A. New Orleans Jazz
B. Armstrong's Impact
C. Chicago and New York City
D. Jazz Piano
E. The Big-Band Era
F. Interplay with Popular and Classical Music
G. The 1940s and the Postwar Decades
H. The Late 1950s, '60s, and '70s
1. Modal Jazz
2. Third-Stream and Avant-Garde Movements
3. Mainstream Developments
4. Fusion Jazz
I. The 1980s
Jazz is America's classical music, and while still rooted in the African-American experience, it is truly an international phenomenon. But where did the language of jazz find its roots? Where was jazz born?
I. Introduction
Jazz, a type of music developed by black Americans about 1900 and possessing an identifiable history and describable stylistic evolution. Jazz has borrowed from black folk music, and popular music has borrowed from jazz, but these three kinds of music remain distinct and should not be confused with one another.
II. Characteristics
Since its beginnings jazz has branched out into so many styles that no single description fits all of them with total accuracy. A few generalizations, however, can be made, bearing in mind that for all of them, exceptions can be cited. Performers of jazz improvise within the conventions of their chosen style. Typically, the improvisation is accompanied by the repeated chord progression of a popular song or an original composition. Instrumentalists emulate black vocal styles, including the use of glissandi and slides, nuances of pitch (including blue notes, the microtonally flattened tones in the blues scale), and tonal effects such as growls and wails.
In striving to develop a personal sound or tone color-an idiosyncratic sense of rhythm and form and an individual style of execution-performers create rhythms characterized by constant syncopation (accents in unexpected places) and also by swing-a sensation of pull and momentum that arises as the melody is heard alternately together with, then slightly at variance with, the expected pulse or division of a pulse. Written scores, if present, are used merely as guides, providing structure within which improvisation occurs. The typical instrumentation begins with a rhythm section consisting of piano, string bass, drums, and optional guitar, to which may be added any number of wind Instruments. In big bands the winds are grouped into three sections-saxophones, trombones, and trumpets. Although exceptions occur in some styles, most jazz is based on the principle that an infinite number of melodies can fit the chord progressions of any song. The musician improvises new melodies that fit the chord progression, which is repeated again and again as each soloist is featured, for as many choruses as desired.
Although pieces with many different formal patterns are used for jazz improvisation, two formal patterns in particular are frequently found in songs used for jazz. One is the AABA form of popular-song choruses, which typically consist of 32 measures in meter, divided into four 8-measure sections: section A; repeat of section A; section B (the "bridge" or "release," often beginning in a new key); repeat of section A. The second form, with roots deep in black American folk music, is the 12-bar blues form. Unlike the 32-bar AABA form, blues songs have a fairly standardized chord progression
III. Origins
Jazz is rooted in the mingled musical traditions of American blacks. These include traits surviving from in the New World; European popular and light classical music of the 18th and 19th centuries; and later popular music forms influenced by black music or produced by black composers. Among the African survivals are vocal styles that include great freedom of vocal color; a tradition of improvisation; call-and-response patterns; and rhythmic complexity-both syncopation of individual melodic lines and conflicting rhythms played by different members of an ensemble. Black folk music forms include field hollers, rowing chants, lullabies, and later, spirituals and blues (see African American Music).
European music contributed specific styles and forms-hymns, marches, waltzes, quadrilles, and other dance music, light theatrical music, Italian operatic music-and also theoretical elements, in particular, harmony, both as a vocabulary of chords and as a concept related to musical form. (Much of the European influence was absorbed through specific training in European music, even when the musicians so trained could find work only in low-life entertainment districts and on Mississippi riverboats.)
Black-influenced elements of popular music that contributed to jazz include the banjo music of the minstrel shows (derived from the banjo music of slaves); the syncopated rhythmic patterns of black-influenced Latin American music (heard in southern U.S. cities); the barrelhouse piano styles of tavern musicians in the Midwest; and marches and hymns as they were played by black brass bands in the late 19th century. Near the end of the 19th century another influential genre emerged. This was ragtime, a composed music that combined many elements, including syncopated rhythms from banjo music and other black sources) and the harmonic contrasts and formal patterns of European marches. After 1910 the bandleader W. C. Handy took another influential form, the blues, beyond its previously strictly oral tradition by publishing his original blues songs. (Favored by jazz musicians, his songs found perhaps their greatest interpreter later, in the 1920s, in the blues singer Bessie Smith, who recorded many of them.) The merging of these multiple influences into jazz is difficult to reconstruct, because it occurred before the phonograph could provide valuable documentation.
IV. History
Most early jazz was played in small marching bands or by solo pianists. Besides ragtime and marches, the repertoire included hymns, spirituals, and blues. The bands played this music,modified frequently by syncopations and acceleration, at picnics, weddings, parades, and funerals. Characteristically, the bands played dirges on the way to funerals and lively marches on the way back. Although blues and ragtime had arisen independently of jazz, and continued to exist alongside it, these genres influenced the style and forms of jazz and provided important vehicles for jazz improvisation.
A. New Orleans Jazz
Around the turn of the 20th century the earliest fully documented jazz style emerged, centered in New Orleans, Louisiana. In this style the cornet or trumpet carried the melody, the clarinet played florid countermelodies, and the trombone played rhythmic slides and sounded the root notes of chords or simple harmony. Below this basic trio the tuba or string bass provided a bass line and drums the rhythmic accompaniment. Exuberance and volume were more important than finesse, and improvisation was focused on the ensemble sound. A musician named Buddy Bolden appears to have led some of the first jazz bands, but their music and its sound have been lost to posterity. Although some jazz influences can be heard on a few early phonograph records, not until 1917 did a jazz band record. This band, a group of white New Orleans musicians called The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, created a sensation overseas and in the United States (The term Dixieland jazz eventually came to mean the New Orleans style as played by white musicians.)
Two groups, one white and one black, followed: in 1922 the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and in 1923 the Creole Jazz Band, the latter led by the cornetist King Oliver, an influential stylist. The series of recordings made by Oliver's group are the most significant recordings in the New Orleans style. Other leading New Orleans musicians included the trumpeters Bunk Johnson and Freddie Keppard, the soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, the drummer Warren "Baby" Dodds, and the pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton. The most influential musician nurtured in New Orleans, however, was King Oliver's second trumpeter, Louis Armstrong.
B. Armstrong's Impact
The first true virtuoso soloist of jazz, Armstrong was a dazzling improviser, technically, emotionally, and intellectually. He changed the format of jazz by bringing the soloist to the forefront, and in his recording groups, the Hot Five and the Hot Seven, demonstrated that jazz improvisation could go far beyond simply ornamenting the melody-he created new melodies based on the chords of the initial tune. He also set standards for all later jazz singers, not only by the way he altered the words and melodies of songs but also by improvising without words, like an instrument (scat singing).
C. Chicago and New York City
For jazz the 1920s was a decade of great experimentation and discovery. Many New Orleans musicians, including Armstrong,migrated to Chicago, influencing local musicians and stimulating the evolution of the Chicago style-derived from the New Orleans style but emphasizing soloists, often adding saxophone to the instrumentation, and usually producing tenser rhythms and more complicated textures. Instrumentalists working in Chicago or influenced by the Chicago style included the trombonist Jack Teagarden, the banjoist Eddie Condon, the drummer Gene Krupa, and the clarinetist Benny Goodman. Also active in Chicago was Bix Beiderbecke, whose lyrical approach to the cornet provided an alternative to Armstrong's trumpet style. Many Chicago musicians eventually settled in New York City, another major center for jazz in the 1920s.
D. Jazz Piano
Another vehicle for jazz developments in the 1920s was piano music. The Harlem district of New York City became the center of a highly technical, hard-driving solo style known as stride piano. The master of this approach in the early 1920s was James P. Johnson, whose protégé Fats Waller, a talented vocalist and entertainer as well, became by far the most popular performer in this idiom.
A second piano style to develop in the 1920s was boogie-woogie. A form of blues played on the piano, it consists of a short, sharply accented bass pattern played over and over by the left hand while the right hand plays freely, using a variety of rhythms. Boogie-woogie became especially popular in the 1930s and '40s. Leading boogie-woogie pianists include Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, and Pine Top Smith.
The most innovative pianist of the 1920s, comparable to Armstrong and present on some of the latter's best recordings, was Earl "Fatha" Hines, a Chicago-nurtured virtuoso considered to possess a wild, unpredictable imagination. His style, combined with the smoother approach of Waller, influenced most pianists of the next generation-notably Teddy Wilson, who was featured with Goodman's band in the 1930s, and Art Tatum, who performed mostly as a soloist, and who was regarded with awe for his complex virtuosity.
E. The Big-Band Era
Also during the 1920s, large groups of jazz musicians began to play together, after the model of society dance bands, forming the so-called big bands that became so popular in the 1930s and early '40s that the period was known as the swing era. One major development in the emergence of the swing era was a rhythmic change that smoothed the two-beat rhythms of the New Orleans style into a more flowing four beats to the bar. Musicians also developed the use of short melodic patterns, called riffs, in call-and-response patterns. To facilitate this procedure, orchestras were divided into instrumental sections, each with its own riffs, and opportunities were provided for musicians to play extended solos.
The development of the big band as a jazz medium was largely the achievement of Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson. Henderson and his arranger, Don Redman, helped introduce written scores into jazz music, but they also attempted to capture the quality of improvisation that characterized the music of smaller ensembles. In the latter aim they were aided by gifted soloists such as the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins.
Ellington, during the 1920s, led a band at the Cotton Club in New York City. Continuing to direct his orchestra until his death in 1974, he composed colorful experimental concert pieces ranging in length from the three-minute "Koko" (1940)to the hour-long Black, Brown, and Beige (1943), as well as songs such as "Solitude" and "Sophisticated Lady." More complex than Henderson's music, Ellington's music made his orchestra a cohesive ensemble, with solos written for the unique qualities of specific instruments and players. Other bands in the tradition of Ellington and Henderson were led by Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, and Cab Calloway.
A different style of big-band jazz was developed in Kansas City during the mid-1930s and was epitomized by the band of Count Basie. Originally assembled in Kansas City, Basie's band reflected the southwestern emphasis on improvisation, keeping the written (or simply memorized) passages relatively short and simple. The wind instruments in his band exchanged ensemble riffs in a free, strongly rhythmical interplay, with pauses to accommodate extended instrumental solos. Basie's tenor saxophonist Lester Young, in particular, played with a rhythmic freedom rarely apparent in the improvisations of soloists from other bands. Young's delicate tone and long, flowing melodies, laced with an occasional avant-garde honk or gurgle, opened up a whole new approach, as Armstrong's playing had done in the 1920s.
Other trend setters of the late 1930s were the trumpeter Roy Eldridge, the electric-guitarist Charlie Christian, the drummer Kenny Clarke, and the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. Jazz singing in the 1930s became increasingly flexible and stylized. Ivie Anderson, Mildred Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, and, above all, Billie Holiday were the leading singers.
F. Interplay with Popular and Classical Music
The pioneering efforts of Armstrong, Ellington, Henderson, and others made jazz a dominant influence on American music during the 1920s and '30s. Such popular musicians as the bandleader Paul Whiteman used some of the more obvious rhythmic and melodic devices of jazz, although with less improvisational freedom and skill than were displayed in the music of the major jazz players. Attempting to fuse jazz with light classical music, Whiteman's orchestra also premiered jazzy symphonic pieces by American composers such as George Gershwin. Closer to the authentic jazz tradition of improvisation and solo virtuosity was the music played by the bands of Benny Goodman (who used many Henderson arrangements), Gene Krupa, and Harry James.
Since the days of ragtime, jazz composers had admired classical music. A number of swing-era musicians "jazzed the classics" in recordings such as "Bach Goes to Town" (Benny Goodman) and "Ebony Rhapsody" (Ellington and others).
Composers of concert music, in turn, paid tribute to jazz in works such as Contrasts (1938, commissioned by Goodman)by the Hungarian Béla Bartók, and Ebony Concerto (1945,commissioned by the orchestra led by Woody Herman, 1913-87) by the Russian-born Igor Stravinsky. Other composers, such as Aaron Copland, an American, and Darius Milhaud, a Frenchman, acknowledged the spirit of jazz in their works.
G. The 1940s and the Postwar Decades
The preeminently influential jazz musician of the 1940s was Charlie Parker, who became the leader of a new style known as bebop, rebop, or bop. Like Lester Young, Charlie Christian, and other outstanding soloists, Parker had played with big bands. During World War II, however, the wartime economy and changes in audience tastes had driven many big bands out of business. Their decline, combined with the radically new bebop style, amounted to a revolution in the jazz world.
Bebop was still based on the principle of improvisation over a chord progression, but the tempos were faster, the phrases longer and more complex, and the emotional range expanded to include more unpleasant feelings than before. Jazz musicians became aware of themselves as artists and made little effort to sell their wares by adding vocals, dancing, and comedy, as had their predecessors.
At the center of the ferment stood Parker, who could do anything on the saxophone, in any tempo and in any key. He created beautiful melodies that were related in advanced ways to the underlying chords, and his music possessed endless rhythmic variety. Parker's frequent collaborators were the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, known for his formidable speed and range and daring harmonic sense, and the pianist Earl "Bud" Powell and drummer Max Roach, both leaders in their own right. Also highly regarded were the pianist-composer Thelonious Monk and the trumpeter Fats Navarro. The jazz singer Sarah Vaughan was associated early in her career with bop musicians, particularly Gillespie and Parker.
The late 1940s brought forth an explosion of experimentation in jazz. Modernized big bands led by Gillespie and Stan Kenton flourished alongside small groups with innovative musicians such as the pianist Lennie Tristano. Most of these groups drew ideas from 20th-century pieces by such masters as Bartók and Stravinsky. The most influential of the midcentury experiments with classically influenced jazz were the 1949-50 recordings made by an unusual nonet led by Charlie Parker's protégé, a young trumpeter named Miles Davis. The written arrangements, by Davis and others, were soft in tone but highly complex. Many groups adopted this "cool" style, especially on the West Coast, and so it became known as West Coast jazz. Refined by players such as the tenor saxophonists Zoot Sims and Stan Getz and the baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, cool jazz flourished throughout the 1950s. Also in the 1950s the pianist Dave Brubeck (a student of Milhaud), with the alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, achieved popularity with his blend of classical music and jazz.
Most musicians, however, particularly on the East Coast, continued to expand on the hotter, more driving bebop tradition. Major exponents of the hard-bop or East Coast style included the trumpeter Clifford Brown, the drummer Art Blakey, and the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, whose unique approach made him one of the major talents of his generation. Another derivative of the Parker style was soul jazz, played by the pianist Horace Silver, the alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, and his brother, the cornetist Nat Adderley.
H. The Late 1950s, '60s, and '70s
Several new approaches characterized jazz in the third quarter of the century. The years around 1960 ranked with the late 1920s and the late 1940s as one of the most fertile periods in the history of jazz.
1. Modal Jazz
In 1955 Miles Davis organized a quintet that featured the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, whose approach produced a striking contrast to Davis's rich-toned, unhurried, expressive melodic lines. Coltrane poured out streams of notes with velocity and passion, exploring every melodic idea, no matter how exotic; yet he played slow ballads with poise and serenity. In his solos he revealed an exceptional sense of form and pacing. In 1959 he appeared on a landmark Miles Davis album, Kind of Blue. Along with the pianist Bill Evans, Davis devised for this album a set of pieces that remain in one key, chord, and mode for as long as 16 measures at a time-leading to the term modal jazz-allowing much freedom for the improviser. Coltrane, striking out on his own, first pushed the complexity of bop to its limits in "Giant Steps" (1959), then settled on the other extreme, modal jazz. The latter style dominated his repertoire after 1960, when he recorded "My Favorite Things" using an open-ended arrangement in which each soloist stayed in one mode for as long as he wished. Coltrane's quartet included the pianist McCoy Tyner and the drummer Elvin Jones, two musicians who, because of their dramatic musical qualities, were widely imitated.
2. Third-Stream and Avant-Garde Movements
Another product of the experimentation of the late 1950s and '60s was the attempt by the composer Gunther Schuller, together with the pianist John Lewis and his Modern Jazz Quartet, to fuse jazz and classical music into a "third stream" by bringing together musicians from both worlds in a repertoire that drew heavily on the techniques of both kinds of music. Also active during these years was the composer, bassist, and bandleader Charlie Mingus, who imbued his chord-progression-based improvisations with a wild, raw excitement. Most controversial was the work of the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, whose improvisations, at times almost atonal, did away with chord progressions altogether,while retaining the steady rhythmic swing so characteristic of jazz. Although Coleman's wailing sound and rough technique shocked many critics, others recognized the wit, sincerity, and rare sense of form that characterized his solos. He inspired a whole school of avant-garde jazz that flourished in the 1960s and '70s and included the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre, the pianist Cecil Taylor, and even Coltrane, who ventured into avant-garde improvisation before his death in 1967.
3. Mainstream Developments
Meanwhile, the mainstream of jazz, although incorporating many of Coltrane's melodic ideas and even some modal jazz pieces, continued to build improvisations largely on the chord progressions of popular songs. Brazilian songs, especially those in the bossa nova style, were added to the repertoire in the early 1960s. Their Latin rhythms and fresh chord progressions appealed to jazz musicians of several generations, notably Stan Getz and the flutist Herbie Mann. Even after the bossa nova style declined, the sambas that gave rise to it remained staples of the jazz repertoire, and many groups augmented their regular drum set with Caribbean percussion. The trio formed by the pianist Bill Evans treated popular songs with depth, the musicians constantly interacting instead of simply taking turns for solos. This interactive approach was carried even further by the rhythm section of Davis's quintet 1963 and later, which included the drummer Tony Williams, the bassist Ron Carter, the pianist Herbie Hancock, and later the highly original tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter.
4. Fusion Jazz
Jazz underwent an economic crisis in the late 1960s. Younger audiences favored soul music and rock, while older aficionados turned away from the abstractness and emotional rawness of much modern jazz. Jazz musicians realized that to regain an audience they must draw ideas from popular music. Some of these ideas came from rock, but most were drawn from the dance rhythms and chord progressions of soul musicians such as James Brown. Some groups also added elements of music from other cultures. The initial examples of this new fusion jazz met with varying success, but in 1969 Davis recorded Bitches Brew, a highly successful album that combined soul rhythms and electronically amplified instruments with uncompromising, highly dissonant jazz. Not surprisingly, alumni of Davis's groups created some of the most musically successful fusion recordings of the 1970s: Herbie Hancock; Wayne Shorter and the Austrian-born pianist Joe Zawinul, co-leaders of the ensemble Weather Report; the English electric guitarist John McLaughlin; and the brilliant pianist Chick Corea and his group Return to Forever. Rock musicians, in turn, began featuring jazz phrasings and solos over a rock-based rhythm. These groups included Chase; Chicago; and Blood, Sweat and Tears.
During this same period another Davis alumnus, the iconoclastic pianist Keith Jarrett, succeeded commercially while eschewing electronic instruments and popular styles. His performances of popular standards and original songs with a quartet, as well as his improvisations alone at the keyboard, marked him as a major contemporary pianist of jazz.
I. The 1980s
In the mid-1980s jazz artists were once again performing, in a variety of styles, to sizable audiences, and there was renewed interest in serious (as opposed to pop-oriented) jazz. Associated with this interest was the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who was also acclaimed for his performances of classical music. Although jazz remained essentially the provenance of American musicians, its international audience flourished to the extent that non-American musicians formed an increasingly significant subgroup within jazz in the 1970s and '80s, as their predecessors, including the Belgian guitarist Django Reinhardt, had done in the 1930s and later.
"Jazz," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2000
http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2000 Microsoft Corporation.
All rights reserved.
