Jazz is an original American musical art form originating around the start of the 20th century in New Orleans, rooted in Western music technique and theory and marked by the profound cultural contributions of African Americans. It is characterized by blue notes, syncopation, swing, call and response, polyrhythms, and improvisation. Jazz has been described as "America's Classical Music," and started in saloons throughout the nation.
Jazz has roots in the combination of Western and African music traditions, including spirituals, blues and ragtime, stemming ultimately from West Africa, western Sahel, and New England's religious hymns and hillbilly music, as well as in European military band music. After originating in African American communities near the beginning of the 20th century, jazz gained international popularity by the 1920s. Since then, jazz has had a pervasive influence on other musical styles worldwide. Even today, various jazz styles continue to evolve.
The word jazz itself is rooted in American slang, probably of sexual origin, although various alternative derivations have been suggested. According to University of Southern California film professor Todd Boyd, the term was originally slang for sexual intercourse as its earliest musicians found employment in New Orleans brothel parlors.
At the root of jazz is the blues, the folk music of former enslaved Africans in the U.S. South and their descendants, heavily influenced by West African cultural and musical traditions, that evolved as black musicians migrated to the cities. According to jazz musician Wynton Marsalis:
Jazz is something Negroes invented, and it said the most profound things -- not only about us and the way we look at things, but about what modern democratic life is really about. It is the nobility of the race put into sound ... jazz has all the elements, from the spare and penetrating to the complex and enveloping. It is the hardest music to play that I know of, and it is the highest rendition of individual emotion in the history of Western music.[1]
Early jazz influences found their first mainstream expression in the marching band and dance band music of the day, which was the standard form of popular concert music at the turn of century. The instruments of these groups became the basic instruments of jazz: brass, reeds, and drums, and are voiced in the Western 12-tone scale.
Black musicians frequently used the melody, structure, and beat of marches as points of departure; but says "North by South, from Charleston to Harlem," a project of the National Endowment for the Humanities: "...a black musical spirit (involving rhythm and melody) was bursting out of the confines of European musical tradition, even though the performers were using European styled instruments.
Many black musicians also made a living playing in small bands hired to lead funeral processions in the New Orleans African-American tradition. These Africanized bands played a seminal role in the articulation and dissemination of early jazz, traveling throughout black communities in the Deep South and to northern cities.
For all its genius, early jazz, with its humble folk roots, was the product of primarily self-taught musicians. But an impressive postbellum network of black-established and -operated institutions, schools, and civic societies in both the North and the South, plus widening mainstream opportunities for education, produced ever-increasing numbers of young, formally trained African-American musicians, some of them schooled in classical European musical forms. Lorenzo Tio and Scott Joplin were among this new wave of musically literate jazz artists. Joplin, the son of a former slave and a free-born woman of color, was largely self-taught until age 11, when he received lessons in the fundamentals of music theory from a classically trained German immigrant in Texarkana, Texas.
Also contributing to this trend was a tightening of Jim Crow laws in Louisiana in the 1890s, which caused the expulsion from integrated bands of numbers of talented, formally trained African-American musicians. The ability of these musically literate, black jazzmen to transpose and then read what was in great part an improvisational art form became an invaluable element in the preservation and dissemination of musical innovations that took on added importance in the approaching big-band era.
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History
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1800s
Strong influence of 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.
Public dance halls, clubs, and tea rooms opened in the cities. Curiously named 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. The cake walk, developed by slaves as a send-up of their masters' formal dress balls, became popular. White audiences saw these dances first in vaudeville shows, then performed by exhibition dancers in the clubs.
The popular dance music of the time was not jazz, but there were precursor forms along the blues-ragtime continuum of musical experimentation and innovation that soon would blossom into jazz. Popular Tin Pan Alley composers like Irving Berlin incorporated ragtime influence into their compositions, though they seldom used the specific musical devices that were second nature to jazz players—the rhythms, the blue notes.
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1910s
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Dixieland/New Orleans Jazz
Main article: Dixieland
A number of regional styles contributed to the early development of jazz. Arguably the single most important was that of the New Orleans, Louisiana area (particularly the Storyville neighborhood), which was the first to be commonly given the name "jazz" (early on often spelled "jass").
The city of New Orleans and the surrounding area had long been a regional music center. People from many different nations of Africa, Europe, and Latin America contributed to New Orleans' rich musical heritage. The slave population of some colonies of what would later become the United States had the opportunity to express themselves culturally. In addition to the slave population, New Orleans also had North America's largest community of free people of color, some of whom prided themselves on their education and used European instruments to play both European music and their own folk tunes.
Key figures in the development of the new style were flamboyant trumpeter Buddy Bolden and the members of his band, who took the blues and arranged it for brass instruments, "variating the melody" by improvising. The New Orleans style used more intricate rhythmic improvisation than ragtime. The New Orleans style players also adopted much of the vocabulary of the blues, including "bent" and "blue" notes, and using the European instruments in ways they were not used previously.
Key figures in the early development of the new style were Freddie Keppard, a Creole who mastered Bolden's style; Joe Oliver, whose style was more bluesier than Bolden's; and Kid Ory, a trombonist who refined the style, and Papa Jack Laine led a multi-ethnic band.
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Other regional styles
Audio samples of jazz music
"Song From A Cotton Field" (file info)
This 1920s classic jazz song by Bessie Brown has a clear blues influence.
"Take The 'A' Train" (file info)
This 1941 sample of Duke Ellington's signature tune is an example of the swing style.
"Yardbird Suite" (file info)
Excerpt from a saxophone solo by Charlie Parker. The fast, complex rhythms and substitute chords of bebop would change jazz forever.
"Mr. P.C." (file info)
This hard blues by John Coltrane is an example of hard bop, a post-bebop style which is informed by gospel music, blues and work songs.
"Birds of Fire" (file info)
This piece by the Mahavishnu Orchestra merges jazz improvisation and rock instrumentation into jazz fusion
"The Jazzstep" (file info)
This 2000 track by Courtney Pine shows how electronica and hip hop influences can be incorporated into modern jazz.
Problems playing the files? See media help.
Meanwhile, other regional styles were developing which would influence the development of jazz.
In 1891 African-American minister Rev. Daniel J. Jenkins of Charleston, South Carolina established the Jenkins Orphanage, where boys formed Orphanage Bands that performed popular and religious music. Orphanage Band members such as William "Cat" Anderson, Gus Aitken, and Jabbo Smith went on to play with jazz legends like Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton and Count Basie.
In the northeastern United States, a "hot" style of playing ragtime developed. Characterized by rollicking rhythms, the "hot" style lacked the bluesy influence of the southern styles. The solo piano version of the northeast style was typified by Eubie Blake. James P. Johnson took the northeast style and developed "stride" piano playing, in which the right hand plays the melody, while the active left hand provides the rhythm. Johnson influenced later pianists like Fats Waller and Willie Smith.
The top orchestral leader of the style was James Reese Europe. Tim Brymn performed with a northeastern "hot" style.
In Chicago at the start of the 1910s, a popular type of dance band consisted of a saxophone vigorously ragging a melody over a 4-square rhythm section. The city soon fell heavily under the influence of waves of New Orleans musicians, and the older style blended with the New Orleans style to form what would be called "Chicago Jazz" starting in the late 1910s.
Along the banks of the Mississippi around Memphis, Tennessee to St. Louis, Missouri, another band style developed incorporating the blues. The most famous composer and bandleader of the style was the "Father of the Blues," W.C. Handy. While in some ways similar to the New Orleans style (Bolden's influence may have spread upriver), it lacked the freewheeling improvisation found further south. Handy denounced jazz as needlessly chaotic and limited improvisation to short fills between phrases.
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1920s
The King & Carter Jazzing Orchestra photographed in Houston, Texas, January 1921.By the nature of their work, Pullman porters helped to spread jazz across the United States.
With Prohibition, the constitutional amendment that forbade the sale of alcoholic beverages, the legal saloons and cabarets were closed; but in their place hundreds of speakeasies appeared, where patrons drank and musicians entertained. The presence of dance venues and the subsequent increased demand for accomplished musicians meant more artists were able to support themselves by playing professionally. As a result, the numbers of professional musicians increased, and jazz—like all the popular music of the 1920s—adopted the 4/4 beat of dance music.
The inventions of the phonograph record and of radio helped the proliferation of jazz as well. Radio stations proliferated at a remarkable rate, and with them, the popularity of jazz. Jazz became associated with things modern, sophisticated, and decadent, and this era would become known as the Jazz Age. In the early 1920s, popular music was still a mixture of things—current dance numbers, novelty songs, show tunes.
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Key figures of the decade
Paul Whiteman and his orchestra in 1929. Paul Whiteman was known throughout the decade as "The King of Jazz." Today, jazz purists would disagree. Nevertheless, Paul Whiteman was the most popular orchestra leader of the decade.Paul Whiteman was the most popular bandleader of the 1920s, and claimed for himself the title "The King of Jazz." Despite his hiring Bix Beiderbecke and many of the other best white jazz musicians of the era, later generations of jazz lovers have often judged Whiteman's music to have little to do with real jazz. Nonetheless, his notion of combining jazz with elaborate orchestrations has been returned to repeatedly by composers and arrangers of later decades.
Whiteman commissioned Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," which was debuted by Whiteman's Orchestra. Ted Lewis's band was second only to the Paul Whiteman in popularity during the 1920s, and arguably played more real jazz with less pretension than Whiteman, especially in his recordings of the late 1920s. Some of the other "jazz" bands of the decade included those of: 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.
In the 1920's, the music performed by these artists was called jazz. Today, however, this music is disparaged and labelled as "sweet music" by jazz purists. The music that people consider today as "jazz" tended to be played by minorities. In the 1920's, however, the majority of people listened to what we would call today "sweet music" and hardcore jazz was categorized as "hot music" or "race music."
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Influential 1920s Performers
King Oliver was "jazz king" of Chicago, and his band was the epitome of the New Orleans hot ensemble jazz style.
A young protege of King Oliver, 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.
Fletcher Henderson's arrangements would play a significant role in the development of the Big Band era in the following decade.
Young pianist and bandleader Duke Ellington's tight band made many recordings and radio broadcasts. Today he is regarded as one of the most important composers in jazz history.
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1930s
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Big bands
While the solo became more important in jazz, popular bands became larger in size. The Big band became the popular provider of music for the era. Big bands varied in their jazz content; some (such as Benny Goodman's Orchestra) were highly jazz oriented, while others (such as Glenn Miller's) left little space for improvisation. Most were somewhere in between, having some musicians adept at jazz solos playing with section men who kept the rhythm and arrangements going. However even bands without jazz soloists adopted a sound owing much to the jazz vocabulary, for example sax sections playing what sounded like an improvised variation on a melody (and may have originated as a transcription of one).
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 in entertainment settings. 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, the popularity of swing and big band music was at its height, making stars of such men as Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington.
The influence of Louis Armstrong also continued to grow. Musicians and bandleaders like Cab Calloway, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and vocalists like Bing Crosby embraced Armstrong's style of improvising. Vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday and later, Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan, all jumped 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. (Also see saxophonist Louis Jordan).
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Kansas City Jazz
Main article: Kansas City Jazz
Kansas City Jazz in the 1930's marked the transition from big bands to the bebop influence of the 1940s. In the 1930s Big City Boss Tom Pendergast was at his zenith of his power and left Kansas City a wide open town in which night clubs were allowed to remain open from dusk to dawn. In this venue an era of musical improvisation developed in which it was not uncommon for a single "song" to be performed all night by competing performers who passed through the city. The era ended in 1936 when producer John H. Hammond began signing Kansas City talent and transferring the acts to New York City. The era of Kansas City influence is bracketed by the rise of Count Basie in 1929 to the advent of Kansas City native Charlie Parker in the 1940s. Pendergast was convicted of income tax evasion in 1940 and the city began a crackdown of the clubs.
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1940s
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Bebop
The next major stylistic turn came in the 1940s with bebop, led by such distinctive stylists as the saxophonist Charlie Parker (known as "Yardbird" or "Bird"), Bud Powell and Dizzy Gillespie. This marked a major shift of jazz from pop music for dancing to a high-art, less-accessible, cerebral "musician's music." Other quintessential bop musicians included Thelonious Monk, the great pianist and composer, Kenny Clarke, the inventor of bop drumming, Coleman Hawkins, the legendary and influential swing saxophonist who easily crossed-over to bop, Fats Navarro, the lyrical trumpet player who some consider to have surpassed Dizzy Gillespie though he only lived until 1950 when his life was cut short by tuberculosis, Wardell Gray, an underappreciated melodic and harmonic wizard on the tenor saxophone, Ray Brown, the bass player who Dizzy Gillespie claimed inveted the modern jazz bass, and Elmo Hope, a contemporary of Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk who through bad luck wasn't recorded until 1953.
Bop musicians valued complex improvisations based on chord progressions rather than melody, and their harmonic vocabulary and stylistic reforms continued to evolve until the label of Hard bop (also known as The Bop Revolution) seemed more fitting circa the late 1950s. Two notable characteristics of this revolution included the wide adoption of rootless voicings (where the pianist in a trio would leave the bass line to the bass player, freeing up the left hand to add harmonic comps while soloing with the right), and an increased use of extensions such that it became standard to express, say, a static tonic major chord up to the thirteenth position, including the major 7th, the 9th, the sharpened 11th and the 13th. As another example, the complexity of a diminished 7th chord with all its four standard extensions (major 7th, 9th, 11th and augmented) was no longer considered at all strenuous. It is interesting to note that the ‘logic’ behind the full development of the Jazz harmonic system (post-Bop revolution, but pre-experimentalism, -modalism or -avant-garde), has much in common with the rules of Baroque harmony in Classical music, despite obvious differences in sound.
The beauty of "bebop," was that, unlike the myriad jazz styles that proceeded it, it retained the feeling and many of the conventions of the music that came before it, swing, and was able to introduce new innovations without throwing out the progress made by the great jazz musicians of the first part of the 20th century. This is why so many older musicians were able to seamlessly move from swing to bop without any difficulty. The perfect example of this phenomenon is Coleman Hawkins, who hired bop musicians such as Fats Navarro, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis.
Even though most jazz musicians after 1955 (the year Charlie Parker died) were content to resort to simpler and more popular ways of playing (such as Hard Bop [Lee Morgan, Art Blakey, etc.]), that incorporated more influences from outside of jazz and seemed to lose the sincerity and feeling of the music made by Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and Fats Navarro, throughout the second half of the century, a select and admirable few have carried on the tradition. These include but are not limited to pianist Barry Harris, Elmo Hope, Thelonious Monk, and Frank Hewitt; saxophonist Clarence "C" Sharpe; drummers Leroy Williams, and Jimmy Wormworth; and trumpeter Tommy Turrentine. Today, the only remnants of the true bebop sound and style exist in New York through a club called Smalls on 7th Avenue South. The current generation of bebop musicians, or as they prefer it to be called, "modern jazz," includes bassist Ari Roland, saxophonists Zaid Nasser, Chris Byars, Mike Mullins, and Grant Stewart; pianists Tardo Hammer and Sacha Perry; drummer Jimmy Wormworth and Keith Balla, trombonist John Mosca, and trumpeter Duane Clemmons.
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1950s
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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, Pharoah Sanders, Sam Rivers, Leroy Jenkins, Don Pullen 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.
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1960s
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Latin jazz
Main article: Latin jazz
Latin jazz has two varieties: Afro-Cuban and Brazilian. Afro-Cuban jazz was played in the U.S. directly after the bebop period, while Brazilian jazz became more popular in the 1960s and 1970s.
Afro-Cuban jazz began as a movement after the death of Charlie Parker. Notable bebop musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie and Billy Taylor started Afro-Cuban bands at that time. Gillespie's work was mostly with big bands of this genre. 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. Bossa is generally slow, played around 80 beats per minute, straight eighths, rather than swing eighths, and difficult polyrhythms. The best-known bossa nova compositions have become jazz standards.
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. Samba itself is actually not jazz but, being derived from older Afro-Brazilian music, it shares some common characteristics.
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Jazz fusion
Main article: Jazz fusion
Bitches Brew is an influential record in the history of jazz fusion.In the 1960s, the hybrid form of jazz-rock fusion was developed. Notable artists of the 1960s and 1970s jazz and fusion scene include: Miles Davis, who recorded the fusion albums In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew in 1968 and 1969, Chick Corea and his Return to Forever band, ex- Miles Davis drummer prodigy Tony Williams's Lifetime with Alan Holdsworth and Larry Young among others, Herbie Hancock and his Headhunters band, John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Frank Zappa, Al Di Meola, Jean-Luc Ponty, Sun Ra, Soft Machine, Narada Michael Walden, Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius, the Pat Metheny Group and Weather Report. Some of artists have continued to develop the genre into the 2000s.
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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. This is sometimes referred to as "European" or "Nordic" jazz, despite some of the leading players being American.
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1980s
However, the jazz community has shrunk dramatically and split, with a mainly older audience retaining an interest in traditional and "straight-ahead" jazz styles, a small core of practitioners and fans interested in highly experimental modern jazz, and a constantly changing group of musicians fusing jazz idioms with contemporary popular music genres.
There have been other developments in the 1980s and 1990s that were less commercially oriented. Many of these artists, notably Wynton Marsalis, called what they were doing jazz and in fact strove to define what the term actually meant. 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 – choose to distance themselves from the term jazz and simply define what they were doing as music (this in fact was suggested by the great composer Duke Ellington when the term jazz first began to be popular).
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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. Sade Adu became the definitive voice of smooth jazz.
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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.
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1990s
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Electronica
With the rise in popularity of various forms of electronic music during the late 1980s and 1990s, some jazz 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. This has been variously dubbed "future jazz", "jazz-house" or "nu jazz".
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.
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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). A debate has arisen as to whether the music of these performers can be called jazz or not (see below).
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Improvisation
Reggie Workman, Pharaoh Sanders, and Idris Muhammad, c. 1978Jazz is often difficult to define, but improvisation is a key element of the form. Improvisation has been since early times an essential element in African and African-American music and is closely related to the use of call and response in West African and African-American cultural expression.
The form of improvisation has changed over time. Early folk blues music often was based around a call and response pattern, and improvisation would factor into the lyrics, the melody, or both. In the Dixieland style, musicians taking turns playing the melody while the others improvise countermelodies.
By the Swing era, big bands played using arranged sheet music, but individual soloists would perform improvised solos within these compositions. In bebop, however, the focus shifted from arranging to improvisation over the form; 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).
When a pianist, guitarist or other chord-playing instrumentalist improvises an accompaniment while a soloist is playing, it is called comping (a contraction of the word "accompanying"). "Vamping" is a mode of comping that is usually restricted to a few repeating chords or bars, as opposed to comping on the chord structure of the entire composition. Most often, vamping is used as a simple way to extend the very beginning or end of a piece, or to set up a segue.
In some modern jazz compositions where the underlying chords of the composition are particularly complex or fast moving, the composer or performer may create a set of "blowing changes," which is a simplfied set of chords better suited for comping and solo improvisation.
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Debates over definition of "jazz"
There have long been debates in the jazz community over the boundaries or definition of “jazz”. In the mid-1930s, New Orleans jazz lovers criticized the "radical innovations" of the swing era. In the 1950s and 1960s, traditional jazz enthusiasts harshly criticized Hard Bop. Although alteration or transformation of jazz by new influences has been initially criticized as “radical” or a “debasement”, Andrew Gilbert argues that jazz has the “ability to absorb and transform influences” from diverse musical styles[1].
Commercially-oriented or popular music-influenced forms of jazz are have long been criticized. Traditional jazz enthusiasts have dismissed the 1970s jazz fusion era as a period of commercial debasement. However, according to Bruce Johnson, jazz music has always had a “ tension between jazz as a commercial music and an art form ”[2].
Gilbert notes that as the notion of a canon of traditional jazz is developing, the “achievements of the past” may be become “...privileged over the idiosyncratic creativity...” and innovation of current artists. Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins argues that as the creation and dissemination of jazz is becoming increasingly institutionalized and dominated by major entertainment firms, jazz is facing a "...perilous future of respectability and disinterested acceptance". David Ake warns that the creation of “norms” in jazz and the establishment of a “jazz tradition” may exclude or sideline other newer, avant-garde forms of jazz[2].
One way to get around the definitional problems is to define the term “jazz” more broadly. According to Krin Gabbard “jazz is a construct” or category that, while artificial, still is a useful to designate “a number of musics with enough in common part of a coherent tradition”. Travis Jackson also definites jazz in a broader way by stating that it is music that includes qualities such as “ 'swinging', improvising, group interaction, developing an 'individual voice', and being 'open' to different musical possibilities”[2].
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. This trend may lead to the perception that all of the performers at a festival are jazz artists – including artists from non-jazz genres.