Jazz: The American Music "Jazz is a good barometer of freedom. In its beginnings, the United States spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country." • Duke Ellington “What a Wonderful World” Louis Armstrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2VCwBzGdPM Blues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zYzzmlK_9I
Transcript
Jazz: The American Music
"Jazz is a good barometer of freedom. In its beginnings, the United States
spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which,
eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free that many people sayit is the only unhampered, unhindered
expression of complete freedomyet produced in this country."
• Duke Ellington
“What a Wonderful World” Louis Armstronghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2VCwBzGdPMBlues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zYzzmlK_9I
Definitions• Confluence of African and European Music Traditions
– Jazz is a musical art form which originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a mingling of African and European music traditions. The style’s West African influence is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swung note. (Wikipedia)
– Jazz is a "form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of blacks with European music … jazz differs from European music in that jazz has a special relationship to time, defined as 'swing', a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role; and sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror the individuality of the performing jazz musician. Thus, improvisation is clearly one of the key elements in jazz.” Jazz Critic Joachim Berendt
• The word jazz began as a West Coast slang term of uncertain derivation. The earliest known references to jazz are in the sports pages of various West Coast newspapers covering the Pacific Coast League, a baseball minor league: – Ben Henderson, Portland Beavers, 1912. BEN'S
JAZZ CURVE. "I got a new curve this year," softly murmured Henderson yesterday, "and I'm goin' to pitch one or two of them tomorrow. I call it the Jazz ball because it wobbles and you simply can't do anything with it."
• The first musical reference to jazz was in Chicago about 1915 as found in the Chicago Daily Tribune on July 11, 1915:– Blues Is Jazz and Jazz Is Blues . . . The Worm had
turned--turned to fox trotting. And the "blues" had done it. The "jazz" had put pep into the legs that had scrambled too long for the 5:15. . . . At the next place a young woman was keeping "Der Wacht Am Rhein" and "Tipperary Mary" apart when the interrogator entered. "What are the blues?" he asked gently. "Jazz!" The young woman's voice rose high to drown the piano. . . . The blues are never written into music, but are interpolated by the piano player or other players. They aren't new. They are just reborn into popularity. They started in the south half a century ago and are the interpolations of darkies originally. The trade name for them is "jazz."
• The first known use in New Orleans, discovered by lexicographer Benjamin Zimmer in 2009, appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune on Nov. 14, 1916: – Theatrical journals have taken cognizance of the "jas
bands" and at first these organizations of syncopation were credited with having originated in Chicago, but any one ever having frequented the "tango belt" of New Orleans knows that the real home of the "jas bands" is right here. However, it remains for the artisans of the stage to give formal recognition to the "jas bands" of New Orleans.
African/American Roots• 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.
• African music was largely functional, for work or ritual, and included work songs and field hollers. The African tradition made use of a single-line melody and 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.
• Another influence came from black slaves who had learned the harmonic style of hymns and incorporated it into their own music as spirituals.
Compendium of Jazz Styles and Performers
1890s to 1910s
The abolition of slavery in 1865 led to new opportunities for the education of freed African-Americans, though strict segregation limited employment opportunities for most blacks. However, blacks were able to find work as entertainmers in dances, minstrel shows, and in vaudeville. Black pianists also played in bars, clubs, and brothels, as ragtime developed.
Ragtime Blues New Orleans Dixieland
Ragtime
• Origins and Style– Ragtime (alternately spelled Ragged-time) is an originally
American musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity between 1897 and 1918.
– Its main characteristic trait is its syncopated, or "ragged", rhythm.
– It began as dance music in the red-light districts of American cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans years before being published as popular sheet music for piano.
– Ragtime fell out of favor as Jazz claimed the public's imagination after 1917, but there have been numerous revivals since as the music has been re-discovered.
• Proponents: Joseph Lamb, James Scott, Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin (1868 – 1917)Maple Leaf Rag
• Joplin was an African-American and pianist, born near Texarkana, Texas into the first post-slavery generation.
• He achieved fame for his unique ragtime compositions, and was dubbed the "King of Ragtime."
• During his brief career, he wrote forty-four original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas.
• Joplin died at age 48 and his music was mostly forgotten by all but a small, dedicated community of ragtime aficionados until the major ragtime revival in the early 1970s.
• In 1976 Joplin was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
• Aeolian Company, founded in 1878, developed the player piano, a self-playing piano, containing a pneumatic or electro-mechanical mechanism that plays on the piano action pre-programmed music via perforated paper rolls.
• Ragtime became a favorite selection for the player piano
Aeolian Player Piano
Player Roll
Blues• Origins and Style
– Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre created within the African-American communities in the Deep South of the United States at the end of the 19th century from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads.
– The first appearance of the blues is not well defined and is often dated after the Emancipation Act in 1863, between 1870 and 1900.
– This period corresponds to the transition from slavery to sharecropping, small-scale agricultural production and the expansion of railroads in the southern United States.
– Several scholars characterize the early 1900s development of blues music as a move from group performances to a more individualized style.
– The origins of the blues are also closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community, the spirituals.
– When the blues appeared, before blues gained its formal definition in terms of chord progressions, the blues was defined as the secular counter part of the spirituals.
• Form– The blues form is characterized by
• the use of specific chord progressions — the twelve-bar chord progressions being the most frequently encountered
• blue notes sung or played for expressive purposes and distinguished by the use of the flattened third, fifth and seventh of the associated major scale.
Chords played over a twelve-bar scheme:
Chords for a blues in C:
I I or IV I I7
IV IV I I7
VV or IV
I I or V
CC or
FC C7
F F C C7
GG or
FC
C or G
• Lyrics– The traditional blues verse was probably a
single line, repeated four times. – It was only later that the current, most
common structure of a line, repeated once and then followed by a single line conclusion, became standard, the so-called AAB pattern.
• Proponents:– Jelly Roll Morton, Robert Johnson, Blind Boy
– Dixieland is an early style of jazz that developed in New Orleans and it is the earliest recorded style of jazz music.
– The style combined earlier brass band marches, French Quadrilles, ragtime and blues with collective, polyphonic improvisation.
– The "standard" band consists of a "front line" of trumpet, trombone, and clarinet, with a “rhythm section" of at least two of the following instruments: guitar or banjo, string bass or tuba, piano and drums.
– The definitive Dixieland sound is created when one instrument (usually the trumpet) plays the melody or a recognizable paraphrase or variation on it, and the other instruments of the "front line" improvise around that melody. This creates a more polyphonic sound.
– The swing era of the 1930s led to the end of many Dixieland Jazz musicians' careers.
• Proponents: King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Original Dixieland Jass Band, Louis Armstrong
Louis Daniel Armstrong(1901 – 1971)
• Nicknamed “Satchmo” or “Pops”
• American jazz trumpeter and singer (scat)
• Foundational influence on jazz was to shift music’s focus from collective improvisation to solo performers
All-Star Band
“Dream a Little Dream”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFl97eZbruc
• Origins– Prohibition in the United States (from 1920 to 1933)
banned the sale of alcoholic drinks, resulting in illicit speakeasies becoming lively venues of the “Jazz Age”.
– Jazz started to get a reputation as being immoral and many members of the older generations saw it as threatening the old values in culture and promoting the new decadent values of the Roaring 20s.
– While New Orleans remained an important jazz center, Chicago became the main center during this timeframe.
• Precursors and Influences of Big Band Swing– Bix Beiderbecke formed The Wolverines in 1924.
“There’ll Come a Time”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pj1ZEKz4Cw
– Jelly Roll Morton recorded with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in an early mixed-race collaboration, then in 1926 formed his Red Hot Peppers.
(1890 – 1941)
– There was a larger market for jazzy dance music played by white orchestras, such as Paul Whiteman’s orchestra. In 1924 Whiteman commissioned Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which was premièred by Whiteman's Orchestra.
(1890 – 1967) Paul Whiteman Orchestra
George Gershwin (1898 – 1937)“Rhapsody in Blue”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U40xBSz6Dc
– Other influential large ensembles included Duke Ellington’s band (which opened an influential residency at the Cotton Club in 1927) in New York, and Earl Hine’s Band in Chicago. All these performers and ensembles significantly influenced Big Band Swing.
Duke Ellington(1899 – 1974)
Duke Ellington Band
Earl Hines(1903 – 1983)
Cotton ClubNew York City
Grand Terrace CaféChicago
Earl Hines Band
• Style– The 1930s belonged to popular swing big bands, in which some
virtuoso soloists became as famous as the band leaders. – Swing was also dance music. It was broadcast on the radio 'live'
nightly across America for many years especially by Hines and his Grand Terrace Cafe Orchestra broadcasting coast-to-coast from Chicago. 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.
– Over time, social strictures regarding racial segregation began to relax in America: white bandleaders began to recruit black musicians and black bandleaders white ones.
• Proponents: Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmy Dorsey and Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw and Louis Armstrong
Tommy Dorsey and Jimmy Dorsey(1905 – 1956) (1904 – 1957)
Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra
Tommy Dorsey “Opus One”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7QjMZ4ckZc
• 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 (1910 – 1953) 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.
Dixieland Revival Bebop Cool Jazz Hard Bop Modal Jazz Free Jazz
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 1930s.
• There were two populations of musicians involved in the revival. One group consisted of players 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, such as Bob Crosby’s Bobcats, Max Kaminsky, Eddie Condon, and Wild Bill Davison. Most of these groups were originally Midwesterners, although there were a small number of New Orleans musicians involved.
• The second population of revivalists consisted of young musicians such as the Lu Watters Band. By the late 1940s, Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars Band became a leading ensemble. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Dixieland was one of the most commercially popular jazz styles in the US, Europe, and Japan, although critics paid little attention to it.
Bob Crosby(1913 – 1993)
The Bob Cats
“Jazz Me Blues”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQWEMXyEAS8
– In the early 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.
– Since bebop was meant to be listened to, not danced to, it used faster tempos. Beboppers introduced new forms of chromaticism and dissonance into jazz; the dissonant tritone (or "flatted fifth") interval became the "most important interval of bebop" and players engaged in a more abstracted form of chord-based improvisation which used "passing" chords, substitute chords, and altered chords.
– The style of drumming shifted as well to a more elusive and explosive style, in which the ride cymbal was used to keep time, while the snare and bass drum were used for unpredictable, explosive accents.
• Proponents: Thelonious Monk, trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown, tenor sax player Leston Young, and drummer Max Roach
Charlie Parker (1920 – 1955)Dizzie Gillespie (1917 – 1993)
• Origins and Style– By the end of the 1940s, the nervous energy and tension of
bebop was replaced with a tendency towards calm and smoothness, with the sounds of cool jazz, which favored long, linear melodic lines. It emerged in New York City, as a result of the mixture of the styles of predominantly white jazz musicians and black bebop musicians, and it dominated jazz in the first half of the 1950s.
• Proponents:Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Gil Evans, Stan Getz, the Modern Jazz Quartet. An important recording was trumpeter Miles Davis’ Birth of Cool (tracks originally recorded in 1949 and 1950 and collected as an LP in 1957).
• Origins and Style– Modal jazz is a development beginning in the later 1950s which
takes the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation.
– Previously, the goal of the soloist was to play a solo that fit into a given chord progression. However, with modal jazz, the soloist creates a melody using one or a small number of modes. The emphasis in this approach shifts from harmony to melody.
• Proponents:– Miles Davis recorded the best selling jazz album of all time in the
modal framework: Kind of Blue– Other innovators in this style include John Coltrane (1926 –
• Origins and Style– Free jazz broke through into an open space of "free tonality" in
which meter, beat, and formal symmetry all disappeared, and a range of world music from India, Africa, and Arabia were melded into an intense, even religiously ecstatic style of playing.
– While rooted in bebop, free jazz tunes gave players much more latitude; the loose harmony and tempo was deemed controversial when this approach was first developed.
• Proponents:Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor. John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders
“Face the Music”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qjiQwD7VCI
1960s and 1970s
Latin Jazz Post Bop Soul Jazz Fusion
Latin Jazz
• Origins and Style– Latin jazz combines rhythms from African and
Latin American countries, often played on instruments such as conga, timbale, guiro, and claves, with jazz and classical harmonies played on typical jazz instruments (piano, double bass, etc.)
– There are two main varieties: Afro-Cuban jazz and Brazilian jazz
Afro-Cuban Latin Jazz
– Afro-Cuban jazz was played in the US right after the bebop period
– It 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
– Proponents: Xavier Cugat, Tito Puente and Arturo Sandoval
• “Oye Como Va”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZQh4IL7unM
Brazilian Jazz
• Brazilian jazz became more popular in the 1960s• 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. This style was pioneered by Brazilians Joao Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim.
• 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.
• “Bossa Nova Medley”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo1SiVwVqic&list=PL7302F398326C31BB
Post Bop
• Origins and Style– Post-bop is a term for a form of small-combo jazz music that
evolved in the early-to-mid sixties from earlier bop styles. – Generally, the term post-bop is taken to mean jazz from the mid-
sixties onward that assimilates influence from hard bop, modal jazz, avant-garde jazz, and free jazz, without necessarily being immediately identifiable as any of the above.
– By the early seventies, most of the major post-bop artists had moved on to jazz fusion of one form or another.
• Proponents:– John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Charles Mingus, Wayne
Shorter and Herbie Hancock
Wayne Shorter(b. 1933)
• “Fee Fi Fo Fum”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEzAJJfTtBE
Herbie Hancock(b. 1940)
• “Dolphin Dance” from Maiden Voyage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB2Z2DY17yQ
Soul Jazz
• Origins and Style– 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. Tenor saxophone and guitar were also important in soul jazz
– Soul jazz was developed in the late 1950s and was perhaps most popular in the mid-to-late 1960s,
– Although the term "soul jazz" contains the word "soul," soul jazz is only a distant cousin to soul music, with its origins in gospel and R&B rather than jazz.
– Unlike hard bop, soul jazz generally emphasized repetitive grooves, melodies, and melodic hooks. The kinds of rhythms used tend to vary as well.
• Proponents: Lee Morgan, Herbie Hancock, Horace Silver
Lee Morgan(1938 – 1972)
• “The Sidewinder”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a4n6yZIXxI
– Fusion or, more specifically, jazz fusion or jazz rock, was developed in the late 1960s from a mixture of elements of jazz such as its focus on improvisation with the rhythms and grooves of funk and R&B and the beats and heavily amplified electric instruments and electronic effects of rock.
– While the term "jazz rock" is often used as a synonym for "jazz fusion", it also refers to the music performed by late 1960s and 1970s-era rock bands when they added jazz elements to their music such as free-form improvisation.
– After a decade of development during the 1970s, fusion split into different branches in the 1980s. While some 1980s performers continued the improvisatory and experimental approaches of the 1970s, others moved towards a lighter, more pop-infused easy-listening style called smooth jazz which often included vocals.
– Fusion music is typically instrumental, often with complex time signatures, meters, rhythmic patterns, and extended track lengths, featuring lengthy improvisations.
– Many prominent fusion musicians are recognized as having a high level of virtuosity, combined with complex compositions and musical improvisation in complex or mixed meters.
• Proponents: Gary Burton, Larry Coryell, Miles Davis
Miles Davis(1926 – 1991)
• “Black Comedy” from Miles in the Sky
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aXx_CkSzfo
1980s to 2010
In the 1980s, the jazz community shrank dramatically and split. A mainly older audience retained an interest in traditional and straight-ahead jazz styles.
Pop Fusion Hip-Hop Straight Ahead Experimental
Pop Fusion
• Origins, Style and Proponents– In the early 1980s, a lighter commercial form of jazz
fusion called pop fusion or “smooth jazz" became successful.
– A smooth jazz track is downtempo, layering a lead, melody-playing instrument over a backdrop that typically consists of programmed rhythms and various pads and/or samples radio airplay.
– Proponents include Grover Washington, Jr., Kenny G, Najee and Michael Lington.
– Hip hop originated in the 1970s in New York City (Bronx)– Hip hop's "golden age" is a name given to a period usually from the late
1980s to early 90s - said to be characterized by its diversity, quality, innovation and influence. There were strong themes of Afrocentricity and political militancy, while the music was experimental and the sampling was eclectic. There was often a strong jazz influence
– Hip hop music may be based around either live or produced music, with a clearly defined drum beat (almost always in 4/4 time signature), presented either with or without vocal accompaniment.
– Hip hop was almost entirely unknown outside of the United States prior to the early 1980s. During that decade, it began its spread to every inhabited continent and became a part of the music scene in dozens of countries.
• Proponents: Public Enemy, KRS-One, Eric B and Rakim, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers
Public Enemy
• “Don’t Believe the Hype” from It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
• In the 2000s, straight ahead jazz continues to appeal to a core group of listeners.
• Well-established jazz musicians, such as Dave Brubeck, Wynton Marsalis, Wayne Shorter and Jessican Williams continue to perform and record.
• In the 1990s and 2000s, a number of young musicians emerged, including US pianists Brad Mehldau, Jason Moran, and Vijay Iyer, guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, vibrophonist Stefon Harris, trumpeters Roy Hargrove and Terence Blanchard, and saxophonists Chris Potter and Joshua Redman.
Joshua Redman(b. 1969)
• Live in Lausanne 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xQZRDpDJhE
Experimental
• The more experimental end of the spectrum has included US trumpeters Dave Douglas and Rob Mazurek, saxophonist Ken Vandemark, Norwegian pianist Bugge Wesseltoft, the Swedish group E.S.T, and US bassist Christian McBride.
• Toward the more dance or pop music end of the spectrum are St. Germain [Ludovic Navarre] , who incorporates some live jazz playing with house beats, and
• Jamie Cullum, who plays a particular mix of jazz standards with his own more pop-oriented compositions.
• In 1987, the US House of Representatives and Senate passed a bill proposed by Democratic Representative John Conyers, Jr. to define jazz as a unique form of American music stating, among other things, "...that jazz is hereby designated as a rare and valuable national American treasure to which we should devote our attention, support and resources to make certain it is preserved, understood and promulgated."
Prelude: The Advent of Rock
Bill Haley and the Comets
“Rock Around the Clock”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5fsqYctXgM
