Jazz - Index

Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in blues and ragtime. Jazz is seen by many as "America's classical music". Since the 1920's Jazz Age, jazz has become recognized as a major form of musical expression. It then emerged in the form of independent traditional and popular musical styles, all linked by the common bonds of African-American and European-American musical parentage with a performance orientation. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, poly-rhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions including blues and ragtime, as well as European military band music. Intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as "one of America's original art forms".

As jazz spread around the world, it drew on different national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to many distinctive styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910's, combining earlier brass-band marches, French quadrilles, beguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. In the 1930's, heavily 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 1940's, 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 1940's, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, linear melodic lines.

The 1950's saw the emergence of free jazz, which explored playing without regular meter, beat and formal structures, and in the mid-1950's, hard bop emerged, which introduced influences from rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues, especially in the saxophone and piano playing. Modal jazz developed in the late 1950's, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960's and early 1970's, combining jazz improvisation with rock music's rhythms, electric instruments, and highly amplified stage sound. In the early 1980's, a commercial form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful, garnering significant radio airplay. Other styles and genres abound in the 2000's, such as Latin and Afro-Cuban jazz.

A


B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

• Miles Davis

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z