Portal:Jazz
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Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in European harmony and African rhythmic rituals.
As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. But jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz (a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisational style), and gypsy jazz (a style that emphasized musette waltzes) were the prominent styles. Bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging "musician's music" which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed near the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, linear melodic lines.
The mid-1950s saw the emergence of hard bop, which introduced influences from rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues to small groups and particularly to saxophone and piano. Modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation, as did free jazz, which explored playing without regular meter, beat and formal structures. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock music's rhythms, electric instruments, and highly amplified stage sound. In the early 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful, garnering significant radio airplay. Other styles and genres abound in the 21st century, such as Latin and Afro-Cuban jazz. (Full article...)
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Did you know (auto-generated)
- ... that an attempt to jazz up a South Carolina radio station did not get much response from listeners?
- ... that Jazzy's 2023 single "Giving Me" made her the first Irish solo female act to top the Irish Singles Chart since Julie-Anne Dineen in 2009 with "Do You Believe"?
- ... that Ron Miles, who would have turned 59 today, played in the same high school jazz band as Don Cheadle?
- ... that zoologist Herb Wong wrote the liner notes for more than 600 jazz albums, by his own count?
- ... that Atlanta's "quicker picker-upper" aired martial arts movies, professional wrestling, jazz music, and Japanese-language programming?
- ... that jazz fusion and funk musician Mark Lettieri graduated with a degree in marketing?
More did you know...
- ... that singer Gary Williams (pictured) played Frank Sinatra in the West End production of The Rat Pack?
- ... that the album A Time for Love recorded by Arturo Sandoval was inspired by trumpeter Bobby Hackett and the album Clifford Brown with Strings?
- ... that after losing a job, the Salty Dogs Jazz Band would sometimes find that they had been replaced by another jazz band with the same name?
- ... that Duke Ellington's 1940 live recording At Fargo was an amateur bootleg not officially released until 1978?
- ... that three different versions of "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" reached the radio airplay charts in the same year? (Andrews Sisters pictured)
January 2011
Selected recording
Fats Waller: "Viper's Drag" (1934)
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