Jazz is a collective term for a variety of styles that trace their origin back to the music of African-American slaves. A distinctive jazz style first appeared in the southern U.S. at the beginning of the 20th century. Combining West African and European traditions, and using early slaves’ songs and spirituals, black southerners created a new, unique music. Its main features include improvisation, syncopation—rhythm that stresses the weak beats—and melodies using “blue” notes, that is, notes of the scale that were flattened to produce a more acute sound. Jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, gospel, and rock music have no single history. They have intertwined, and continue to do so. What distinguishes jazz is that its practitioners have always looked for personal means of expression, and this has led them into intellectual musical development at a level that blues and gospel, for example, have never been able to match. However, it has also meant that jazz has often moved away from a mass audience into less lucrative areas of the market.
It is not known exactly when jazz emerged. As far back as the early 1800s, brass bands and minstrel shows (”black” revues performed by whites with blacked faces) were popular in the U.S., and by the late 1890s, Buddy Bolden’s band was playing ragtime music with improvised sections. The earliest recording, made in 1917 by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, was, ironically, by a group of white musicians. Other leading early musicians in 1910s included Jelly Roll MORTON, Sidney Bechet, Coleman HAWKINS, and bands such as the New Orleans Rhythm Kings.
The instruments of early jazz bands were those of the New Orleans marching bands. A cornet or trumpet carried the main melody, with a clarinet and trombone supplying counter-melodies, accompanied by drums, tuba, and banjo. Other early jazz instruments include string bass, piano, and guitar.
The basic story of jazz shifts from one part of the U.S. to another. Black migration to northern factories and, in 1917, the closing down of the black New Orleans ghetto of Storyville—where jazz flourished around the bordellos and gambling halls—helped spread this new music up the Mississippi River to St. Louis, Kansas City, and Chicago. It was in Chicago, in 1923, that King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band made the first important recording by black musicians. King Oliver’s band included one of the most influential trumpet players to come out of New Orleans—Louis ARMSTRONG—who was a jazz star in his own right by the mid-1920s. Around the same time, legendary white cornet-player Bix BEIDERBECKE established the Wolverines, who went on to make a series of highly influential recordings. These two bands came to define the Chicago style, an approach characterised by less counterpoint and more improvised solos from front-line instruments.
The 1930s saw jazz shift to two new centres—Harlem in New York and Kansas City. The New York style, pioneered by Fletcher HENDERSON and Duke ELLINGTON, featured larger bands, elaborate written arrangements, and the frequent insertion of improvised solos. In Kansas City, Bennie Moten and Count BASIE established a looser, more bluesy, style. These two approaches became what is generally referred to as swing—a “big-band” dance music that was popular during the 1930s and 1940s, when jazz gained commercial success.
Racial prejudice at the time meant that it was the great white swing bands—led by Benny GOODMAN, Tommy DORSEY, Glen MILLER, and Woody Herman— that took centre stage. These bands had sections of trumpets, trombones, and saxophones with three or four players per section, supported by a rhythm section of drums, piano, string bass, and guitar. Commercial success was essential for the band to keep going, so they satisfied the demand for dance music and placed less emphasis on improvisation and experimentation.
By the early 1940s, jazz musicians were tiring of the restrictions of the big band. At a New York nightclub called Minton’s, Charlie PARKER (saxophone), Dizzy GILLESPIE (trumpet), Thelonious MONK (piano), Charlie CHRISTIAN (guitar), and others were developing a style known as bebop. It featured small combos with a solo trumpet or saxophone, accompanied by a rhythm section that included drums, bass, guitar, and piano. Emphasis was on improvised virtuoso solos, fast tempos, complex harmonic structure, and irregular rhythmic phrasing. The music demanded much of performer and listener, its erratic rhythms were unsuitable for dancing, so bop did not gain much popularity.
The 1950s saw the genesis of another style, and a new epicentre—the West Coast. “Cool” emerged partly as a reaction against bebop, and was sparked by Miles DAVIS’S album, Birth of Cool (1948). Cool jazz often returned to carefully organised arrangements, with a slower, smoother feel. The idea was to create moods with a wash of sound and variations in tone colour. Lennie Tristano, Stan KENTON, and Dave BRUBECK all made major contributions to this style. Meanwhile, bandleaders such as Art BLAKEY and Horace SILVER, and soloists such as Sonny ROLLINS and Lee MORGAN, began playing a modern version of bop. “Hard bop” sounded like rhythm and blues, but with bop style improvisations, and was better for dancing than straight bebop. At the same time Davis was experimenting with more unusual scales, in the style known as “modal jazz.”
The “free jazz” of the 1960s reflected the social turbulence of the time, with musicians such as Omette COLEMAN, Cecil Taylor, and John COLTRANE pushing the limits of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic structure as far as they would go. This style often featured several musicians improvising together. Important features were atonality, dissonance, and emotional passion, expressed by screeches, wails, and soaring cascades of notes against an irregular but driving rhythm.
At the start of the 1960s no one style dominated, and every type of jazz, old and new, found a willing audience. By the end of the decade, however, jazz was facing the onslaught of rock music and was in financial trouble. Some jazz musicians responded by incorporating rock elements in their work—a fairly natural process as both genres came from the same roots—and Miles Davis set the standard for jazz-rock fusion with his 1969 recording Bitches Brew. The players on this album went on to lead highly influential groups. Chick COREA formed Return to Forever, Joe Zawinul and Wayne SHORTER formed Weather Report and John MCLAUGHLIN formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Jazz rock, with its stress on amplification, electric bass, electronic keyboards, and new rhythmic structures, took jazz out of the small club and into large venues.
“World music,” bringing ethnic roots music from all over the globe, started to make itself felt during the 1980s, and exerted an influence on every musical genre. Jazz was no exception. Players from Europe and Japan—where jazz had its single biggest audience— were experimenting with all kinds of interesting ideas with elements from African, Latin American, and Brazilian music. Many fusion players incorporated pop music in their work, creating a commercially successful style often labelled “contemporary jazz.” David Sanborn, Kenny G., Chuck Mangione, Lee Ritenour, and David Benoit found great success in this field.
The 1980s saw a great diversity. No one type of jazz dominated and earlier styles resurfaced. This neoclassical trend helped to revitalise Blakey’s famous Jazz Messengers, which in turn helped to launch the careers of Branford and Wynton MARSALIS, Mulgrew Miller, Robin Eubanks, and other musicians. By the 1990s, modern jazz had become increasingly difficult to categorise. The terms “post-bop” and “modern mainstream” have been applied to musicians playing essentially a hard bop style with elements of free jazz and fusion—McCoy TYNER, Joe HENDERSON, Pat Metheny, and Keith JARRETT, among others. The New York group M-Base forged their own musical language, while avant-garde jazz artists John Zorn and Tim Berne defy categorisation. The “acid jazz” fusion with hip-hop dance represents yet another branch of a musical tradition that shows no signs of dying.
Thomas Betts
SEE ALSO:
BIG BAND JAZZ; COOL JAZZ; EUROPEAN JAZZ; FREE JAZZ; HARD BOP; MODAL JAZZ; NEW ORLEANS JAZZ/DIXIELAND.
FURTHER READING
Gridley, Mark C. Concise Guide to Jazz (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1998);
Nicholson, Stuart. Jazz: The 1980s Resurgence (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995);
Porter, Lewis. Jazz: A Century of Change (New York: Schirmer Books, 1997).
SUGGESTED LISTENING
Louis Armstrong: The Louis Armstrong Legend, Steve Coleman: Black Science, John Coltrane:
Giant Steps; Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool;
Fletcher Henderson: Fletcher Henderson and His Orchestra; Great Original Performances;
Wynton Marsalis: Black Codes from the Underground, Charlie Parker: Bird: The Complete Charlie Parker on Verve, Charlie Parker; John Zorn: News for Lulu.