Jazz
- For other article subjects named jazz see jazz (disambiguation).
| Jazz | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins: | African American music Blues and European marching band music |
| Cultural origins: | West African music African American music 1910s New Orleans Storyville |
| Typical instruments: | Guitar - Saxophone - Trombone - Piano - Clarinet - Trumpet - Bass - Drums |
| Mainstream popularity: | As "straight-ahead jazz," sporadic; mostly in pop forms like Swing; also steadily influential in some pop music forms with "jazz extensions," e.g., rhythm and blues, neo soul and cool jazz |
| Derivative forms: | Latin jazz - Swing |
| Subgenres | |
| Bebop - Hard bop - Dixieland - Cool jazz - Free jazz - Jazz fusion - Modal jazz - Soul jazz - Smooth jazz | |
| Fusion | |
| Jazz fusion - Smooth jazz - Jazz rap - Acid jazz - Nu jazz | |
| Musicians | |
| Bands - Bassists - Clarinetists - Drummers - Guitarists - Organists - Pianists - Trombonists - Trumpeters | |
| Other topics | |
| Jazz standard | |
At the root of jazz is the blues, the folk music of former African slaves in the American South and their descendants, heavily influenced by West African cultural and musical traditions, that evolved as black musicians migrated to the cities -- most notably, the Storyville district of New Orleans -- in the late 19th century. Many early jazz musicians made a living playing in small bands hired to lead funeral processions in the New Orleans African-American tradition. The instruments of these groups became the basic instruments of jazz: brass, reeds, and drums. Purportedly, the availability of war-surplus band instruments from the American Civil War aided the trend.
Early jazz influences found their first mainstream expression in the marching band music of the day, which was the standard form of popular concert music at the turn of century. Black musicians frequently used the melody, structure and beat of marches as points of departure; but, says "North by South, from Charleston to Harlem," a project of the National Endowment for the Humanities: "...a black musical spirit (involving rhythm and melody) was bursting out of the confines of European musical tradition, even though the performers were using European styled instruments. This African-American feel for rephrasing melodies and re-shaping rhythm created the embryo from which many great black jazz musicians were to emerge." These Africanized bands played a seminal role in the articulation and dissemination of early jazz. Traveling throughout black communities in the Deep South and to northern big cities, these musician-pioneers were the Hand helping to fashion jazz's howling, raucous, free-wheeling, "raggedy," ragtime spirit, then later quickening it to its more eloquent, sophisticated, swing incarnation.
One unlikely player in this phenomenon was African-American minister Rev. Daniel J. Jenkins of Charleston, South Carolina, who in 1891 established The Jenkins Orphanage for boys. In 1895, Jenkins instituted a rigorous music program in which the orphanageÃÂs young charges were taught the religious and secular music of the day, including overtures and marches. Precocious orphans and defiant runaways, some of whom played ragtime in bars and brothels, were delivered to the orphanage for ÃÂsalvationÃÂ and rehabilitation and made their contributions, as well. In the fashion of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and Fisk University, the Jenkins Orphanage Bands traveled widely, earning money to keep the orphanage afloat. It was an expensive enterprise. Jenkins typically took in approximately 125-150 ÃÂblack lambsÃÂ yearly, and many of them received formal musical training. Less than 30 years later, five bands operated nationally, with one traveling to England ÃÂ again in the Fisk tradition. It would be virtually impossible to overstate the influence of the Jenkins Orphanage Bands on early jazz, scores of whose members went on to play with jazz legends like Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton and Count Basie. Among them were the likes of Cat Anderson and Jabbo Smith.
For all its genius, early jazz, with its humble, folk roots, was the product of primarily self-taught musicians. But an impressive postbellum network of black-established and -operated institutions, schools and civic societies in both the North and the South -- of which Jenkins' orphanage was only one -- plus widening mainstream opportunities for education, produced ever-increasing numbers of young, formally trained African-American musicians, some of them schooled in classical European musical forms. Lorenzo Tio and Scott Joplin were among this new wave of musically literate jazz artists. Joplin, the son of a former slave and a free-born woman of color, was largely self-taught until age 11, when he received lessons in the fundamentals of music theory from a classically trained German immigrant in Texarkana, Texas.
An important event in the development of jazz was the tightening of the Jim Crow (racial segregation) laws in Louisiana in the 1890s. Accomplished African American musicians were no longer allowed to work with whites but were easily able to find work in all-black bands and orchestras, applying conservatory standards to black music.
There was a general liberalization of customs before World War I. Public dance halls, clubs, and tea rooms opened in the cities, and black dances like the cakewalk and the shimmy were eventually adopted by a white public, especially the flappers. White audiences saw them first in vaudeville shows, then performed by exhibition dancers in the clubs.
Much of the music for this dancing was not jazz, but it was new, and the fashion for new music did involve enthusiasm for some idea of jazz. Popular composers like Irving Berlin made attempts at jazzy writing, though they seldom used the specific musical devices that were second nature to jazz players--the rhythms, the blue notes. Nothing did more to popularize the idea of jazz than Berlin's hit song of 1911,"Alexander's Ragtime Band," which became a craze as far from home as Vienna. Although the song wasn't written in rag time, the lyrics describe a jazz band, right up to jazzing up popular songs, as in the line, "If you want to hear the Swanee River played in ragtime . . ."
Phonograph records made new music available everywhere. Through a few recordings aimed at black audiences, Louis Armstrong made the first decisive change in jazz. He played with the usual New Orleans march combo, in which everyone improvised simultaneously. But he was an extraordinary improviser, capable of creating endless variations on the initial melody. Musicians imitated him, not the ensemble, and jazz became a solo form.
The presence of dance venues influenced jazz musicians in two ways. They were more of them, since they could make a living, and jazz--like all the popular music of the 1920s--adopted the 4/4 beat of dance music.
With Prohibition, the constitutional amendment that forbade the sale of alcoholic beverages, the legal saloons and cabarets were closed, but in their place hundreds of speakeasies appeared, where patrons drank and were entertained by musicians. The music was still a mixture of things--current dance numbers, novelty songs, show tunes. "Businessman's bounce music," as one horn player put it. But musicians with steady jobs, playing with the same companions, were able to go far beyond that. The Ellington band at the Cotton Club and the various Kansas City groups that became the Count Basie band date from this period.
The early development of jazz was racially segregated, reflecting the culture of the United States at the time, with the innovation of mainly black club musicians being taken onto bandstands by white band leaders, who tended to mould the music more to orthodox rhythms and harmony. The slow dissolution of this segregation began in the mid-1930s when Benny Goodman hired pianist Teddy Wilson, vibraharpist Lionel Hampton, and guitarist Charlie Christian to join small groups. In the mid to late 1930s the popularity of Swing (genre) and big band music was at its height, making stars of such men as Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington. Swing, the popular music of its time, covered a broad spectrum from "sweet" to "hot" bands, with the jazz content varying across the range.
A development of Swing known as the jump blues anticipated rhythm and blues and rock and roll in some respects. It involved a use of small combos instead of big bands and a concentration on up-tempo music using the familiar blues chord progressions. One brief variation, known as boogie woogie, used a doubled rhythm--that is, the rhythm section played "eight to the bar," eight beats per measure instead of four. Big Joe Turner, a Kansas City singer who worked in the 1930s with Swing bands like Count Basie's, became a boogie woogie star in the 1940s and then in the 1950s was one of the first innovators of rock and roll, notably with his song "Shake, Rattle and Roll". Another jazz founder of rock and roll was saxophonist Louis Jordan.
The next major stylistic turn came with bebop, led by such distinctive stylists as the saxophonist Charlie Parker (known as "Bird"). This marked a major shift from music for dancing towards an intellectual art form of the first rank. Hard bop was an attempt to make bop more appealing to audiences by incorporating influences from soul music, gospel music, and the blues. Later bebop and hard bop musicians, such as trumpeter Miles Davis made more stylistic advances with modal jazz where the harmonic structure of pieces was much more free than previously, and frequently only implied by skeletal piano chords and bass parts. The instrumentalists would then improvise around a given mode of the scale. Soul jazz was a development of hard bop which centred on the Hammond organ.
With the growth of rock and roll in the 1960s, came the hybrid form jazz-rock fusion, again involving Davis who released the fusion albums In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew. Jazz at this stage was no longer in the center stage of popular music but was still breaking new ground and combining and recombining in different forms. Notable artists of the 1960s and 1970s jazz and fusion scene include: Carlos Santana, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Joni Mitchell, Sun Ra, Peter Skellern, Soft Machine, Caravan, Frank Zappa, Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius, and Weather Report. The only band that has continuously developed from the late 70s until now (2004) and has known an unusual popular reception for a jazz band is the Pat Metheny Group.
Since then the stylistic diversity of jazz has shown no sign of diminishing, absorbing influences from such disparate sources as world music and avant garde classical music, including African rhythm and traditional structure, serialism and the extensive use of chromatic scale, by such musicians as Ornette Coleman or John Zorn. However, jazz's audience has shrunk dramatically and split somewhat, with a mainly older audience retaining an interest in traditional jazz styles, a small core of practitioners and fans interested in highly experimental modern jazz, and a constantly changing group of musicians fusing jazz idioms with contemporary popular music genres, forming styles like acid jazz which contains elements of 1970s disco, acid swing which combines 1940s style big-band sounds with faster, more aggressive rock-influenced drums and electric guitar. Jazz enjoyed a resurgence in the 1980s with bands like Pigbag and Curiosity Killed the Cat achieving chart hits in Britain. Sade Adu became the definitive voice of smooth jazz. Starting in the 70ies with artists like Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny Group, Jan Garbarek, Ralph Towner or Eberhard Weber, the ECM record label established a new chamber-music aesthetics, preferably on acoustic instruments, heading to a world-music concept, also sometimes referred to as European leg of jazz.
Latin jazz deserves its own category or two - specifically there are two main styles of music that combine jazz harmonies and other concepts with rhythms and instruments from Africa and Latin America: Brazilian jazz and Afro-cuban jazz. While the music can be quite different, these forms of music are most definitely jazz, because they involve quite a bit of improvisation.
It is difficult to define precisely what jazz is; but, clearly, a key element of the form is improvisation. Improvisation has been since early times an essential element in African and African-American music and is closely related to the pervasiveness of call and response in West African and African-American cultural expression. The exact form of improvisation has changed over time. Early folk blues music often was based around a call and response pattern, and improvisation would factor into the lyrics, the melody, or both. Part of the Dixieland style involves musicians taking turns playing the melody while the others make up counter lines to go with it. By the Swing era, big bands played carefully arranged sheet music, but the music often would call for one member of the band to stand up and play a short, improvised solo. Finally, in Bebop, improvisation takes center stage, as almost the entire focus of the music is on clever, improvised solos, with little attention given to the melody, or "head", of each piece.
When jazz musicians improvise, they usually use a chord progression - the series of chords that define the harmonic structure of a piece of music. For example, the Charlie Parker composition "Now's the Time" is 12 bars long and follows what jazz musicians call a "twelve-bar blues" progression. After the melody, the rhythm section keeps playing the same 12 bars of music, while each soloist in turn improvises new melodies within the harmonic structure of the chords. It is possible to get a better idea of what is happening musically by humming the melody while listening to the solo. In this manner, it becomes clearer that the improvised melody is closely related to the chord progression of the piece. Fitting an improvised melody to the harmony is known as "playing the (chord) changes." As previously noted, later styles of jazz, such as modal jazz, abandoned the strict notion of a chord progression, allowing the individual musicians to improvise more freely within the context of a given scale or mode. When a pianist or guitarist improvises chords while a soloist is playing, it is called comping.
History
Roots of jazz
Early 20th century
1920s to 1950s
Development of bebop
Jazz and rock music: jazz fusion
Recent developments
Improvisation
Styles
See also
External links
| American roots music |
| Appalachian | Blues (Ragtime) | Cajun and Creole (Zydeco) | Country (Honky tonk and Bluegrass) | Jazz | Native American | Spiritualss and Gospel | Tejano |