Jazz

Jazz is a musical style developed in the United States during the late 1800s and early 1900s that has grown to be one of the major music genres throughout the world. Characteristics of jazz include a focus on performance, improvisation, syncopated rhythms and swing, chordal complexity, and unique alternations of timing and tonality. Instruments commonly used to play jazz include the piano; brass and woodwinds such as the trumpet, saxophone, and clarinet; a variety of percussion instruments, including the drum set; and stringed instruments such as the guitar, bass, and violin.

Jazz music originated among African American communities in New Orleans, Louisiana, and combined elements from a variety of musical traditions, including religious spirituals, blues, ragtime, European chamber music, and West African music. The genre spread throughout the United States and into Europe from the 1920s on, facilitated by the rise of radio and the phonograph. As the music evolved it integrated influences and instrumentation from a variety of other music styles, including Caribbean and Latin American music, European traditional dance music, and pop music. The many resulting subgenres of jazz sometimes represent regional styles, as in New Orleans style or Chicago style, but they can also represent purely artistic movements, such as bebop, cool jazz, and avant-garde. While jazz music continues to evolve, a traditionalist movement has also grown to actively preserve jazz history and the varied techniques, styles, and repertoire of each historic period. Jazz as a whole is frequently regarded as one of the United States’ greatest cultural achievements.

Background

Two central elements of jazz—complex rhythmic variations and the social, communal aspect of performance—can be traced directly to Africa. In West and Central Africa, music has long been an integral part of many social and spiritual rituals. Many forms of African music incorporate syncopation, a technique that uses rhythmic displacement to create an "offbeat" sound, usually by placing emphasis on the "down" or "weak" beat. Another feature of African music that was brought to the United States is the call-and-response pattern, in which one voice or instrument provides a musical statement that is followed by a response in the form of another voice or instrumental sequence. Traditional African vocal styles often feature a singer calling out a solo phrase that is then answered by a phrase from the chorus.

During the African diaspora of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans were brought to North America, though historians disagree on the exact number. Enslaved people were often prohibited from engaging in their native cultural practices, but some elements of African musical styles were maintained in secret or integrated with Western music. Most prominently, the Christianization of enslaved Africans and their descendants led to a blending of African and European spiritual music that formed new genres of Christian music, such as gospel and slave spirituals.

In the mid-1800s it became popular in the American South to train enslaved Black people in classical instrumentation, singing, and dancing so that they could perform for White audiences. Another form of entertainment, the minstrel show, featured White actors and musicians dressed in blackface and performing crude imitations of Black culture. Ironically, by the late 1800s minstrelsy had become so popular that Black performers copied the stereotypes themselves. These introductions of European musical theory and song structures into the African American community helped give rise to the genre known as ragtime, which uses syncopated piano and banjo to create a unique, jaunty form of dance music. Composer Scott Joplin is credited with helping to invent and spread this musical form, which became extremely popular around the turn of the twentieth century and became a direct ancestor of jazz.

Another important early inspiration for jazz was the blues, a form of African American folk music that first arose from the field songs of rural slaves. Early blues songs used call-and-response patterns, simple repetitive melodies, and lyrics that reflected the realities of life among African American communities. Several important chord progressions and musical innovations of the blues became foundational parts of jazz as well. These include the common twelve-bar musical structure, the pentatonic scale, and the use of unexpected tonal shifts, called "blue notes," that provide mood and emotional emphasis.

New Orleans to the Jazz Age

Jazz first distinguished itself from its various influences around the turn of the twentieth century in New Orleans, particularly among the bars and streets of the Storyville neighborhood. As far back as 1817 the city designated the Congo Square area for enslaved people to play traditional songs and perform dances. Cornet player Buddy Bolden is credited as one of the first true jazz musicians. Hi band, first formed in 1895, became famous for their unique music that blended blues, minstrelsy, ragtime, and other elements in innovative ways. Bolden’s music contained a quality called "swing," which involves using syncopation and other rhythmic techniques to give the music a sense of forward movement.

The earliest form of jazz created by Bolden and others became known as Dixieland, which can be differentiated from later styles by its tendency toward collective improvisation, in which the full band participates in written call-and-response sequences, followed by sections in which the band members all improvise together over the basic melody. The first jazz recording was made by Nick LaRocca and his Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917, beginning a new era of musical transmission beyond local live performances.

Capitalizing on all of these elements and adding new ones was cornetist and trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who emerged from Storyville to become one of the most innovative and influential musicians in American history. Armstrong essentially invented the idea of providing "breaks" in the music where instrumentalists could take turns soloing against the background melody. It was one of the central innovations in the development of modern jazz, and for most of the next century, jazz musicians continued to look to Armstrong as one of the most important influences in the genre.

Despite the growing popularity of jazz, racism and segregation meant that it could be difficult for Black performers to win performing or recording contracts. White jazz bands, formed to keep up with the demand for the music, largely imitated Black performers. Americans’ increasing exposure to radio and records fueled the appetites of jazz audiences of all races, who found the swinging, danceable rhythms irresistible. The Prohibition era, which lasted from 1920 to 1933, led to the creation of illegal drinking parlors that provided important showcases for jazz musicians and helped spread the music to new listeners, launching the period that would become known as the Jazz Age. The music's pervasive influence also spread to film, as the first "talkie," or motion picture with synchronized sound, was The Jazz Singer (1927). The film starred popular vaudeville entertainer Al Jolson as a young man who forgoes traditional music to pursue fame through the new, exciting style of jazz.

By the 1930s jazz had cornered the American music market and the leading styles continued to shift. Most prominent was the "big band" movement, in which both African American and White bandleaders created large orchestral jazz bands that played in dance halls across the United States. Among the innovators in the genre were Chick Webb, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Artie Shaw. The big band sound represented the evolution of jazz from a form of regional folk music to a fully commercialized genre. The 1930s and then World War II also saw the exportation of jazz to Europe, where more hybrid genres were created. The most influential was so-called Gypsy jazz, or French jazz, which blended American jazz with traditional European dance music and acoustic instrumentation, exemplified by guitarist Django Reinhardt.

Bebop to Cool Jazz

Near the end of the big band era in the 1940s, many musicians gravitated toward a more intimate sound with smaller ensembles. From this emerged an influential subgenre called bebop, which eschewed the large-scale commercial sound of the big bands in favor of a more cerebral and personal presentation. Unlike big band or Dixieland, bebop is not meant to be danceable; rather, it is a highly complex, intellectual form of jazz that places increased focus on individuality, artistic innovation, technical virtuosity, and improvisation.

While some bebop is played at slow or medium tempos, pioneering bebop musicians increasingly explored fast, frenetic tempos that allowed musicians to showcase their ability to race against difficult rhythmic structures. Virtuoso innovators in the genre, such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Thelonious Monk, treated listeners to extended solos that emphasized the musician’s ability to improvise. Bebop innovation popularized the use of new sounds, including chords such as the flattened fifth, that were previously avoided because of their dissonant sound. Many critics have described bebop as only fully appreciable by other musicians due to its complexity and its sometimes jarring sound. Despite this, the basic bebop formula—in which the ensemble plays together through the first chorus of a song, then gives each performer space to solo over choruses—became the standard in American jazz, and the style remained one of the most popular subgenres of jazz into the twenty-first century.

An innovation of the late 1950s was cool jazz, which became one of the most popular subgenres into the early 1960s. In part a reaction to the energetic passion of bebop, it represented a stylistic shift toward a calmer, smoother form of music. Cool jazz places the emphasis less on the virtuosity and technical complexity of solos and more on their emotional aspects, as represented by the quality of tone. Trumpet player Miles Davis was an early innovator of the cool jazz sound and inspired an explosion of cool jazz on the West Coast, where musicians such as Dave Brubeck and Stan Getz became some of the subgenre’s best-known proponents. While not as artistically challenging as bebop, cool jazz produced some of the best-selling jazz albums of all times, such as Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959), and has remained a popular subgenre into the twenty-first century.

Avant-Garde, Latin Jazz, and Jazz Fusion

The evolution of jazz followed broader trends in American culture and counterculture, and the avant-garde and related free jazz movements of the 1950s and beyond can be seen as the musical equivalent of the avant-garde movements in visual and other arts of the same era. Performers such as Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago stripped jazz of the formalities characteristic of earlier styles, focusing on unimpeded improvisation and experimentation. Saxophonist John Coltrane, who performed in a variety of jazz subgenres, recorded some of the seminal albums that popularized the free jazz genre. Many avant-garde artists also experimented with unusual instruments and ideas from various styles of world music.

The integration of Latin sounds into both experimental and popular jazz became particularly important beginning in the mid-twentieth century, and the influence often flowed both ways. The bossa nova craze of the 1960s featured Brazilian samba music mixed with jazz, typically with guitar accompaniment. The style spread from Brazil to the United States and proved so popular that it helped create an entire subgenre of Latin jazz. Afro-Cuban influences were also important in the establishment of Latin jazz, with musicians borrowing from the rhythmic and melodic styles that had developed in Cuba and other Caribbean nations since the era of slavery.

Throughout the late twentieth century jazz hybridized with other genres as well, leading to the broad term "jazz fusion." Most notably, jazz fusion encompasses efforts to combine the complex musicality and improvisation of jazz with elements of rock and funk music as well as non-Western styles. From the late 1960s on, many fusion groups used electric instruments and amplification to create various forms of fusion, including jazz-rock. Some well-established jazz musicians experimented with fusion—for example, Miles Davis's groundbreaking introduction of jazz-rock—as did a number of important soul and funk musicians, such as James Brown and Ray Charles. The 1980s and 1990s saw further integration of jazz with electronic dance music, forming even narrower subgenres such as "acid jazz" and "nu jazz," which fuse jazz styles with synthesized beats and other sounds and elements of hip-hop music.

Impact

In the twenty-first century, myriad styles of jazz are actively performed and recorded, from Dixieland to jazz rap. Some musicians continue to push the boundaries of what can be considered jazz, while others focus on faithful reproductions of older forms. Over more than a century of evolution, jazz transitioned from an amalgamation of disparate elements to one of the most unique and popular genres of American—and global—music. Music education has embraced jazz as an important topic, and most major musical schools offer programs in jazz-focused music theory, composition, history, and performance. The compositional complexity of jazz music is considered by some musicologists to rival that of Western classical music. The study of jazz history, meanwhile, has provided important insights into many social topics, including African American history and race relations.

While jazz has diverged into many different subgenres that may seem barely related, many of the key elements found in the first examples of jazz music have remained central throughout its many forms. The importance of improvisation continues to be a defining characteristic and is the core of the genre’s focus on self-expression. In addition, the ideas of ensemble collaboration, live performance, and rhythmic movement have been retained to some degree in nearly every subgenre. The use of tonal and rhythmic characteristics such as swing, blue notes, and counterpoint also remain strongly associated with jazz as a whole. A living art form, jazz continues to evolve and change with each new musician and listener.

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