JAZZ MUSIC

How to Relate to Jazz Artists

Jazz is a musical art form which originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions. Because of the continuing popularity of Jazz we explore it’s history and how to relate to jazz artists.

Jazz music was, ultimately, the product of New Orleans’ melting pot. These groups were formed by Italians, Creoles and all sorts of European immigrants. Jazz bands took the piano from ragtime, and the saxophone and trumpet from dance hall bands. This type of music was very much a continuation of blues music, except that it took advantage of the instruments of the marching band.

Jazz would eventually be assimilated by white pop music (from Broadway show tunes to Tin Pan Alley ballads) without causing any major upheaval. This became the unchallenged popular music of America during the Swing era of the 1930s and 1940s.

It was, indirectly, also another stage in the process of black assimilation of white musical styles, because jazz was founded on ragtime, and ragtime was fundamentally the grafting of European musical styles (such as marches and waltzes) onto West-African syncopated rhythms.

Jazz has, from its early 20th century inception, spawned a variety of subgenres, from New Orleans Dixieland dating from the early 1910s, big band-style swing from the 1930s and 1940s, Bebop from the mid-1940s, a variety of Latin jazz fusions such as Afro-Cuban and Brazilian jazz from the 1950s and 1960s, jazz-rock fusion from the 1970s and late 1980s developments such as acid jazz, which blended jazz influences into funk and hip-hop.

This genre can be hard to define because it spans from Ragtime waltzes to 2000s-era fusion. Jazz, however is often characterized as the product of democratic creativity, interaction and collaboration, placing equal value on the contributions of composer and performer, ‘adroitly weighing the respective claims of the composer and the improviser’.

Jazz musicians began to compose their own material because improvising on other people’s material was neither fun nor as rewarding as improvising on one’s own material.

Early stars included other New Orleans musicians like King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton, a Creole musician who, in the early 1920′s, recorded over a hundred of his own and other’s Jazz tunes.

Trumpeter, bandleader and singer Louis Armstrong was a much-imitated innovator of early jazz. Trumpeter and sin ger, and first internationally known jazz soloist also pioneered the Bebop movement in 1945 along with Charlie Parker.

Louis Armstrong was born and raised in New Orleans, a culturally diverse town with a unique musical mix of creole, ragtime, marching bands and blues.

Armstrong was immediately popular and added to the growing prestige of King Oliver’s band. Oliver’s band played primitive jazz, a hotter style of ragtime, with looser rhythm and more improvisation, and Armstrong’s role was mostly backup.

Louis Armstrong soon grew to become the greatest Jazz musician of his era and eventually one of the biggest stars in the world. Armstrong played with King Oliver for a short period of time and then formed his own group, the Hot Five.

Armstrong applied a similar technique to his vocals, which did more than just popularize “scat” singing. They invented a way to sing without singing. Armstrong turned the human voice into not only an instrument but an instrument that was as legitimate for improvising as any other instrument of the orchestra. Armstrong became famous for his improvisations on covers of blues and pop standards.

Jazz fans, both African American and white, crowded in to hear Duke Ellington’s Orchestra. Famous for his “Big Band” sound, Ellington was himself a fine pianist.

Musicians such as Pharoah Sanders, Hubert Laws and Wayne Shorter began using African instruments such as kalimbas, cowbells, beaded gourds a nd other instruments not traditional to jazz.

Musicians began improvising jazz tunes on unusual instruments, such as the jazz harp (Alice Coltrane), electrically-amplified and wah-wah pedaled jazz violin (Jean-Luc Ponty), and even bagpipes (Rufus Harley). Musicians working in this field popularized this form of music through their creativity in jazz music.

Musicians who worked with Miles Davis formed the four most influential fusion groups: Weather Report and Mahavishnu Orchestra which emerged in 1971 and were soon followed by Return to Forever and The Headhunters.

Jazz fusion music often uses mixed meters, odd time signatures, syncopation, and complex chords and harmonies. Jazz continued to expand and change, influenced by other types of music, such as world music, avant garde classical music, and rock and pop music.

Jazz poetry, fashion, and industry were effected by the “basement” music that took the United States by storm. The music also exacerbated the racial tensions in the post war period as Jazz represented a break from Western musical traditions, where the composer wrote a piece of music on paper and the musicians then tried their best to play exactly what was in t he score.

By listening to the earlier jazz musicians it would be easier to assimilate this style of music by learning how to relate to jazz artists.

About the Author

Jackie Spivey is the Author of this Article. He is an artist who has a very creative, eclectic collection of music that is available for your listening pleasure. You can listen to and/or download the jazz song, Kiafa at JacSan Records. And learn much more about music at JacSanRecords Music Blog.

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