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A type of music developed from ragtime and blues in the S states of the USA during the second decade of the 20th-c. It originated among black musicians, who were much influenced by African-inspired works songs and spirituals, but was soon taken up by whites also and spread throughout the USA and abroad, influencing such composers of ‘serious’ music as Milhaud, Ravel, Stravinsky, and Walton. What constitutes jazz is notoriously difficult to define, but prominent features of the earliest New Orleans jazz included syncopation (strongly accented rhythms which conflict with the basic pulse of the music), collective improvisation, and the exploitation of unusual timbres and extreme ranges in an ensemble which consisted typically of clarinet, trumpet (or cornet), trombone, piano, double bass (played pizzicato), guitar, and drums. At least one of these elements is usually present in later jazz, which has developed many different styles.

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Jazz is an original American musical art form originating around the start of the 20th century in New Orleans, rooted in African American musical styles blended with Western music technique and theory. Jazz uses blue notes, syncopation, swing, call and response, polyrhythms, and improvisation.

Overview

Jazz has roots in the combination of Western and African music traditions, including spirituals, blues and ragtime, stemming from West Africa, western Sahel, and New England's religious hymns, hillbilly music, and European military band music. After originating in African American communities near the beginning of the 20th century, jazz styles spread in the 1920s, influencing other musical styles. University of Southern California film professor Todd Boyd, the term was originally slang for sexual intercourse

Jazz is rooted in the blues, the folk music of former enslaved Africans in the U.S. South and their descendants, which is influenced by West African cultural and musical traditions that evolved as black musicians migrated to the cities. Jazz musician Wynton Marsalis states that "Jazz is something Negroes invented...the nobility of the race put into sound ... A "...black musical spirit (involving rhythm and melody) was bursting out of the confines of European musical tradition of the marching bands, even though the performers were using European styled instruments."North by South, from Charleston to Harlem," a project of the National Endowment for the Humanities

Small bands of Black musicians which led funeral processions in New Orleans played a seminal role in the articulation and dissemination of early jazz, traveling throughout black communities in the Deep South and to northern cities. Lorenzo Tio and Scott Joplin were schooled in classical European musical forms.

History

1800s

African American music traditions had already been a part of mainstream popular music in the United States for generations, going back to the 19th century minstrel show tunes and the melodies of Stephen Foster. Black dances inspired by African dance moves, like the shimmy, turkey trot, buzzard lope, chicken scratch, monkey glide, and the bunny hug eventually were adopted by a white public. In New Orleans, Louisiana area (particularly the Storyville neighborhood) an early style of jazz called "Dixieland" jazz developed. members such as William "Cat" Anderson, Gus Aitken, and Jabbo Smith went on to play with jazz bandleaders like Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton and Count Basie. Tim Brymn performed with a northeastern "hot" style.

• In Chicago in the early 1910s, saxophones vigorously "ragged" a melody over a dance band rhythm section, blending New Orleans styles and creating a new "Chicago Jazz" sound.
  
• Along the Mississippi from Memphis, Tennessee to St. Louis, Missouri, the "Father of the Blues," W.C. Handy popularized a less improvisation-based approach, in which improvisation was limited to short "fills" between phrases.
  

1920s

With Prohibition, the constitutional amendment that forbade the sale of alcoholic beverages, speakeasies emerged as nightlife settings, and many early jazz artists played in them. The inventions of the phonograph record and of radio helped the proliferation of jazz as well.

Key figures of the decade

Paul Whiteman was a popular bandleader of the 1920s who hired Bix Beiderbecke and other white jazz musicians and combined jazz with elaborate orchestrations. Some of the other bandleaders included: Harry Reser, Leo Reisman, Abe Lyman, Nat Shilkret, George Olsen, Ben Bernie, Bob Haring, Ben Selvin, Earl Burtnett, Gus Arnheim, Rudy Vallee, Jean Goldkette, Isham Jones, Roger Wolfe Kahn, Sam Lanin, Vincent Lopez, Ben Pollack and Fred Waring.

• King Oliver's protégé, Louis Armstrong, had a major influence on the development of jazz, with his extensive improvisations and scat singing.
  
• Sidney Bechet brought the saxophone to prominence.
  
• Bix Beiderbecke was a white, non-New Orleanian whose legato phrasing brought the influence of classical romanticism to jazz. The Big bands such as Benny Goodman's Orchestra were highly jazz oriented, while others (such as Glenn Miller's) left less space for improvisation. Key figures in developing the big jazz band were arrangers and bandleaders Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman and Duke Ellington.
  
  Over time, social strictures regarding racial segregation began to relax, and white bandleaders began to recruit black musicians. In the mid-1930s, Benny Goodman hired pianist Teddy Wilson, vibraharpist Lionel Hampton, and guitarist Charlie Christian to join small groups. During this period, swing and big band music were very popular.
  
  The influence of Louis Armstrong can be seen in bandleaders like Cab Calloway, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and vocalists like Bing Crosby, who were influenced by Armstrong's style of improvising. later, Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan, among others, would jump on the scat bandwagon.
  
  An early 1940s style known as "jumping the blues" or jump music used small combos, up-tempo music, and blues chord progressions. Jump blues drew on boogie-woogie from the 1930s, with the rhythm section playing "eight to the bar," (eight beats per measure instead of four). Big Joe Turner became a boogie-woogie star in the 1940s, and then in the 1950s was an early rock and roll musician.

1940s

Bebop

In the 1940s with bebop performers such as saxophonist Charlie Parker (known as "Yardbird" or "Bird"), pianist Bud Powell and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie helped to shift jazz from danceable pop music to more challenging "musician's music." Other bop musicians included pianist Thelonious Monk, drummer Kenny Clarke, saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, trumpeters Clifford Brown, Fats Navarro, saxophonists Wardell Gray, Sonny Stitt, bassist Ray Brown, drummer Max Roach

Bop musicians valued complex improvisations based on chord progressions over a sophisticated harmonic vocabulary. Hard bop (also known as The Bop Revolution) of the late 1950s used rootless voicings where the tonic or "root" is not included), and an increased use of extensions, non-diatonic notes such as the tritone (flattened fifth), and stacked chords ?

1950s

Free jazz and avant-garde jazz

Main articles: Free jazz, Avant-garde jazz

Free jazz and avant-garde jazz, are two partially overlapping subgenres that, while rooted in bebop, typically 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. Avant-garde jazz has more "rules" than free jazz, in that performances being partly composed, but the improvised parts are almost as free as in free jazz.

Early performers of these styles go back as early as the late 40s and early 50s with Lennie Tristano's Crosscurrents and Descent into the Maelstrom credited as being precursors to the movement. Free and avant-garde jazz started to gain popularity in the 1950s with Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. In the 1960s, performers included John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Makanda Ken McIntyre, Pharoah Sanders, Sam Rivers, Leroy Jenkins, Don Pullen, Dewey Redman and others. Peter Brötzmann, Ken Vandermark, William Parker, Derek Bailey and Evan Parker are leading contemporary free jazz musicians, and musicians such as Coleman, Taylor and Sanders continue to play in this style. Keith Jarrett has been prominent in defending free jazz from criticism by traditionalists in recent years.

1960s

Latin jazz

Main article: Latin jazz

Latin jazz has two varieties: Afro-Cuban and Brazilian jazz. Notable bebop musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie and Billy Taylor started Afro-Cuban bands at that time. The music was influenced by such Cuban and Puerto Rican musicians as Tito Puente, Mario Bauza, Chano Pozo, and, much later, Arturo Sandoval.

Brazilian jazz is synonymous with bossa nova, a Brazilian popular style which is derived from samba with influences from jazz as well as other 20th-century classical and popular music.

The related term jazz-samba essentially describes an adaptation of bossa nova compositions to the jazz idiom by American performers such as Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd, and usually played at 120 beats per minute or faster.

1970s

The stylistic diversity of jazz has shown no sign of diminishing, absorbing influences from such disparate sources as world music, avant garde classical music, and a range of rock and pop musics.

Beginning in the 1970s with such artists as Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, the Pat Metheny Group, Jan Garbarek, Ralph Towner, and Eberhard Weber, the ECM record label established a new chamber-music aesthetic, featuring mainly acoustic instruments, and incorporating elements of world music and folk music.

There have been other developments in the 1980s and 1990s that were less commercially oriented. They sought to create within what they felt was the tradition, creating extensions of small and large forms initially pioneered by such artists as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. In the case of Marsalis these efforts met with critical acclaim.

Others musicians in this time period - although clearly within the tradition of the great spontaneous composers such as Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Fats Navarro and many others ?

Acid Jazz and Nu Jazz

Styles as acid jazz which contains elements of 1970s disco, acid swing which combines 1940s style big-band sounds with faster, more aggressive rock-influenced drums and electric guitar, and nu jazz which combines elements of jazz and modern forms of electronic dance music.

Exponents of the "acid jazz" style which was initially UK-based included the Brand New Heavies, Jamiroquai, James Taylor Quartet, Young Disciples, and Corduroy. In the United States, acid jazz groups included the Groove Collective, Soulive, and Solsonics. In a more pop or smooth jazz context, jazz enjoyed a resurgence in the 1980s with such bands as Pigbag and Curiosity Killed the Cat achieving chart hits in Britain.

Funk-based improvisation

Jean-Paul Bourelly and M-Base argue that rhythm is the key for further progress in the music; they believe that the rhythmic innovations of James Brown and other Funk pioneers can provide an effective rhythmic base for spontaneous composition.

These musicians playing over a funk groove and extend the rhythmic ideas in a way analogous to what had been done with harmony in previous decades, an approach M-Base calls Rhythmic Harmony. Wynton Marsalis has disagreed with the use of funk as a musical genre for jazz improvisation, preferring instead to retain the rhythmic base of swing. Though some claim the proto-hip hop, jazzy poet Gil Scott-Heron the beginning of jazz rap, the genre arose in 1988 with the release of the debut singles by Gang Starr ("Words I Manifest", which samples Charlie Parker) and Stetsasonic ("Talkin' All That Jazz", which samples Lonnie Liston-Smith). One year later, Gang Starr's debut LP, No More Mr. Nice Guy and their work on the soundtrack to Mo' Better Blues, and De La Soul's debut 3 Feet High and Rising have proven remarkably influential in the genre's development. De La Soul's cohorts in the Native Tongues Posse also released important jazzy albums, including the Jungle Brothers' debut Straight Out the Jungle (1988, 1988 in music) and A Tribe Called Quest's debut, People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (1990, 1990 in music).

1990s

Electronica

With the rise in popularity of various forms of electronic music during the late 1980s and 1990s, some artists have attempted a fusion of jazz with more of the experimental leanings of electronica (particularly IDM and Drum and bass) with various degrees of success.

The more experimental and improvisional end of the spectrum includes Scandinavia-based artists such as pianist Bugge Wesseltoft, trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær (who both began their careers on the ECM record label), and the trio Wibutee, all of whom have gained their chops as instrumentalists in their own right in more traditional jazz circles.

The Cinematic Orchestra from the UK or Julien Lourau from France have also gained praise in this area. Toward the more pop or pure dance music end of the spectrum of nu jazz are such proponents as St Germain and Jazzanova, who incorporate some live jazz playing with more metronomic house beats.

2000s

In the 2000s, "jazz" hit the pop charts and blended with contemporary Urban music through the work of artists like Norah Jones, Jill Scott, Jamie Cullum, Erykah Badu, Amy Winehouse and Diana Krall and the jazz advocacy of performers who are also music educators (such as Jools Holland, Courtney Pine and Peter Cincotti). Early folk blues music often was based around a call and response pattern, and improvisation would factor into the lyrics, the melody, or both. Many jazz performances contain no variation in the basic tempo -- there is no room for rubato.

By the Swing era, big bands played using arranged sheet music, but individual soloists would perform improvised solos within these compositions. musicians paid less attention to the composed melody, or "head," which was played at the beginning and the end of the tune's performance.

As previously noted, later styles of jazz, such as modal jazz, abandoned the strict notion of a chord progression, allowing the individual musicians to improvise more freely within the context of a given scale or mode (e.g., the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue). from diverse musical stylesIn "Jazz Inc." by Andrew Gilbert, Metro Times, December 23 1998.

Commercially-oriented or popular music-influenced forms of jazz are have long been criticized. 'swinging', improvising, group interaction, developing an 'individual voice', and being 'open' to different musical possibilities?.

Where to draw the boundaries of "jazz" is the subject of debate among music critics, scholars, and fans.

For example:

• Music that is a mixture of jazz and pop music, such as the recent albums of Jamie Cullum, is sometimes called "jazz".
  
• James Blunt and Joss Stone have been called "jazz" performers by radio DJ's, and record label promoters.
  
• Jazz festivals are increasingly programming a wide range of genres, including world beat music, folk, electronica, and hip-hop.