jazz

1 empty rhetoric or insincere or exaggerated talk; "that's a lot of wind"; "don't give me any of that jazz" [syn: wind, idle words, nothingness]

2 a genre of popular music that originated in New Orleans around 1900 and developed through increasingly complex styles

3 a style of dance music popular in the 1920s; similar to New Orleans jazz but played by large bands

1 play something in the style of jazz

2 have sexual intercourse with; "This student sleeps with everyone in her dorm"; "Adam knew Eve"; "Were you ever intimate with this man?" [syn: roll in the hay, love, make out, make love, sleep with, get laid, have sex, know, do it, be intimate, have intercourse, have it away, have it off, screw, fuck, eff, hump, lie with, bed, have a go at it, bang, get it on, bonk]

see Jazz

English

Etymology

Etymology uncertain. See also Origin of the word jazz in Wikipedia.

Pronunciation

• /ˈʤæz/, /"dZ

Origins

By 1808 the Atlantic slave trade had brought almost half a million Africans to the United States. The slaves largely came from West Africa and brought strong tribal musical traditions with them. Lavish festivals featuring African dances to drums were organized on Sundays at Place Congo, or Congo Square, in New Orleans until 1843, as were similar gatherings in New England and New York. African music was largely functional, for work or ritual, and included work songs and field hollers. In the African tradition, they had a single-line melody and a call-and-response pattern, but without the European concept of harmony. Rhythms reflected African speech patterns, and the African use of pentatonic scales led to blue notes in blues and jazz. In the early 19th century an increasing number of black musicians learned to play European instruments, particularly the violin, which they used to parody European dance music in their own cakewalk dances. In turn, European-American minstrel show performers in blackface popularized such music internationally, combining syncopation with European harmonic accompaniment. Louis Moreau Gottschalk adapted African-American cakewalk music, South American, Caribbean and other slave melodies as piano salon music. Another influence came from black slaves who had learned the harmonic style of hymns and incorporated it into their own music as spirituals. The origins of the blues are undocumented, though they can be seen as the secular counterpart of the spirituals. Paul Oliver has drawn attention to similarities in instruments, music and social function to the griots of the West African savannah.

1890s–1910s

Ragtime

Emancipation of slaves led to new opportunities for education of freed African-Americans, but strict segregation meant limited employment opportunities. Black musicians provided "low-class" entertainment at dances, minstrel shows, and in vaudeville, and many marching bands formed. Black pianists played in bars, clubs and brothels, and ragtime developed.

New Orleans music

The music of New Orleans had a profound effect on the creation of early jazz. Many early jazz performers played in the brothels and bars of red-light district around Basin Street called "Storyville." In addition, numerous marching bands played at lavish funerals arranged by the African American community. The instruments used in marching bands and dance bands became the basic instruments of jazz: brass and reeds tuned in the European 12-tone scale and drums. Small bands of primarily self-taught African American musicians, many of whom came from the funeral-procession tradition of New Orleans, played a seminal role in the development and dissemination of early jazz, traveling throughout Black communities in the Deep South and, from around 1914 on, Afro-Creole and African American musicians playing in vaudeville shows took jazz to western and northern US cities.Afro-Creole pianist Jelly Roll Morton began his career in Storyville. From 1904, he toured with vaudeville shows around southern cities, also playing in Chicago and New York. His "Jelly Roll Blues," which he composed around 1905, was published in 1915 as the first jazz arrangement in print, introducing more musicians to the New Orleans style. In the northeastern United States, a "hot" style of playing ragtime had developed, notably James Reese Europe's symphonic Clef Club orchestra in New York which played a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall in 1912, and his "Society Orchestra" which in 1913 became the first black group to make recordings. The Baltimore rag style of Eubie Blake influenced James P. Johnson's development of "Stride" piano playing, in which the right hand plays the melody, while the left hand provides the rhythm and bassline.

Swing

The 1930s belonged to popular swing big bands, in which some virtuoso soloists became as famous as the band leaders. Key figures in developing the "big" jazz band included bandleaders and arrangers Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Glenn Miller. Swing was also dance music and it was broadcast on the radio 'live' coast-to-coast nightly across America for many years. Although it was a collective sound, swing also offered individual musicians a chance to 'solo' and improvise melodic, thematic solos which could at times be very complex and 'important' music. Included among the critically acclaimed leaders who specialized in live radio broadcasts of swing music as well as "Sweet Band" compositions during this era was Shep Fields.

European jazz

Outside of the United States the beginnings of a distinct European style of jazz emerged in France with the Quintette du Hot Club de France which began in 1934. Belgian guitar virtuoso Django Reinhardt popularized gypsy jazz, a mix of 1930s American swing, French dance hall "musette" and Eastern European folk with a languid, seductive feel. The main instruments are steel stringed guitar, violin, and double bass. Solos pass from one player to another as the guitar and bass play the role of the rhythm section. Some music researchers hold that it was Philadelphia's Eddie Lang (guitar) and Joe Venuti (violin) who pioneered the gypsy jazz form , which was brought to France after they had been heard live or on Okeh Records in the late 1920s.

1940s and 1950s

Dixieland revival

In the late 1930s there was a revival of "Dixieland" music, harkening back to the original contrapuntal New Orleans style. This was driven in large part by record company reissues of early jazz classics by the Oliver, Morton, and Armstrong bands of the 20s. There were two populations of musicians involved in the revival. One group consisted of men who had begun their careers playing in the traditional style, and were either returning to it, or continuing what they had been playing all along. In the late 1930s, Bob Crosby's Bobcats led this revival. Other prominent Dixieland revivalists included Max Kaminsky, Eddie Condon, and Wild Bill Davison. Most of this group were originally midwesterners, although there were a small number of New Orleans musicians involved as well.

Bebop

In the mid-1940s bebop performers helped to shift jazz from danceable popular music towards a more challenging "musician's music." Differing greatly from swing, early bebop divorced itself from dance music, establishing itself more as an art form but lessening its potential popular and commercial value. Influential bebop musicians included saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianists Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown, bassist Ray Brown, and drummer Max Roach. (See also List of bebop musicians).

Cool jazz

Cool jazz emerged in the late 1940s in New York City, as a result of the mixture of the styles of predominantly white jazz musicians and black bebop musicians. Cool jazz recordings by Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Gil Evans, Stan Getz and the Modern Jazz Quartet usually have a "lighter" sound which avoided the aggressive tempos and harmonic abstraction of bebop. An important recording was Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool (tracks originally recorded in 1949 and 1950 and collected as an LP in 1957). Players such as pianist Bill Evans began searching for new ways to structure their improvisations by exploring modal music. Cool jazz later became strongly identified with the West Coast jazz scene. Its influence stretches into such later developments as Bossa Nova, modal jazz (especially in the form of Davis's Kind of Blue 1959), and even free jazz (see also the List of Cool jazz and West Coast jazz musicians).

Hard bop

Hard bop is an extension of bebop (or "bop") music that incorporates influences from rhythm and blues, gospel music, and blues, especially in the saxophone and piano playing. Hard bop was developed in the mid-1950s, partly in response to the vogue for cool jazz in the early 1950s. The hard bop style coalesced in 1953 and 1954, paralleling the rise of rhythm and blues. Miles Davis' performance of "Walkin'," the title track of his album of the same year, at the very first Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, announced the style to the jazz world. The quintet Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, fronted by Blakey and featuring pianist Horace Silver and trumpeter Clifford Brown, were leaders in the hard bop movement along with Davis. (See also List of Hard bop musicians)

Free jazz

Free jazz and the related form of avant-garde jazz, are subgenres rooted in bebop, that use less compositional material and allow performers more latitude. Free jazz uses implied or loose harmony and tempo, which was deemed controversial when this approach was first developed. The bassist Charles Mingus is also frequently associated with the avant-garde in jazz, although his compositions draw off a myriad of styles and genres. The first major stirrings came in the 1950s, with the early work of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. In the 1960s, performers included John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, and others. Free jazz quickly found a foothold in Europe, also in part because musicians such as Ayler, Taylor, Steve Lacy and Eric Dolphy spent extended periods in Europe.

1960s and 1970s

Latin jazz

Latin jazz has two main varieties: Afro-Cuban and Brazilian jazz. Afro-Cuban jazz was played in the U.S. directly after the bebop period, while Brazilian jazz became more popular in the 1960s. Afro-Cuban jazz began as a movement in the mid-1950s as bebop musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie and Billy Taylor started Afro-Cuban bands influenced by such Cuban and Puerto Rican musicians as Xavier Cugat, Tito Puente, and Arturo Sandoval. Brazilian jazz such as bossa nova is derived from samba, with influences from jazz and other 20th century classical and popular music styles. Bossa is generally moderately paced, with melodies sung in Portuguese or English. The style was pioneered by Brazilians João Gilberto, Antônio Carlos Jobim, Vinícius de Moraes, among others. The related term jazz-samba describes an adaptation of bossa nova compositions to the jazz idiom by American performers such as Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd.

Soul jazz

Soul jazz was a development of hard bop which incorporated strong influences from blues, gospel and rhythm and blues in music for small groups, often the organ trio which featured the Hammond organ. Unlike hard bop, soul jazz generally emphasized repetitive grooves and melodic hooks, and improvisations were often less complex than in other jazz styles. Horace Silver had a large influence on the soul jazz style, with his songs that used funky and often gospel-based piano vamps. Important soul jazz organists included Jimmy McGriff and Jimmy Smith and Johnny Hammond Smith, and influential tenor saxophone players included Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Stanley Turrentine. (See also List of soul-jazz musicians.)

Jazz fusion

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the hybrid form of jazz-rock fusion was developed. Although jazz purists protested the blend of jazz and rock, some of jazz's significant innovators crossed over from the contemporary hardbop scene into fusion. Jazz fusion music often uses mixed meters, odd time signatures, syncopation, and complex chords and harmonies, and fusion includes a number of electric instruments, such as the electric guitar, electric bass, electric piano, and synthesizer keyboards. Notable performers of jazz fusion included Miles Davis, keyboardists Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, drummer Tony Williams, guitarists Larry Coryell and John McLaughlin, Frank Zappa, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and bassist-composer Jaco Pastorius.

1970s trends

There was a resurgence of interest in jazz and other forms of African American cultural expression during the Black Arts Movement and Black nationalist period of the early 1970s. Musicians such as Pharoah Sanders, Hubert Laws and Wayne Shorter began using kalimbas, cowbells, beaded gourds and other instruments not traditional to jazz. Alice Coltrane drew notice as a jazz harpist, Jean-Luc Ponty as a jazz violinist, and Rufus Harley as a bagpipe player. Jazz continued to expand and change, influenced by other types of music, such as world music, avant garde classical music, and rock and pop music. Guitarist John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra played a mix of rock and jazz infused with East Indian influences. The ECM record label began in the 1970s with artists including Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, the Pat Metheny Group, Jan Garbarek, Ralph Towner, and Eberhard Weber, establishing a new chamber-music aesthetic, featuring mainly acoustic instruments, and incorporating elements of world music and folk music.

1980s–2000s

In the 1980s, the jazz community shrank dramatically and split. A mainly older audience retained an interest in traditional and "straight-ahead" jazz styles. Wynton Marsalis strove to create music within what he believed was the tradition, creating extensions of small and large forms initially pioneered by such artists as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.

Pop fusion and other subgenres

In the early 1980s, a lighter commercial form of jazz fusion called pop fusion or "smooth jazz" became successful and garnered significant radio airplay. Smooth jazz saxophonists include Grover Washington, Jr., Kenny G and Najee. Smooth jazz received frequent airplay with more straight-ahead jazz in quiet storm time slots at radio stations in urban markets across the U.S., helping to establish or bolster the careers of vocalists including Al Jarreau, Anita Baker, Chaka Khan, and Sade.

Experimental and straight-ahead performers

The more experimental and improvisational end of the spectrum includes Norwegian pianist Bugge Wesseltoft and American bassist Christian McBride. Toward the more pop or dance music end of the spectrum are St Germain who incorporates some live jazz playing with house beats. Radiohead, Björk, and Portishead have also incorporated jazz influences into their music.

Definition

As the term "jazz" has long been used for a wide variety of styles, a comprehensive definition including all varieties is elusive. While some enthusiasts of certain types of jazz have argued for narrower definitions which exclude many other types of music also commonly known as "jazz", jazz musicians themselves are often reluctant to define the music they play. Duke Ellington summed it up by saying, "It's all music." Some critics have even stated that Ellington's music was not in fact jazz, as by its very definition, according to them, jazz cannot be orchestrated. On the other hand Ellington's friend Earl Hines' s 20 solo "transformative versions" of Ellington compositions (on Earl Hines Plays Duke Ellington recorded in the 1970s) were described by Ben Ratliff, the New York Times jazz critic, as "as good an example of the jazz process as anything out there."

Improvisation

While jazz may be difficult to define, improvisation is clearly one of its key elements. Early blues was commonly structured around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, a common element in the African American oral tradition. A form of folk music which rose in part from work songs and field hollers of rural Blacks, early blues was also highly improvisational. These features are fundamental to the nature of jazz. While in European classical music elements of interpretation, ornamentation and accompaniment are sometimes left to the performer's discretion, the performer's primary goal is to play a composition as it was written.

Samples

sample box start jazz music

See also

• Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame
• American Jazz Museum
• Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame
• Cape jazz
• Cool (aesthetic)
• European free jazz
• International Association for Jazz Education
• Jazz at Lincoln Center
• Jazz in Germany
• Jazz poetry
• Jazzpar Prize
• Music of the United States
• Swing (genre)
• Swing (jazz performance style), a term of praise for playing that has a strong rhythmic "groove" or drive
• Thirty-two-bar form

Sources

• Adorno, Theodor. "Prisms." The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. 1967.
• Allen, William Francis, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McLim Garrison, eds. 1867. Slave Songs of the United States. New York: A Simpson & Co. Electronic edition, Chapel Hill, N. C.: Academic Affairs Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000.
• Burns, Ken, and Geoffrey C. Ward. 2000. Jazz—A History of America's Music. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Also: The Jazz Film Project, Inc.
• Jazz .
• Collier, James Lincoln. The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History (Dell Publishing Co., 1978)
• Davis, Miles. 2005.
• Elsdon, Peter. 2003. "The Cambridge Companion to Jazz, Edited by Mervyn Cooke and David Horn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Review." Frankfürter Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 6:159–75.
• Gang Starr. 2006. Mass Appeal: The Best of Gang Starr. CD recording 72435-96708-2-9. New York: Virgin Records.
• Giddins, Gary. 1998. Visions of Jazz: The First Century New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195076753
• Gridley, Mark C. 2004. Concise Guide to Jazz, fourth edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall. ISBN 0131826573
• Kenney, William Howland. 1993. Chicago Jazz: A Cultural History, 1904-1930. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195064534 (cloth); paperback reprint 1994 ISBN 0195092600
• Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues .
• Mandel, Howard. 2007. Miles, Ornette, Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz. Routledge. ISBN 0415967147.
• Porter, Eric. What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics and Activists. University of California Press, Ltd. London, England. 2002.
• Ratliffe, Ben. 2002. Jazz: A Critic's Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings. The New York Times Essential Library. New York: Times Books. ISBN 0805070680
• Scaruffi, Piero: A History of Jazz Music 1900-2000 (Omniware, 2007)
• Szwed, John Francis. 2000. Jazz 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz. New York: Hyperion. ISBN 0786884967
• Yanow, Scott. 2004. Jazz on Film: The Complete Story of the Musicians and Music Onscreen. (Backbeat Books) ISBN 0879307838

References

External links

commons Jazz

• Online jazz radio stations
• Great Jazz Musician Biographies
• Jazz History Timeline
• Jazz - A Film by Ken Burns, PBS
• Jazz @ the Smithsonian
• Smooth Jazz Radio Links
• Piero Scaruffi's history of jazz music 1900-2000
• Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame website
• Jazz at Lincoln Center website
• American Jazz Museum website
• Europe Jazz Network
• Great Jazz Baritone Saxophonists and players
• New England Jazz History Database
• The Best Jazz Videos Database

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