Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with roots in blues and ragtime. Since the Jazz Age of the 1920s, it has been recognized as a significant form of musical expression in both traditional and popular music. Jazz is marked by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms, and improvisation. It draws from both European harmony and African rhythmic rituals.
As jazz spread around the globe, it drew from national, regional, and local musical cultures, resulting in various styles. New Orleans jazz originated in the early 1910s, blending earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime, and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. However, jazz did not start as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or anywhere else. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz (a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisational style), and gypsy jazz (a style that highlighted musette waltzes) were the dominant styles. Bebop emerged in the 1940s, transforming jazz from danceable popular music into a more challenging "musician's music" characterized by faster tempos and more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed toward the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, linear melodic lines.
The mid-1950s saw the emergence of hard bop, which introduced influences from rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues to small groups and particularly to saxophone and piano. Modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation, as did free jazz, which explored playing without regular meter, beat, and formal structures. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock music's rhythms, electric instruments, and highly amplified stage sound. In the early 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful, garnering significant radio airplay. Other styles and genres abound in the 2000s, such as Latin and Afro-Cuban jazz.
See also [ Jazz Age ]
External links
- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Jazz ]
- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:List of jazz venues ]
Chat rooms • What links here • Copyright info • Contact information • Category:Root
{{cats|Musical genres}