves, Jewish composers of popular music saw themselves as natural allies with African Americans.
'' The Jazz Singer'' with
Al Jolson
Al Jolson (born Eizer Yoelson; June 9, 1886 – October 23, 1950) was a Lithuanian-American Jewish singer, comedian, actor, and vaudevillian. He was one of the United States' most famous and highest-paid stars of the 1920s, and was self-billed ...
is one example of how Jewish Americans were able to bring jazz, music that African Americans developed, into popular culture.
Benny Goodman
Benjamin David Goodman (May 30, 1909 – June 13, 1986) was an American clarinetist and bandleader known as the "King of Swing".
From 1936 until the mid-1940s, Goodman led one of the most popular swing big bands in the United States. His conc ...
was a vital Jewish American to the progression of Jazz. Goodman was the leader of a racially integrated band named King of Swing. His jazz concert in the
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall ( ) is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. It is at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east side of Seventh Avenue between West 56th and 57th Streets. Designed by architect William Burnet Tuthill and built ...
in 1938 was the first ever to be played there. The concert was described by Bruce Eder as "the single most important jazz or popular music concert in history".
Origins and early history
Jazz originated in the late-19th to early-20th century. It developed out of many forms of music, including
blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the ...
,
spirituals
Spirituals (also known as Negro spirituals, African American spirituals, Black spirituals, or spiritual music) is a genre of Christian music that is associated with Black Americans, which merged sub-Saharan African cultural heritage with the ex ...
,
hymns
A hymn is a type of song, and partially synonymous with devotional song, specifically written for the purpose of adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification. The word ''hymn'' ...
,
marches
In medieval Europe, a march or mark was, in broad terms, any kind of borderland, as opposed to a national "heartland". More specifically, a march was a border between realms or a neutral buffer zone under joint control of two states in which diff ...
,
vaudeville
Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment born in France at the end of the 19th century. A vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition ...
song,
ragtime
Ragtime, also spelled rag-time or rag time, is a musical style that flourished from the 1890s to 1910s. Its cardinal trait is its syncopated or "ragged" rhythm. Ragtime was popularized during the early 20th century by composers such as Scott J ...
, and
dance music
Dance music is music composed specifically to facilitate or accompany dancing. It can be either a whole musical piece or part of a larger musical arrangement. In terms of performance, the major categories are live dance music and recorded da ...
. It also incorporated interpretations of American and European classical music, entwined with African and slave folk songs and the influences of West African culture. 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.
Blended African and European music sensibilities
By the 18th century, slaves in the New Orleans area gathered socially at a special market, in an area which later became known as Congo Square, famous for its African dances.
By 1866, the
Atlantic slave trade
The Atlantic slave trade, transatlantic slave trade, or Euro-American slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and ...
had brought nearly 400,000 Africans to North America. The slaves came largely from
West Africa
West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of Africa. The United Nations defines Western Africa as the 16 countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali ...
and the greater
Congo River
The Congo River ( kg, Nzâdi Kôngo, french: Fleuve Congo, pt, Rio Congo), formerly also known as the Zaire River, is the second longest river in Africa, shorter only than the Nile, as well as the second largest river in the world by discharg ...
basin and brought strong musical traditions with them. The African traditions primarily use a single-line melody and call-and-response pattern, and the rhythms have a counter-metric structure and reflect African speech patterns.
An 1885 account says that they were making strange music (Creole) on an equally strange variety of 'instruments'—washboards, washtubs, jugs, boxes beaten with sticks or bones and a drum made by stretching skin over a flour-barrel.
Lavish festivals with African-based dances to drums were organized on Sundays at Place Congo, or
Congo Square
Congo Square (french: Place Congo) is an open space, now within Louis Armstrong Park, which is located in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, Louisiana, just across Rampart Street north of the French Quarter. The square is famous for its ...
, in New Orleans until 1843. There are historical accounts of other music and dance gatherings elsewhere in the southern United States. Robert Palmer said of 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 ccountsfrom the southeastern states and Louisiana dating from the period 1820–1850. Some of the earliest ississippiDelta 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.
Another influence came from the harmonic style of
hymn
A hymn is a type of song, and partially synonymous with devotional song, specifically written for the purpose of adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification. The word ''hymn ...
s of the church, which black slaves had learned and incorporated into their own music as
spirituals
Spirituals (also known as Negro spirituals, African American spirituals, Black spirituals, or spiritual music) is a genre of Christian music that is associated with Black Americans, which merged sub-Saharan African cultural heritage with the ex ...
. The
origins of the blues
Little is known about the exact origin of the music now known as the blues.Southern, p. 332 No specific year can be cited as the origin of the blues, largely because the style evolved over a long period and existed in approaching its modern form ...
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
In music, homophony (;, Greek: ὁμόφωνος, ''homóphōnos'', from ὁμός, ''homós'', "same" and φωνή, ''phōnē'', "sound, tone") is a texture in which a primary part is supported by one or more additional strands that flesh ...
, rural blues and early jazz "was largely based on concepts of
heterophony
In music, heterophony is a type of texture characterized by the simultaneous variation of a single melodic line. Such a texture can be regarded as a kind of complex monophony in which there is only one basic melody, but realized at the same time ...
".
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
The cakewalk was a dance developed from the "prize walks" (dance contests with a cake awarded as the prize) held in the mid-19th century, generally at get-togethers on Black slave plantations before and after emancipation in the Southern Uni ...
dances. In turn, European American
minstrel show
The minstrel show, also called minstrelsy, was an American form of racist theatrical entertainment developed in the early 19th century.
Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music performances that depicted people spec ...
performers in
blackface
Blackface is a form of theatrical makeup used predominantly by non-Black people to portray a caricature of a Black person.
In the United States, the practice became common during the 19th century and contributed to the spread of racial stereo ...
popularized the music internationally, combining
syncopation
In music, syncopation is a variety of rhythms played together to make a piece of music, making part or all of a tune or piece of music off-beat. More simply, syncopation is "a disturbance or interruption of the regular flow of rhythm": a "place ...
with European harmonic accompaniment. In the mid-1800s the white New Orleans composer
Louis Moreau Gottschalk
Louis Moreau Gottschalk (May 8, 1829 – December 18, 1869) was an American composer and pianist, best known as a virtuoso performer of his own romantic piano works. He spent most of his working career outside the United States.
Life and c ...
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
The
Black Codes
The Black Codes, sometimes called the Black Laws, were laws which governed the conduct of African Americans (free and freed blacks). In 1832, James Kent wrote that "in most of the United States, there is a distinction in respect to political p ...
outlawed drumming by slaves, which meant that African drumming traditions were not preserved in North America, unlike in Cuba, Haiti, and elsewhere in the Caribbean. African-based rhythmic patterns were retained in the United States in large part through "body rhythms" such as stomping, clapping, and patting juba dancing..
In the opinion of jazz historian
Ernest Borneman Ernst Wilhelm Julius Bornemann (12 April 1915 – 4 June 1995), also known by his self-chosen anglicisation Ernest Borneman, was a German crime writer, filmmaker, anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, psychoanalyst, sexologist, communist agitator, ...
, what preceded New Orleans jazz before 1890 was "Afro-Latin music", similar to what was played in the Caribbean at the time. A three-stroke pattern known in Cuban music as ''tresillo'' is a fundamental rhythmic figure heard in many different slave musics of the Caribbean, as well as the
Afro-Caribbean
Afro-Caribbean people or African Caribbean are Caribbean people who trace their full or partial ancestry to Sub-Saharan Africa. The majority of the modern African-Caribbeans descend from Africans taken as slaves to colonial Caribbean via the tr ...
folk dances performed in New Orleans
Congo Square
Congo Square (french: Place Congo) is an open space, now within Louis Armstrong Park, which is located in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, Louisiana, just across Rampart Street north of the French Quarter. The square is famous for its ...
and Gottschalk's compositions (for example "Souvenirs From Havana" (1859)). Tresillo (shown below) is the most basic and most prevalent duple-pulse rhythmic
cell
Cell most often refers to:
* Cell (biology), the functional basic unit of life
Cell may also refer to:
Locations
* Monastic cell, a small room, hut, or cave in which a religious recluse lives, alternatively the small precursor of a monastery ...
African Diaspora
The African diaspora is the worldwide collection of communities descended from native Africans or people from Africa, predominantly in the Americas. The term most commonly refers to the descendants of the West and Central Africans who were ...
.
:
\new RhythmicStaff
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. "By and large the simpler African rhythmic patterns survived in jazz ... because they could be adapted more readily to European rhythmic conceptions," jazz historian
Gunther Schuller
Gunther Alexander Schuller (November 22, 1925June 21, 2015) was an American composer, conductor, horn player, author, historian, educator, publisher, and jazz musician.
Biography and works
Early years
Schuller was born in Queens, New York City ...
observed. "Some survived, others were discarded as the Europeanization progressed."
In the post-Civil War period (after 1865), African Americans were able to obtain surplus military bass drums, snare drums and fifes, and an original African-American drum and fife music emerged, featuring tresillo and related syncopated rhythmic figures. This was a drumming tradition that was distinct from its Caribbean counterparts, expressing a uniquely African-American sensibility. "The snare and bass drummers played syncopated cross-rhythms," observed the writer Robert Palmer, speculating that "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."
contradanza
''Contradanza'' (also called ''contradanza criolla'', ''danza'', ''danza criolla'', or ''habanera'') is the Spanish and Spanish-American version of the contradanse, which was an internationally popular style of music and dance in the 18th centu ...
) gained international popularity. Musicians from
Havana
Havana (; Spanish: ''La Habana'' ) is the capital and largest city of Cuba. The heart of the La Habana Province, Havana is the country's main port and commercial center.
and New Orleans would take the twice-daily ferry between both cities to perform, and the habanera quickly took root in the musically fertile Crescent City.
John Storm Roberts
John Storm Roberts (February 24, 1936 – November 29, 2009) was a British-born, U.S.-based ethnomusicologist, writer and record producer. He is best known as the co-founder of Original Music, a mail-order company that distributed world music bo ...
states that the musical genre habanera "reached the U.S. twenty years before the first rag was published." For the more than quarter-century in which the
cakewalk
The cakewalk was a dance developed from the "prize walks" (dance contests with a cake awarded as the prize) held in the mid-19th century, generally at get-togethers on Black slave plantations before and after emancipation in the Southern Uni ...
,
ragtime
Ragtime, also spelled rag-time or rag time, is a musical style that flourished from the 1890s to 1910s. Its cardinal trait is its syncopated or "ragged" rhythm. Ragtime was popularized during the early 20th century by composers such as Scott J ...
, and proto-jazz were forming and developing, the habanera was a consistent part of African-American popular music.
Habaneras were widely available as sheet music and were the first written music which was rhythmically based on an African motif (1803). From the perspective of African-American music, the "habanera rhythm" (also known as "congo"), "tango-congo", or
tango
Tango is a partner dance and social dance that originated in the 1880s along the Río de la Plata, the natural border between Argentina and Uruguay. The tango was born in the impoverished port areas of these countries as the result of a combina ...
. can be thought of as a combination of tresillo and the
backbeat
In music and music theory, the beat is the basic unit of time, the pulse (regularly repeating event), of the ''mensural level'' (or ''beat level''). The beat is often defined as the rhythm listeners would tap their toes to when listening to a p ...
. 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.
:
\new Staff <<
\relative c'
>>
New Orleans native
Louis Moreau Gottschalk
Louis Moreau Gottschalk (May 8, 1829 – December 18, 1869) was an American composer and pianist, best known as a virtuoso performer of his own romantic piano works. He spent most of his working career outside the United States.
Life and c ...
's piano piece "Ojos Criollos (Danse Cubaine)" (1860) was influenced by the composer's studies in Cuba: the habanera rhythm is clearly heard in the left hand. In Gottschalk's symphonic work "A Night in the Tropics" (1859), the tresillo variant cinquillo appears extensively. The figure was later used by Scott Joplin and other ragtime composers.
:
\new RhythmicStaff
Comparing the music of New Orleans with the music of Cuba,
Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Learson Marsalis (born October 18, 1961) is an American trumpeter, composer, teacher, and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. He has promoted classical and jazz music, often to young audiences. Marsalis has won nine Grammy Award ...
observes that tresillo is the New Orleans "clavé", a Spanish word meaning "code" or "key", as in the key to a puzzle, or mystery. Although 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
Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe (later Morton; c. September 20, 1890 – July 10, 1941), known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton, was an American ragtime and jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer. Morton was jazz's first arranger, proving that a gen ...
called the rhythmic figure the Spanish tinge and considered it an essential ingredient of jazz.Morton, Jelly Roll (1938: Library of Congress Recording) ''The Complete Recordings By Alan Lomax''.
Ragtime
The abolition of
slavery
Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...
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 show
The minstrel show, also called minstrelsy, was an American form of racist theatrical entertainment developed in the early 19th century.
Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music performances that depicted people spec ...
s, and in
vaudeville
Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment born in France at the end of the 19th century. A vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition ...
, during which time many marching bands were formed. Black pianists played in bars, clubs, and brothels, as
ragtime
Ragtime, also spelled rag-time or rag time, is a musical style that flourished from the 1890s to 1910s. Its cardinal trait is its syncopated or "ragged" rhythm. Ragtime was popularized during the early 20th century by composers such as Scott J ...
developed.
Ragtime appeared as sheet music, popularized by African-American musicians such as the entertainer
Ernest Hogan
Ernest Hogan (born Ernest Reuben Crowdus; 1865 – May 20, 1909) was the first African-American entertainer to produce and star in a Broadway show (''The Oyster Man'' in 1907) and helped to popularize the musical genre of ragtime.
A native of ...
, whose hit songs appeared in 1895. Two years later,
Vess Ossman
Sylvester Louis "Vess" Ossman (August 21, 1868 – December 7, 1923) was a leading five-string banjoist and popular recording artist of the early 20th century.
Biography
Sylvester Louis Ossman was born in Hudson, New York, and made his firs ...
recorded a medley of these songs as a
banjo
The banjo is a stringed instrument with a thin membrane stretched over a frame or cavity to form a resonator. The membrane is typically circular, and usually made of plastic, or occasionally animal skin. Early forms of the instrument were fashi ...
solo known as "Rag Time Medley". Also in 1897, the white composer William Krell published his " Mississippi Rag" as the first written piano instrumental ragtime piece, and
Tom Turpin
Thomas Million John Turpin (November 18, 1871 – August 13, 1922) was an African American composer of ragtime music.
Tom Turpin was born in Savannah, Georgia, a son of John L. Turpin and Lulu Waters Turpin. In his early twenties he opened a sal ...
published his "Harlem Rag", the first rag published by an African-American.
Classically trained pianist
Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin ( 1868 – April 1, 1917) was an American composer and pianist. Because of the fame achieved for his ragtime compositions, he was dubbed the "King of Ragtime." During his career, he wrote over 40 original ragtime pieces, one ra ...
produced his " Original Rags" in 1898 and, in 1899, had an international hit with "
Maple Leaf Rag
The "Maple Leaf Rag" (copyright registered on September 18, 1899) is an early ragtime musical composition for piano composed by Scott Joplin. It was one of Joplin's early works, and became the model for ragtime compositions by subsequent compos ...
march
March is the third month of the year in both the Julian and Gregorian calendars. It is the second of seven months to have a length of 31 days. In the Northern Hemisphere, the meteorological beginning of spring occurs on the first day of March ...
with four parts that feature recurring themes and a bass line with copious
seventh chord
A seventh chord is a chord consisting of a triad plus a note forming an interval of a seventh above the chord's root. When not otherwise specified, a "seventh chord" usually means a dominant seventh chord: a major triad together with a mi ...
s. Its structure was the basis for many other rags, and the
syncopation
In music, syncopation is a variety of rhythms played together to make a piece of music, making part or all of a tune or piece of music off-beat. More simply, syncopation is "a disturbance or interruption of the regular flow of rhythm": a "place ...
s in the right hand, especially in the transition between the first and second strain, were novel at the time. The last four measures of Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899) are shown below.
:
African-based rhythmic patterns such as tresillo and its variants, the habanera rhythm and cinquillo, are heard in the ragtime compositions of Joplin and Turpin. Joplin's "
Solace
Consolation, consolement, and solace are terms referring to psychological comfort given to someone who has suffered severe, upsetting loss, such as the death of a loved one. It is typically provided by expressing shared regret for that loss and ...
" (1909) is generally considered to be in the habanera genre:Manuel, Peter (2009: 69). ''Creolizing Contradance in the Caribbean''. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. both of the pianist's hands play in a syncopated fashion, completely abandoning any sense of a
march
March is the third month of the year in both the Julian and Gregorian calendars. It is the second of seven months to have a length of 31 days. In the Northern Hemisphere, the meteorological beginning of spring occurs on the first day of March ...
rhythm.
Ned Sublette
Ned Sublette (born 1951 in Lubbock, Texas) is an American composer, musician, record producer, musicologist, historian, and author. Sublette studied Spanish Classical Guitar with Hector Garcia at the University of New Mexico and with Emilio P ...
postulates that the tresillo/habanera rhythm "found its way into ragtime and the cakewalk," whilst Roberts suggests that "the habanera influence may have been part of what freed black music from ragtime's European bass".
Blues
African genesis
Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre, which originated in
African-American
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ensl ...
communities of primarily the
Deep South
The Deep South or the Lower South is a cultural and geographic subregion in the Southern United States. The term was first used to describe the states most dependent on plantations and slavery prior to the American Civil War. Following the wa ...
of the United States at the end of the 19th century from their
spirituals
Spirituals (also known as Negro spirituals, African American spirituals, Black spirituals, or spiritual music) is a genre of Christian music that is associated with Black Americans, which merged sub-Saharan African cultural heritage with the ex ...
,
work song
A work song is a piece of music closely connected to a form of work, either sung while conducting a task (usually to coordinate timing) or a song linked to a task which might be a connected narrative, description, or protest song.
Definitions and ...
s,
field holler
The field holler or field call is mostly a historical type of vocal work song sung by field slaves in the United States (and later by African American forced laborers accused of violating vagrancy laws) to accompany their tasked work, to commun ...
chant
A chant (from French ', from Latin ', "to sing") is the iterative speaking or singing of words or sounds, often primarily on one or two main pitches called reciting tones. Chants may range from a simple melody involving a limited set of n ...
s and rhymed simple narrative
ballads
A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads derive from the medieval French ''chanson balladée'' or '' ballade'', which were originally "dance songs". Ballads were particularly characteristic of the popular poetry and ...
.
The African use of pentatonic scales contributed to the development of
blue note
In jazz and blues, a blue note is a note that—for expressive purposes—is sung or played at a slightly different pitch from standard. Typically the alteration is between a quartertone and a semitone, but this varies depending on the musical c ...
s in blues and jazz. 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.
W. C. Handy: early published blues
W. C. Handy became interested in folk blues of the Deep South while traveling through the Mississippi Delta. In this folk blues form, the singer would improvise freely within a limited melodic range, sounding like a field holler, and the guitar accompaniment was slapped rather than strummed, like a small drum which responded in syncopated accents, functioning as another "voice". Handy and his band members were formally trained African-American musicians who had not grown up with the blues, yet he was able to adapt 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.Handy, Father (1941), p. 99.
The publication of his " Memphis Blues" sheet music in 1912 introduced the 12-bar blues to the world (although
Gunther Schuller
Gunther Alexander Schuller (November 22, 1925June 21, 2015) was an American composer, conductor, horn player, author, historian, educator, publisher, and jazz musician.
Biography and works
Early years
Schuller was born in Queens, New York City ...
argues that it is not really a blues, but "more like a cakewalk"). This composition, as well as his later "
St. Louis Blues
The St. Louis Blues are a professional ice hockey team based in St. Louis. The Blues compete in the National Hockey League (NHL) as a member of the Central Division in the Western Conference. The franchise was founded in 1967 as one of the ...
" and others, included the habanera rhythm,W. C. Handy, ''Father of the Blues: An Autobiography'', edited by
Arna Bontemps
Arna Wendell Bontemps ( ) (October 13, 1902 – June 4, 1973) was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance.
Early life
Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, into a Louisiana Creole family. Hi ...
: foreword by Abbe Niles. Macmillan Company, New York; (1941), pp. 99, 100 (no ISBN in this first printing). and would become
jazz standard
Jazz standards are musical compositions that are an important part of the musical repertoire of jazz musicians, in that they are widely known, performed, and recorded by jazz musicians, and widely known by listeners. There is no definitive li ...
s. 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.
New Orleans
The music of New Orleans had a profound effect on the creation of early jazz. In New Orleans, slaves could practice elements of their culture such as voodoo and playing drums. Many early jazz musicians played in the bars and brothels of the red-light district around Basin Street called Storyville. In addition to dance bands, there were marching bands which played at lavish funerals (later called jazz funerals). The instruments used by marching bands and dance bands became the instruments of jazz: brass, drums, and reeds tuned in the European 12-tone scale. Small bands contained a combination of self-taught and formally educated musicians, many from the funeral procession tradition. These bands traveled in black communities in the deep south. Beginning in 1914, Creole and African-American musicians played in
vaudeville
Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment born in France at the end of the 19th century. A vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition ...
shows which carried jazz to cities in the northern and western parts of the U.S. Jazz became international in 1914, when the Creole Band with cornettist Freddie Keppard performed the first ever jazz concert outside the United States, at the
Pantages Playhouse Theatre
The Pantages Playhouse Theatre () is a former vaudeville theatre in downtown Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
The two-storey building features a decorative façade with a lit marquee across the front, as well as classical decorative elements such as ...
in
Winnipeg
Winnipeg () is the capital and largest city of the province of Manitoba in Canada. It is centred on the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, near the longitudinal centre of North America. , Winnipeg had a city population of 749 ...
,
Canada
Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by to ...
.
In New Orleans, a white bandleader named Papa Jack Laine integrated blacks and whites in his marching band. He was known as "the father of white jazz" because of the many top players he employed, such as George Brunies, Sharkey Bonano, and future members of the Original Dixieland Jass Band. During the early 1900s, jazz was mostly performed in African-American and
mulatto
(, ) is a racial classification to refer to people of mixed African and European ancestry. Its use is considered outdated and offensive in several languages, including English and Dutch, whereas in languages such as Spanish and Portuguese ...
communities due to segregation laws. Storyville brought jazz to a wider audience through tourists who visited the port city of New Orleans. Many jazz musicians from African-American communities were hired to perform in bars and brothels. These included
Buddy Bolden
Charles Joseph "Buddy" Bolden (September 6, 1877 – November 4, 1931) was an African American cornetist who was regarded by contemporaries as a key figure in the development of a New Orleans style of ragtime music, or "jass", which later ca ...
and
Jelly Roll Morton
Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe (later Morton; c. September 20, 1890 – July 10, 1941), known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton, was an American ragtime and jazz pianist, bandleader, and composer. Morton was jazz's first arranger, proving that a gen ...
in addition to those from other communities, such as Lorenzo Tio and
Alcide Nunez
Alcide Patrick Nunez (March 17, 1884 – September 2, 1934), also known as Yellow Nunez and Al Nunez, was an American jazz clarinetist. He was one of the first musicians of New Orleans to make audio recordings.
Biography
Alcide Patrick Nunez wa ...
.
Louis Armstrong
Louis Daniel Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971), nicknamed "Satchmo", "Satch", and "Pops", was an American trumpeter and Singing, vocalist. He was among the most influential figures in jazz. His career spanned five decades and se ...
started his career in Storyville and found success in Chicago. Storyville was shut down by the U.S. government in 1917.
Syncopation
Cornetist Buddy Bolden played in New Orleans from 1895 to 1906. No recordings by him exist. His band is credited with creating the big four: the first syncopated bass drum pattern to deviate from the standard on-the-beat march. As the example below shows, the second half of the big four pattern is the habanera rhythm.
:
\new Staff <<
\relative c'
>>
Afro-Creole pianist Jelly Roll Morton began his career in Storyville. Beginning in 1904, he toured with vaudeville shows to southern cities, Chicago, and New York City. In 1905, he composed " Jelly Roll Blues", which became the first jazz arrangement in print when it was published in 1915. It introduced more musicians to the New Orleans style.
Morton considered the tresillo/habanera, which he called the Spanish tinge, an essential ingredient of jazz. "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."
An excerpt of "New Orleans Blues" is shown below. In the excerpt, the left hand plays the tresillo rhythm, while the right hand plays variations on cinquillo.
:
Morton was a crucial innovator in the evolution from the early jazz form known as ragtime to
jazz piano
Jazz piano is a collective term for the techniques pianists use when playing jazz. The piano has been an integral part of the jazz idiom since its inception, in both solo and ensemble settings. Its role is multifaceted due largely to the instru ...
, and could perform pieces in either style; in 1938, Morton made a series of recordings for the Library of Congress in which he demonstrated the difference between the two styles. Morton's solos, however, were still close to ragtime, and were not merely improvisations over chord changes as in later jazz, but his use of the blues was of equal importance.
Swing in the early 20th century
Morton loosened ragtime's rigid rhythmic feeling, decreasing its embellishments and employing a
swing
Swing or swinging may refer to:
Apparatus
* Swing (seat), a hanging seat that swings back and forth
* Pendulum, an object that swings
* Russian swing, a swing-like circus apparatus
* Sex swing, a type of harness for sexual intercourse
* Swing ri ...
feeling. 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." ''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." The dictionary does nonetheless provide the useful description of triple subdivisions of the beat contrasted with duple subdivisions: 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".
New Orleans brass bands are a lasting influence, contributing horn players to the world of professional jazz with the distinct sound of the city whilst helping black children escape poverty. The leader of New Orleans' Camelia Brass Band, D'Jalma Ganier, taught Louis Armstrong to play trumpet; Armstrong would then popularize the New Orleans style of trumpet playing, and then expand 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.
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. That year, numerous other bands made recordings featuring "jazz" in the title or band name, but most were ragtime or novelty records rather than jazz. In February 1918 during World War I, James Reese Europe's "Hellfighters" infantry band took ragtime to Europe, then on their return recorded Dixieland standards including " Darktown Strutters' Ball".
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 City, which played a benefit concert at
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall ( ) is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. It is at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east side of Seventh Avenue between West 56th and 57th Streets. Designed by architect William Burnet Tuthill and built ...
in 1912. The Baltimore rag style of
Eubie Blake
James Hubert "Eubie" Blake (February 7, 1887 – February 12, 1983) was an American pianist and composer of ragtime, jazz, and popular music. In 1921, he and his long-time collaborator Noble Sissle wrote '' Shuffle Along'', one of the first B ...
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.
In Ohio and elsewhere in the mid-west the major influence was ragtime, until about 1919. Around 1912, when the four-string banjo and saxophone came in, 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.
The Jazz Age
From 1920 to 1933,
Prohibition in the United States
In the United States from 1920 to 1933, a nationwide constitutional law prohibited the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages. The alcohol industry was curtailed by a succession of state legislatures, an ...
banned the sale of alcoholic drinks, resulting in illicit speakeasies which became lively venues of the "Jazz Age", hosting popular music, dance songs, novelty songs, and show tunes. Jazz began to get a reputation as immoral, and many members of the older generations saw it as a threat to the old cultural values by promoting the decadent values of the Roaring 20s. 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." ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' reported that Siberian villagers used jazz to scare away bears, but the villagers had used pots and pans; another story claimed that the fatal heart attack of a celebrated conductor was caused by jazz.
In 1919,
Kid Ory
Edward "Kid" Ory (December 25, 1886 – January 23, 1973) was an American jazz composer, trombonist and bandleader. One of the early users of the glissando technique, he helped establish it as a central element of New Orleans jazz.
He was ...
's Original Creole Jazz Band of musicians from New Orleans began playing in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where in 1922 they became the first black jazz band of New Orleans origin to make recordings. During the same year,
Bessie Smith
Bessie Smith (April 15, 1894 – September 26, 1937) was an American blues singer widely renowned during the Jazz Age. Nicknamed the " Empress of the Blues", she was the most popular female blues singer of the 1930s. Inducted into the Rock an ...
made her first recordings. Chicago was developing "
Hot Jazz
Dixieland jazz, also referred to as traditional jazz, hot jazz, or simply Dixieland, is a style of jazz based on the music that developed in New Orleans at the start of the 20th century. The 1917 recordings by the Original Dixieland Jass Band ( ...
", and
King Oliver
Joseph Nathan "King" Oliver (December 19, 1881 – April 8/10, 1938) was an American jazz cornet player and bandleader. He was particularly recognized for his playing style and his pioneering use of mutes in jazz. Also a notable composer, he wr ...
joined Bill Johnson. Bix Beiderbecke formed The Wolverines in 1924.
Despite its Southern black origins, there was a larger market for jazzy dance music played by white orchestras. In 1918,
Paul Whiteman
Paul Samuel Whiteman (March 28, 1890 – December 29, 1967) was an American bandleader, composer, orchestral director, and violinist.
As the leader of one of the most popular dance bands in the United States during the 1920s and early 1930s, W ...
and his orchestra became a hit in San Francisco. He signed a contract with Victor and became the top bandleader of the 1920s, giving hot jazz a white component, hiring white musicians such as
Bix Beiderbecke
Leon Bismark "Bix" Beiderbecke (March 10, 1903 – August 6, 1931) was an American jazz cornetist, pianist and composer.
Beiderbecke was one of the most influential jazz soloists of the 1920s, a cornet player noted for an inventive lyrical app ...
,
Jimmy Dorsey
James Francis Dorsey (February 29, 1904 – June 12, 1957) was an American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, composer and big band leader. He recorded and composed the jazz and pop standards " I'm Glad There Is You (In This World of Ordinary Peop ...
,
Tommy Dorsey
Thomas Francis Dorsey Jr. (November 19, 1905 – November 26, 1956) was an American jazz trombonist, composer, conductor and bandleader of the big band era. He was known as the "Sentimental Gentleman of Swing" because of his smooth-toned trombo ...
,
Frankie Trumbauer
Orie Frank Trumbauer (May 30, 1901 – June 11, 1956) was an American jazz saxophonist of the 1920s and 1930s. His main instrument was the C-melody saxophone, a now-uncommon instrument between an alto and tenor saxophone in size and pitch. He a ...
, and
Joe Venuti
Giuseppe "Joe" Venuti (September 16, 1903 – August 14, 1978) was an American jazz musician and pioneer jazz violinist.
Considered the father of jazz violin, he pioneered the use of string instruments in jazz along with the guitarist Eddie L ...
. In 1924, Whiteman commissioned
George Gershwin
George Gershwin (; born Jacob Gershwine; September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937) was an American composer and pianist whose compositions spanned popular, jazz and classical genres. Among his best-known works are the orchestral compositions ' ...
's ''
Rhapsody in Blue
''Rhapsody in Blue'' is a 1924 musical composition written by George Gershwin for solo piano and jazz band, which combines elements of classical music with jazz-influenced effects. Commissioned by bandleader Paul Whiteman, the work premiered i ...
'', which was premiered by his orchestra. Jazz began to be recognized as a notable musical form. Olin Downes, reviewing the concert in ''The New York Times'', wrote, "This composition shows extraordinary talent, as it shows a young composer with aims that go far beyond those of his ilk, struggling with a form of which he is far from being master. ... In spite of all this, he has expressed himself in a significant and, on the whole, highly original form. ... His first theme ... is no mere dance-tune ... it is an idea, or several ideas, correlated and combined in varying and contrasting rhythms that immediately intrigue the listener."
After Whiteman's band successfully toured Europe, huge hot jazz orchestras in theater pits caught on with other whites, including
Fred Waring
Fredrick Malcolm Waring Sr. (June 9, 1900 – July 29, 1984) was an American musician, bandleader, and radio and television personality, sometimes referred to as "America's Singing Master" and "The Man Who Taught America How to Sing". He was also ...
,
Jean Goldkette
John Jean Goldkette (March 18, 1893 – March 24, 1962) was a jazz pianist and bandleader.
Life
Goldkette was reportedly born on March 18, 1893 in Valenciennes, France,Russel B. Nye (1976). Music in the Twenties: The Jean Goldkette Orchestra ...
, and
Nathaniel Shilkret
Nathaniel Shilkret (December 25, 1889 – February 18, 1982) was an American musician, composer, conductor and musical director.
Early career
Shilkret (originally named Natan Schüldkraut) was born in New York City, United States, to parents ...
. According to Mario Dunkel, Whiteman's success was based on a "rhetoric of domestication" according to which he had elevated and rendered valuable (read "white") a previously inchoate (read "black") kind of music.
Whiteman's success caused blacks to follow suit, including
Earl Hines
Earl Kenneth Hines, also known as Earl "Fatha" Hines (December 28, 1903 – April 22, 1983), was an American jazz pianist and bandleader. He was one of the most influential figures in the development of jazz piano and, according to one source, " ...
(who opened in The Grand Terrace Cafe in Chicago in 1928),
Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra from 1923 through the rest of his life. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Ellington was bas ...
(who opened at the
Cotton Club
The Cotton Club was a New York City nightclub from 1923 to 1940. It was located on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue (1923–1936), then briefly in the midtown Theater District (1936–1940).Elizabeth Winter"Cotton Club of Harlem (1923- )" Blac ...
in Harlem in 1927),
Lionel Hampton
Lionel Leo Hampton (April 20, 1908 – August 31, 2002) was an American jazz vibraphonist, pianist, percussionist, and bandleader. Hampton worked with jazz musicians from Teddy Wilson, Benny Goodman, and Buddy Rich, to Charlie Parker, Charles ...
,
Fletcher Henderson
James Fletcher Hamilton Henderson (December 18, 1897 – December 29, 1952) was an American pianist, bandleader, arranger and composer, important in the development of big band jazz and swing music. He was one of the most prolific black music ...
Don Redman
Donald Matthew Redman (July 29, 1900 – November 30, 1964) was an American jazz musician, arranger, bandleader, and composer.
Biography
Redman was born in Piedmont, Mineral County, West Virginia, United States. His father was a music teacher ...
, with Henderson and Redman developing the "talking to one another" formula for "hot" swing music.
In 1924, Louis Armstrong joined the Fletcher Henderson dance band for a year, as featured soloist. 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
Coleman Randolph Hawkins (November 21, 1904 – May 19, 1969), nicknamed "Hawk" and sometimes "Bean", was an American jazz tenor saxophonist.Yanow, Scot"Coleman Hawkins: Artist Biography" AllMusic. Retrieved December 27, 2013. One of the first p ...
), sounded "stiff, stodgy", with "jerky rhythms and a grey undistinguished tone quality". The following example shows a short excerpt of the straight melody of "Mandy, Make Up Your Mind" by
George W. Meyer
George William Meyer (January 1, 1884– August 28, 1959) was an American Tin Pan Alley songwriter. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1884. He graduated from Roxbury High School, and began working in accountancy for Boston department stor ...
and Arthur Johnston (top), compared with Armstrong's solo improvisations (below) (recorded 1924). Armstrong's solos were a significant factor in making jazz a true 20th-century language. After leaving Henderson's group, Armstrong formed his Hot Five band, where he popularized
scat singing
In vocal jazz, scat singing is vocal improvisation with wordless vocables, nonsense syllables or without words at all. In scat singing, the singer improvises melodies and rhythms using the voice as an instrument rather than a speaking medium. ...
.
Swing in the 1920s and 1930s
The 1930s belonged to popular
swing
Swing or swinging may refer to:
Apparatus
* Swing (seat), a hanging seat that swings back and forth
* Pendulum, an object that swings
* Russian swing, a swing-like circus apparatus
* Sex swing, a type of harness for sexual intercourse
* Swing ri ...
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
William James "Count" Basie (; August 21, 1904 – April 26, 1984) was an American jazz pianist, organist, bandleader, and composer. In 1935, he formed the Count Basie Orchestra, and in 1936 took them to Chicago for a long engagement and the ...
,
Cab Calloway
Cabell Calloway III (December 25, 1907 – November 18, 1994) was an American singer, songwriter, bandleader, conductor and dancer. He was associated with the Cotton Club in Harlem, where he was a regular performer and became a popular vocalis ...
,
Jimmy
Jimmy may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Film and television
* ''Jimmy'' (2008 film), a 2008 Hindi thriller directed by Raj N. Sippy
* ''Jimmy'' (1979 film), a 1979 Indian Malayalam film directed by Melattoor Ravi Varma
* ''Jimmy'' (2013 f ...
and
Tommy Dorsey
Thomas Francis Dorsey Jr. (November 19, 1905 – November 26, 1956) was an American jazz trombonist, composer, conductor and bandleader of the big band era. He was known as the "Sentimental Gentleman of Swing" because of his smooth-toned trombo ...
,
Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra from 1923 through the rest of his life. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Ellington was bas ...
,
Benny Goodman
Benjamin David Goodman (May 30, 1909 – June 13, 1986) was an American clarinetist and bandleader known as the "King of Swing".
From 1936 until the mid-1940s, Goodman led one of the most popular swing big bands in the United States. His conc ...
,
Fletcher Henderson
James Fletcher Hamilton Henderson (December 18, 1897 – December 29, 1952) was an American pianist, bandleader, arranger and composer, important in the development of big band jazz and swing music. He was one of the most prolific black music ...
,
Earl Hines
Earl Kenneth Hines, also known as Earl "Fatha" Hines (December 28, 1903 – April 22, 1983), was an American jazz pianist and bandleader. He was one of the most influential figures in the development of jazz piano and, according to one source, " ...
,
Harry James
Harry Haag James (March 15, 1916 – July 5, 1983) was an American musician who is best known as a trumpet-playing band leader who led a big band from 1939 to 1946. He broke up his band for a short period in 1947 but shortly after he reorganized ...
,
Jimmie Lunceford
James Melvin Lunceford (June 6, 1902 – July 12, 1947) was an American jazz alto saxophonist and bandleader in the swing era.
Early life
Lunceford was born on a farm in the Evergreen community, west of the Tombigbee River, near Fulton, Mi ...
,
Glenn Miller
Alton Glen Miller (March 1, 1904 – December 15, 1944) was an American big band founder, owner, conductor, composer, arranger, trombone player and recording artist before and during World War II, when he was an officer in the US Army Air Forc ...
and
Artie Shaw
Artie Shaw (born Arthur Jacob Arshawsky; May 23, 1910 – December 30, 2004) was an American clarinetist, composer, bandleader, actor and author of both fiction and non-fiction.
Widely regarded as "one of jazz's finest clarinetists", Shaw led ...
. 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 complex "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
Theodore Shaw Wilson (November 24, 1912 – July 31, 1986) was an American jazz pianist. Described by critic Scott Yanow as "the definitive swing pianist", Wilson had a sophisticated, elegant style. His work was featured on the records of many ...
, vibraphonist
Lionel Hampton
Lionel Leo Hampton (April 20, 1908 – August 31, 2002) was an American jazz vibraphonist, pianist, percussionist, and bandleader. Hampton worked with jazz musicians from Teddy Wilson, Benny Goodman, and Buddy Rich, to Charlie Parker, Charles ...
and guitarist
Charlie Christian
Charles Henry Christian (July 29, 1916 – March 2, 1942) was an American swing and jazz guitarist.
Christian was an important early performer on the electric guitar and a key figure in the development of bebop and cool jazz. He gained nat ...
to join small groups. In the 1930s, Kansas City Jazz as exemplified by tenor saxophonist
Lester Young
Lester Willis Young (August 27, 1909 – March 15, 1959), nicknamed "Pres" or "Prez", was an American jazz tenor saxophonist and occasional clarinetist.
Coming to prominence while a member of Count Basie's orchestra, Young was one of the most ...
marked the transition from big bands to the bebop influence of the 1940s. An early 1940s style known as "jumping the blues" or
jump blues
Jump blues is an up-tempo style of blues, usually played by small groups and featuring horn instruments. It was popular in the 1940s and was a precursor of rhythm and blues and rock and roll. Appreciation of jump blues was renewed in the 1990s as ...
used small combos, uptempo music and blues chord progressions, drawing on
boogie-woogie
Boogie-woogie is a genre of blues music that became popular during the late 1920s, developed in African-American communities since 1870s.Paul, Elliot, ''That Crazy American Music'' (1957), Chapter 10, p. 229. It was eventually extended from pi ...
from the 1930s.
The influence of Duke Ellington
While swing was reaching the height of its popularity,
Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra from 1923 through the rest of his life. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Ellington was bas ...
spent the late 1920s and 1930s developing an innovative musical idiom for his orchestra. Abandoning the conventions of swing, he experimented with orchestral sounds, harmony, and
musical form
In music, ''form'' refers to the structure of a musical composition or performance. In his book, ''Worlds of Music'', Jeff Todd Titon suggests that a number of organizational elements may determine the formal structure of a piece of music, such ...
with complex compositions that still translated well for popular audiences; some of his tunes became
hits
Hits or H.I.T.S. may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Music
* '' H.I.T.S.'', 1991 album by New Kids on the Block
* ''...Hits'' (Phil Collins album), 1998
* ''Hits'' (compilation series), 1984–2006; 2014 - a British compilation album s ...
, and his own popularity spanned from the United States to Europe.
Ellington called his music ''American Music'', rather than ''jazz'', and liked to describe those who impressed him as "beyond category". These included many musicians from his orchestra, some of whom are considered among the best in jazz in their own right, but it was Ellington who melded them into one of the most popular jazz orchestras in the history of jazz. He often composed for the style and skills of these individuals, such as "Jeep's Blues" for
Johnny Hodges
Cornelius "Johnny" Hodges (July 25, 1907 – May 11, 1970) was an American alto saxophonist, best known for solo work with Duke Ellington's big band. He played lead alto in the saxophone section for many years. Hodges was also featured on soprano ...
, "Concerto for Cootie" for
Cootie Williams
Charles Melvin "Cootie" Williams (July 10, 1911 – September 15, 1985) was an American jazz, jump blues, and rhythm and blues trumpeter.
Biography
Born in Mobile, Alabama, Williams began his professional career at the age of 14 with the Y ...
(which later became "
Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me
"Do Nothing till You Hear from Me" (also written as "Do Nothin' Til You Hear from Me") is a song with music by Duke Ellington and lyrics by Bob Russell. It originated as a 1940 instrumental ("Concerto for Cootie") that was designed to highlight th ...
" with Bob Russell's lyrics), and "The Mooche" for
Tricky Sam Nanton
Joe "Tricky Sam" Nanton (February 1, 1904 – July 20, 1946) was an American trombonist with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
Early life
Joe Nanton was born Joseph Irish Nanton in New York City, United States. His parents were John Barzly Nanton an ...
and
Bubber Miley Bubber is a nickname and surname which may refer to:
People:
* Bubber or Bubba Brooks (1922-2002), American jazz tenor saxophonist
* James Bubber Epps (born 1943), American politician
* Clarence James Bubber Jonnard (1897-1977), American Major Leag ...
. He also recorded compositions written by his bandsmen, such as
Juan Tizol
Juan Tizol Martínez (22 January 1900 – 23 April 1984) was a Puerto Rican jazz trombonist and composer. He is best known as a member of Duke Ellington's big band, and as the writer of the jazz standards "Caravan", "Pyramid", and " Perdid ...
's "
Caravan
Caravan or caravans may refer to:
Transport and travel
*Caravan (travellers), a group of travellers journeying together
**Caravanserai, a place where a caravan could stop
*Camel train, a convoy using camels as pack animals
*Convoy, a group of veh ...
" and " Perdido", which brought the "Spanish Tinge" to big-band jazz. Several members of the orchestra remained with him for several decades. The band reached a creative peak in the early 1940s, when Ellington and a small hand-picked group of his composers and arrangers wrote for an orchestra of distinctive voices who displayed tremendous creativity.
Beginnings of European jazz
As only a limited number of American jazz records were released in Europe, European jazz traces many of its roots to American artists such as James Reese Europe, Paul Whiteman, and Lonnie Johnson, who visited Europe during and after World War I. It was their live performances which inspired European audiences' interest in jazz, as well as the interest in all things American (and therefore exotic) which accompanied the economic and political woes of Europe during this time. The beginnings of a distinct European style of jazz began to emerge in this interwar period.
British jazz began with a tour by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1919. In 1926,
Fred Elizalde
Federico "Fred" Díaz Elizalde (December 12, 1907 – January 16, 1979) was a Spanish Filipino classical and jazz pianist, composer, conductor, and bandleader, influential in the British dance band era.
Biography
Elizalde was born in Manila, Ph ...
and His Cambridge Undergraduates began broadcasting on the BBC. Thereafter jazz became an important element in many leading dance orchestras, and jazz instrumentalists became numerous.
This style entered full swing in France with the Quintette du Hot Club de France, which began in 1934. Much of this French jazz was a combination of African-American jazz and the symphonic styles in which French musicians were well-trained; in this, it is easy to see the inspiration taken from Paul Whiteman since his style was also a fusion of the two. Belgian guitarist
Django Reinhardt
Jean Reinhardt (23 January 1910 – 16 May 1953), known by his Romani nickname Django ( or ), was a Romani-French jazz guitarist and composer. He was one of the first major jazz talents to emerge in Europe and has been hailed as one of its most ...
popularized
gypsy jazz
Gypsy jazz (also known as gypsy swing, jazz manouche or hot club-style jazz) is a style of small-group jazz originating from the Romani guitarist Jean "Django" Reinhardt (1910–53), in conjunction with the French swing violinist Stéphane G ...
, a mix of 1930s American swing, French dance hall "
musette
Musette may refer to:
Music
* Musette de cour, or baroque musette, a musical instrument of the bagpipe family
* Musette bechonnet, a type of French bagpipe
* Musette bressane, a type of French bagpipe
* Oboe musette, or piccolo oboe, the smalles ...
", and Eastern European folk with a languid, seductive feel; the main instruments were steel stringed guitar, violin, and double bass. Solos pass from one player to another as guitar and bass form the rhythm section. Some researchers believe
Eddie Lang
Eddie Lang (born Salvatore Massaro, October 25, 1902 – March 26, 1933) was an American musician who is credited as the father of jazz guitar. During the 1920s, he gave the guitar a prominence it previously lacked as a solo instrument, as p ...
and
Joe Venuti
Giuseppe "Joe" Venuti (September 16, 1903 – August 14, 1978) was an American jazz musician and pioneer jazz violinist.
Considered the father of jazz violin, he pioneered the use of string instruments in jazz along with the guitarist Eddie L ...
pioneered the guitar-violin partnership characteristic of the genre, which was brought to France after they had been heard live or on
Okeh Records
Okeh Records () is an American record label founded by the Otto Heinemann Phonograph Corporation, a phonograph supplier established in 1916, which branched out into phonograph records in 1918. The name was spelled "OkeH" from the initials of Ott ...
in the late 1920s.
Post-war jazz
240px, The "classic quintet": ,_Tommy_Potter">Charlie_Parker,_Tommy_Potter,_Miles_Davis.html" ;"title="Tommy_Potter.html" ;"title="Charlie Parker, Tommy Potter">Charlie Parker, Tommy Potter, Miles Davis">Tommy_Potter.html" ;"title="Charlie Parker, Tommy Potter">Charlie Parker, Tommy Potter, Miles Davis,
Dizzy Gillespie
John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie (; October 21, 1917 – January 6, 1993) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer, educator and singer. He was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser, building on the virtuosic style of Roy Eldridge but a ...
, and
Max Roach
Maxwell Lemuel Roach (January 10, 1924 – August 16, 2007) was an American jazz drummer and composer. A pioneer of bebop, he worked in many other styles of music, and is generally considered one of the most important drummers in history. He work ...
performing at Three Deuces in New York City. Photograph by William P. Gottlieb (August 1947), Library of Congress.
The outbreak of World War II marked a turning point for jazz. The swing-era jazz of the previous decade had challenged other popular music as being representative of the nation's culture, with big bands reaching the height of the style's success by the early 1940s; swing acts and big bands traveled with U.S. military overseas to Europe, where it also became popular. Stateside, however, the war presented difficulties for the big-band format: conscription shortened the number of musicians available; the military's need for
shellac
Shellac () is a resin secreted by the female lac bug on trees in the forests of India and Thailand. It is processed and sold as dry flakes and dissolved in alcohol to make liquid shellac, which is used as a brush-on colorant, food glaze and ...
(commonly used for pressing
gramophone records
A phonograph record (also known as a gramophone record, especially in British English), or simply a record, is an analog sound storage medium in the form of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove. The groove usually starts near ...
) limited record production; a shortage of rubber (also due to the war effort) discouraged bands from touring via road travel; and a demand by the musicians' union for a commercial recording ban limited music distribution between 1942 and 1944.
Many of the big bands who were deprived of experienced musicians because of the war effort began to enlist young players who were below the age for conscription, as was the case with saxophonist
Stan Getz
Stanley Getz (February 2, 1927 – June 6, 1991) was an American jazz saxophonist. Playing primarily the tenor saxophone, Getz was known as "The Sound" because of his warm, lyrical tone, with his prime influence being the wispy, mellow timbre ...
's entry in a band as a teenager. This coincided with a nationwide resurgence in the Dixieland style of pre-swing jazz; performers such as clarinetist George Lewis, cornetist
Bill Davison
William Edward Davison (January 5, 1906 – November 14, 1989), nicknamed "Wild Bill", was an American jazz cornetist. He emerged in the 1920s through his work playing alongside Muggsy Spanier and Frank Teschemacher in a cover band where they p ...
, and trombonist Turk Murphy were hailed by conservative jazz critics as more authentic than the big bands. Elsewhere, with the limitations on recording, small groups of young musicians developed a more uptempo, improvisational style of jazz, collaborating and experimenting with new ideas for melodic development, rhythmic language, and harmonic substitution, during informal, late-night jam sessions hosted in small clubs and apartments. Key figures in this development were largely based in New York and included pianists
Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Sphere Monk (, October 10, 1917 – February 17, 1982) was an American jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including " 'Round Midnight", ...
and
Bud Powell
Earl Rudolph "Bud" Powell (September 27, 1924 – July 31, 1966) was an American jazz pianist and composer. Along with Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke and Dizzy Gillespie, Powell was a leading figure in the development of mode ...
, drummers
Max Roach
Maxwell Lemuel Roach (January 10, 1924 – August 16, 2007) was an American jazz drummer and composer. A pioneer of bebop, he worked in many other styles of music, and is generally considered one of the most important drummers in history. He work ...
and
Kenny Clarke
Kenneth Clarke Spearman (January 9, 1914January 26, 1985), nicknamed Klook, was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. A major innovator of the bebop style of drumming, he pioneered the use of the ride cymbal to keep time rather than the hi-ha ...
, saxophonist
Charlie Parker
Charles Parker Jr. (August 29, 1920 – March 12, 1955), nicknamed "Bird" or "Yardbird", was an American jazz saxophonist, band leader and composer. Parker was a highly influential soloist and leading figure in the development of bebop, a form ...
, and trumpeter
Dizzy Gillespie
John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie (; October 21, 1917 – January 6, 1993) was an American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, composer, educator and singer. He was a trumpet virtuoso and improviser, building on the virtuosic style of Roy Eldridge but a ...
. This musical development became known as
bebop
Bebop or bop is a style of jazz developed in the early-to-mid-1940s in the United States. The style features compositions characterized by a fast tempo, complex chord progressions with rapid chord changes and numerous changes of key, instrumen ...
.
Bebop and subsequent post-war jazz developments featured a wider set of notes, played in more complex patterns and at faster tempos than previous jazz. According to
Clive James
Clive James (born Vivian Leopold James; 7 October 1939 – 24 November 2019) was an Australian critic, journalist, broadcaster, writer and lyricist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom from 1962 until his death in 2019.
With the rise of bebop and the end of the swing era after the war, jazz lost its cachet as
pop music
Pop music is a genre of popular music that originated in its modern form during the mid-1950s in the United States and the United Kingdom. The terms ''popular music'' and ''pop music'' are often used interchangeably, although the former descri ...
. Vocalists of the famous big bands moved on to being marketed and performing as solo pop singers; these included
Frank Sinatra
Francis Albert Sinatra (; December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) was an American singer and actor. Nicknamed the " Chairman of the Board" and later called "Ol' Blue Eyes", Sinatra was one of the most popular entertainers of the 1940s, 1950s, and ...
,
Peggy Lee
Norma Deloris Egstrom (May 26, 1920 – January 21, 2002), known professionally as Peggy Lee, was an American jazz and popular music singer, songwriter, composer, and actress, over a career spanning seven decades. From her beginning as a vocalis ...
,
Dick Haymes
Richard Benjamin Haymes (September 13, 1918 – March 28, 1980) was an Argentinian singer and actor. He was one of the most popular male vocalists of the 1940s and early 1950s. He was the older brother of Bob Haymes, an actor, television host, ...
, and
Doris Day
Doris Day (born Doris Mary Kappelhoff; April 3, 1922 – May 13, 2019) was an American actress, singer, and activist. She began her career as a big band singer in 1939, achieving commercial success in 1945 with two No. 1 recordings, " Sent ...
. Older musicians who still performed their pre-war jazz, such as Armstrong and Ellington, were gradually viewed in the mainstream as passé. Other younger performers, such as singer
Big Joe Turner
Joseph Vernon "Big Joe" Turner Jr. (May 18, 1911 – November 24, 1985) was an American singer from Kansas City, Missouri. According to songwriter Doc Pomus, "Rock and roll would have never happened without him." His greatest fame was due to ...
and saxophonist
Louis Jordan
Louis Thomas Jordan (July 8, 1908 – February 4, 1975) was an American saxophonist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and bandleader who was popular from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Known as " the King of the Jukebox", he earned his high ...
, who were discouraged by bebop's increasing complexity, pursued more lucrative endeavors in rhythm and blues,
jump blues
Jump blues is an up-tempo style of blues, usually played by small groups and featuring horn instruments. It was popular in the 1940s and was a precursor of rhythm and blues and rock and roll. Appreciation of jump blues was renewed in the 1990s as ...
, and eventually
rock and roll
Rock and roll (often written as rock & roll, rock 'n' roll, or rock 'n roll) is a genre of popular music that evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It originated from African-American music such as jazz, rhythm ...
. Some, including Gillespie, composed intricate yet danceable pieces for bebop musicians in an effort to make them more accessible, but bebop largely remained on the fringes of American audiences' purview. "The new direction of postwar jazz drew a wealth of critical acclaim, but it steadily declined in popularity as it developed a reputation as an academic genre that was largely inaccessible to mainstream audiences", Burchett said. "The quest to make jazz more relevant to popular audiences, while retaining its artistic integrity, is a constant and prevalent theme in the history of postwar jazz." During its swing period, jazz had been an uncomplicated musical scene; according to Paul Trynka, this changed in the post-war years:
Bebop
In the early 1940s, bebop-style performers began to shift jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging "musician's music". The most influential bebop musicians included saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianists
Bud Powell
Earl Rudolph "Bud" Powell (September 27, 1924 – July 31, 1966) was an American jazz pianist and composer. Along with Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke and Dizzy Gillespie, Powell was a leading figure in the development of mode ...
and
Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Sphere Monk (, October 10, 1917 – February 17, 1982) was an American jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including " 'Round Midnight", ...
, trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and
Clifford Brown
Clifford Benjamin Brown (October 30, 1930 – June 26, 1956) was an American jazz trumpeter and composer. He died at the age of 25 in a car accident, leaving behind four years' worth of recordings. His compositions "Sandu", "Joy Spring", an ...
, and drummer
Max Roach
Maxwell Lemuel Roach (January 10, 1924 – August 16, 2007) was an American jazz drummer and composer. A pioneer of bebop, he worked in many other styles of music, and is generally considered one of the most important drummers in history. He work ...
. Divorcing itself from dance music, bebop established itself more as an art form, thus lessening its potential popular and commercial appeal.
Composer
Gunther Schuller
Gunther Alexander Schuller (November 22, 1925June 21, 2015) was an American composer, conductor, horn player, author, historian, educator, publisher, and jazz musician.
Biography and works
Early years
Schuller was born in Queens, New York City ...
wrote: "In 1943 I heard the great Earl Hines band which had Bird in it and all those other great musicians. They were playing all the flatted fifth chords and all the modern harmonies and substitutions and Dizzy Gillespie runs in the trumpet section work. Two years later I read that that was 'bop' and the beginning of modern jazz ... but the band never made recordings."
Dizzy Gillespie wrote: "People talk about the Hines band being 'the incubator of bop' and the leading exponents of that music ended up in the Hines band. But people also have the erroneous impression that the music was new. It was not. The music evolved from what went before. It was the same basic music. The difference was in how you got from here to here to here...naturally each age has got its own shit."
Since bebop was meant to be listened to, not danced to, it could use faster tempos. Drumming shifted to a more elusive and explosive style, in which the
ride cymbal The ride cymbal is a standard cymbal in most drum kits. Its function in the kit is to maintain a beat,Schroedl, Scott (2001). ''Play Drums Today!'', p.7. Hal Leonard. . "It's called the ride cymbal because you 'ride' on it--that is, you maintain a ...
was used to keep time while the snare and bass drum were used for accents. This led to a highly syncopated music with a linear rhythmic complexity.Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. (1995). ''The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its history from Africa to the United States''. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bebop musicians employed several harmonic devices which were not previously typical in jazz, engaging in a more abstracted form of chord-based improvisation. Bebop scales are traditional scales with an added chromatic passing note; bebop also uses "passing" chords, substitute chords, and
altered chord
An altered chord is a chord that replaces one or more notes from the diatonic scale with a neighboring pitch from the chromatic scale. By the broadest definition, any chord with a non-diatonic chord tone is an altered chord. The simplest examp ...
s. New forms of
chromaticism
Chromaticism is a compositional technique interspersing the primary diatonic pitches and chords with other pitches of the chromatic scale. In simple terms, within each octave, diatonic music uses only seven different notes, rather than the tw ...
and dissonance were introduced into jazz, and the dissonant
tritone
In music theory, the tritone is defined as a musical interval composed of three adjacent whole tones (six semitones). For instance, the interval from F up to the B above it (in short, F–B) is a tritone as it can be decomposed into the three adj ...
(or "flatted fifth") interval became the "most important interval of bebop" Chord progressions for bebop tunes were often taken directly from popular swing-era tunes and reused with a new and more complex melody and/or reharmonized with more complex chord progressions to form new compositions, a practice which was already well-established in earlier jazz, but came to be central to the bebop style. Bebop made use of several relatively common chord progressions, such as blues (at base, I–IV–V, but often infused with ii–V motion) and "rhythm changes" (I–VI–ii–V) – the chords to the 1930s pop standard "
I Got Rhythm
"I Got Rhythm" is a piece composed by George Gershwin with lyrics by Ira Gershwin and published in 1930, which became a jazz standard. Its chord progression, known as the " rhythm changes", is the foundation for many other popular jazz tunes suc ...
". Late bop also moved towards extended forms that represented a departure from pop and show tunes.
The harmonic development in bebop is often traced back to a moment experienced by Charlie Parker while performing "Cherokee" at
Clark Monroe's Uptown House
Clark Monroe's Uptown House, sometimes shortened to Monroe's Uptown House or simply Monroe's, was a nightclub in New York City. Along with Minton's Playhouse, it was one of the two principal jazz clubs in the early history of bebop.
History
Cla ...
, New York, in early 1942. "I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used...and I kept thinking there's bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes. I couldn't play it...I was working over 'Cherokee,' and, as I did, I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing. It came alive."Gerhard Kubik postulates that harmonic development in bebop sprang from blues and African-related tonal sensibilities rather than 20th-century Western classical music. "Auditory inclinations were the African legacy in arker'slife, reconfirmed by the experience of the blues tonal system, a sound world at odds with the Western diatonic chord categories. Bebop musicians eliminated Western-style functional harmony in their music while retaining the strong central tonality of the blues as a basis for drawing upon various African matrices."
Samuel Floyd states that blues was both the bedrock and propelling force of bebop, bringing about a new harmonic conception using extended chord structures that led to unprecedented harmonic and melodic variety, a developed and even more highly syncopated, linear rhythmic complexity and a melodic angularity in which the blue note of the fifth degree was established as an important melodic-harmonic device; and reestablishment of the blues as the primary organizing and functional principle. Kubik wrote:
While for an outside observer, the harmonic innovations in bebop would appear to be inspired by experiences in Western "serious" music, from
Claude Debussy
(Achille) Claude Debussy (; 22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) was a French composer. He is sometimes seen as the first Impressionism in music, Impressionist composer, although he vigorously rejected the term. He was among the most infl ...
to
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (, ; ; 13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was as ...
, such a scheme cannot be sustained by the evidence from a cognitive approach. Claude Debussy did have some influence on jazz, for example, on Bix Beiderbecke's piano playing. And it is also true that Duke Ellington adopted and reinterpreted some harmonic devices in European contemporary music. West Coast jazz would run into such debts as would several forms of cool jazz, but bebop has hardly any such debts in the sense of direct borrowings. On the contrary, ideologically, bebop was a strong statement of rejection of any kind of eclecticism, propelled by a desire to activate something deeply buried in self. Bebop then revived tonal-harmonic ideas transmitted through the blues and reconstructed and expanded others in a basically non-Western harmonic approach. The ultimate significance of all this is that the experiments in jazz during the 1940s brought back to African-American music several structural principles and techniques rooted in African traditions.
These divergences from the jazz mainstream of the time met a divided, sometimes hostile response among fans and musicians, especially swing players who bristled at the new harmonic sounds. To hostile critics, bebop seemed filled with "racing, nervous phrases". But despite the friction, by the 1950s bebop had become an accepted part of the jazz vocabulary.
Afro-Cuban jazz (cu-bop)
Machito and Mario Bauza
The general consensus among musicians and musicologists is that the first original jazz piece to be overtly based in clave was "Tanga" (1943), composed by Cuban-born
Mario Bauza
is a character created by Japanese video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto. He is the title character of the '' Mario'' franchise and the mascot of Japanese video game company Nintendo. Mario has appeared in over 200 video games since his c ...
and recorded by Machito and his Afro-Cubans in New York City. "Tanga" began as a spontaneous descarga (Cuban jam session), with jazz solos superimposed on top.
This was the birth of
Afro-Cuban jazz
Afro-Cuban jazz is the earliest form of Latin jazz. It mixes Afro-Cuban clave-based rhythms with jazz harmonies and techniques of improvisation. Afro-Cuban music has deep roots in African ritual and rhythm.{{cite web, Cuba: Son and Afro-Cuban ...
. The use of clave brought the African ''timeline'', or '' key pattern'', into jazz. Music organized around key patterns convey a two-celled (binary) structure, which is a complex level of African cross-rhythm. Within the context of jazz, however, harmony is the primary referent, not rhythm. The harmonic progression can begin on either side of clave, and the harmonic "one" is always understood to be "one". If the progression begins on the "three-side" of clave, it is said to be in ''3–2 clave'' (shown below). If the progression begins on the "two-side", it is in ''2–3 clave''.
:
\new RhythmicStaff
Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo
Mario Bauzá
Prudencio Mario Bauzá Cárdenas (April 28, 1911 – July 11, 1993) was an Afro-Cuban jazz, Latin, and jazz musician. He was among the first to introduce Cuban music to the United States by bringing Cuban musical styles to the New York City ja ...
introduced bebop innovator Dizzy Gillespie to Cuban conga drummer and composer
Chano Pozo
Luciano Pozo González (January 7, 1915 – December 3, 1948), known professionally as Chano Pozo, was a Cuban jazz percussionist, singer, dancer, and composer. Despite only living to age 33, he played a major role in the founding of Latin jazz. ...
. Gillespie and Pozo's brief collaboration produced some of the most enduring Afro-Cuban jazz standards. " Manteca" (1947) is the first jazz standard to be rhythmically based on clave. According to Gillespie, Pozo composed the layered, contrapuntal
guajeo
A guajeo (Anglicized pronunciation: ''wa-hey-yo'') is a typical Cuban ostinato melody, most often consisting of arpeggiated chords in syncopated patterns. Some musicians only use the term ''guajeo'' for ostinato patterns played specifically by a ...
s (Afro-Cuban
ostinato
In music, an ostinato (; derived from Italian word for ''stubborn'', compare English ''obstinate'') is a motif or phrase that persistently repeats in the same musical voice, frequently in the same pitch. Well-known ostinato-based pieces include ...
s) of the A section and the introduction, while Gillespie wrote the bridge. Gillespie recounted: "If I'd let it go like hanowanted it, it would have been strictly Afro-Cuban all the way. There wouldn't have been a bridge. I thought I was writing an eight-bar bridge, but ... I had to keep going and ended up writing a sixteen-bar bridge." The bridge gave "Manteca" a typical jazz harmonic structure, setting the piece apart from Bauza's modal "Tanga" of a few years earlier.
Gillespie's collaboration with Pozo brought specific African-based rhythms into bebop. While pushing the boundaries of harmonic improvisation, ''cu-bop'' also drew from African rhythm. Jazz arrangements with a Latin A section and a swung B section, with all choruses swung during solos, became common practice with many Latin tunes of the jazz standard repertoire. This approach can be heard on pre-1980 recordings of "Manteca", "
A Night in Tunisia
"A Night in Tunisia" is a musical composition written by Dizzy Gillespie around 1940–42, while Gillespie was playing with the Benny Carter band. It has become a jazz standard. It is also known as "Interlude", and with lyrics by Raymond Leveen w ...
Cuban percussionist Mongo Santamaria first recorded his composition " Afro Blue" in 1959.
"Afro Blue" was the first jazz standard built upon a typical African three-against-two (3:2) cross-rhythm, or hemiola. The piece begins with the bass repeatedly playing 6 cross-beats per each measure of , or 6 cross-beats per 4 main beats—6:4 (two cells of 3:2).
The following example shows the original
ostinato
In music, an ostinato (; derived from Italian word for ''stubborn'', compare English ''obstinate'') is a motif or phrase that persistently repeats in the same musical voice, frequently in the same pitch. Well-known ostinato-based pieces include ...
"Afro Blue" bass line. The cross noteheads indicate the main beats (not bass notes).
:
\new Staff <<
\new voice \relative c
\new voice \relative c
>>
When
John Coltrane
John William Coltrane (September 23, 1926 – July 17, 1967) was an American jazz saxophonist, bandleader and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music.
Born and raise ...
covered "Afro Blue" in 1963, he inverted the metric hierarchy, interpreting the tune as a jazz waltz with duple cross-beats superimposed (2:3). Originally a B pentatonic blues, Coltrane expanded the harmonic structure of "Afro Blue".
Perhaps the most respected
Afro-cuban jazz
Afro-Cuban jazz is the earliest form of Latin jazz. It mixes Afro-Cuban clave-based rhythms with jazz harmonies and techniques of improvisation. Afro-Cuban music has deep roots in African ritual and rhythm.{{cite web, Cuba: Son and Afro-Cuban ...
Dixieland
Dixieland jazz, also referred to as traditional jazz, hot jazz, or simply Dixieland, is a style of jazz based on the music that developed in New Orleans at the start of the 20th century. The 1917 recordings by the Original Dixieland Jass Band ...
, harking back to the contrapuntal New Orleans style. This was driven in large part by record company reissues of jazz classics by the Oliver, Morton, and Armstrong bands of the 1930s. There were two types of musicians involved in the revival: the first group was made up of those who had begun their careers playing in the traditional style and were returning to it (or continuing what they had been playing all along), such as
Bob Crosby
George Robert Crosby (August 23, 1913 – March 9, 1993) was an American jazz singer and bandleader, best known for his group the Bob-Cats, which formed around 1935. The Bob-Cats were a New Orleans Dixieland-style jazz octet. He was the young ...
Eddie Condon
Albert Edwin Condon (November 16, 1905 – August 4, 1973) was an American jazz banjoist, guitarist, and bandleader. A leading figure in Chicago jazz, he also played piano and sang.
Early years
Condon was born in Goodland, Indiana, the son of J ...
, and Wild Bill Davison. Most of these players were originally Midwesterners, although there were a small number of New Orleans musicians involved. The second group of revivalists consisted of younger musicians, such as those in the
Lu Watters
Lucius Carl Watters (December 19, 1911 – November 5, 1989) was a trumpeter and bandleader of the Yerba Buena Jazz Band. Jazz critic Leonard Feather said, “The Yerba Buena band was perhaps the most vital factor in the reawakening of public i ...
band,
Conrad Janis
Conrad Janis (February 11, 1928 – March 1, 2022) was a jazz trombonist and actor who starred in film and television during the Golden Age Era in the 1950s and 1960s. He played the role of Mindy McConnell's father, Frederick, on television's ' ...
, and
Ward Kimball
Ward Walrath Kimball (March 4, 1914 – July 8, 2002) was an American animator employed by Walt Disney Animation Studios. He was part of Walt Disney's main team of animators, known collectively as Disney's Nine Old Men. His films have been honore ...
and his Firehouse Five Plus Two Jazz Band. By the late 1940s, Louis Armstrong's Allstars band became a leading ensemble. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Dixieland was one of the most commercially popular jazz styles in the US, Europe, and Japan, although critics paid little attention to it.
Hard bop
Hard bop is an extension of bebop (or "bop") music that incorporates influences from blues, rhythm and blues, and gospel, especially in saxophone and piano playing. Hard bop was developed in the mid-1950s, coalescing in 1953 and 1954; it developed partly in response to the vogue for cool jazz in the early 1950s and paralleled the rise of rhythm and blues. It has been described as "funky" and can be considered a relative of soul jazz. Some elements of the genre were simplified from their bebop roots.
Miles Davis' 1954 performance of "Walkin'" at the first
Newport Jazz Festival
The Newport Jazz Festival is an annual American multi-day jazz music festival held every summer in Newport, Rhode Island. Elaine Lorillard established the festival in 1954, and she and husband Louis Lorillard financed it for many years. They hir ...
introduced the style to the jazz world. Further leaders of hard bop's development included the
Clifford Brown
Clifford Benjamin Brown (October 30, 1930 – June 26, 1956) was an American jazz trumpeter and composer. He died at the age of 25 in a car accident, leaving behind four years' worth of recordings. His compositions "Sandu", "Joy Spring", an ...
/Max Roach Quintet, Art Blakey's
Jazz Messengers
The Jazz Messengers were a jazz combo that existed for over thirty-five years beginning in the early 1950s as a collective, and ending when long-time leader and founding drummer Art Blakey died in 1990. Blakey led or co-led the group from the o ...
, the Horace Silver Quintet, and trumpeters
Lee Morgan
Edward Lee Morgan (July 10, 1938 – February 19, 1972) was an American jazz trumpeter and composer.
One of the key hard bop musicians of the 1960s, Morgan came to prominence in his late teens, recording on John Coltrane's '' Blue Train'' ...
and
Freddie Hubbard
Frederick Dewayne Hubbard (April 7, 1938 – December 29, 2008) was an American jazz trumpeter. He played bebop, hard bop, and post-bop styles from the early 1960s onwards. His unmistakable and influential tone contributed to new perspectives ...
. The late 1950s to early 1960s saw hard boppers form their own bands as a new generation of blues- and bebop-influenced musicians entered the jazz world, from pianists Wynton Kelly and
Tommy Flanagan
Thomas Lee Flanagan (March 16, 1930 – November 16, 2001) was an American jazz pianist and composer. He grew up in Detroit, initially influenced by such pianists as Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, and Nat King Cole, and then by bebop musicians. ...
to saxophonists
Joe Henderson
Joe Henderson (April 24, 1937 – June 30, 2001) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. In a career spanning more than four decades, Henderson played with many of the leading American players of his day and recorded for several prominent l ...
and
Hank Mobley
Henry "Hank" Mobley (July 7, 1930 – May 30, 1986) was an American hard bop and soul jazz tenor saxophonist and composer. Mobley was described by Leonard Feather as the "middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone", a metaphor used to de ...
. Coltrane, Johnny Griffin, Mobley, and Morgan all participated on the album '' A Blowin' Session'' (1957), considered by Al Campbell to have been one of the high points of the hard bop era.
Hard bop was prevalent within jazz for about a decade spanning from 1955 to 1965, but has remained highly influential on mainstream or "straight-ahead" jazz. It went into decline in the late 1960s through the 1970s due to the emergence of other styles such as jazz fusion, but again became influential following the Young Lions Movement and the emergence of
neo-bop
Neo-bop (also called neotraditionalist) refers to a style of jazz that gained popularity in the 1980s among musicians who found greater aesthetic affinity for acoustically based, swinging, melodic forms of jazz than for free jazz and jazz fusion th ...
.
Modal jazz
Modal jazz is a development which began in the later 1950s which takes the
mode
Mode ( la, modus meaning "manner, tune, measure, due measure, rhythm, melody") may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* '' MO''D''E (magazine)'', a defunct U.S. women's fashion magazine
* ''Mode'' magazine, a fictional fashion magazine which is ...
, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Previously, a solo was meant to fit into a given
chord progression
In a musical composition, a chord progression or harmonic progression (informally chord changes, used as a plural) is a succession of chords. Chord progressions are the foundation of harmony in Western musical tradition from the common practice ...
, but with modal jazz, the soloist creates a melody using one (or a small number of) modes. The emphasis is thus shifted from harmony to melody: "Historically, this caused a seismic shift among jazz musicians, away from thinking vertically (the chord), and towards a more horizontal approach (the scale)", explained pianist Mark Levine.
The modal theory stems from a work by George Russell. Miles Davis introduced the concept to the greater jazz world with ''
Kind of Blue
''Kind of Blue'' is a studio album by American jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Miles Davis. It was recorded on March 2 and April 22, 1959, at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York City, and released on August 17 of that year by Co ...
'' (1959), an exploration of the possibilities of modal jazz which would become the best selling jazz album of all time. In contrast to Davis' earlier work with hard bop and its complex chord progression and improvisation, ''Kind of Blue'' was composed as a series of modal sketches in which the musicians were given scales that defined the parameters of their improvisation and style.
"I didn't write out the music for ''Kind of Blue'', but brought in sketches for what everybody was supposed to play because I wanted a lot of spontaneity," recalled Davis. The track "So What" has only two chords: D-7 and E-7.
Other innovators in this style include
Jackie McLean
John Lenwood "Jackie" McLean (May 17, 1931 – March 31, 2006) was an American jazz alto saxophonist, composer, bandleader, and educator, and is one of the few musicians to be elected to the ''DownBeat'' Hall of Fame in the year of their deat ...
, and two of the musicians who had also played on ''Kind of Blue'': John Coltrane and Bill Evans.
Free jazz
Free jazz, and the related form of
avant-garde jazz
Avant-garde jazz (also known as avant-jazz and experimental jazz) is a style of music and improvisation that combines avant-garde art music and composition with jazz. It originated in the early 1950s and developed through to the late 1960s. Ori ...
, broke through into an open space of "free tonality" in which meter, beat, and formal symmetry all disappeared, and a range of world music from India, Africa, and Arabia were melded into an intense, even religiously ecstatic or orgiastic style of playing. While loosely inspired by bebop, free jazz tunes gave players much more latitude; the loose harmony and tempo was deemed controversial when this approach was first developed. The bassist
Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Jr. (April 22, 1922 – January 5, 1979) was an American jazz upright bassist, pianist, composer, bandleader, and author. A major proponent of collective improvisation, he is considered to be one of the greatest jazz musicians an ...
is also frequently associated with the avant-garde in jazz, although his compositions draw from myriad styles and genres.
The first major stirrings came in the 1950s with the early work of
Ornette Coleman
Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman (March 9, 1930 – June 11, 2015) was an American jazz saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter, and composer known as a principal founder of the free jazz genre, a term derived from his 1960 album '' Free Jazz: A Coll ...
Cecil Taylor
Cecil Percival Taylor (March 25, 1929April 5, 2018) was an American pianist and poet.
Taylor was classically trained and was one of the pioneers of free jazz. His music is characterized by an energetic, physical approach, resulting in complex ...
. In the 1960s, exponents included
Albert Ayler
Albert Ayler (; July 13, 1936 – November 25, 1970) was an American avant-garde jazz saxophonist, singer and composer.
After early experience playing R&B and bebop, Ayler began recording music during the free jazz era of the 1960s. Howev ...
Carla Bley
Carla Bley (born Lovella May Borg; May 11, 1936) is an American jazz composer, pianist, organist and bandleader. An important figure in the free jazz movement of the 1960s, she is perhaps best known for her jazz opera '' Escalator over the Hill'' ...
Larry Coryell
Larry Coryell (born Lorenz Albert Van DeLinder III; April 2, 1943 – February 19, 2017) was an American jazz guitarist.
Early life
Larry Coryell was born in Galveston, Texas, United States. He never knew his biological father, a musician. He ...
,
John Coltrane
John William Coltrane (September 23, 1926 – July 17, 1967) was an American jazz saxophonist, bandleader and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music.
Born and raise ...
,
Bill Dixon
William Robert “Bill” Dixon (October 5, 1925 – June 16, 2010) was an American composer, improviser, visual artist, activist, and educator. Dixon was one of the seminal figures in free jazz and late twentieth-century contemporary music. Hi ...
,
Jimmy Giuffre
James Peter Giuffre (, ; April 26, 1921 – April 24, 2008) was an American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, composer, and arranger. He is known for developing forms of jazz which allowed for free interplay between the musicians, anticipating f ...
Sun Ra
Le Sony'r Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, May 22, 1914 – May 30, 1993), better known as Sun Ra, was an American jazz composer, bandleader, piano and synthesizer player, and poet known for his experimental music, "cosmic" philosophy, prolific ou ...
Pharoah Sanders
Pharoah Sanders (born Ferrell Lee Sanders; October 13, 1940 – September 24, 2022) was an American jazz saxophonist. Known for his overblowing, harmonic, and multiphonic techniques on the saxophone, as well as his use of " sheets of sound", ...
, and
John Tchicai
John Martin Tchicai ( ; 28 April 1936 – 8 October 2012) was a Danish free jazz saxophonist and composer.
Biography
Tchicai was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, to a Danish mother and a Congolese father. The family moved to Aarhus, where he st ...
. In developing his late style, Coltrane was especially influenced by the dissonance of Ayler's trio with bassist
Gary Peacock
Gary George Peacock (May 12, 1935September 4, 2020) was an American jazz double bassist. He recorded a dozen albums under his own name, and also performed and recorded with major jazz figures such as avant garde saxophonist Albert Ayler, pianis ...
and drummer Sunny Murray, a rhythm section honed with
Cecil Taylor
Cecil Percival Taylor (March 25, 1929April 5, 2018) was an American pianist and poet.
Taylor was classically trained and was one of the pioneers of free jazz. His music is characterized by an energetic, physical approach, resulting in complex ...
as leader. In November 1961, Coltrane played a gig at the Village Vanguard, which resulted in the classic ''Chasin' the 'Trane'', which ''DownBeat'' magazine panned as "anti-jazz". On his 1961 tour of France, he was booed, but persevered, signing with the new
Impulse! Records
Impulse! Records (occasionally styled as "¡mpulse! Records" and "¡!") is an American jazz record company and label established by Creed Taylor in 1960. John Coltrane was among Impulse!'s earliest signings. Thanks to consistent sales and positiv ...
in 1960 and turning it into "the house that Trane built", while championing many younger free jazz musicians, notably
Archie Shepp
Archie Shepp (born May 24, 1937) is an American jazz saxophonist, educator and playwright who since the 1960s has played a central part in the development of avant-garde jazz.
Biography Early life
Shepp was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, but ...
, who often played with trumpeter
Bill Dixon
William Robert “Bill” Dixon (October 5, 1925 – June 16, 2010) was an American composer, improviser, visual artist, activist, and educator. Dixon was one of the seminal figures in free jazz and late twentieth-century contemporary music. Hi ...
, who organized the 4-day " October Revolution in Jazz" in Manhattan in 1964, the first free jazz festival.
A series of recordings with the Classic Quartet in the first half of 1965 show Coltrane's playing becoming increasingly abstract, with greater incorporation of devices like multiphonics, utilization of overtones, and playing in the altissimo register, as well as a mutated return to Coltrane's sheets of sound. In the studio, he all but abandoned his soprano to concentrate on the tenor saxophone. In addition, the quartet responded to the leader by playing with increasing freedom. The group's evolution can be traced through the recordings '' The John Coltrane Quartet Plays'', ''
Living Space
Housing, or more generally, living spaces, refers to the construction and assigned usage of houses or buildings individually or collectively, for the purpose of shelter. Housing ensures that members of society have a place to live, whether ...
New Thing at Newport
''New Thing at Newport'' is a 1965 live album featuring two separate sets from that year's Newport Jazz Festival by tenor saxophonists John Coltrane and Archie Shepp. It was recorded four days after the recording session for Coltrane's album ' ...
'' (July 1965), '' Sun Ship'' (August 1965), and '' First Meditations'' (September 1965).
In June 1965, Coltrane and 10 other musicians recorded '' Ascension'', a 40-minute-long piece without breaks that included adventurous solos by young avant-garde musicians as well as Coltrane, and was controversial primarily for the collective improvisation sections that separated the solos.
Dave Liebman
David Liebman (born September 4, 1946) is an American saxophonist, flautist and jazz educator. He is known for his innovative lines and use of atonality. He was a frequent collaborator with pianist Richie Beirach.
In June 2010, he received ...
later called it "the torch that lit the free jazz thing". After recording with the quartet over the next few months, Coltrane invited Pharoah Sanders to join the band in September 1965. While Coltrane used over-blowing frequently as an emotional exclamation-point, Sanders would opt to overblow his entire solo, resulting in a constant screaming and screeching in the altissimo range of the instrument.
Free jazz in Europe
Free jazz was played in Europe in part because musicians such as Ayler, Taylor, Steve Lacy, and
Eric Dolphy
Eric Allan Dolphy Jr. (June 20, 1928 – June 29, 1964) was an American jazz alto saxophonist, bass clarinetist and flautist. On a few occasions, he also played the clarinet and piccolo. Dolphy was one of several multi-instrumentalists to ga ...
spent extended periods of time there, and European musicians such as Michael Mantler and
John Tchicai
John Martin Tchicai ( ; 28 April 1936 – 8 October 2012) was a Danish free jazz saxophonist and composer.
Biography
Tchicai was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, to a Danish mother and a Congolese father. The family moved to Aarhus, where he st ...
traveled to the U.S. to experience American music firsthand. European contemporary jazz was shaped by
Peter Brötzmann
Peter Brötzmann (born 6 March 1941) is a German saxophonist and clarinetist.
Biography Early life
Brötzmann was born in Remscheid, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. He studied painting in Wuppertal and was involved with the Fluxus move ...
,
John Surman
John Douglas Surman (born 30 August 1944) is an English jazz saxophone, bass clarinet, and synthesizer player, and composer of free jazz and modal jazz, often using themes from folk music. He has composed and performed music for dance performanc ...
Zbigniew Namysłowski
Zbigniew Jacek Namysłowski (9 September 1939 – 7 February 2022) was a Polish jazz alto saxophonist, flautist, cellist, trombonist, pianist and composer.
Life and career
Namysłowski was born in Warsaw, Poland, on 9 September 1939. He performe ...
,
Tomasz Stanko Tomasz is a Polish given name, the equivalent of Thomas in English.
Notable people with the given name include:
*Tomasz Adamek (born 1976), Polish heavyweight boxer
*Tomasz Arciszewski (1877–1955), Polish socialist politician and Prime Minist ...
,
Lars Gullin
Lars Gunnar Victor Gullin (4 May 1928 – 17 May 1976) was a Swedish jazz saxophonist.
Career
Lars Gullin was born in Visby, Sweden. He was a child prodigy on the accordion. At age thirteen, he played clarinet in a military band and later ...
,
Joe Harriott
Joseph Arthurlin Harriott (15 July 1928 – 2 January 1973) was a Jamaican jazz musician and composer, whose principal instrument was the alto saxophone.
Initially a bebopper, he became a pioneer of free-form jazz. Born in Kingston, Harriot ...
,
Albert Mangelsdorff
Albert Mangelsdorff (September 5, 1928 – July 25, 2005) was a German jazz trombonist. Working mainly in free jazz, he was an innovator in multiphonics.
Early life
Mangelsdorff was born in Frankfurt on September 5, 1928, as the son of the book ...
,
Kenny Wheeler
Kenneth Vincent John Wheeler, OC (14 January 1930 – 18 September 2014) was a Canadian composer and trumpet and flugelhorn player, based in the U.K. from the 1950s onwards.
Most of his performances were rooted in jazz, but he was also active i ...
,
Graham Collier
James Graham Collier (21 February 1937 – 9 September 2011) was an English jazz bassist, bandleader and composer.
Life and career
Born in Tynemouth, Northumberland, England, on leaving school Collier joined the British Army as a musician, ...
, Michael Garrick and Mike Westbrook. They were eager to develop approaches to music that reflected their heritage.
Since the 1960s, creative centers of jazz in Europe have developed, such as the creative jazz scene in Amsterdam. Following the work of drummer Han Bennink and pianist Misha Mengelberg, musicians started to explore by improvising collectively until a form (melody, rhythm, a famous song) is found Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead documented the free jazz scene in Amsterdam and some of its main exponents such as the ICP (Instant Composers Pool) orchestra in his book ''New Dutch Swing''. Since the 1990s Keith Jarrett has defended free jazz from criticism. British writer Stuart Nicholson has argued European contemporary jazz has an identity different from American jazz and follows a different trajectory.
Latin jazz
Latin jazz is jazz that employs Latin American rhythms and is generally understood to have a more specific meaning than simply jazz from Latin America. A more precise term might be ''Afro-Latin jazz'', as the jazz subgenre typically employs rhythms that either have a direct analog in Africa or exhibit an African rhythmic influence beyond what is ordinarily heard in other jazz. The two main categories of Latin jazz are
Afro-Cuban jazz
Afro-Cuban jazz is the earliest form of Latin jazz. It mixes Afro-Cuban clave-based rhythms with jazz harmonies and techniques of improvisation. Afro-Cuban music has deep roots in African ritual and rhythm.{{cite web, Cuba: Son and Afro-Cuban ...
and Brazilian jazz.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many jazz musicians had only a basic understanding of Cuban and Brazilian music, and jazz compositions which used Cuban or Brazilian elements were often referred to as "Latin tunes", with no distinction between a Cuban son montuno and a Brazilian
bossa nova
Bossa nova () is a style of samba developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is mainly characterized by a "different beat" that altered the harmonies with the introduction of unconventional chords and an innovat ...
. Even as late as 2000, in Mark Gridley's ''Jazz Styles: History and Analysis'', a bossa nova bass line is referred to as a "Latin bass figure". It was not uncommon during the 1960s and 1970s to hear a conga playing a Cuban tumbao while the drumset and bass played a Brazilian bossa nova pattern. Many jazz standards such as "Manteca", "On Green Dolphin Street" and "Song for My Father" have a "Latin" A section and a swung B section. Typically, the band would only play an even-eighth "Latin" feel in the A section of the head and swing throughout all of the solos. Latin jazz specialists like Cal Tjader tended to be the exception. For example, on a 1959 live Tjader recording of "A Night in Tunisia", pianist
Vince Guaraldi
Vincent Anthony Guaraldi (; né Dellaglio, July 17, 1928 – February 6, 1976) was an American jazz pianist best known for composing music for animated television adaptations of the ''Peanuts'' comic strip. His compositions for this series includ ...
soloed through the entire form over an authentic
mambo
Mambo most often refers to:
*Mambo (music), a Cuban musical form
*Mambo (dance), a dance corresponding to mambo music
Mambo may also refer to:
Music
* Mambo section, a section in arrangements of some types of Afro-Caribbean music, particula ...
.
Afro-Cuban jazz renaissance
For most of its history, Afro-Cuban jazz had been a matter of superimposing jazz phrasing over Cuban rhythms. But by the end of the 1970s, a new generation of New York City musicians had emerged who were fluent in both
salsa
Salsa most often refers to:
* Salsa (Mexican cuisine), a variety of sauces used as condiments
* Salsa music, a popular style of Latin American music
* Salsa (dance), a Latin dance associated with Salsa music
Salsa or SALSA may also refer to:
A ...
dance music and jazz, leading to a new level of integration of jazz and Cuban rhythms. This era of creativity and vitality is best represented by the Gonzalez brothers Jerry (congas and trumpet) and Andy (bass). During 1974–1976, they were members of one of Eddie Palmieri's most experimental salsa groups: salsa was the medium, but Palmieri was stretching the form in new ways. He incorporated parallel fourths, with McCoy Tyner-type vamps. The innovations of Palmieri, the Gonzalez brothers and others led to an Afro-Cuban jazz renaissance in New York City.
This occurred in parallel with developments in Cuba The first Cuban band of this new wave was Irakere. Their "Chékere-son" (1976) introduced a style of "Cubanized" bebop-flavored horn lines that departed from the more angular guajeo-based lines which were typical of Cuban popular music and Latin jazz up until that time. It was based on Charlie Parker's composition "Billie's Bounce", jumbled together in a way that fused clave and bebop horn lines. In spite of the ambivalence of some band members towards Irakere's Afro-Cuban folkloric / jazz fusion, their experiments forever changed Cuban jazz: their innovations are still heard in the high level of harmonic and rhythmic complexity in Cuban jazz and in the jazzy and complex contemporary form of popular dance music known as
timba
Timba is a Cuban genre of music based on Cuban ''son'' with ''salsa'', American
Funk/R&B and the strong influence of Afro-Cuban folkloric music. Timba rhythm sections differ from their salsa counterparts, because timba emphasizes the bass dru ...
.
Afro-Brazilian jazz
Brazilian jazz, such as
bossa nova
Bossa nova () is a style of samba developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is mainly characterized by a "different beat" that altered the harmonies with the introduction of unconventional chords and an innovat ...
, is derived from
samba
Samba (), also known as samba urbano carioca (''urban Carioca samba'') or simply samba carioca (''Carioca samba''), is a Brazilian music genre that originated in the Afro-Brazilian communities of Rio de Janeiro in the early 20th century. Havi ...
, with influences from jazz and other 20th-century classical and popular music styles. Bossa is generally moderately paced, with melodies sung in Portuguese or English, whilst the related jazz-samba is an adaptation of street samba into jazz.
The bossa nova style was pioneered by Brazilians
João Gilberto
João Gilberto (born João Gilberto Prado Pereira de Oliveira – ; 10 June 1931 – 6 July 2019) was a Brazilian guitarist, singer and composer who was a pioneer of the musical genre of bossa nova in the late 1950s. Around the world, he was of ...
and
Antônio Carlos Jobim
Antônio Carlos Brasileiro de Almeida Jobim (25 January 1927 – 8 December 1994), also known as Tom Jobim (), was a Brazilian composer, pianist, guitarist, songwriter, arranger, and singer. Considered one of the great exponents of Brazilian mu ...
Chega de Saudade
"Chega de Saudade" (), also known as "No More Blues", is a bossa nova jazz standard. It is often considered to be the first bossa nova song to be recorded. Like " The Girl from Ipanema", the music for "Chega de Saudade" was composed by Antônio C ...
" on the ''
Canção do Amor Demais
''Canção do Amor Demais'' is 1958 album by Elizete Cardoso. It is often considered the first bossa nova album, and contains the first recordings of João Gilberto's guitar beat, which would go on to become a staple of bossa nova. Gilberto play ...
'' LP. Gilberto's initial releases, and the 1959 film ''
Black Orpheus
''Black Orpheus'' ( Portuguese: ''Orfeu Negro'' ) is a 1959 romantic tragedy film made in Brazil by French director Marcel Camus and starring Marpessa Dawn and Breno Mello. It is based on the play ''Orfeu da Conceição'' by Vinicius de Mora ...
'', achieved significant popularity in
Latin America
Latin America or
* french: Amérique Latine, link=no
* ht, Amerik Latin, link=no
* pt, América Latina, link=no, name=a, sometimes referred to as LatAm is a large cultural region in the Americas where Romance languages — languages derived ...
; this spread to North America via visiting American jazz musicians. The resulting recordings by Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz cemented bossa nova's popularity and led to a worldwide boom, with 1963's ''
Getz/Gilberto
''Getz/Gilberto'' is an album by American saxophonist Stan Getz and Brazilian guitarist João Gilberto, featuring pianist and composer Antônio Carlos Jobim (Tom Jobim), who also composed many of the tracks. It was released in March 1964 by Verv ...
'', numerous recordings by famous jazz performers such as
Ella Fitzgerald
Ella Jane Fitzgerald (April 25, 1917June 15, 1996) was an American jazz singer, sometimes referred to as the "First Lady of Song", "Queen of Jazz", and "Lady Ella". She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing, timing, in ...
and
Frank Sinatra
Francis Albert Sinatra (; December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) was an American singer and actor. Nicknamed the " Chairman of the Board" and later called "Ol' Blue Eyes", Sinatra was one of the most popular entertainers of the 1940s, 1950s, and ...
, and the eventual entrenchment of the bossa nova style as a lasting influence in world music.
Brazilian percussionists such as Airto Moreira and
Naná Vasconcelos
Juvenal de Holanda Vasconcelos, known as Naná Vasconcelos (2 August 1944 – 9 March 2016), was a Brazilian percussionist, vocalist and berimbau player, notable for his work as a solo artist on over two dozen albums, and as a backing musician wi ...
also influenced jazz internationally by introducing Afro-Brazilian folkloric instruments and rhythms into a wide variety of jazz styles, thus attracting a greater audience to them.
While bossa nova has been labeled as jazz by music critics, namely those from outside of Brazil, it has been rejected by many prominent bossa nova musicians such as Jobim, who once said "Bossa nova is not Brazilian jazz."
African-inspired
Rhythm
The first
jazz standard
Jazz standards are musical compositions that are an important part of the musical repertoire of jazz musicians, in that they are widely known, performed, and recorded by jazz musicians, and widely known by listeners. There is no definitive li ...
composed by a non-Latino to use an overt African cross-rhythm was
Wayne Shorter
Wayne Shorter (born August 25, 1933) is an American jazz saxophonist and composer. Shorter came to prominence in the late 1950s as a member of, and eventually primary composer for, Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. In the 1960s, he joined Miles Dav ...
's "
Footprints
Footprints are the impressions or images left behind by a person walking or running. Hoofprints and pawprints are those left by animals with hooves or paws rather than feet, while "shoeprints" is the specific term for prints made by shoes. The ...
" (1967). On the version recorded on ''Miles Smiles'' by
Miles Davis
Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926September 28, 1991) was an American trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. Davis adopted a variety of musi ...
, the bass switches to a tresillo figure at 2:20. "Footprints" is not, however, a
Latin jazz
Latin jazz is a genre of jazz with Latin American rhythms. The two main categories are Afro-Cuban jazz, rhythmically based on Cuban popular dance music, with a rhythm section employing ostinato patterns or a clave, and Afro-Brazilian jazz, which ...
tune: African rhythmic structures are accessed directly by Ron Carter (bass) and Tony Williams (drums) via the rhythmic sensibilities of
swing
Swing or swinging may refer to:
Apparatus
* Swing (seat), a hanging seat that swings back and forth
* Pendulum, an object that swings
* Russian swing, a swing-like circus apparatus
* Sex swing, a type of harness for sexual intercourse
* Swing ri ...
. Throughout the piece, the four beats, whether sounded or not, are maintained as the temporal referent. The following example shows the and forms of the bass line. The slashed noteheads indicate the main beats (not bass notes), where one ordinarily taps their foot to "keep time".
:
Pentatonic scales
The use of
pentatonic scale
A pentatonic scale is a musical scale with five notes per octave, in contrast to the heptatonic scale, which has seven notes per octave (such as the major scale and minor scale).
Pentatonic scales were developed independently by many an ...
s was another trend associated with Africa. The use of pentatonic scales in Africa probably goes back thousands of years.
McCoy Tyner
Alfred McCoy Tyner (December 11, 1938March 6, 2020) was an American jazz pianist and composer known for his work with the John Coltrane Quartet (from 1960 to 1965) and his long solo career afterwards. He was an NEA Jazz Master and five-time Gram ...
perfected the use of the pentatonic scale in his solos, and also used parallel fifths and fourths, which are common harmonies in West Africa.
The minor pentatonic scale is often used in blues improvisation, and like a blues scale, a minor pentatonic scale can be played over all of the chords in a blues. The following pentatonic lick was played over blues changes by
Joe Henderson
Joe Henderson (April 24, 1937 – June 30, 2001) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. In a career spanning more than four decades, Henderson played with many of the leading American players of his day and recorded for several prominent l ...
on
Horace Silver
Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver (September 2, 1928 – June 18, 2014) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and arranger, particularly in the hard bop style that he helped pioneer in the 1950s.
After playing tenor saxophone and piano at sc ...
's "African Queen" (1965).
Jazz pianist, theorist, and educator Mark Levine refers to the scale generated by beginning on the fifth step of a pentatonic scale as the ''V pentatonic scale''.
Levine points out that the V pentatonic scale works for all three chords of the standard II–V–I jazz progression. This is a very common progression, used in pieces such as Miles Davis' "Tune Up". The following example shows the V pentatonic scale over a II–V–I progression.
Accordingly, John Coltrane's "
Giant Steps
''Giant Steps'' is the fifth studio album by jazz musician John Coltrane as leader. It was released in February 1960 on Atlantic Records. This was his first album as leader for Atlantic Records, with which he had signed a new contract the previou ...
" (1960), with its 26 chords per 16 bars, can be played using only three pentatonic scales. Coltrane studied Nicolas Slonimsky's ''Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns'', which contains material that is virtually identical to portions of "Giant Steps". The harmonic complexity of "Giant Steps" is on the level of the most advanced 20th-century art music. Superimposing the pentatonic scale over "Giant Steps" is not merely a matter of harmonic simplification, but also a sort of "Africanizing" of the piece, which provides an alternate approach for soloing. Mark Levine observes that when mixed in with more conventional "playing the changes", pentatonic scales provide "structure and a feeling of increased space".
Sacred and liturgical jazz
As noted above, jazz has incorporated from its inception aspects of African-American sacred music including spirituals and hymns. Secular jazz musicians often performed renditions of spirituals and hymns as part of their repertoire or isolated compositions such as "Come Sunday", part of "Black and Beige Suite" by
Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra from 1923 through the rest of his life. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Ellington was bas ...
. Later many other jazz artists borrowed from black gospel music. However, it was only after World War II that a few jazz musicians began to compose and perform extended works intended for religious settings and/or as religious expression. Since the 1950s, sacred and liturgical music has been performed and recorded by many prominent jazz composers and musicians. The "Abyssinian Mass" by
Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Learson Marsalis (born October 18, 1961) is an American trumpeter, composer, teacher, and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. He has promoted classical and jazz music, often to young audiences. Marsalis has won nine Grammy Award ...
(Blueengine Records, 2016) is a recent example.
Relatively little has been written about sacred and liturgical jazz. In a 2013 doctoral dissertation, Angelo Versace examined the development of sacred jazz in the 1950s using disciplines of musicology and history. He noted that the traditions of black gospel music and jazz were combined in the 1950s to produce a new genre, "sacred jazz". Versace maintained that the religious intent separates sacred from secular jazz. Most prominent in initiating the sacred jazz movement were pianist and composer
Mary Lou Williams
Mary Lou Williams (born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs; May 8, 1910 – May 28, 1981) was an American jazz pianist, arranger, and composer. She wrote hundreds of compositions and arrangements and recorded more than one hundred records (in 78, 45, an ...
, known for her jazz masses in the 1950s and
Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra from 1923 through the rest of his life. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Ellington was bas ...
. Prior to his death in 1974 in response to contacts from Grace Cathedral in San Francisco,
Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra from 1923 through the rest of his life. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Ellington was bas ...
wrote three Sacred Concerts: 1965 – A Concert of Sacred Music; 1968 – Second Sacred Concert; 1973 – Third Sacred Concert.
The most prominent form of sacred and liturgical jazz is the jazz mass. Although most often performed in a concert setting rather than church worship setting, this form has many examples. An eminent example of composers of the jazz mass was
Mary Lou Williams
Mary Lou Williams (born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs; May 8, 1910 – May 28, 1981) was an American jazz pianist, arranger, and composer. She wrote hundreds of compositions and arrangements and recorded more than one hundred records (in 78, 45, an ...
. Williams converted to Catholicism in 1957, and proceeded to compose three masses in the jazz idiom. One was composed in 1968 to honor the recently assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. and the third was commissioned by a pontifical commission. It was performed once in 1975 in St Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. However the
Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...
has not embraced jazz as appropriate for worship. In 1966 Joe Masters recorded "Jazz Mass" for Columbia Records. A jazz ensemble was joined by soloists and choir using the English text of the Roman Catholic Mass. Other examples include "Jazz Mass in Concert" by
Lalo Schiffrin
Boris Claudio "Lalo" Schifrin (born June 21, 1932) is an Argentine-American pianist, composer, arranger and conductor. He is best known for his large body of film and TV scores since the 1950s, incorporating jazz and Latin American musical eleme ...
(Aleph Records, 1998, UPC 0651702632725) and "Jazz Mass" by
Vince Guaraldi
Vincent Anthony Guaraldi (; né Dellaglio, July 17, 1928 – February 6, 1976) was an American jazz pianist best known for composing music for animated television adaptations of the ''Peanuts'' comic strip. His compositions for this series includ ...
(Fantasy Records, 1965). In England, classical composer
Will Todd
Will Todd (b 14 January 1970) is an English musician and composer. He is a pianist, who performs regularly with others in his own works.
Biography and work
Todd was born in County Durham, attended Durham School and joined the choir of St Oswald ...
recorded his "Jazz Missa Brevis" with a jazz ensemble, soloists and the St Martin's Voices on a 2018 Signum Records release, "Passion Music/Jazz Missa Brevis" also released as "Mass in Blue", and jazz organist James Taylor composed "The Rochester Mass" (Cherry Red Records, 2015). In 2013, Versace put forth bassist
Ike Sturm
Ike Sturm (born 29 June 1978 in Wisconsin) is a bassist, composer, and bandleader in New York. He serves as Music Director for the Jazz Ministry at Saint Peter's Church in Manhattan.
Biography
Raised in a musical home in Wisconsin, Sturm learne ...
and New York composer Deanna Witkowski as contemporary exemplars of sacred and liturgical jazz.
Jazz fusion
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the hybrid form of jazz-rock fusion was developed by combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments and the highly amplified stage sound of rock musicians such as Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa. Jazz fusion often uses mixed meters, odd time signatures, syncopation, complex chords, and harmonies.
According to
AllMusic
AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the databa ...
:
... until around 1967, the worlds of jazz and rock were nearly completely separate. owever, ...as rock became more creative and its musicianship improved, and as some in the jazz world became bored with
hard bop
Hard bop is a subgenre of jazz that is an extension of bebop (or "bop") music. Journalists and record companies began using the term in the mid-1950s to describe a new current within jazz that incorporated influences from rhythm and blues, gospe ...
and did not want to play strictly avant-garde music, the two different idioms began to trade ideas and occasionally combine forces.
Miles Davis' new directions
In 1969, Davis fully embraced the electric instrument approach to jazz with ''
In a Silent Way
''In a Silent Way'' is a studio album by American jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Miles Davis, released on July 30, 1969, on Columbia Records. Produced by Teo Macero, the album was recorded in one session date on February 18, 1969, at CBS ...
'', which can be considered his first fusion album. Composed of two side-long suites edited heavily by producer
Teo Macero
Attilio Joseph "Teo" Macero (October 30, 1925 – February 19, 2008) was an American jazz saxophonist, composer, and record producer. He was a producer at Columbia Records for twenty years. Macero produced Miles Davis' '' Bitches Brew'', and ...
, this quiet, static album would be equally influential to the development of ambient music.
As Davis recalls:
The music I was really listening to in 1968 was James Brown, the great guitar player Jimi Hendrix, and a new group who had just come out with a hit record, " Dance to the Music",
Sly and the Family Stone
Sly and the Family Stone was an American band from San Francisco. Active from 1966 to 1983, it was pivotal in the development of funk, soul, rock, and psychedelic music. Its core line-up was led by singer-songwriter, record producer, and multi ...
... I wanted to make it more like rock. When we recorded ''In a Silent Way'' I just threw out all the chord sheets and told everyone to play off of that.
Two contributors to ''In a Silent Way'' also joined organist Larry Young to create one of the early acclaimed fusion albums: ''Emergency!'' (1969) by
The Tony Williams Lifetime
The Tony Williams Lifetime was a jazz fusion group led by jazz drummer Tony Williams.
Original line-up
The Tony Williams Lifetime was founded in 1969 as a power trio with John McLaughlin on electric guitar, and Larry Young on organ. The band ...
.
Psychedelic-jazz
=Weather Report
=
Weather Report
Weather Report was an American jazz fusion band active from 1970 to 1986. The band was founded in 1970 by Austrian virtuoso keyboardist Joe Zawinul, American saxophonist Wayne Shorter, Czech bassist Miroslav Vitouš, American drummer and voca ...
's self-titled electronic and psychedelic ''
Weather Report
Weather Report was an American jazz fusion band active from 1970 to 1986. The band was founded in 1970 by Austrian virtuoso keyboardist Joe Zawinul, American saxophonist Wayne Shorter, Czech bassist Miroslav Vitouš, American drummer and voca ...
'' debut album caused a sensation in the jazz world on its arrival in 1971, thanks to the pedigree of the group's members (including percussionist Airto Moreira), and their unorthodox approach to music. The album featured a softer sound than would be the case in later years (predominantly using acoustic bass with Shorter exclusively playing soprano saxophone, and with no synthesizers involved), but is still considered a classic of early fusion. It built on the avant-garde experiments which Joe Zawinul and Shorter had pioneered with Miles Davis on '' Bitches Brew'', including an avoidance of head-and-chorus composition in favor of continuous rhythm and movement – but took the music further. To emphasize the group's rejection of standard methodology, the album opened with the inscrutable avant-garde atmospheric piece "Milky Way", which featured by Shorter's extremely muted saxophone inducing vibrations in Zawinul's piano strings while the latter pedaled the instrument. '' DownBeat'' described the album as "music beyond category", and awarded it Album of the Year in the magazine's polls that year.
Weather Report
Weather Report was an American jazz fusion band active from 1970 to 1986. The band was founded in 1970 by Austrian virtuoso keyboardist Joe Zawinul, American saxophonist Wayne Shorter, Czech bassist Miroslav Vitouš, American drummer and voca ...
's subsequent releases were creative funk-jazz works.
Jazz-rock
Although some jazz purists protested against the blend of jazz and rock, many jazz innovators crossed over from the contemporary hard bop scene into fusion. As well as the electric instruments of rock (such as electric guitar, electric bass, electric piano and synthesizer keyboards), fusion also used the powerful amplification, "fuzz" pedals,
wah-wah pedal
A wah-wah pedal, or simply wah pedal, is a type of electric guitar effects pedal that alters the tone and frequencies of the guitar signal to create a distinctive sound, mimicking the human voice saying the onomatopoeic name "wah-wah". The ped ...
s and other effects that were used by 1970s-era rock bands. Notable performers of jazz fusion included Miles Davis, Eddie Harris, keyboardists Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, and Herbie Hancock, vibraphonist
Gary Burton
Gary Burton (born January 23, 1943) is an American jazz vibraphonist, composer, and educator. Burton developed a pianistic style of four-mallet technique as an alternative to the prevailing two-mallet technique. This approach caused him to be he ...
, drummer
Tony Williams (drummer)
Anthony Tillmon Williams (December 12, 1945 – February 23, 1997) was an American jazz drummer.
Williams first gained fame as a member of Miles Davis' " Second Great Quintet", and later pioneered jazz fusion with Davis' group and his own ...
, violinist
Jean-Luc Ponty
Jean-Luc Ponty (born 29 September 1942) is a French jazz violinist and composer.
Early life
Ponty was born into a family of classical musicians in Avranches, France. His father taught violin, his mother taught piano. At sixteen, he was admitt ...
, guitarists
Larry Coryell
Larry Coryell (born Lorenz Albert Van DeLinder III; April 2, 1943 – February 19, 2017) was an American jazz guitarist.
Early life
Larry Coryell was born in Galveston, Texas, United States. He never knew his biological father, a musician. He ...
John McLaughlin John or Jon McLaughlin may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* John McLaughlin (musician) (born 1942), English jazz fusion guitarist, member of Mahavishnu Orchestra
* Jon McLaughlin (musician) (born 1982), American singer-songwriter
* John McLaug ...
,
Ryo Kawasaki
was a Japanese jazz fusion guitarist, composer and band leader, best known as one of the first musicians to develop and popularise the fusion genre and for helping to develop the guitar synthesizer in collaboration with Roland Corporation and K ...
, and Frank Zappa, saxophonist Wayne Shorter and bassists
Jaco Pastorius
John Francis Anthony "Jaco" Pastorius III (; December 1, 1951 – September 21, 1987) was an American jazz bassist, composer and producer. He recorded albums as a solo artist and band leader and was a member of Weather Report from 1976 to 1981. ...
and
Stanley Clarke
Stanley Clarke (born June 30, 1951) is an American bassist, film composer and founding member of Return to Forever, one of the first jazz fusion bands. Clarke gave the bass guitar a prominence it lacked in jazz-related music. He is the first ja ...
. Jazz fusion was also popular in Japan, where the band
Casiopea
, now known in its fourth iteration as Casiopea-P4, is a Japanese jazz fusion band formed in 1976 by guitarist Issei Noro, bassist Tetsuo Sakurai, drummer Tohru "Rika" Suzuki, and keyboardist Hidehiko Koike. In 1977, keyboardist Minoru Mukaiya ...
released more than thirty fusion albums.
According to jazz writer Stuart Nicholson, "just as free jazz appeared on the verge of creating a whole new musical language in the 1960s ... jazz-rock briefly suggested the promise of doing the same" with albums such as Williams' ''
Emergency!
''Emergency!'' is an American action-adventure medical drama television series jointly produced by Mark VII Limited and Universal Television. Debuting on NBC as a midseason replacement on January 15, 1972, replacing the two short-lived situa ...
'' (1970) and Davis' '' Agharta'' (1975), which Nicholson said "suggested the potential of evolving into something that might eventually define itself as a wholly independent genre quite apart from the sound and conventions of anything that had gone before." This development was stifled by commercialism, Nicholson said, as the genre "mutated into a peculiar species of jazz-inflected pop music that eventually took up residence on FM radio" at the end of the 1970s.
Jazz-funk
By the mid-1970s, the sound known as jazz-funk had developed, characterized by a strong
back beat
In music and music theory, the beat is the basic unit of time, the pulse (regularly repeating event), of the ''mensural level'' (or ''beat level''). The beat is often defined as the rhythm listeners would tap their toes to when listening to a p ...
(
groove
Groove or Grooves may refer to:
Music
* Groove (music)
* Groove (drumming)
* The Groove (band), an Australian rock/pop band of the 1960s
* The Groove (Sirius XM), a US radio station
* Groove 101.7FM, a former Perth, Australia, radio station
...
), electrified sounds and, often, the presence of electronic
analog synthesizers
An analog (or analogue) synthesizer is a synthesizer that uses analog circuits and analog signals to generate sound electronically.
The earliest analog synthesizers in the 1920s and 1930s, such as the Trautonium, were built with a variety of v ...
. Jazz-funk also draws influences from traditional African music, Afro-Cuban rhythms and Jamaican
reggae
Reggae () is a music genre that originated in Jamaica in the late 1960s. The term also denotes the modern popular music of Jamaica and its diaspora. A 1968 single by Toots and the Maytals, " Do the Reggay" was the first popular song to use ...
, notably Kingston bandleader Sonny Bradshaw. Another feature is the shift of emphasis from improvisation to composition: arrangements, melody and overall writing became important. The integration of funk,
soul
In many religious and philosophical traditions, there is a belief that a soul is "the immaterial aspect or essence of a human being".
Etymology
The Modern English noun '' soul'' is derived from Old English ''sāwol, sāwel''. The earliest atte ...
, and R&B music into jazz resulted in the creation of a genre whose spectrum is wide and ranges from strong
jazz improvisation
Jazz improvisation is the spontaneous invention of melodic solo lines or accompaniment parts in a performance of jazz music. It is one of the defining elements of jazz. Improvisation is composing on the spot, when a singer or instrumentalist inv ...
to soul, funk or disco with jazz arrangements, jazz
riff
A riff is a repeated chord progression or refrain in music (also known as an ostinato figure in classical music); it is a pattern, or melody, often played by the rhythm section instruments or solo instrument, that forms the basis or acc ...
s and jazz solos, and sometimes soul vocals.
Early examples are Herbie Hancock's Headhunters band and Miles Davis' ''
On the Corner
''On the Corner'' is a studio album by American jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer Miles Davis. It was recorded in June and July 1972 and released on October 11 of the same year by Columbia Records. The album continued Davis's exploration o ...
'' album, which, in 1972, began Davis' foray into jazz-funk and was, he claimed, an attempt at reconnecting with the young black audience which had largely forsaken jazz for
rock
Rock most often refers to:
* Rock (geology), a naturally occurring solid aggregate of minerals or mineraloids
* Rock music, a genre of popular music
Rock or Rocks may also refer to:
Places United Kingdom
* Rock, Caerphilly, a location in Wales ...
and funk. While there is a discernible rock and funk influence in the
timbre
In music, timbre ( ), also known as tone color or tone quality (from psychoacoustics), is the perceived sound quality of a musical note, sound or tone. Timbre distinguishes different types of sound production, such as choir voices and musica ...
s of the instruments employed, other tonal and rhythmic textures, such as the Indian tambora and tablas and Cuban congas and bongos, create a multi-layered soundscape. The album was a culmination of sorts of the '' musique concrète'' approach that Davis and producer
Teo Macero
Attilio Joseph "Teo" Macero (October 30, 1925 – February 19, 2008) was an American jazz saxophonist, composer, and record producer. He was a producer at Columbia Records for twenty years. Macero produced Miles Davis' '' Bitches Brew'', and ...
had begun to explore in the late 1960s.
Traditionalism in the 1980s
The 1980s saw something of a reaction against the fusion and free jazz that had dominated the 1970s. Trumpeter
Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Learson Marsalis (born October 18, 1961) is an American trumpeter, composer, teacher, and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. He has promoted classical and jazz music, often to young audiences. Marsalis has won nine Grammy Award ...
emerged early in the decade, and strove to create music within what he believed was the tradition, rejecting both fusion and free jazz and creating extensions of the small and large forms initially pioneered by artists such as
Louis Armstrong
Louis Daniel Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971), nicknamed "Satchmo", "Satch", and "Pops", was an American trumpeter and Singing, vocalist. He was among the most influential figures in jazz. His career spanned five decades and se ...
and
Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra from 1923 through the rest of his life. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Ellington was bas ...
, as well as the hard bop of the 1950s. It is debatable whether Marsalis' critical and commercial success was a cause or a symptom of the reaction against Fusion and Free Jazz and the resurgence of interest in the kind of jazz pioneered in the 1960s (particularly
modal jazz
Modal jazz is jazz that makes use of musical modes, often modulating among them to accompany the chords instead of relying on one tonal center used across the piece. Although precedents exist, modal jazz was crystallized as a theory by compose ...
and
post-bop
Post-bop is a genre of small-combo jazz that evolved in the early to mid 1960s in the United States. Pioneers of the genre, such as Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, John Coltrane and Jackie McLean, crafted syntheses ...
); nonetheless there were many other manifestations of a resurgence of traditionalism, even if fusion and free jazz were by no means abandoned and continued to develop and evolve.
For example, several musicians who had been prominent in the fusion genre during the 1970s began to record acoustic jazz once more, including Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. Other musicians who had experimented with electronic instruments in the previous decade had abandoned them by the 1980s; for example, Bill Evans,
Joe Henderson
Joe Henderson (April 24, 1937 – June 30, 2001) was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. In a career spanning more than four decades, Henderson played with many of the leading American players of his day and recorded for several prominent l ...
, and
Stan Getz
Stanley Getz (February 2, 1927 – June 6, 1991) was an American jazz saxophonist. Playing primarily the tenor saxophone, Getz was known as "The Sound" because of his warm, lyrical tone, with his prime influence being the wispy, mellow timbre ...
. Even the 1980s music of
Miles Davis
Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926September 28, 1991) was an American trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. Davis adopted a variety of musi ...
, although certainly still fusion, adopted a far more accessible and recognizably jazz-oriented approach than his abstract work of the mid-1970s, such as a return to a theme-and-solos approach.
The emergence of young jazz talent beginning to perform in older, established musicians' groups further impacted the resurgence of traditionalism in the jazz community. In the 1970s, the groups of
Betty Carter
Betty Carter (born Lillie Mae Jones; May 16, 1929 – September 26, 1998) was an American jazz singer known for her improvisational technique, scatting and other complex musical abilities that demonstrated her vocal talent and imaginative inte ...
and
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers
The Jazz Messengers were a jazz combo that existed for over thirty-five years beginning in the early 1950s as a collective, and ending when long-time leader and founding drummer Art Blakey died in 1990. Blakey led or co-led the group from the o ...
retained their conservative jazz approaches in the midst of fusion and jazz-rock, and in addition to difficulty booking their acts, struggled to find younger generations of personnel to authentically play traditional styles such as
hard bop
Hard bop is a subgenre of jazz that is an extension of bebop (or "bop") music. Journalists and record companies began using the term in the mid-1950s to describe a new current within jazz that incorporated influences from rhythm and blues, gospe ...
and
bebop
Bebop or bop is a style of jazz developed in the early-to-mid-1940s in the United States. The style features compositions characterized by a fast tempo, complex chord progressions with rapid chord changes and numerous changes of key, instrumen ...
. In the late 1970s, however, a resurgence of younger jazz players in Blakey's band began to occur. This movement included musicians such as
Valery Ponomarev
Valery Ponomarev, Russian: Вале́рий Миха́йлович Пономарёв, ''Valery Mikhaylovich Ponomaryov'', (born 1943) is a Russian-born jazz trumpeter. He has lived in the United States since 1973.
Ponomarev became interested in j ...
and
Bobby Watson
Robert Michael Watson Jr. (born August 23, 1953), known professionally as Bobby Watson, is an American saxophonist, composer, and educator.
Music career
Watson was born in Lawrence, Kansas, United States, and grew up in Kansas City, Kansas. He ...
,
Dennis Irwin
__NOTOC__
Dennis Irwin (November 28, 1951 in Birmingham, Alabama - March 10, 2008) was an American jazz double bassist. He toured and recorded with John Scofield and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra among others, and played on over 500 albums.
Bio ...
Mulgrew Miller
Mulgrew Miller (August 13, 1955 – May 29, 2013) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and educator. As a child he played in churches and was influenced on piano by Ramsey Lewis and then Oscar Peterson. Aspects of their styles remained i ...
, and later, Benny Green, bassists such as
Charles Fambrough
Charles Fambrough (August 25, 1950January 1, 2011) was an American jazz bassist, composer and record producer from Philadelphia.
Fambrough was a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers during the early 1980s.
Suffering from kidney failure, conges ...
,
Lonnie Plaxico
Lonnie Plaxico (born September 4, 1960) is an American jazz double bassist.
Biography
Plaxico was born in Chicago, Illinois, into a musical family, and started playing the bass at the age of twelve, turning professional at fourteen (playing bot ...
(and later,
Peter Washington
Peter Washington (born in Los Angeles on August 28, 1964) is a jazz double bassist. He played with the Westchester Community Symphony at the age of 14. Later he played electric bass in rock bands. He attended the University of California, Berke ...
and Essiet Essiet) horn players such as Bill Pierce,
Donald Harrison
Donald Harrison Jr. (born June 23, 1960) is an African-American jazz saxophonist and the Big Chief of The Congo Square Nation Afro-New Orleans Cultural Group from New Orleans, Louisiana.
He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Berklee Col ...
and later
Javon Jackson
Javon Anthony Jackson (born June 16, 1965) is an American jazz tenor saxophonist, bandleader, and educator. He first became known as a member of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers from 1987 until Blakey's death in 1990. and went on to release 22 reco ...
and
Terence Blanchard
Terence Oliver Blanchard (born March 13, 1962) is an American trumpeter and composer. He started his career in 1982 as a member of the Lionel Hampton Orchestra, then The Jazz Messengers. He has composed more than forty film scores and performed ...
emerged as talented jazz musicians, all of whom made significant contributions in the 1990s and 2000s.
The young Jazz Messengers' contemporaries, including Roy Hargrove,
Marcus Roberts
Marthaniel "Marcus" Roberts (born August 7, 1963) is an American jazz pianist, composer, arranger, bandleader, and teacher.
Early life
Roberts was born in Jacksonville, Florida, United States. His mother was a gospel singer who had gone blind a ...
,
Wallace Roney
Wallace Roney (May 25, 1960 – March 31, 2020) was an American jazz ( hard bop and post-bop) trumpeter. He has won 1 Grammy award and has two nominations.
Roney took lessons from Clark Terry and Dizzy Gillespie and studied with Miles Davis fr ...
and
Mark Whitfield
Mark Whitfield (born October 6, 1966) is an American jazz guitarist.
Life and career
Whitfield was born in Lindenhurst, New York. He has worked with Jack McDuff, Jimmy Smith, Courtney Pine, Nicholas Payton, and Chris Botti.
In 2000, Whitfield ...
were also influenced by
Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Learson Marsalis (born October 18, 1961) is an American trumpeter, composer, teacher, and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. He has promoted classical and jazz music, often to young audiences. Marsalis has won nine Grammy Award ...
's emphasis toward jazz tradition. These younger rising stars rejected avant-garde approaches and instead championed the acoustic jazz sound of Charlie Parker,
Thelonious Monk
Thelonious Sphere Monk (, October 10, 1917 – February 17, 1982) was an American jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including " 'Round Midnight", ...
and early recordings of the first
Miles Davis
Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926September 28, 1991) was an American trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. Davis adopted a variety of musi ...
quintet. This group of "Young Lions" sought to reaffirm jazz as a high art tradition comparable to the discipline of classical music.
In addition,
Betty Carter
Betty Carter (born Lillie Mae Jones; May 16, 1929 – September 26, 1998) was an American jazz singer known for her improvisational technique, scatting and other complex musical abilities that demonstrated her vocal talent and imaginative inte ...
's rotation of young musicians in her group foreshadowed many of New York's preeminent traditional jazz players later in their careers. Among these musicians were Jazz Messenger alumni Benny Green, Branford Marsalis and
Ralph Peterson Jr.
Ralph Peterson Jr. (May 20, 1962 – March 1, 2021) was an American jazz drummer and bandleader.
Early life
Four of Peterson's uncles and his grandfather were drummers. Peterson himself began on percussion at age three. He was raised in Pleasan ...
Lewis Nash
Lewis Nash (born December 30, 1958) is an American jazz drummer. According to ''Modern Drummer'' magazineNashhas one of the longest discographies in jazz and has played on over 400 records, earning him the honor of Jazz's Most Valuable Player ...
,
Curtis Lundy
Curtis Lundy (born October 1, 1955) is an American double bass player, composer, producer, choir director and arranger. Lundy is best known for his work as part of jazz vocalist Betty Carter's band.
Discography As leader
* ''Beatitudes'' with Bo ...
,
Cyrus Chestnut
Cyrus Chestnut (born January 17, 1963) is an American jazz pianist, composer and producer. In 2006, Josh Tyrangiel, music critic for '' Time'', wrote: "What makes Chestnut the best jazz pianist of his generation is a willingness to abandon note ...
,
Mark Shim
Mark Shim (born November 21, 1973 in Kingston, Jamaica) is a jazz tenor saxophonist.
History
Shim's family moved from Kingston to Canada when he was eight years old, and then settled in Richmond, Virginia five years later. He started on sax ...
Marc Cary
Marc Cary (born January 29, 1967) is a post bop jazz pianist based out of New York City. Cary has played and recorded with several well-known musicians, including Dizzy Gillespie, Betty Carter, Roy Hargrove, Arthur Taylor, Abbey Lincoln, Carl ...
Geri Allen
Geri Antoinette Allen (June 12, 1957 – June 27, 2017) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and educator. In addition to her career as a performer and bandleader, Allen was also an associate professor of music at the University of Pittsburgh ...
.
O.T.B. ensemble included a rotation of young jazz musicians such as
Kenny Garrett
Kenny Garrett (born October 9, 1960) is an American post-bop jazz musician and composer who gained recognition in his youth as a member of the Duke Ellington Orchestra and for his time with Miles Davis's band. His primary instruments are alto and ...
Ralph Peterson Jr.
Ralph Peterson Jr. (May 20, 1962 – March 1, 2021) was an American jazz drummer and bandleader.
Early life
Four of Peterson's uncles and his grandfather were drummers. Peterson himself began on percussion at age three. He was raised in Pleasan ...
,
Billy Drummond
Willis Robert "Billy" Drummond Jr. (born June 19, 1959) is an American jazz drummer.
Early life
Billy Drummond was born in Newport News, Virginia, where he grew up listening to the extensive jazz record collection of his father, an amateur dr ...
, and Robert Hurst.
A similar reaction took place against free jazz. According to
Ted Gioia
Ted Gioia (born October 21, 1957) is an American jazz critic and music historian. He is author of eleven books, including ''Music: A Subversive History'', '' The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire'', ''The History of Jazz'' and ''Delta Blu ...
:
the very leaders of the avant garde started to signal a retreat from the core principles of free jazz. Anthony Braxton began recording standards over familiar chord changes.
Cecil Taylor
Cecil Percival Taylor (March 25, 1929April 5, 2018) was an American pianist and poet.
Taylor was classically trained and was one of the pioneers of free jazz. His music is characterized by an energetic, physical approach, resulting in complex ...
played duets in concert with
Mary Lou Williams
Mary Lou Williams (born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs; May 8, 1910 – May 28, 1981) was an American jazz pianist, arranger, and composer. She wrote hundreds of compositions and arrangements and recorded more than one hundred records (in 78, 45, an ...
, and let her set out structured harmonies and familiar jazz vocabulary under his blistering keyboard attack. And the next generation of progressive players would be even more accommodating, moving inside and outside the changes without thinking twice. Musicians such as David Murray or
Don Pullen
Don Gabriel Pullen (December 25, 1941 – April 22, 1995) was an American jazz pianist and organist. Pullen developed a strikingly individual style throughout his career. He composed pieces ranging from blues to bebop and modern jazz. The great ...
may have felt the call of free-form jazz, but they never forgot all the other ways one could play African-American music for fun and profit.
Pianist Keith Jarrett—whose bands of the 1970s had played only original compositions with prominent free jazz elements—established his so-called 'Standards Trio' in 1983, which, although also occasionally exploring collective improvisation, has primarily performed and recorded jazz standards. Chick Corea similarly began exploring jazz standards in the 1980s, having neglected them for the 1970s.
In 1987, the United States House of Representatives and Senate passed a bill proposed by Democratic Representative
John Conyers Jr.
John James Conyers Jr. (May 16, 1929October 27, 2019) was an American politician of the Democratic Party who served as a U.S. representative from Michigan from 1965 to 2017. The districts he represented always included part of western Detroit ...
to define jazz as a unique form of American music, stating "jazz is hereby designated as a rare and valuable national American treasure to which we should devote our attention, support and resources to make certain it is preserved, understood and promulgated." It passed in the House on September 23, 1987, and in the Senate on November 4, 1987.HR-57 Cente HR-57 Center for the Preservation of Jazz and Blues, with the six-point mandate.
Smooth jazz
In the early 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called "pop fusion" or "smooth jazz" became successful, garnering significant radio airplay in "
quiet storm
Quiet storm is a radio format and genre of R&B, performed in a smooth, romantic, jazz-influenced style. It was named after the title song on Smokey Robinson's 1975 album '' A Quiet Storm''.
The radio format was pioneered in 1976 by Melvin Li ...
" time slots at radio stations in urban markets across the U.S. This helped to establish or bolster the careers of vocalists including Al Jarreau,
Anita Baker
Anita Denise Baker (born January 26, 1958) is an American singer-songwriter. She is one of the most popular singers of soulful ballads, especially renowned for her work during the height of the quiet storm period in the 1980s. Starting her career ...
Sade
Sade may refer to:
People
* Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), French aristocrat, writer, and libertine
* Sade (singer) (born 1959, Helen Folasade Adu), British Nigerian musician and lead singer of the eponymous band
* Sade Baderinwa (born 1969), WAB ...
Kenny G
Kenneth Bruce Gorelick (born June 5, 1956), known professionally as Kenny G, is an American smooth jazz saxophonist, composer, and producer. His 1986 album ''Duotones'' brought him commercial success. Kenny G is one of the best-selling artis ...
,
Kirk Whalum
Kirk is a Scottish and former Northern English word meaning "church". It is often used specifically of the Church of Scotland. Many place names and personal names are also derived from it.
Basic meaning and etymology
As a common noun, ''kirk' ...
,
Boney James
Boney James (born James Oppenheim September 1, 1961) is an American saxophonist (tenor, alto and soprano), songwriter, record producer and recording artist.
He is a four-time Grammy Award nominee (Best Pop Instrumental Album, 2001, 2004, 2014 a ...
, and
David Sanborn
David William Sanborn (born July 30, 1945) is an American alto saxophonist. Though Sanborn has worked in many genres, his solo recordings typically blend jazz with instrumental pop and R&B. He released his first solo album ''Taking Off'' in 19 ...
. In general, smooth jazz is downtempo (the most widely played tracks are of 90–105
beats per minute
Beat, beats or beating may refer to:
Common uses
* Patrol, or beat, a group of personnel assigned to monitor a specific area
** Beat (police), the territory that a police officer patrols
** Gay beat, an area frequented by gay men
* Battery ...
), and has a lead melody-playing instrument (saxophone, especially soprano and tenor, and
legato
In music performance and notation, legato (; Italian for "tied together"; French ''lié''; German ''gebunden'') indicates that musical notes are played or sung smoothly and connected. That is, the player makes a transition from note to note wit ...
electric guitar are popular).
In his ''
Newsweek
''Newsweek'' is an American weekly online news magazine co-owned 50 percent each by Dev Pragad, its president and CEO, and Johnathan Davis, who has no operational role at ''Newsweek''. Founded as a weekly print magazine in 1933, it was widely ...
'' article "The Problem With Jazz Criticism",
Stanley Crouch
Stanley Lawrence Crouch (December 14, 1945 – September 16, 2020) was an American poet, music and cultural critic, syndicated columnist, novelist, and biographer. He was known for his jazz criticism and his 2000 novel ''Don't the Moon Look ...
considers Miles Davis' playing of fusion to be a turning point that led to smooth jazz. Critic Aaron J. West has countered the often negative perceptions of smooth jazz, stating:
I challenge the prevalent marginalization and malignment of smooth jazz in the standard jazz narrative. Furthermore, I question the assumption that smooth jazz is an unfortunate and unwelcomed evolutionary outcome of the jazz-fusion era. Instead, I argue that smooth jazz is a long-lived musical style that merits multi-disciplinary analyses of its origins, critical dialogues, performance practice, and reception.
Acid jazz, nu jazz, and jazz rap
Acid jazz developed in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s, influenced by
jazz-funk
Jazz-funk is a subgenre of jazz music characterized by a strong back beat ( groove), electrified sounds, and an early prevalence of analog synthesizers. The integration of funk, soul, and R&B music and styles into jazz resulted in the creat ...
and electronic dance music. Acid jazz often contains various types of electronic composition (sometimes including sampling or live DJ cutting and
scratching
Scratching, sometimes referred to as scrubbing, is a DJ and turntablist technique of moving a vinyl record back and forth on a turntable to produce percussive or rhythmic sounds. A crossfader on a DJ mixer may be used to fade between two record ...
), but it is just as likely to be played live by musicians, who often showcase jazz interpretation as part of their performance. Richard S. Ginell of AllMusic considers
Roy Ayers
Roy Ayers (born September 10, 1940) is an American funk, soul, and jazz composer, vibraphone player, and music producer. Ayers began his career as a post-bop jazz artist, releasing several albums with Atlantic Records, before his tenure at Po ...
"one of the prophets of acid jazz".
Nu jazz
Nu jazz (also known as jazztronica, or future jazz) is a genre of jazz and electronic music. The music blends jazz elements with other musical styles, such as funk, electronic music, and free improvisation.Definition from Sergey Chernov, June 7, ...
is influenced by jazz harmony and melodies, and there are usually no improvisational aspects. It can be very experimental in nature and can vary widely in sound and concept. It ranges from the combination of live instrumentation with the beats of jazz house music, house (as exemplified by Saint Germain (musician), St Germain, Jazzanova, and Fila Brazillia) to more band-based improvised jazz with electronic elements (for example, The Cinematic Orchestra, Kobol (band), Kobol and the Norwegian "future jazz" style pioneered by Bugge Wesseltoft, Jaga Jazzist, and Nils Petter Molvær).
Jazz rap developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s and incorporates jazz influences into hip hop. In 1988, Gang Starr released the debut single "Words I Manifest", which sampled Dizzy Gillespie's 1962 "Night in Tunisia", and Stetsasonic released "Talkin' All That Jazz", which sampled Lonnie Liston Smith. Gang Starr's debut LP ''No More Mr. Nice Guy (Gang Starr album), No More Mr. Nice Guy'' (1989) and their 1990 track "Jazz Thing" sampled Charlie Parker and Ramsey Lewis. The groups which made up the Native Tongues Posse tended toward jazzy releases: these include the Jungle Brothers' debut ''Straight Out the Jungle'' (1988), and A Tribe Called Quest's ''People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm'' (1990) and ''The Low End Theory'' (1991). Rap duo Pete Rock & CL Smooth incorporated jazz influences on their 1992 debut ''Mecca and the Soul Brother''. Rapper Guru (rapper), Guru's Jazzmatazz, Vol. 1, Jazzmatazz series began in 1993 using jazz musicians during the studio recordings.
Although jazz rap had achieved little mainstream success, Miles Davis' final album ''Doo-Bop'' (released posthumously in 1992) was based on hip hop beats and collaborations with producer Easy Mo Bee. Davis' ex-bandmate Herbie Hancock also absorbed hip-hop influences in the mid-1990s, releasing the album ''Dis Is Da Drum'' in 1994.
Punk jazz and jazzcore
The relaxation of orthodoxy which was concurrent with post-punk in London and New York City led to a new appreciation of jazz. In London, the Pop Group began to mix free jazz and dub reggae into their brand of punk rock. In New York, No Wave took direct inspiration from both free jazz and punk. Examples of this style include Lydia Lunch's ''Queen of Siam'',Bangs, Lester. "Free Jazz / Punk Rock". ''Musician Magazine'', 1979 Access date: July 20, 2008. Gray, the work of James Chance and the Contortions (who mixed Soul music, Soul with free jazz and punk rock, punk) and the Lounge Lizards (the first group to call themselves "punk jazz").
John Zorn took note of the emphasis on speed and dissonance that was becoming prevalent in punk rock, and incorporated this into free jazz with the release of the ''Spy vs Spy (album), Spy vs. Spy'' album in 1986, a collection of
Ornette Coleman
Randolph Denard Ornette Coleman (March 9, 1930 – June 11, 2015) was an American jazz saxophonist, violinist, trumpeter, and composer known as a principal founder of the free jazz genre, a term derived from his 1960 album '' Free Jazz: A Coll ...
tunes done in the contemporary thrashcore style. In the same year, Sonny Sharrock,
Peter Brötzmann
Peter Brötzmann (born 6 March 1941) is a German saxophonist and clarinetist.
Biography Early life
Brötzmann was born in Remscheid, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. He studied painting in Wuppertal and was involved with the Fluxus move ...
, Bill Laswell, and Ronald Shannon Jackson recorded the first album under the name Last Exit (free jazz band), Last Exit, a similarly aggressive blend of thrash and free jazz. These developments are the origins of ''jazzcore'', the fusion of free jazz with hardcore punk.
M-Base
The M-Base movement started in the 1980s, when a loose collective of young African-American musicians in New York which included Steve Coleman, Greg Osby, and Gary Thomas (musician), Gary Thomas developed a complex but grooving sound.
In the 1990s, most M-Base participants turned to more conventional music, but Coleman, the most active participant, continued developing his music in accordance with the M-Base concept.
Coleman's audience decreased, but his music and concepts influenced many musicians, according to pianist Vijay Iver and critic Ben Ratlifff of ''The New York Times''.
M-Base changed from a movement of a loose collective of young musicians to a kind of informal Coleman "school", with a much advanced but already originally implied concept. Steve Coleman's music and M-Base concept gained recognition as "next logical step" after Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman.
1990s–present
Since the 1990s, jazz has been characterized by a pluralism in which no one style dominates, but rather a wide range of styles and genres are popular. Individual performers often play in a variety of styles, sometimes in the same performance. Pianist Brad Mehldau and The Bad Plus have explored contemporary rock music within the context of the traditional jazz acoustic piano trio, recording instrumental jazz versions of songs by rock musicians. The Bad Plus have also incorporated elements of free jazz into their music. A firm avant-garde or free jazz stance has been maintained by some players, such as saxophonists Greg Osby and Charles Gayle, while others, such as James Carter (musician), James Carter, have incorporated free jazz elements into a more traditional framework.
Harry Connick Jr. began his career playing stride piano and the Dixieland jazz of his home, New Orleans, beginning with his first recording when he was 10 years old. Some of his earliest lessons were at the home of pianist Ellis Marsalis Jr., Ellis Marsalis. Connick had success on the pop charts after recording the soundtrack to the movie ''When Harry Met Sally'', which sold over two million copies. Crossover success has also been achieved by Diana Krall, Norah Jones, Cassandra Wilson, Kurt Elling, and Jamie Cullum.
A number of players from largely straight-ahead jazz, straight-ahead or post-bop backgrounds have emerged since the 1990s, including pianists Jason Moran (musician), Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer, guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, vibraphonist Stefon Harris, trumpeters Roy Hargrove and
Terence Blanchard
Terence Oliver Blanchard (born March 13, 1962) is an American trumpeter and composer. He started his career in 1982 as a member of the Lionel Hampton Orchestra, then The Jazz Messengers. He has composed more than forty film scores and performed ...
, saxophonists Chris Potter (jazz saxophonist), Chris Potter and Joshua Redman, clarinetist Ken Peplowski and bassist Christian McBride.
Although jazz fusion, jazz-rock fusion reached the height of its popularity in the 1970s, the use of electronic instruments and rock-derived musical elements in jazz continued in the 1990s and 2000s. Musicians using this approach include Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie (guitarist), John Abercrombie, John Scofield and the Swedish group Esbjörn Svensson Trio, e.s.t. Since the beginning of the 1990s, electronic music had significant technical improvements that popularized and created new possibilities for the genre. Jazz elements such as improvisation, rhythmic complexities and harmonic textures were introduced to the genre and consequently had a big impact in new listeners and in some ways kept the versatility of jazz relatable to a newer generation that did not necessarily relate to what the traditionalists call real jazz (bebop, cool and modal jazz). Artists such as Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Flying Lotus and sub genres like Intelligent dance music, IDM, drum 'n' bass, jungle music, jungle and techno ended up incorporating a lot of these elements. Squarepusher being cited as one big influence for jazz performers drummer Mark Guiliana and pianist Brad Mehldau, showing the correlations between jazz and electronic music are a two-way street.
In 2001, Ken Burns's documentary ''Jazz (TV series), Jazz'' was premiered on Public Broadcasting Service, PBS, featuring
Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Learson Marsalis (born October 18, 1961) is an American trumpeter, composer, teacher, and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. He has promoted classical and jazz music, often to young audiences. Marsalis has won nine Grammy Award ...
and other experts reviewing the entire history of American jazz to that time. It received some criticism, however, for its failure to reflect the many distinctive non-American traditions and styles in jazz that had developed, and its limited representation of US developments in the last quarter of the 20th century.
The mid-2010s saw an increasing influence of R&B, hip-hop, and pop music on jazz. In 2015, Kendrick Lamar released his third studio album, ''To Pimp a Butterfly''. The album heavily featured prominent contemporary jazz artists such as Thundercat (musician), Thundercat and redefined jazz rap with a larger focus on improvisation and live soloing rather than simply sampling. In that same year, saxophonist Kamasi Washington released his nearly three-hour long debut, ''The Epic (album), The Epic''. Its hip-hop inspired beats and R&B vocal interludes was not only acclaimed by critics for being innovative in keeping jazz relevant, but also sparked a small resurgence in jazz on the internet.
Another internet-aided trend of 2010's jazz was that of extreme reharmonization, inspired by both virtuosic players known for their speed and rhythm such as Art Tatum, as well as players known for their ambitious voicings and chords such as Bill Evans. Supergroup Snarky Puppy adopted this trend, allowing players like Cory Henry to shape the grooves and harmonies of modern jazz soloing. YouTube phenomenon Jacob Collier also gained recognition for his ability to play an incredibly large number of instruments and his ability to use microtones, advanced polyrhythms, and blend a spectrum of genres in his largely homemade production process.
See also
* Jazz (Henri Matisse)
* Jazz piano
* Jazz royalty
* Victorian Jazz Archive
* Hogan Jazz Archive
* International Jazz Day
* Bibliography of jazz
* Timeline of jazz education
* List of certified jazz recordings
* List of jazz festivals
* List of jazz genres
* List of jazz musicians
* List of jazz standards
* List of jazz venues
* List of jazz venues in the United States
Notes
References
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* Includes a 120-page interview with Hines plus many photos.
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* New printing 1986.
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* Also: Jazz (miniseries), ''Jazz'' (2001 miniseries).
Further reading
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* Ian Carr, Carr, Ian. ''Music Outside: Contemporary Jazz in Britain.'' 2nd edition. London: Northway.
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* Downbeat (2009). ''The Great Jazz Interviews'': Frank Alkyer & Ed Enright (eds). Hal Leonard Books.
* Gridley, Mark C. 2004. ''Concise Guide to Jazz'', fourth edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson/Prentice Hall.
* Nairn, Charlie. 1975. ''Earl 'Fatha' Hines'': 1 hour 'solo' documentary made in "Blues Alley" Jazz Club, Washington DC, for ATV, England, 1975: produced/directed by Charlie Nairn: original 16mm film plus out-takes of additional tunes from that film archived in British Film Institute Library at bfi.org.uk and itvstudios.com: DVD copies with Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library [who hold The
Earl Hines
Earl Kenneth Hines, also known as Earl "Fatha" Hines (December 28, 1903 – April 22, 1983), was an American jazz pianist and bandleader. He was one of the most influential figures in the development of jazz piano and, according to one source, " ...
Collection/Archive], University of California, Berkeley: also University of Chicago, Hogan Jazz Archive Tulane University New Orleans and Louis Armstrong House Museum Libraries.
* Schuller, Gunther. 1991. ''The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945''. Oxford University Press.
American Jazz Museum website
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Jazz,
African-American cultural history
African-American music
American styles of music
Jazz terminology
Musical improvisation
Popular music
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