Jazz emerged in the United States at the turn of the 20th century in a quest for new rhythms and harmonies. Swinging, improvisation and a sophisticated beat are its trademarks.
Trends and landmarks
Jazz arose out of a blend of African beat and European harmony as ethnicities and traditions merged to create the unique New World culture. Jazz had gone through the formative stages of ragtime, blues and proto-jazz before it became what we know it today.
Considered quintessentially traditional is New Orleans jazz — the style of bands that played in New Orleans in 1900-1917 and performed and put out recordings in Chicago from 1917 through the 1920s.
Quickly crossing the local lore limits, jazz spread to the American North and Northeast, gaining a national scope. St.Louis, Kansas City and Memphis did no less for it than New Orleans, its cradle.
Bands became the main attraction of Mississippi leisure boat trips in the 1900s. Small riverbank towns got a taste of jazz as they played during boat stops.
Jazz earned national renown as performers moved north in the 1920s to find the best venues in New York City and the best recording studios in Chicago.
Ever new performing styles emerged as the number of jazz musicians and fans skyrocketed.
Jazz in 20th century
The merging of many trends at the turn of the 1930s produced a new style known as swing. The term is also applied to the propulsive rhythm that gives jazz its expressive energy in an unsteady balance.
The classic big band became universally known in the early 1920s and remained in the musical foreground through the 1940s. A majority of performers joined bands in their teens and played straight from the score after thorough rehearsing, giving them a polished technique but leaving little room for improvisation. The subtle arrangement of brass and reeds produced mellow harmonies while the great wind section brought sensational loudness known as "the big band sound."
Big bands' glory peaked in the mid-1930s, when swing dancing became a universal obsession and solo improvisations during broadly advertised battles of the bands threw fans into hysterics. Public enthusiasm subsided somewhat after WWII, but bands remained a great success with tours and records for several more decades. Their music evolved under the influence of new trends. Today, big bands set jazz education standards, and repertory orchestras regularly perform arrangements of big band tunes.
The Great Depression and Prohibition made Kansas City the jazz mecca, with big bands and tiny swing ensembles playing soulful, blue-tinged tunes and powerful solos in illicit speakeasies.
The late 1930s eased off the diktat of big bands as their leaders and star performers gathered after concerts in small clubs for jam sessions, with virtuoso swing and imaginative improvisations — a style known as mainstream. Presently, the word is applied to any style at some distance from old jazz.
In the early and mid-40s, New York was the cradle of bebop, a style that ushered in modern jazz. Stepping away from commercial music, it focused on small ensembles which experimented with fast tempos and harmonies, not melodies. Its emphasis on sophisticated improvisations pushed the virtuoso soloist to the foreground — hence boppers' glad rags and flamboyant manners. Bebop marked a shift in focus from popular danceable tunes to the intellectual challenge of "musician's music": This music was made to listen to, not to dance to.
Progressive jazz emerged side by side with bop to break away from big band clichés. Unlike boppers, progressives did not turn away from tradition but improved and updated swing with the latest finds in European symphonic music's tonality and harmony.
The drive and tension of bop receded at the turn of the 50s to make room for the smooth, calm and equanimous cool jazz, with its long, linear melodies. Its static harmony gave the impression of boundless vistas. Dissonance was softened, and great attention was paid to instrumentation. Many tunes were arranged to include the French horn, the tuba and other brass instruments, not traditionally found in jazz. Cool jazz allowed larger bands than bebop, and nonets and tentets became more common. Cool jazzmen of the 50s made many recordings in Los Angeles studios, so the style later became known as West Coast Jazz.
At that same time, jazzmen of Detroit, Philadelphia and New York turned to the more aggressive version of good old bebop, which became known as hard bop. Similar to bebop in technique, the hard bop of the 50s and 60s drifted away from the song to blues and rhythmic drive. Inspired improvisation and the instinct for harmony mattered more than ever to brass and reed musicians. The piano and drums were used more extensively than in conventional bop, while the bass took on a mellow, vocal funk quality.
Soul jazz, developing off of hard bop, was a blend of blues and African-American folk music. Its small bands emerged in the mid-50s and remained popular through the 70s. The fast beat with repeated bass ostinato and rhythmic patterns evoked emotion and made audiences feel like one person. Soul jazz is not identical to what we know as "soul music" presently: the former is the offspring of bebop while the latter of rhythm and blues, popular since the early 60s.
Jazz-funk, a branch of soul jazz, incorporates the elements of funk, soul, and rhythm and blues. Blues notes form the backbone of its tunes. Concentrated on the rhythm, it keeps an unbroken background beat with light, lyrical instrumental ornamentation. Improvised solos fall in with the general rhythm and harmonize with the band. Extremely danceable, jazz-funk tunes, whether fast or slow, are imbued with joy.
The late 1950s ushered in new melodic and improvisation experiments. It will suffice to mention that a small number of specific modes were used instead of chords to build tunes. Modal jazz was the result — a harmoniously static genre resting on melody. Soloists occasionally ventured away from a given scale to create the impression of freedom. Fast or slow, modal jazz spoke of deliberation with its changeful, serpentine tunes. The genre sounded exotic with borrowed Indian, Arab and African modes. Tonal ambiguity gave rise to the free jazz quest of the next decade.
The late 50s and early 60s were a time like no other in jazz history: a time when experiments involved not only the mood but also the melody structure, rhythm and tonality.
Free jazz is one of the most disputable trends. It took shape as an independent style in the late 50s, though its elements had been present long before in the music structure. It rejected chord sequence to allow musical movement in any direction. Another fundamental innovation reappraised swing or ignored it altogether. In other words, free jazz gave up meter, beat and groove. Still another breakthrough brought in atonality. The musical phrase no longer rested on the conventional tonal system. A world of new sounds appeared — of ecstatic altissimo shrieks. Free jazz is no longer pulled by a controversial undercurrent but remains a dynamic expressive means full of vitality.
Creative jazz emerged at about the same time as free jazz. It introduced the extensive avant-garde experiment concerning rhythm, tonality and structure. Free solo phrases blended with planned composition, whose elements merged indivisibly with improvisation, so that it was hard to tell the one from the other. Solos were arranged to bring music to what is regarded conventionally as abstraction or downright chaos. Swing rhythms and tunes were not necessary parts of the musical texture.
Non-experimenting musicians turned to post-bop, a form based on rhythm and ensemble performance and inheriting the repertory and drive of hard bop. Amply borrowing from Latin music, it differed from bebop as it used elements of funk, groove and soul reappraised in the spirit of the pop-dominated new time.
Initially known as jazz-rock, jazz fusion emerged in the late 1960s as a hybrid of jazz, pop, rock, soul, funk and R&B. Resting on melody and improvisation, it amply used electric instruments, rock rhythms and mixed meters to shrug off swung beat — the cornerstone of all jazz. Though the 1970s reduced fusion to entertainment music, the next decade turned it into music of mighty expressive power.
Smooth jazz, which branched off from fusion, gave up the aggressive solos and dynamic crescendos of the previous styles for a deliberately polished sound. Harmony here means more than anything else. Glossy keyboard melodies and a mild beat free from improvisation produce the most marketable music commodity since the Swing Age.
Acid jazz, dance music in which funk blended with jazz classics, hip-hop, soul and Latin groove, appeared in the UK in 1987. This predominantly instrumental style was one of the many phenomena of jazz renaissance, inspired not so much by live music as by recordings from the late 60s and early 70s. The classification of acid as a jazz style is not quite accurate. However, even though it is not exactly a branch of the mighty tree of jazz traditions, we should not overlook it as we survey the versatile world of contemporary jazz.
Also worth mentioning is jazz-manouche, which combines swing with Gypsy guitar music.
Jazz today
The present-day music world is amazingly multi-faceted and evolves toward what we might call "global music." Jazz cannot stay immune to tunes coming from every part of the world.
The evolution of talent and the development of its expressive means are unpredictable. They become stronger through the interaction of jazz and other genres, so jazz has vast resources for further progress.