Jazz



Jazz is a music genre that includes improvisation, particularly in American music that has African-American and European roots. Over the years, it has gained influences from other cultural music styles, particularly the music of Latin America and classical music.

Understand
"They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art."

- Charlie Parker

Improvisation separates jazz from some other genres of music. In most jazz tunes, a melody is played by a front-line musician before each musician takes an improvised solo. Improvisation involves a musician or singing or playing phrases, melodic patterns, riffs or rhythms based upon the melody or chords played at the beginning of the tune. A selected group of musicians improvises on a track before the melody is returned to.

History
Jazz music began in early 20th-century Louisiana with New Orleans jazz and Dixieland jazz, but new styles of jazz evolved over time. Jazz was initially a development from ragtime, a style of late 19th-century origins that took America by storm around the turn of the 20th century. A related African-American style, the blues, grew out of preexisting West African and African-American improvisatory storytelling and work song styles, starting probably after the Civil War in rural areas and small towns in the South and starting to gain wider notice in the first decades of the 20th century. While the influence of ragtime on jazz waned drastically over the years, the blues has remained a big part of jazz repertoire and vocabulary to the present day, at the same time that it also developed separately.

Buddy Bolden and Bunk Johnson were some of the original creators of the first branch of jazz, which is now known as "traditional jazz". Traditional jazz involves ensemble playing in which multiple musicians improvise at the same time. Jazz groups in traditional jazz usually included at least six musicians. New Orleans jazz prospered in and around New Orleans until the Great Depression, which forced many New Orleans jazz musicians out of work. New Orleans and Chicago, during the 1920s, became major jazz cities, with Louis Armstrong being one of the top traditional jazz trumpeters.

Another early jazz style, which grew almost directly out of ragtime, with its virtuosic right hand melodies and "oom-pah" chord patterns in the left hand, was stride piano. This style, somewhat influenced by that of the Creole ragtime/early jazz pianist from New Orleans, Jelly Roll Morton, was popular from the '20s to the '40s, particularly in New York City. Famous stride pianists included James P. Johnson, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Fats Waller, Erroll Garner and Earl Hines, and Art Tatum, arguably the greatest jazz pianist of all, took stride as his foundation and extended it wherever he wanted to go.

As the Great Depression came to an end in the late 1930s, swing music played by big bands began to dominate not only the jazz scene in America, but also the music scene in general, with a style that was more arranged than heretofore traditional jazz. Famous big bandleaders such as Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller created record-selling recordings in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

While big bands were becoming popular, however, another style of jazz developed that changed the course of jazz permanently - "modern jazz". The first major style of modern jazz was called bebop. One of bebop's founders, Charlie Parker, developed a complex improvisation style in the late 1930s in Kansas City and he joined the Jay McShann Band in the early 1940s. He then went to New York City and began recording with another bebop pioneer, Dizzy Gillespie. By late 1945, Gillespie's quintet included Parker and other upcoming bebop musicians. Charlie Parker left Gillespie's group in 1946 and created his own quintet in 1947. He had a couple of years of successful bebop recordings, but by the 1950s, new musicians had become major figures on the modern jazz scene. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that bebop set the tone for just about all the new jazz styles that were developed since World War II, as they were either extensions of bebop ideas and material and/or reactions against bebop. In the mid-1950s, Charlie Parker died, and modern jazz began to return to its African roots and began to be more influenced by the blues. By 1957, bebop drummer Art Blakey's jazz group, the Jazz Messengers, included saxophonist Benny Golson and trumpeter Lee Morgan. Morgan and Golson both had blues influences in their improvisation, and pianist Bobby's Timmons' Gospel-influenced style continued to push jazz in the "soul jazz" direction. Over the next few years, younger musicians like Dexter Gordon and Hank Mobley began to improvise with slower phrases and incorporate more blues into their styles. The growth of rock and roll and other music styles also influenced jazz at this time. Pianist and composer Herbie Hancock made many important soul jazz recordings during the early 1960s, and his music group at times included jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and saxophonist Dexter Gordon.

The late 50s and early 60s also saw the rise of cool jazz, a more relaxed style than bebop and its hard-driving descendants. Quite a few musicians are associated with this style, but probably most of all, Miles Davis and his collaborators in the Birth of the Cool (released 1957) and Kind Of Blue (1959) albums and the Dave Brubeck Quartet in albums such as Time Out (1959).

During the early 1960s, free jazz, which uses improvisation that is not based on standard chords or melodies, developed with Jimmy Giuffre's Free Fall and the recordings of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. Free jazz and avant-garde jazz became particularly popular in the late 1970s and 1980s with Bob Berg, Michael Brecker, and the free improvisation music in Europe during that time, but free jazz's influence with the public proved to not be as prominent as other types of modern jazz.

Another important development, particularly from the '40s onwards, was the increasing popularity of Latin jazz, with Afro-Cuban and other, similar Latin-American rhythms being integrated into a number of jazz styles. In Brazil, bossa nova was first developed in the late '50s by composers João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim as a sort of minimalist variety of samba combining spare acoustic guitar arrangements with an almost whispered singing style. But the massive success of the 1964 album Getz/Gilberto—saxophonist Stan Getz's incursion into the genre, which featured the hit song "The Girl from Ipanema", sung by Gilberto's then-wife Astrud, veered bossa nova firmly into the orbit of jazz. The stage was set for a nearly decade-long period of worldwide popularity for bossa nova, during which the careers of such additional greats as Sérgio Mendes, Nara Leão, Luiz Bonfá, and Eumir Deodato were launched. The popularity of bossa nova also spread to Japan in the late 1980s with the rise of Japanese-Brazilian singer Lisa Ono. Other important Latin jazz performers include trumpeter Herb Alpert, who, along with his band the Tijuana Brass, fused swing and cool jazz with Mexican mariachi music for a string of hit albums in the 60s, and percussionist Tito Puente, whose mambo-inflected style is best exemplified by his 1958 album Dance Mania.

Although jazz albums were still able to have commercial success into the 60s, the popularity of jazz was increasingly eclipsed by that of rock 'n' roll/rhythm & blues in the 1950s and to a much greater extent by 1960s and '70s rock. Relatedly, the late 1960s saw the rise of a new style, jazz-rock fusion, which did indeed have a mass audience. Among the more famous exponents of fusion were the trumpeter, Miles Davis, previously known as a bebopper and then a leader of the cool jazz movement in the late '50s and early-to-mid '60s; Chick Corea; Herbie Hancock; Wayne Shorter and his band, Weather Report; Mahavishnu Orchestra; and Alan Holdsworth. Many listeners and musicians were captivated by the creativity of some of these artists and the literally groovy, virtuosic songs they wrote and performed, but there was also a backlash from a more purist faction of jazz musicians in the '70s who did not want to integrate rock elements into their work and were afraid fusion would take over from jazz completely. The result is that while fusion gradually morphed into radio-friendly smooth jazz, with artists such as Kenny G, Al Jarreau, and George Benson enjoying continued commercial success in the '80s and '90s, the more orthodox branch of jazz also survived as a niche genre, integrating some fusion elements but mostly going its own way.

The 1980s and subsequent decades have seen more of a blending of the various different strains of jazz — not only does no single aesthetic predominate within the modern-day scene, but individual musicians too have become adept at mastering a variety of jazz styles, sometimes even within the same performance. Furthermore, jazz has become a more and more important influence on other genres of music: not only rock and pop (chanteuses such as Diana Krall and Norah Jones have enjoyed massive crossover success in the 21st century, and Rod Stewart saw enormous success in the '00s revisiting old big-band standards in his Great American Songbook series of albums) but also hip-hop (the music of A Tribe Called Quest, Stetsasonic, and other artists of the early-'90s "Native Tongues" collective was largely built on samples of old jazz records, while Keith "Guru" Elam of the rap duo Gang Starr performed with greats such as Donald Byrd, Branford Marsalis, and David Sanborn in his Jazzmatazz side project), electronica (in the form of acid jazz which came roaring out of the UK in the '80s and '90s; the band Jamiroquai is the most famous exponent of the style), and even hardcore punk (Greg Ginn's innovative solos as lead guitarist for L.A.'s Black Flag, especially toward the latter part of the band's career, owe a huge stylistic debt to the free jazz of Ornette Coleman).

East Coast
Much of the Eastern United States' jazz scene can be covered in an itinerary called the Jazz Track.



South




Outside of the United States
As jazz expanded in its number of subgenres and jazz musicians began to tour the world, jazz became popular in Europe and some non-European countries, such as Japan. While jazz also gained some popularity in Germany, the Nazis - perhaps due to the music's association with African Americans, which the Nazis emphasized and bizarrely combined with their antisemitism - heavily cracked down on jazz and even after the war some "respectable bourgeois" Germans demeaned the music with words not fit for print which made it hard for the music to get a foothold. That said, Nazi records indicate that listening to jazz was one of the main reasons for Germans to engage in the capital crime of listening to foreign radio stations, though if it was "just" that, even the Gestapo would often let the "delinquent" off with a warning.

Similar things happened in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. During some of his period as leader of the USSR, the Soviet Union treated jazz like the Nazi government did.

Africa




Venues
There are several notable jazz clubs around the world, but they are usually found in large metro areas where there are plenty of people who like jazz. These jazz clubs have become well-known, often due to their interesting history.

Events
International Jazz Day is celebrated on April 30 of each year.

Jazz concerts
There are many jazz concerts all around the world. Jazz concerts are often either part of a concert series dedicated to jazz concerts or are part of a concert series featuring multiple music genres, although sometimes there are single events. Many libraries occasionally host jazz concerts, but jazz concerts are also an occurrence in concert halls, whether these concert halls are at a 300-seat theater or 100-person capacity concert hall that is owned by a store or other business.

Jazz concerts aren’t as formal as most Western classical music performances; applause is appropriate, and may be expected, after each solo. A few, such as Keith Jarrett, on the more classical or Third Stream end of the scale, disapprove of audience noise such as coughing, but most don’t have those expectations of the audience.

Jazz festivals
There are several well-known annual jazz festivals around the United States and other parts of the world. This does not by any means cover every single jazz festival in the United States, let alone the world, because so many cities and towns have jazz festivals. However, this includes the best-known American jazz festivals and some others scattered around the United States and a few in other parts of the world.

See
There are many sights, including statues of jazz musicians and museums dedicated to information about the lives of jazz musicians. Here are a few examples:



Universities
Over the years, and particularly since the 1970s, universities and conservatories finally began to recognize jazz as an appropriate subject for academic study. This had a number of profound effects: one, the ethnic makeup of jazz musicians, especially in the U.S., gradually shifted from majority-black to majority-white, and two, the structure of jazz music, particularly that performed in areas near universities, became more like classical music, rigidly formalized rather than improvised "from the soul". As a result, the production of sheet music for jazz tunes or as part of jazz arrangements became more common (see below). While this has helped open jazz performance up to a wider range of people, many fans complain that modern-day jazz sounds more homogenized and formulaic than before, and the quality of improvisation has gone down.

If your goal is to learn to play jazz yourself, the universities listed below will teach you music theory and give you ways to improvise. But the basis for improvisation is the music you hear, so if you want to really know what you're doing, you will need to listen to jazz outside the college classes.



CDs
If you're interested in expanding your CD collection, a good place to go is a jazz concert or other event where there is a jazz musician or group of jazz musicians performing. A stack of CDs is one of the items many jazz musicians take to every event at which they perform - they will take the big stack and put it on a table near the place where they are performing if they are playing background music at a restaurant or bar, and they will quite possibly bring stacks of CDs to their concerts.

At some point during a jazz event, the leading jazz musician at the event will ask you to check out their CD collection and buy one of their CDs, usually for quite a high price. These CDs will usually include a lot of the musician's own compositions so they do not need to pay publishing companies for rights to songs composed by other individuals. Also, the typical jazz musician's CD will include at least one 12-bar blues and a few relaxing music pieces or perhaps a few tunes with modern music rhythms and instruments.

Fakebooks
Fakebooks are collections of sheet music of popular jazz compositions (called "lead sheets"), including chords so you can improvise along. The first fakebook was published in the early 1970s at Boston's Berklee College of Music under the title of "The Real Book", and the aforementioned academicization of jazz starting in the '80s has led to more and more of them being published. They're widely available at music stores and bookstores and can be an excellent way to learn to play many standard jazz tunes, either on your own or with a band, but keep in mind that many are illegally produced and copyrights have not been paid. (For example, the first five editions of the Real Book were illegal bootlegs, though the version sold nowadays isn't.)

Play-a-longs
Basically miniature fakebooks (usually including about 8-15 lead sheets) plus a CD with accompaniment that you can play along with as if it were a real band. Play-a-long books can be purchased on the internet.