Jazz: Culture and Travel Context

Jazz is a music genre that includes improvisation, particularly in American music that has African-American and European roots. Over the years, it has gained influences from other cultural music styles, particularly the music of Latin America and classical music.

Improvisation separates jazz from some other genres of music. In most jazz tunes, a melody is played by a front-line musician before each musician takes an improvised solo. Improvisation involves a musician or singing or playing phrases, melodic patterns, riffs or rhythms based upon the melody or chords played at the beginning of the tune. A selected group of musicians improvises on a track before the melody is returned to.

Jazz music began in early 20th-century Louisiana with New Orleans jazz and Dixieland jazz, but new styles of jazz evolved over time. Jazz was initially a development from ragtime, a style of late 19th-century origins that took America by storm around the turn of the 20th century. A related African-American style, the blues, grew out of preexisting West African and African-American improvisatory storytelling and work song styles, starting probably after the Civil War in rural areas and small towns in the South and starting to gain wider notice in the first decades of the 20th century. While the influence of ragtime on jazz waned drastically over the years, the blues has remained a big part of jazz repertoire and vocabulary to the present day, at the same time that it also developed separately.

Buddy Bolden and Bunk Johnson were some of the original creators of the first branch of jazz, which is now known as "traditional jazz". Traditional jazz involves ensemble playing in which multiple musicians improvise at the same time. Jazz groups in traditional jazz usually included at least six musicians. New Orleans jazz prospered in and around New Orleans until the Great Depression, which forced many New Orleans jazz musicians out of work. New Orleans and Chicago, during the 1920s, became major jazz cities, with Louis Armstrong being one of the top traditional jazz trumpeters.

Another early jazz style, which grew almost directly out of ragtime, with its virtuosic right hand melodies and "oom-pah" chord patterns in the left hand, was stride piano. This style, somewhat influenced by that of the Creole ragtime/early jazz pianist from New Orleans, Jelly Roll Morton, was popular from the '20s to the '40s, particularly in New York City. Famous stride pianists included James P. Johnson, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Fats Waller, Erroll Garner and Earl Hines, and Art Tatum, arguably the greatest jazz pianist of all, took stride as his foundation and extended it wherever he wanted to go.

As the Great Depression came to an end in the late 1930s, swing music played by big bands began to dominate not only the jazz scene in America, but also the music scene in general, with a style that was more arranged than heretofore traditional jazz. Famous big bandleaders such as Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller created record-selling recordings in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

While big bands were becoming popular, however, another style of jazz developed that changed the course of jazz permanently - "modern jazz". The first major style of modern jazz was called bebop. One of bebop's founders, Charlie Parker, developed a complex improvisation style in the late 1930s in Kansas City and he joined the Jay McShann Band in the early 1940s. He then went to New York City and began recording with another bebop pioneer, Dizzy Gillespie. By late 1945, Gillespie's quintet included Parker and other upcoming bebop musicians. Charlie Parker left Gillespie's group in 1946 and created his own quintet in 1947. He had a couple of years of successful bebop recordings, but by the 1950s, new musicians had become major figures on the modern jazz scene. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that bebop set the tone for just about all the new jazz styles that were developed since World War II, as they were either extensions of bebop ideas and material and/or reactions against bebop.

In the mid-1950s, Charlie Parker died, and modern jazz began to return to its African roots and began to be more influenced by the blues. By 1957, bebop drummer Art Blakey's jazz group, the Jazz Messengers, included saxophonist Benny Golson and trumpeter Lee Morgan. Morgan and Golson both had blues influences in their improvisation, and pianist Bobby's Timmons' Gospel-influenced style continued to push jazz in the "soul jazz" direction. Over the next few years, younger musicians like Dexter Gordon and Hank Mobley began to improvise with slower phrases and incorporate more blues into their styles. The growth of rock and roll and other music styles also influenced jazz at this time. Pianist and composer Herbie Hancock made many important soul jazz recordings during the early 1960s, and his music group at times included jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and saxophonist Dexter Gordon.

The late 50s and early 60s also saw the rise of cool jazz, a more relaxed style than bebop and its hard-driving descendants. Quite a few musicians are associated with this style, but probably most of all, Miles Davis and his collaborators in the Birth of the Cool (released 1957) and Kind Of Blue (1959) albums and the Dave Brubeck Quartet in albums such as Time Out (1959).

During the early 1960s, free jazz, which uses improvisation that is not based on standard chords or melodies, developed with Jimmy Giuffre's Free Fall and the recordings of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. Free jazz and avant-garde jazz became particularly popular in the late 1970s and 1980s with Bob Berg, Michael Brecker, and the free improvisation music in Europe during that time, but free jazz's influence with the public proved to not be as prominent as other types of modern jazz.

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Text adapted from Jazz by Wikivoyage contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0. Paragraphs have been selected and abridged, and formatting adjusted. This adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.