Jazz

TWENTIES

There was prohibition in the United States from 1920 to about 1930 which banned the sale of alcoholic drinks among other things. The result was illicit speakeasies becoming lively venues of the "Jazz Age", an era when popular music included current dance songs, novelty songs, and show tunes. It was at this point that jazz began to build a reputation as being immoral, and many members of the older generations saw it as a threat to the values they held dear in culture and promoting the new decadent values of the ‘Roaring 20s’, as the period was known as. The Original Creole Jazz Band of Kid Ory from New Orleans played in San Francisco and Los Angeles from 1919, and in 1922 they became the first black jazz band to make recordings. However, the main centre developing the new jazz form hot jazz was Chicago, where King Oliver joined Bill Johnson. That year also saw the first recording by Bessie Smith, the most famous of the 1920s blues singers. Bix Beiderbecke formed The Wolverines in 1924. Also in 1924 Louis Armstrong joined the Fletcher Henderson dance band as featured soloist for a year, and then formed his virtuosic Hot Five band. The renown Jelly Roll Morton recorded with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in an early mixed-race collaboration, then in 1926 formed his Red Hot Peppers. In the twenties, the market was widened for dance music performed by white orchestras that had a jazzy feel, such as the orchestras of Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman. Duke Ellington's band in New York was also a great influence on jazz in the twenties. All of these in no small way influenced the development of big band-style swing jazz.

SWING

In the 1930s popular swing big bands dominated the scene in which some virtuoso soloists became as famous as the band leaders. Key figures in developing the "big" jazz band included bandleaders and arrangers Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Glenn Miller, but to name a few. The famous band leader, trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong known internationally as the Ambassador of Jazz, was for example a much-imitated innovator of early jazz.

Swing was also dance music and it was broadcast on the radio 'live' coast-to-coast nightly across America for many years. Although it was a collective sound, swing also offered individual musicians a chance to 'solo' and improvise melodic, thematic solos which could at times be very complex and 'important' music.

Over time, social strictures regarding racial segregation began to relax, and white bandleaders began to recruit black musicians. In the mid-1930s, Benny Goodman hired pianist Teddy Wilson, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, and guitarist Charlie Christian to join small groups. An early 1940s style known as "jumping the blues" or jump blues used small combos, up-tempo music, and blues chord progressions. Jump blues drew on boogie-woogie from the 1930s. Kansas City Jazz in the 1930s marked the transition from big bands to the bebop influence of the 1940s.

 

Ragtime

One of the first forms of jazz was ragtime. As said earlier, the blacks after being freed had limited opportunities for employment. Thus they fell on their music to provide their source of livelihood. Music is a universal language and as such their music was accepted even in places where they themselves were not. Thus they played anywhere they could, from bars to brothels to clubs. Their music at that time was largely unrecognized and unappreciated. After a while though, in the late 1890s, their music began to make some impact. Specifically in the year 1897, a white composer William H. Krell published a piano instrumental piece which he called Mississippi Rags. This is known to be the first ragtime musical piece written for the piano. This music must have gone down well with the powers that be in music as a year later, a similar musical piece followed. The classical pianist Scott Joplin came out with his own piece ‘Original Rags’. He did no stop there, but released another musical piece in 1899, a year later. This one was called the Maple Leaf Rags. His efforts paid off, and it was an international hit. The music made by Scott Joplin made use of syncopation, the banjo and even sometimes call-and-response. This style made ragtime attractive to many famous composers such as Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky. This set the pace for the creation of jazz music.

 

Dixieland Revival

In the late 1930s there was a revival of "Dixieland" music, harkening back to the original contrapuntal New Orleans style. This was driven in large part by record company reissues of early jazz classics by the Oliver, Morton, and Armstrong bands of the 20s. There were two populations of musicians involved in the revival. One group consisted of men who had begun their careers playing in the traditional style, and were either returning to it, or continuing what they had been playing all along. In the late 1930s, Bob Crosby's Bobcats led this revival. Other prominent Dixieland revivalists included Max Kaminsky, Eddie Condon, and Wild Bill Davison. Most members of this group were originally Midwesterners, although there were a small number of New Orleans musicians involved as well. The second population of revivalists consisted of young musicians too young to have been involved in early jazz, but who now rejected the contemporary swing style of jazz, and who preferred the traditional approach. The Lu Watters band was perhaps the more prominent of this second group. By the late 1940s, the revival was in full swing. Louis Armstrong formed his Allstars band, which became a leading ensemble in the Dixieland revival. Through the 1950s and 60s, Dixieland was one of the most commercially popular jazz styles in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, although critics paid little attention.

 

BEBOP

In the mid-1940s bebop performers helped to shift jazz from danceable popular music towards a more challenging "musician's music." Differing greatly from swing, early bebop divorced itself from dance music, establishing itself more as an art form but lessening its potential popular and commercial value. Influential bebop musicians included saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianists Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown, bassist Ray Brown, and drummer Max Roach. Beboppers introduced new forms of chromaticism and dissonance into jazz and engaged in a more abstracted form of chord-based improvisation which used "passing" chords, substitute chords, and altered chords. The style of drumming shifted as well to a more elusive and explosive style, in which the ride cymbal was used to keep time, while the snare and bass drum were used for unpredictable accents. These divergences from the jazz mainstream of the time initially met with a divided, sometimes hostile response among fans and fellow musicians. By the 1950s bebop had become an accepted part of the jazz vocabulary.

 

Hard bop

Hard bop is a different form of bebop music that incorporates influences from rhythm and blues, gospel music, and blues, especially in the playing of the saxophone and piano. Hard bop was developed in the mid-1950s, partly in response to the vogue for cool jazz in the early 1950s. The hard bop style became more established in 1953 and 1954, paralleling the rise of rhythm and blues. Miles Davis' performance of "Walkin'," the title track of his album of the same year, at the very first Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, announced the style to the jazz world. The quintet Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, fronted by Blakey and featuring pianist Horace Silver and trumpeter Clifford Brown, were leaders in the hard bop movement along with Davis.

COOL JAZZ

The jazz form cool jazz began to emerge in the later years of the1940s in New York City. It Arose because of the mingling of the styles of the white jazz musicians who formed the majority, anmd the black bebop musicians. Musicians such as Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Gil Evans, Stan Getz and the Modern Jazz Quartet made cool jazz recordings which usually had a "lighter" sound than was conventionally known, and avoided the aggressive tempos and harmonic abstraction of bebop. A very important personality in the development of cool jazz was Miles Davis. An important recording was Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool. The tracks were originally recorded in 1949 and 1950 and collected as an LP in 1957. Players such as pianist Bill Evans began searching for new ways to implement their improvisations by exploring modal music. Cool jazz later became strongly identified with the West Coast jazz scene. Its influence stretches into such later developments as Bossa Nova and modal jazz, especially in the form of Davis's Kind of Blue 1959.

Jazz poetry

Jazz poetry can be defined as poetry that exhibits rhythms reminiscent of jazz or the feel of improvisation. During the 1920s, several poets began to eschew the conventions of rhythm and style; among these were Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and E. E. Cummings. The significance of the simultaneous evolution of poetry and jazz during the 1920s was apparent to many poets of the era, resulting in the merging of the two art forms into jazz poetry. Jazz poetry has long been considered a stranger of an art form that exists somewhere outside the mainstream, having been conceived in the 1920s by African-Americans, maintained in the 1950s by counterculture poets like those of the Beat generation, and adapted in modern times into hip-hop music and live poetry events known as poetry slams.

Early jazz poetry did not mimic the sounds and improvisational spirit of jazz. Instead, it heavily referenced the musical form with allusions made to musicians, instruments, and locations key to the burgeoning jazz scene. Poets like Vachel Lindsay, who actually abhorred the "primitive" sound of jazz music, and Mina Loy wrote poetry in this vein. It was with the advent of the Harlem Renaissance that jazz poetry developed into what it is today.

Poets like Langston Hughes and Paul Lawrence Dunbar incorporated the syncopated rhythms and repetitive phrases of blues and jazz music into their writing. Hughes and Dunbar, like many Harlem Renaissance writers, were deeply concerned with racial pride and with the creation of purely African-American poetry. Since jazz music was an important part of African-American culture at the time, Hughes and others like him adapted the musical genre to create their own, singularly African-American voices that could easily be distinguished from the work of white poets. Many of Hughes' poems, such as "Weary Man Blues," sound almost exactly like popular jazz and blues songs of the period, and vice versa. His work is also highly evocative of spirituals.

In the 1960s and '70s, the Beat poet formerly known as LeRoi Jones renamed himself Amiri Baraka and revived the idea of jazz poetry as a source of black pride. Baraka was a cultural nationalist who believed that "Black People are a race, a culture, a Nation Elements of jazz show up often in Baraka's work, such as syncopation and repetition of phrases. Gil Scott-Heron, often seen as one of the founding fathers of rap music, also used many of the artistic devices of jazz poetry in his spoken-word albums of the 1970s and 1980's.

The tradition of jazz poetry has been carried on by hip-hop and rap artists, who often set poetic lyrics to syncopated beats. Another parallel that can be drawn is that of the freestyle rap, which features lyrics improvised to a beat, thus capturing the spontaneous, improvised nature of the jazz poem.