Jazz is a music of self-expression and improvisation. It's lively, swinging, and can lift the human spirit.
However, most people don't know what jazz is. Ask a stranger what jazz is, and you'll get a wide variety of answers. But knowing about jazz is important to our understanding of the deeper meanings behind popular music genres.
Origins
Jazz has deep roots in African and European musical traditions. It developed in New Orleans around the beginning of the 20th century, where a mix of people from different cultures and ethnic backgrounds mingled. This cosmopolitan milieu helped give jazz its unique character.
While the early history of jazz is poorly documented because it was largely transmitted aurally, jazz quickly became an American cultural phenomenon. By the Roaring Twenties, it was being performed in clubs, theaters, and ballrooms across the country.
Unlike most classical music, which is written down, jazz relies heavily on improvisation and spontaneity. This allows musicians to express their individual creativity and make the music their own. For this reason, jazz is a very personal form of art.
Jazz’s improvised nature also contributes to its unpredictable, fluid qualities. This sense of surprise is a key element in the music’s appeal.
The earliest examples of jazz were often played for dancing, but as the genre developed it began to incorporate elements of other forms such as ragtime and marching songs. It soon came to encompass many other styles, and eventually jazz evolved into a form that was influenced by blues, Latin music, and classical music. This led to the development of cool jazz, bebop, hard bop, and more contemporary genres like fusion and free jazz.
Styles
Jazz is a music of spontaneous improvisation, where musicians respond to each other in the moment. This creates a very dynamic and lively musical experience for the listener. It’s very important for a jazz musician to have a good understanding of the fundamentals of rhythm and harmony.
Unlike traditional classical music where musicians interpret and express someone else’s composition, jazz artists are essentially self-contained composers who compose their own material in real time during performance. This makes Jazz an extremely creative and versatile form of music.
Early Jazz originated in New Orleans, a melting pot of diverse cultures where musical traditions from Europe and Africa mingled. This resulted in a unique style of jazz that was heavily influenced by blues and ragtime. This style of jazz is often characterized by its lightheartedness, and playful use of syncopation, which emphasizes rhythms that are off the beat.
Bebop was a development from early jazz that emerged in the 1940’s. This style was known for its complex harmonies, fast tempos and instrumental virtuosity. Bebop was a form of jazz that relied less on written melodies and instead focused on improvising on chord changes and using scales as a basis for composition.
Artists like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis created Bebop, but they were soon looking for a way to develop a new sound in jazz. The next big evolution in jazz was called Free Jazz, also known as Avant Garde. This style is a break from the chord progressions of Bebop and allows soloists to explore different modes.
Influences
The musical forms that jazz has embraced or discarded, and its key characteristics like improvisation, have left an indelible mark on other styles of music, as well as on other art forms—film, dance, literature, painting, architecture, and even vernacular speech. These influences are a testament to the genre’s dynamic nature, which is never limited to one specific historical context.
The informal rhythms of blues music and the syncopated melodies of ragtime are among the earliest influences on jazz, which also draws on field hollers and work songs adapted by African American slaves in the 1700s and 1800s, New Orleans' popular brass bands, and other historical sources of Black American culture. The largely pentatonic melody structures of jazz reflect its African antecedents, but it has since evolved into diatonic and more chromatic forms.
Jazz also has absorbed the sounds of European classical music and the blues-oriented folk traditions that were brought to America by immigrants from other parts of the world. More recently, jazz has incorporated influences from other modern genres like smooth jazz and jazz fusion and branched out into different styles, with artists such as Herbie Hancock and Tito Puente creating a more accessible form of the music with a mix of rock and funk influences.
As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, a revitalized tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon and younger technically proficient “young lions” led by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis returned jazz to its roots by rejecting fusion and free developments and re-establishing jazz as an authentic art form worthy of the highest cultural honors. This refocusing also paved the way for jazz to expand its global presence.