The one musical feature that unites all forms of jazz is an emphasis on free expression. By definition, that can take a lot of forms! Jazz musicians often express themselves by improvising , making spontaneous changes to the melody and creating new musical ideas in conversation with one another.
The result is a loose, rollicking sound that rides right along the edge of chaos without ever falling in. Rhythmically, jazz tends to be heavily syncopated. The result is a kind of jumping sound that immediately gets people on their feet dancing. In more modern jazz styles, this syncopation is taken to such an extreme that it might be difficult to find the beat at all! Lastly, jazz is often highly polyphonic , meaning it uses many sounds simultaneously — many layers of harmony are built up over a basic melody.
Think of a piano player using all his fingers at once to build an extremely complex chord while a fast trumpet player bounces around from note to note — these two musicians by themselves can achieve a lot of polyphonic complexity even without a big band. As with the rhythm, jazz polyphony can be taken to extremes in some avant-garde jazz. The melody can become difficult to find under all the layers of dissonant harmony!
Dixieland jazz is the original jazz sound. Dixieland is easy to recognize by the frenetic rhythms, but it also uses a very different set of instruments from most other jazz styles. There are many shared instruments — for example, the trumpet, trombone, and saxophone are common to many styles of jazz.
But Dixieland bands also use banjos, kazoos, and small portable percussion instruments in the video, notice how the kazoo player is using her kazoo and paper roll as a percussion instrument. The tuba is also a common player in Dixieland jazz but less common in other subgenres. The first jazz recordings, made in by The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, proved wildly popular and helped bring the music to an enthusiastic nationwide audience.
Singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday appeared, fronting big bands at first, then making solo careers of their own. Partly in response to the perceived commercialism of some swing era music, the mids saw the emergence of bebop , a fiercely intellectual Afro-American creation that was meant for listening more than dancing.
Jazz from the West Coast began to emerge: artists like Dexter Gordon, Chet Baker and Art Pepper were also perceived as having a laid-back, sunny aesthetic. In Ornette Coleman pioneered free jazz. This initially controversial style dispensed with chord sequences and song structures in favour of a kind of bluesy, swinging chaos. Meanwhile, Miles Davis and others had been experimenting with modal jazz — where the musicians improvise with scales, often for extended periods — in an attempt to free themselves from the constraints of traditional harmony.
This fusing of jazz with music from other cultures was a tradition that had been in place at least since Dizzy Gillespie had mixed together bebop with Cuban music in the s. This grew into fusion as artists like Herbie Hancock and Weather Report mixed jazz improvisation with disco and funk to create complex, danceable sounds. More recent trends in jazz have included the growth of European jazz , which has often had its own distinct sound, the complex rhythmic music of the M-Base movement in the s, and the neo-traditionalism of the Young Lions school.
Jazz is now taught all over the world in elite conservatories, which continue to produce outstanding young players and, whilst it is no longer popular music in the way that it was in the s, it retains a dedicated audience of concertgoers and listeners. He also makes the point elsewhere that we cannot teach an art form to younger generations if we are unable to define it clearly.
All major directions in jazz have resulted from reimagining those fundamentals, not avoiding them. In fact, these parameters would exclude a number of the sub-genres mentioned above, including jazz-rock, fusion, Brazilian jazz and much of what we think of as modern European and even American jazz. But certain types of jazz or at least jazz-adjacent musics, featuring artists who are recognised as jazz musicians have utilised straight, rather than swung, eighth notes whilst retaining other elements that we associate with the music.
Jazz music is characterized by blue notes and call-and-response vocals, much like the blues genre. It differs in its swing style, though, with a dominant element of improvisation. Improvisation is what makes it memorable. It started in the late nineteenth century, as the slave folk songs of the African people were influenced by European and American classical music.
The slaves in New Orleans were mainly from West Africa, so the Western African culture provides the roots of jazz music.
The harmonic style of church hymns in America combined with their spirituals and laid the groundwork for this musical genre, rich with emotion. As the nineteenth century wore on, many black musicians learned to play instruments from Europe, which they used for their cakewalks. As the popularity of jazz grew, European-American performers wore blackface and popularized the music worldwide.
Although the Black Codes prohibited slaves from drumming, they were able to keep drumming traditions alive through body rhythms like stomping and clapping. In the Caribbean, however, African-based rhythms were retained, and these influences crossed over into New Orleans from the Cuban and Haitian people.
African American music incorporated Afro-Cuban motifs due to the twice-a-day ferry that musicians took between Havana and New Orleans.
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