Lesson 1. American jazz Quiz

1. What do you know about the origin of jazz?

2. Can you name some jazz styles? What are they characterized by?

3. What epochs and names do you associate with the following jazz hits: “Oh when the Saints…”, “The Caravan”, “Moonlight Serenade”?

From the History of Jazz

What is jazz? To some people, it is a Dixieland band playing on a Mississippi riverboat. To others, it is Louis Armstrong blowing a tune on his trumpet. Or maybe it's a group playing a "gig" in a smoke-filled nightclub. Jazz is all of these things. It is hard to define jazz music.

One thing is certain – jazz was born and bred in the United States. Its rhythm and energy came from black Americans. But jazz is not just the music of blacks. The instruments used to play jazz came from Europe. Jazz also got its structure and written form from European music.

What makes jazz different from other forms of music? One difference is its use of improvisation. Improvisation happens when a musician changes the melody of a song while he plays. He makes up a new melody as he goes along.

Also, in playing jazz, performers create rhythms characterized by constant syncopation (accents in unexpected places) and by swing – a sensation of drive and force.

Jazz began to emerge in the 1890s. It evolved from the music of black slaves in the early 1800s. Black religious music also played a part in the development of jazz. Blacks expressed their religious feelings through songs called spirituals. Spirituals had much of the emotion and power of later jazz music.

Over the years, jazz music has gone through many changes. These changes make jazz one of the most interesting forms of music. Below are some jazz styles that have been seen through the years. Almost all of these jazz styles are still played today.

Ragtime – Ragtime music was popular from about 1890 to 1910. It is played mostly on the piano. Ragtime is fast-paced and full of energy. The most famous composer of ragtime was Scott Joplin.

Dixieland – The first Dixieland bands were formed in New Orleans, Louisiana. Dixieland bands use the same instruments as marching bands. But Dixieland music has more emotion and rhythm than band music. Shouting and the clapping of hands are also a part of Dixieland.

Chicago – In the early 1900s, many blacks moved up north in search of jobs. Some settled in Chicago, Illinois. These blacks brought jazz music with them. Chicago jazz bands were made up of trumpets, clarinets, trombones, and saxophones. Some famous musicians of Chicago-style jazz were King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Bix Beiderbecke.

Swing – Swing was popular during the 1930s and early 1940s. It is big-band music with a snappy beat. People don't just listen to swing – they dance to it. Swing bands are made up of trumpets, trombones, clarinets, and drums. Often, a singer accompanies the music. Famous swing bandleaders were Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie.

Bop – Bop started after World War II. Bop music is for listening, not dancing. It uses a lot of improvisation. The most famous bop musicians were Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

Cool – Cool was a reaction against bop music. Cool jazz is more mellow and lowkey than other jazz styles. The leading cool musicians were Miles Davis and Stan Getz.

Jazz-Rock – This style combines elements of jazz and rock music. It makes use of jazz instruments, as well as electric guitars and synthesizers. Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea are well-known jazz-rock artists. (“News for you”)

Most early jazz was played in small marching bands or by solo pianists. Besides ragtime and marches, the repertoire included hymns, spirituals, and blues. The bands played this music, often modified by syncopations and acceleration, at picnics, weddings, parades, and funerals. Although blues and ragtime had arisen independently of jazz, and continued to exist alongside it, these genres influenced the style and forms of jazz.

New Orleans Jazz. Around the turn of the 20th century the earliest fully documented jazz style emerged, centered in New Orleans, Louisiana. In this style the cornet or trumpet carried the melody, the clarinet played countermelodies, and the trombone played rhythmic slides and sounded the root notes of chords or simple harmony. Below this basic trio the tuba or string bass provided a bass line and drums the rhythmic accompaniment.

Chicago and New York City. For jazz the 1920s was a decade of great experimentation and discovery. Many New Orleans musicians, including Armstrong, migrated to Chicago, influencing local musicians and stimulating the evolution of the Chicago style—derived from the New Orleans style but emphasizing soloists, often adding saxophone to the instrumentation, and usually producing tenser rhythms and more complicated textures. Instrumentalists working in Chicago or influenced by the Chicago style included the trombonist Jack Teagarden, the banjoist Eddie Condon, the drummer Gene Krupa, and the clarinetist Benny Goodman.

The Big-Band Era. During the 1920s, large groups of jazz musicians began to play together, after the model of society dance bands, forming the so-called big bands that became so popular in the 1930s and early ‘40s that the period was known as the swing era. One major development in the emergence of the swing era was a rhythmic change that smoothed the two-beat rhythms of the New Orleans style into a more flowing four beats to the bar.

The development of the big band as a jazz medium was largely the achievement of Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson. Henderson and his arranger, Don Redman, helped introduce written scores into jazz music, but they also attempted to capture the quality of improvisation that characterized the music of smaller ensembles. In this they were aided by gifted soloists such as the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins.

Interplay with Popular and Classical Music. The pioneering efforts of Armstrong, Ellington, Henderson, and others made jazz a dominant influence on American music during the 1920s and ‘30s. Such popular musicians as the bandleader Paul Whiteman used some of the more obvious rhythmic and melodic devices of jazz, although with less improvisational freedom and skill than were displayed in the music of the major jazz players. Attempting to fuse jazz with light classical music, Whiteman’s orchestra also premiered jazzy symphonic pieces by American composers such as George Gershwin. Closer to the authentic jazz tradition of improvisation and solo virtuosity was the music played by the bands of Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, and Harry James.

Since the days of ragtime, jazz composers had admired classical music. A number of swing-era musicians “jazzed the classics” in recordings such as “Bach Goes to Town” (Benny Goodman) and “Ebony Rhapsody” (Ellington and others). Composers of concert music, in turn, paid tribute to jazz in works such as Contrasts (1938) by the Hungarian Béla Bartók, and Ebony Concerto (1945) by the Russian-born Igor Stravinsky.

The 1940s and the Postwar Decades. The most influential jazz musician of the 1940s was Charlie Parker, who became the leader of a new style known as bebop, rebop, or bop. Like Lester Young, Charlie Christian, and other outstanding soloists, Parker had played with big bands. During World War II, however, the wartime economy and changes in audience tastes had driven many big bands out of business. Their decline, combined with the radically new bebop style, led to a revolution in the jazz world.

At the center of this revolution stood Parker, who could do anything on the saxophone, in any tempo and in any key. He created beautiful melodies that were related in advanced ways to the underlying chords, and his music possessed endless rhythmic variety. Parker’s collaborators were the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, known for his formidable speed and range and harmonic sense, and the pianist Earl “Bud” Powell and drummer Max Roach.

The most influential of the midcentury experiments with classically influenced jazz were the 1949–50 recordings made by a young trumpeter named Miles Davis. The written arrangements, by Davis and others, were soft in tone but highly complex. Many groups adopted this “cool” style, especially on the West Coast, and so it became known as West Coast jazz. Most musicians, however, particularly on the East Coast, continued to expand on the hotter, more driving bebop tradition.

Modal Jazz. In 1955 Miles Davis organized a quintet that featured the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, whose approach produced a striking contrast to Davis’s rich-toned, unhurried, expressive melodic lines. Coltrane poured out streams of notes with speed and passion, exploring every melodic idea; but he also played slow ballad. In his solos he revealed an exceptional sense of form and pacing.

Third-Stream and Avant-Garde Movements. Another product of the experimentation of the late 1950s and ‘60s was the attempt by the composer Gunther Schuller, together with the pianist John Lewis and his Modern Jazz Quartet, to fuse jazz and classical music into a “third stream” by bringing together musicians from both worlds in a repertoire that used the techniques of both kinds of music.

Mainstream Developments. Meanwhile, the mainstream of jazz, although incorporating many of Coltrane’s melodic ideas and even some modal jazz pieces, continued to build improvisations largely on the chord progressions of popular songs. Brazilian songs, especially those in the bossa nova style, were added to the repertoire in the early 1960s. Their Latin rhythms appealed to jazz musicians of several generations, notably Stan Getz and the flutist Herbie Mann. Even after the bossa nova style declined, the sambas remained in the jazz repertoire, and many groups added Caribbean percussion to their regular drum set.

Fusion Jazz. Jazz underwent an economic crisis in the late 1960s. Younger audiences favored soul music and rock, while older fans turned away from the abstractness of modern jazz. Jazz musicians realized that to keep an audience they must draw ideas from popular music. Some of these ideas came from rock, but most were drawn from the dance rhythms and chord progressions of soul musicians such as James Brown. Some groups also added elements of music from other cultures. The initial examples of this new fusion jazz met with varying success, but in 1969 Davis recorded Bitches Brew, a highly successful album that combined soul rhythms and electronically amplified instruments with uncompromising, highly dissonant jazz.

The 1980s. In the mid-1980s jazz artists were once again performing, in a variety of styles, and there was renewed interest in serious (as opposed to pop-oriented) jazz. Associated with this interest was the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who was also acclaimed for his performances of classical music. Although jazz remained essentially the privilege of American musicians, its international audience flourished, and non-American musicians formed a significant subgroup within jazz in the 1970s and ‘80s. (Encyclopedia Britannica).