History of Jazz

ORIGINS

Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, United States. It originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in blues and rag. Jazz is seen by many as "America's classical music". Since the 1920s Jazz Age, jazz has become recognized as a major form of musical expression. It then emerged in the form of independent traditional and popular musical styles. Jazz is characterized by swing and blues notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as "one of America's original art forms".

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 quadrilles, biguines, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. In the 1930s, heavily arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz, a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisational style and Gypsy jazz (a style that emphasized musette waltzes) were the prominent styles. Bebop 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 developed near the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, linear melodic lines. The 1940s also brought other styles and genres, such as Latin and Afro-Cuban jazz.

The 1950s saw the emergence of free jazz, which explored playing without regular meter, beat and formal structures, and in the mid-1950s, hard bop emerged, which introduced influences from rhythym and blues, gospel, and blues, especially in the saxophone and piano playing. Modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock music's rhythms, electric instruments, and highly amplified stage sound. In the early 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful, garnering significant radio airplay.

THE MOVEMENT

The Dixieland Era

The characteristics of this early style included a relatively complex of melodic lines among the trumpet, clarinet, trombone, and steady chom-chom beat from the rhythm instruments. Most bands use no written notations preferring head arrangements agreed upon verbally. Improvisation was an indispensable factor.

The New York Era

As the decade progressed, the performance styles in all groups featured more written arrangements and placed increasing emphasis on solo performance. That's were some of the great ones made their mark. Like Sydney Bechet, Jelly Role Morton, Coleman Hawkins, Louis Armstrong and James P. Johnson to name a few.

The Swing Era

Utilize almost exclusively for dancing the music of the big bands developed a style that's emphasized a blues vocabulary as well tempos of break neck speeds and overwhelming use of riffs.

The Bebop Era

Now here comes the era of rebellion. In regards to restrictive arrangements required by bands emphasizing solos rather than ensembles bebop was extremely complex rhythmically it used extension of usual harmonic structures and feature speed and irregular phrasing. It demanded great listening skills and its erratic rhythm made it unsuitable for dancing.

The Cool Era

Cool was a return of the carefully organized and scored principles of swing but without the emphasis on call-and- response and riffs. They preferred to play in the middle register utilizing a smooth attack, little vibrato and largely on beat phrasing

The Third Stream Jazz

This style used improvisational segments interwoven with compositions scored for symphony orchestras and chamber groups including string quartet.

Latin 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.

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