Jazz

A term covering a wide variety of styles of African-American origin, including New Orleans/DixiELAND, Chicago, big band/SWING, BEBOP, COOL/THIRD STREAM, FREE JAZZ, jazz-rock/jazz-funk, and neotraditionalism. Most are characterized by improvisation and a "swinging" beat composed of a steady, prominent meter and dotted or SYNCOPATED rhythms.

The word jazz appeared for the first time in print in the sports column in The Bulletin of San Francisco in 1913. Describing the arrival of a baseball team, writer "Scoop" Gleeson reported: "Everybody has come back to the old town, full of the old 'jazz' and they promise to knock the fans off their feet with their playing." Gleeson then asks himself a rhetorical question: "What is this jazz? Why, it's a little of that 'old life,' the 'gin-i-leer,' the 'pep,' otherwise known as the enthusiasalum." Reminiscing about the occasion in an article published in the same San Francisco newspaper in 1938, Gleeson volunteered that the expression "jazz" had been picked up by the sports editor during a game of craps. According to Gleeson, it was first applied to music when one Art Hickman launched his dance band, but there is no evidence of this in any published source.

The next verified appearance of the word was in Variety in 1916, in a brief communication from Chicago reporting a concert of jazz music, with the word spelled jass. Another item in Variety followed in 1917 in which it was spelled Jaz. An engagement of the Dixie Jass Band of New Orleans in a Chicago cabaret was noted in Variety that same year. A week later jazz reached N.Y., and it was spelled jazz in yet another report in Variety.

Jazz (through the 1950s, at least) combines an unlimited variety of rhythmic patterns with fairly standard scales and meters. Jazz melodies, almost without exception, are set in major keys, in or time. Within this framework, the syncopated melody often departs widely from the basic harmony pattern. Typically, the major tonality is modified by the use of BLUE NOTES, the lowered seventh and the lowered third in the melody.

Historically, jazz evolved from RAGTIME, a syncopated type of American music that flourished in the last decade of the 19th century and during the first years of the new 20th. A parallel development is BLUES, a distinctively American ballad form. The blues has a unique rhythmic and harmonic pattern that was adopted in early jazz, and blues singers like BESSIE SMITH were often accompanied by jazz musicians. Other early stylistic contributions to jazz were the work songs and field hollers of rural black America, the street cries of peddlers in urban black America, and the most important influence on orchestration, the New Orleans marching band, notable for its use in funeral processions outside of that city (necessary since burial inside that delta city was banned for health reasons).

The Dixieland/New Orleans jazz style, with its group improvisations and lack of drums, was never recorded, except for a pale imitation, an all-white group called the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, which was formed in 1917. When many New Orleans musicians moved north to Chicago in the 1920s (including LOUIS ARMSTRONG and JELLY ROLL MORTON), the ensembles grew smaller and emphasized star improvisers, while allowing other band members brief solos in a 12-bar (blues) or 16/32-bar (song) structure. The instrumentation solidified, drawn from cornet (later trumpet), trombone, clarinet, piano, guitar, tuba or double bass, and drums. This style was emotionally "hot," much like its predecessor.

An item in the Victor Record Review in 1917 reads: "Spell it Jass, Jas, Jab or jazz—nothing can spoil a Jass band. . . . It has sufficient power and penetration to inject new life into a mummy, and will keep ordinary human dancers on their feet till breakfast time...." It was about the same time that the Victor Company issued the first recording bearing the word Jass—Dixieland Jass One-Step.

A new era of jazz music dawned in the late 1920s with an explosion of swing, which indicated a certain rhythmic manner of performance rather than a structural form. The ensemble grew into the big band, averaging between 10 and 15 players, and true composition (and orchestration, or arranging) became an element of jazz. Musicians like DUKE ELLINGTON, COUNT BASIE, FLETCHER HENDERSON, BILLY STRAYHORN, DO N REDMAN, and BENNY CARTER created their own recognizable "sounds," shaping their compositions and arrangements with the abilities of individual members of their band in mind (Ellington was especially sensitive to this). The big bands of BENNY GOODMAN and GLENN MILLER emphasized their role as dance bands, while Ellington alternated between the "hot" dance music style and the more reflective "cool" style that sought to portray the African-American experience.

Parallel to these developments, piano jazz evolved from its ragtime beginnings to STRIDE in the 1920s. The oompah bass became more aggressive dynamically and harmonically, while the melody lines grew subtly in syncopation. While this style continued to influence piano playing, the 1930s saw the inauguration of BOOGIE-WOOGIE, which turned the bass line into a "walking" accompaniment, with broken chords (ARPEGGIOS) often following the 12-bar blues harmonic pattern. The melody lines became more bluesy than modal.

A new jazz form, BEBOP (also rebop or bop), appeared in the 1940s. Its tonal and structural underpinnings seemed to return to those of the 1920s, with the emphasis on simple blues progressions or interpretations of popular standards. But the improvisation reached lightning speeds and, in the hands of CHARLIE PARKER and other good musicians, expanded jazz's horizons melodically and harmonically with added notes to chords and melodic CHROMATICISM. Even more important was its unrepressed emotionality, perhaps indicative of the rising black rebellion against segregation, disrespect, and financial desperation.

In the late 1930s, the SAXOPHONE, with its brassy yet mellow qualities, capable of raucous exuberance or gentle poetry, went to the fore of the melody instruments in jazz. By the mid-'50s it had virtually replaced the CLARINET.

If bebop had a negative result, it was the dividing of jazz's audience into listener-dancers (who wanted to move) and listener-fans (who were content to sit down). This divide continued in the next decades. In the 1950s, cool jazz, spearheaded by MILES DAVIS, GIL EVANS, JERRY MULLIGAN, CHET BAKER, JOHN LEWIS, and GÜNTHER SCHULLER (of the THIRD STREAM), was a listening music. It emphasized complete compositions and arrangements, performed in a laid-back manner inappropriate for dancing. Meanwhile, HARD BOP represented a return to a more gospel-influenced, roots music, designed to get the listeners up on their feet.

In the 1960s FREE JAZZ referred both to a highly improvisational style with few if any structural demands and to the freeing of jazz musicians from the need to "belong" to a single style. This had the disadvantage, however, of limiting even further the audience for jazz. Blues and rock and roll had replaced jazz as popular music forms. In an attempt to recapture its audience, jazz-rock and JAZZ-FUNK, both of which are examples of the style called fusion, combined the instrumentation and relative accessibility of popular music with the extemporaneous freedom and rhythmic complexity of jazz.

In the '80s and '90s, the work of WYNTON MARSALIS and others has emphasized the "classic repertoire" approach to jazz. Marsalis believes jazz can regain a larger audience through emphasizing more traditional jazz styles. He also strongly believes in developing a knowledge of jazz history among today's players and listeners.