Guggenheim Museum, New York The origin of the word " jazz " has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well documented. It is believed to be related to "jasm", a slang term dating back to meaning "pep, energy". It wasn't called that.
It was spelled 'J-A-S-S'. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, you wouldn't say it in front of ladies. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions, such as European music history or African music.
But critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt argues that its terms of reference and its definition should be broader, [12] defining jazz as a "form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of the Negro with European music" [13] and arguing that it differs from European music in that jazz has a "special relationship to time defined as 'swing'".
Jazz involves "a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role" and contains a "sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror the individuality of the performing jazz musician". Duke Ellington , one of jazz's most famous figures, said, "It's all music. Jazz improvisation Although jazz is considered difficult to define, in part because it contains many subgenres, improvisation is one of its defining elements.
The centrality of improvisation is attributed to the influence of earlier forms of music such as blues , a form of folk music which arose in part from the work songs and field hollers of African-American slaves on plantations. These work songs were commonly structured around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, but early blues was also improvisational. Classical music performance is evaluated more by its fidelity to the musical score , with less attention given to interpretation, ornamentation, and accompaniment.
The classical performer's goal is to play the composition as it was written. In contrast, jazz is often characterized by the product of interaction and collaboration, placing less value on the contribution of the composer, if there is one, and more on the performer. Depending on the performer's mood, experience, and interaction with band members or audience members, the performer may change melodies, harmonies, and time signatures. New Orleans jazz, performers took turns playing melodies and improvising countermelodies.
In the swing era of the s—'40s, big bands relied more on arrangements which were written or learned by ear and memorized. Soloists improvised within these arrangements. In the bebop era of the s, big bands gave way to small groups and minimal arrangements in which the melody was stated briefly at the beginning and most of the song was improvised. Modal jazz abandoned chord progressions to allow musicians to improvise even more. In many forms of jazz, a soloist is supported by a rhythm section of one or more chordal instruments piano, guitar , double bass, and drums.
The rhythm section plays chords and rhythms that outline the song structure and complement the soloist. Tradition and race Since the emergence of bebop, forms of jazz that are commercially oriented or influenced by popular music have been criticized. According to Bruce Johnson, there has always been a "tension between jazz as a commercial music and an art form". An alternative view is that jazz can absorb and transform diverse musical styles.
For others, jazz is a reminder of "an oppressive and racist society and restrictions on their artistic visions". Papa Jack Laine , who ran the Reliance band in New Orleans in the s, was called "the father of white jazz".
Others from Chicago such as Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa became leading members of swing during the s. These musicians helped change attitudes toward race in the U. Women began playing instruments in jazz in the early s, drawing particular recognition on piano. Women were members of the big bands of Woody Herman and Gerald Wilson.
Beginning in the s, many women jazz instrumentalists were prominent, some sustaining long careers. Some of the most distinctive improvisers, composers, and bandleaders in jazz have been women. Kemble from a century later In the late 18th-century painting The Old Plantation , African-Americans dance to banjo and percussion.
By the 18th century, slaves gathered socially at a special market, in an area which later became known as Congo Square, famous for its African dances. Robert Palmer said of percussive slave music: Usually such music was associated with annual festivals, when the year's crop was harvested and several days were set aside for celebration.
As late as , a traveler in North Carolina saw dancers dressed in costumes that included horned headdresses and cow tails and heard music provided by a sheepskin-covered "gumbo box", apparently a frame drum; triangles and jawbones furnished the auxiliary percussion. There are quite a few [accounts] from the southeastern states and Louisiana dating from the period — Some of the earliest [Mississippi] Delta settlers came from the vicinity of New Orleans, where drumming was never actively discouraged for very long and homemade drums were used to accompany public dancing until the outbreak of the Civil War.
However, as Gerhard Kubik points out, whereas the spirituals are homophonic , rural blues and early jazz "was largely based on concepts of heterophony. In turn, European-American minstrel show performers in blackface popularized the music internationally, combining syncopation with European harmonic accompaniment.
In the mids the white New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk adapted slave rhythms and melodies from Cuba and other Caribbean islands into piano salon music. African rhythmic retention See also: Traditional sub-Saharan African harmony The Black Codes outlawed drumming by slaves, which meant that African drumming traditions were not preserved in North America, unlike in Cuba, Haiti, and elsewhere in the Caribbean.
African-based rhythmic patterns were retained in the United States in large part through "body rhythms" such as stomping, clapping, and patting juba dancing.
Tresillo shown below is the most basic and most prevalent duple-pulse rhythmic cell in sub-Saharan African music traditions and the music of the African Diaspora. John Storm Roberts states that the musical genre habanera "reached the U. Comparing the music of New Orleans with the music of Cuba, Wynton Marsalis observes that tresillo is the New Orleans "clave", a Spanish word meaning "code" or "key", as in the key to a puzzle, or mystery.
Jelly Roll Morton called the rhythmic figure the Spanish tinge and considered it an essential ingredient of jazz. Although strict segregation limited employment opportunities for most blacks, many were able to find work in entertainment. Black musicians were able to provide entertainment in dances, minstrel shows , and in vaudeville , during which time many marching bands were formed. Black pianists played in bars, clubs, and brothels, as ragtime developed. Two years later, Vess Ossman recorded a medley of these songs as a banjo solo known as "Rag Time Medley".
Classically trained pianist Scott Joplin produced his " Original Rags " in and, in , had an international hit with " Maple Leaf Rag ", a multi- strain ragtime march with four parts that feature recurring themes and a bass line with copious seventh chords. Its structure was the basis for many other rags, and the syncopations in the right hand, especially in the transition between the first and second strain, were novel at the time.
African-based rhythmic patterns such as tresillo and its variants, the habanera rhythm and cinquillo , are heard in the ragtime compositions of Joplin and Turpin. Joplin's "Solace" is generally considered to be in the habanera genre: Many of the rural blues of the Deep South are stylistically an extension and merger of basically two broad accompanied song-style traditions in the west central Sudanic belt: It is characterized by melisma, wavy intonation, pitch instabilities within a pentatonic framework, and a declamatory voice.
An ancient west central Sudanic stratum of pentatonic song composition, often associated with simple work rhythms in a regular meter, but with notable off-beat accents Handy at 19, W. Handy became interested folk blues of the Deep South while traveling through the Mississippi Delta.
In this folk blues form, the singer would improvise freely within a limited melodic range, sounding like a field holler, and the guitar accompaniment was slapped rather than strummed, like a small drum which responded in syncopated accents, functioning as another "voice".
Handy wrote about his adopting of the blues: The primitive southern Negro, as he sang, was sure to bear down on the third and seventh tone of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the cotton field of the Delta or on the Levee up St. Louis way, it was always the same. Till then, however, I had never heard this slur used by a more sophisticated Negro, or by any white man. I tried to convey this effect This composition, as well as his later " St.
Louis Blues " and others, included the habanera rhythm, [73] and would become jazz standards. Handy's music career began in the pre-jazz era and contributed to the codification of jazz through the publication of some of the first jazz sheet music.
In New Orleans, slaves could practice elements of their culture such as voodoo and playing drums. The instruments used by marching bands and dance bands became the instruments of jazz: Small bands contained a combination of self-taught and formally educated musicians, many from the funeral procession tradition. These bands traveled in black communities in the deep south. Beginning in , Creole and African-American musicians played in vaudeville shows which carried jazz to cities in the northern and western parts of the U.
He was known as "the father of white jazz" because of the many top players he employed, such as George Brunies , Sharkey Bonano , and future members of the Original Dixieland Jass Band.
During the early s, jazz was mostly performed in African-American and mulatto communities due to segregation laws. Storyville brought jazz to a wider audience through tourists who visited the port city of New Orleans. Louis Armstrong started his career in Storyville [78] and found success in Chicago. Storyville was shut down by the U. No recordings by him exist. His band is credited with creating the big four: Beginning in , he toured with vaudeville shows to southern cities, Chicago, and New York City.
In , he composed " Jelly Roll Blues ", which became the first jazz arrangement in print when it was published in In introduced more musicians to the New Orleans style. In fact, if you can't manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz.
In the excerpt, the left hand plays the tresillo rhythm, while the right hand plays variations on cinquillo. Morton was a crucial innovator in the evolution from the early jazz form known as ragtime to jazz piano , and could perform pieces in either style; in , Morton made a series of recordings for the Library of Congress in which he demonstrated the difference between the two styles.
Morton's solos, however, were still close to ragtime, and were not merely improvisations over chord changes as in later jazz, but his use of the blues was of equal importance. Swing in the early 20th century Morton loosened ragtime's rigid rhythmic feeling, decreasing its embellishments and employing a swing feeling. An oft quoted definition of swing by Louis Armstrong is: Swing defies analysis; claims to its presence may inspire arguments. This aspect of swing is far more prevalent in African-American music than in Afro-Caribbean music.
One aspect of swing, which is heard in more rhythmically complex Diaspora musics, places strokes in-between the triple and duple-pulse "grids". Like Jelly Roll Morton, Armstrong is also credited with the abandonment of ragtime's stiffness in favor of swung notes.
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