Background

• Jazz began developing in the African American communities of New Orleans in the late 19th century.

• It has its roots in West African cultural and musical expressions and in African American music traditions.

• It’s influential elements are brass band marches, the rhythm of ragtime, the blues, polyphonic improvisation, spiritual songs, call and response, Western classical music tradition, the French quadrille, and the biguine.

• New Orleans was an ideal site for the birth of jazz because it was an intensely rich musical city, with a lot of demand for live bands to accompany dance and parties.

Ragtime

• Ragtime is a musical style in the U.S. which got its peak of popularity between 1895 and 1919, but its origins date earlier than that.

• Its name comes from the "ragged" rhythms in compositions for solo piano called rags.

• The originating composers were Scott Joplin, James Scott, and Charles Lamb.

• Ragtime composers developed rhythmic complexities by fusing European and African rhythmic approaches: the player's left hand keeps steady beats in a strong meter, while his right-hand rhythms emphasize weak beats, or arrive just before or after beats.

  • The result is a hybrid of strong European dance rhythm and the interlocking patterns of polyrhythm.

The Blues

• The blues is both the name of a musical genre and a musical form (12 bar blues).

• It originated at the end of the 19th century from the work songs, spirituals, field hollers, rhymed narrative ballads and chants of African American communities in the Deep South.

• The “blue note”: a note that is played for aesthetic reasons at a slightly different pitch.

• W. C Handy or “The father of the Blues”, was one of the most influential songwriters in the US.

  • He didn’t invent the blues, but he was interested in folk blues of the Deep South when traveling in the Mississippi Delta.

  • He noticed that in this blues form, the singers would improvise freely in a limited melodic range while the guitar accompaniment was slapped like a small drum, responding in syncopated accents.

  • Handy started to compose and arrange this form for a larger ensemble.

  • His composition “St Louis Blues” has become a standard.

New Orleans

• Some of the earliest forms of jazz are referred to as dixieland.

• Congo Square: an open space in New Orleans where African descents gathered throughout the 19th century for meetings, open markets, and the African dance and drumming celebrations that played a substantial role in the development of jazz.

• The early development of jazz in New Orleans is most associated with the popularity of bandleader Charles "Buddy" Bolden, an "uptown" cornetist whose charisma and musical power became legendary.

• By the turn of the century, an instrumentation borrowing from both brass marching bands and string bands was predominant: usually a front line of cornet, clarinet, and trombone with a rhythm section of guitar, bass, and drums.

• New Orleans jazzmen and jazzwomen became known for a style of blending improvised parts–sometimes referred to as "collective improvisation".

  • It appealed to younger players and dancers alike because it permitted greater freedom of expression and spontaneity.

The Swing Era

• In the 1930s, New York City became the center of jazz activity, partly because of the huge demand for dance music and the size-able venues into which jazz musicians were booked.

• Jazz bands became larger, often with entire sections of reed and brass instruments. In addition, the saxophone, considered largely a joke instrument in the 1920s, emerged as the jazz instrument par excellence.

• This was the era of the jazz big band, and of groups such as those led by Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Count Basie.

• Many of the era’s greatest soloists—saxophonists Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster, clarinetists Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, trumpeters Roy Eldridge, Red Allen and Cootie Williams, as well as Armstrong played with these big bands.

• It became the most popular type of dance music on the scene, and resulted in the creation of thousands of records.

Count Basie and Billie Holiday

• Count Basie was an American jazz pianist, organist, bandleader, and composer.

  • In 1935, he formed his own jazz orchestra, the Count Basie Orchestra, and in 1936 took them to Chicago for a long engagement and their first recording.

  • He led the group for almost 50 years of work and featured many important Jazz figures, among them Billie Holiday.

• Billie Holiday is one of the most influential jazz singer after Bessie Smith.

  • Her phrasing and the way she was interpreting and improvising the melody influenced many vocalists and instrumentalists alike.

  • She directly addressed racial injustice in her music.

    • Her very famous version of “Strange Fruit” that she called “her protest” was included into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978.

Bebop

• Largely because of financial hardships brought on by World War II, the popularity and economic feasibility of big band jazz began to wane in the 1940s.

• By 1945 trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and alto saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker, along with pianists Thelonious Monk had essentially redefined jazz.

  • Their music, which became known as “bebop,” remained firmly rooted in past jazz traditions

  • They promoted a return to small-ensemble music, and greatly expanded jazz’s harmonic, rhythmic and melodic possibilities.

  • They seemed to suggest that jazz should be taken more seriously as an art form, rather than dance music or entertainment for a white audience.

    • This music of 1940s created the foundation for nearly all modern jazz, and saw an important separation to social dancing.

• Characteristics of Bebop:

  • small combo instead of big band - less emphasis on arrangement - faster tempo

  • display of soloist virtuosity

  • more complex melodies and harmonies - comping on the beat chording