History of Jazz

When jazz first emerged as a new form of popular dance music in the early 20th was electric: they recognized the music as something new and different from other forms of lively dance music of the time, such as fox trots, turkey trots, and one-steps. This is because early jazz, first shaped by African-American parade and dance bands in New Orleans, embodied certain musical traits not found in Euro-American music of the time and traceable to West African century the universal response among listeners music. The most essential of these traits was the improvisatory mode of performance and, more specifically, the collective improvisation of the New Orleans black bands, a spontaneous, interactive process outside the European musical tradition. A second musical feature, and the one most conspicuous to early jazz dancers, was the exhilarating complexity of early jazz rhythm that embodied two distinct rhythmic elements: syncopation and “swing.” While syncopation (accents between the beats) exists as a special rhythmic effect in the European tradition, its complexity and ongoing, intensive use in jazz is rooted in West African polyrhythm. A third musical feature in early jazz is its microtonal melodic inflection (employing “bent” or “blue” notes), an African-American musical trait that jazz absorbed from the blues.

Contrary to a common myth that jazz is the first true African-American music, there were two fully fledged musical genres created by blacks in the post slavery era: Ragtime and Blues. And these were distinctly different musical genres, ragtime being an instrumental/rhythmic music shaped to the piano keyboard, blues being a vocal/melodic music shaped to the flexible singing voice. Yet these essentially incompatible musical idioms were mixed and fused by the New Orleans black marching bands to create the musical hybrid that was jazz. Thus, jazz as a finished product was a unique blend of march, ragtime, and blues that could only have arisen in New Orleans. Indeed, early New Orleans jazz bands, significantly, utilized European military instruments: trumpet, clarinet, trombone, and tuba, supported, not by African drums, but snare drums, bass drums, and cymbals. The use of these instruments, playing ad libitum performance of march music (marches and hymns), ragtime, and blues is what constitutes the first jazz bands.

In its original heyday, early New Orleans jazz bands, while conforming to the same basic parameters of the style, cultivated individual sounds. The earlier bands, such as King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, the Sam Morgan Jazz Band, and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, engaged in interactive, collective improvising derived from the parade bands and from the collective singing of black sanctified churches. In this highly distinctive style, sometimes referred to as “Classic New Orleans Jazz,” the music of parade and church was adapted to uninhibited dancing. As jazz spread across the United States, touring New Orleans bands began to adopt a more theatrical, extroverted style—known as “hot” jazz in the 20’s — to appeal to northern audiences The most conspicuous among these bands were Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers and Louis Armstrong’s Hot 7. Morton, a jazz piano virtuoso, composed original tunes and brilliant, intricate arrangements for his 7-piece ensemble that represent the first jazz compositions. Louis Armstrong, the first great trumpet soloist in jazz, adapted the classic New Orleans style to his brilliant virtuoso solos and his genius for inspired melody. Another great virtuoso melodist was the creole clarinetist/saxophonist, Sidney Bechet, who, like Armstrong pursued a career as a jazz soloist. Both musicians made a major impact on the Paris jazz scene of the 1920’s (Le Jazz Hot) and both have a Parisian street named for them.

Another development in the 1920’s, as freewheeling jazz bands threatened to pre-empt the traditional dance orchestras playing from written arrangements, was the initiative to adapt the spontaneous jazz sound to written music. Through the 1920’s, dance orchestra leaders coped with incorporating jazz effects (syncopation, blues, etc.) into their dance arrangements. By the late 20’s, a number of dance orchestras, among them, the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra, The Benny Moten Orchestra, and the Duke Ellington Orchestra, had perfected jazz arrangements and through intensive rehearsing, reading musicians began to “lift the music off the page.”

Spontaneous jazz was effectively married to European notation and the new style was known as Big Band Swing. Though the new style was in place by the late 1920’s, its discovery by the national dancing audience was delayed for five years by the Great Depression, during which live entertainment was put on hold and few bands had engagements. The vibrant new style broke out when the youth of Los Angeles heard the touring Benny Goodman Swing Orchestra at the Palomar Ballroom and caused a virtual riot. From that point on Swing, felt as a release from the doldrums of the Depression, became the new, streamlined jazz of the moment and the pop music law of the land. The Goodman band had lit the fuse and Swing bands criss-crossed the country playing for every kind of dance event, from high school and college “sock hops,” to “jive jams” at juke joints, to hip, athletic lindy hops at Harlem clubs.

Swing in its heyday developed into three substyles: the hard driving, blues-based Kansas City Swing, the smoother and more restrained swing called Sweet Swing, to which white teens danced the “Jitterbug,” and the high-tension, streamlined swing called Harlem Swing, to which black dancers danced the “Lindy Hop.” An important sociological function of the Swing Era was to begin to lessen the tensions between black and white Americans, serving as an initial stepping stone toward the eventual dissolving of Jim Crow segregation.

A pivotal development in jazz took place in the 1940’s that was to permanently change the status of jazz in the American musical scene. Earlier jazz styles — from the early New Orleans bands, to the hot jazz of the late 1920’s, to the plush swing orchestras — were part of the popular dance music industry and the band leaders and their soloists were pop music stars. By the 1930’s, however, a new kind of jazz was emerging that was at once more complex in its musical language and more serious in its expressive intent. It was called BeBop and it was developed in a series of Manhattan jam sessions by young, mostly black players anxious to extend the boundaries of jazz improvisation. Most were veteran members of touring swing bands and were frustrated by the limited opportunities for solo improvising in the swing band arrangements. They were eager to move beyond the dance-entertainment function of Swing and to emphasize the inventive side of jazz, catered to listeners. In these experimental jam sessions men like Charlie Parker (alto sax), Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), and Thelonious Monk (piano) began to utilize the abstract elements of modern classical music – dissonant harmony, complex melodies, and polyrhythms – in their jazz improvisations.

The “bopsters,” as they were called, were initially misunderstood by jazz traditionalists as simply arrogant, self-conscious musical snobs who were creating modernistic sounds just to gain attention. But they were serious in their purpose in expanding the psychological potential of jazz expression. The increased musical tension created by dissonance and polyrhythm increased the emotional tension of jazz, enabling the music to express a range of deeper moods. BeBop was jazz with a new agenda. The bopsters’ performance was geared not to pleasing dancing audiences but to a musical logic of its own and to listeners who liked the result. In keeping with their new modernistic approach, the bopsters rarely improvised on popular songs, but rather on newly created intricate melodies based on dissonant chords. And in the “hip” jargon of the BeBop movement they called these tunes “charts,” with abstract or oblique titles such as “Epistrophy,” Klacktoveedstene, “Ornithology,” and “Scrapple From The Apple.” From BeBop forward, the mainstream of jazz became a thing apart from commercial popular music: an American art form.

By the end of the 1940s, new trends were in the air: offshoots of BeBop were cropping up. A new group of young musicians of the highest caliber of training began to adapt the BeBop sound to further experimentation. By the outset of the 1950s two of these experimental styles were attracting the most attention: Cool Jazz and Hard Bop, both equally indebted to the Bop techniques yet extending it in opposite stylistic directions. Cool Jazz, also known as “Progressive Jazz” and “West Coast Jazz,” was the first significant white musicians’ response to BeBop. Most of the earliest Cool Jazz musicians, such as Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, and Paul Desmond, were virtuoso performers on their various instruments, with musical conservatory training. It is significant that BeBop was the first jazz style of sufficient musical complexity to attract the interest of classically-trained performers and composers. Cool Jazz actually encompasses a range of individual approaches by various Cool groups.

What these all had in common was what was known as the “cool sound,” a low key, almost recessive level of instrumental attack and articulation, coupled with a “cool” instrumental tone quality: a pure and airy sound produced by blowing clear straight tones on a horn while letting breath escaped into the sound. This cool surface sound was linked to the technical intricacies of BeBop. Where Bebop, as one critic observed, had an internal intensity masked by a cool outer shell (the “surface” cool of the bopster) Cool Jazz musicians “lowered the temperature” of the inner core, producing a remarkably introverted jazz style, imbued with a feeling of tranquility. Initially, Cool Jazz was cultivated by small, bop-like combos (a quartet, quintet, or sextet) improvising on both popular songs and abstract “chart” melodies. But newly-emerging modern jazz composers applied the Cool sound to extended compositions for jazz orchestra. Such abstract compositions were widely employed in the 1950’s and 60’s for Hollywood and European film scores, used to evoke a modern urban atmosphere. Initially a style cultivated by White musicians, African-American musicians like Miles Davis crossed over to the style, creating a unique “Cool-Funk” fusion. Davis applied the ethereal, introverted cool sound to swinging blues-type pieces, a style that was to have a lasting impact on jazz for the next few decades. Hard Bop was the antithesis of Cool Jazz: it was an intense and aggressive post-Bop style that was cultivated as a reaction against the low-key Cool sound. Where Cool Jazz explored the sober, “laid back” surface manner of Bop players, Hard Bop reasserted Bop’s underlying intensity. Where Cool Jazz exploited soft-edged instrumental tones, Hard Bop exploited hard-edged, strident instrumental tones. Cool Jazz players projected their improvised lines with a steady flow of slackly phrased notes,

Hard Bop players projected improvised lines that were aggressively loud and angular. Cool Jazz players performed with an introverted sophistication, Hard Bop players performed with an extroverted funkiness. Among the key exponents of Hard Bop were the Horace Silver Quintet and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.

Jazz reached a new level of experimental improvisation during the 1960’s. The BeBop revolution had contributed an array of specific modern musical techniques to future jazz styles but it also established a legacy of experimentation as a natural part of the jazz process. This paved the way for a dominant trend in jazz during the 1960’s: the search for increasingly personal styles on the part of the major performers of this period. As a result, it became impossible to divide jazz styles in the 60’s in broad style categories such as Kansas City Swing versus Sweet Swing, or Cool Jazz versus Hard Bop. If “schools” of jazz did emerge in the 60’s they centered around individual players whose innovations were brilliant and original enough to attract a following. Of such figures, the single most influential was John Coltrane, whose powerful playing stretched the limits of jazz improvisation beyond the strict framework of popular song forms to a freer, more open-ended approach. The Coltrane “sound” has had a profound influence on the jazz of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s.

At a purely visceral level his massive and intense tenor sax tone and the withering speed of his note-flow overwhelmed the younger generation of jazz players. In the words of the jazz critic, Ira Gitler, “he played notes so fast that he seemed to hang sheets of sound before the listener, playing through scales and melodic patterns at a velocity previously unknown to the jazz world.”

Coltrane also re-introduced an instrument lost to jazz since the brilliant early playing of Sidney Bechet, the soprano saxophone. A whole new generation of saxophonists have made the soprano sax their standard instrument. Coltrane’s intensely ecstatic level of improvising, based on nearly superhuman virtuosity, was derived from the most virtuosic form of improvisation in Asiatic cultures: the quasi-religious raga improvisations of India, using such instruments as the sitar, the veena, the sarangi, and the sarod. Coltrane derived three things from raga improvisors: 1) the hypnotic intensity of the playing based on extreme virtuosity; 2) the frequent shifting, in a rapid improvisation, from the standard major or minor scale to modal scales, giving his music a faintly exotic sound; and 3) basing a radically extended improvised line on a mere fragment of melody. This was the first significant step
toward free improvisation in jazz, in that the improvised melodic lines are not confined to a fixed song form, such as 32-bar songs or 12-bar blues but, instead, are free “spin offs” of the short tune fragment.

The two most conspicuous and controversial jazz advances of the 1970’s were Free Jazz and Jazz-Fusion. The controversy toward these radical breakthroughs was the disagreement between jazz innovators and jazz “populists:” the innovators felt that jazz, by its very nature as a creative music, must progress, while the populists thought that jazz should always attract and please a large audience. Even today these controversies remain
far from settled. In many ways they mirror the general tension in America between popular and fine art. What ultimately validates an art form? Acceptance by a large audience (the popular) or the originality resulting from ground-breaking experimentation (the avant garde)?

Free Jazz

What made Free Jazz so controversial was that the style radically rejected aspects of the jazz tradition that many players and listeners considered fundamental. Improvisation still remained in Free Jazz, but other elements were drastically altered – changes that made the music seem incoherent to many. These changes included the absence of a steady beat (the 4-beat swing groove often considered essential to the jazz tradition was frequently abandoned in Free Jazz performances) and the absence of a fixed set of chord progressions – for Free Jazz soloists improvisations were not bound by an underlying song form or chord cycle. In sum Free Jazz transferred improvisation from songs to open-ended musical “space.” While the trend toward Free Jazz was initiated in the 1960’s by John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Charles Mingus, the style was brought to fruition by the later Miles Davis combos in the late 1960’s and by various alumni and protégés of Davis such as Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, John Mclaughlin, and Joe Zaiwinal, who formed a Free Jazz group called Weather Report. An extreme practitioner of Free Jazz was Cecil Taylor.

Jazz Fusion

Jazz Fusion developed parallel to Free Jazz in the 1960’s. Fusion involved the incorporation of Rock, Soul, and Funk elements into jazz. Key elements of Jazz Fusion included 1) the replacement of the 4-beat swing groove with Rock or Funk rhythms, 2) the replacement of the rich and varied harmonies of mainstream jazz with rudimentary and repetitious chord progressions, and 3) the use of electronically amplified instruments such as electric guitar, electric bass, and electric pianos and keyboard synthesizers. Jazz Fusion was controversial because it represented a crossing over to Rock. For most jazz musicians and listeners, Rock was the antitheses of Jazz — especially in its de-emphasis of high technical skill and avoidance of elaborate improvisation. Once established, Jazz Fusionbegan to include a blending of jazz with other styles, such as Country Music, Classical Music, and, especially, Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban music. An early example of the latter was Bossa Nova, a blend of Cool Jazz and Samba. A more recent exponent of Latin jazz was Chick Corea’s group, Return To Forever.