Jazz History

Jazz 1920s and 1930s


Prohibition in the United States (from 1920 to 1933) banned the sale of alcoholic drinks, resulting in illicit speakeasies becoming lively venues of the “Jazz Age”, an era when popular music included current dance songs, novelty songs, and show tunes. Jazz started to get a reputation as being immoral and many members of the older generations saw it as threatening the old values in culture and promoting the new decadent values of the Roaring 20s. Professor Henry van Dyke of Princeton University wrote “… it is not music at all. It’s merely an irritation of the nerves of hearing, a sensual teasing of the strings of physical passion.” Even the media began to denigrate jazz. The New York Times took stories and altered headlines to pick at jazz. For instance, villagers used pots and pans in Siberia to scare off bears, and the newspaper stated that it was jazz that scared the bears away. Another story claims that Jazz caused the death of a celebrated conductor. The actual cause of death was a fatal heart attack (natural cause). From 1919 Kid Ory’s Original Creole Jazz Band of musicians from New Orleans played in San Francisco and Los Angeles where in 1922 they became the first black jazz band of New Orleans origin to make recordings. However, the main center developing the new “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. The original New Orleans style was polyphonic, with theme variation, and simultaneous collective improvisation. Armstrong was a master of his hometown style, but by the time he joined Henderson’s band, he was already a trailblazer in a new phase of jazz, with its emphasis on arrangements and soloists. Armstrong’s solos went well beyond the theme-improvisation concept, and extemporized on chords, rather than melodies. Armstrong’s solos were a significant factor in making jazz a true twentieth-century language. After leaving Henderson’s group, Armstrong formed his virtuosic Hot Five band, where he popularized scat singing. The 1930s belonged to popular swing big bands, 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, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw.
 

Jazz 1940s and 1950s

By the 1940s, Duke Ellington’s music transcended the bounds of swing, bridging jazz and art music in a natural synthesis. Ellington called his music “American Music” rather than jazz, and liked to describe those who impressed him as “beyond category.” These included many of the musicians who were members of his orchestra, some of whom are considered among the best in jazz in their own right, but it was Ellington who melded them into one of the most well-known jazz orchestral units in the history of jazz. He often composed specifically for the style and skills of these individuals, such as “Jeep’s Blues” for Johnny Hodges, “Concerto for Cootie” for Cootie Williams, which later became “Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me” with Bob Russell’s lyrics, and “The Mooche” for Tricky Sam Nanton and Bubber Miley. He also recorded songs written by his bandsmen, such as Juan Tizol’s “Caravan” and “Perdido” which brought the “Spanish Tinge” to big-band jazz. Several members of the orchestra remained there for several decades. The band reached a creative peak in the early 1940s, when Ellington and a small hand-picked group of his composers and arrangers wrote for an orchestra of distinctive voices who displayed tremendous creativity. In the early 1940s bebop-style performers began to shift jazz from danceable popular music towards a more challenging “musician’s music.” The most influential bebop musicians included saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianists Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown, and drummer Max Roach. Since bebop was meant to be listened to, not danced to, it could use faster tempos. Drumming shifted 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 accents. This led to a highly syncopated, linear rhythmic complexity. Bebop musicians employed several harmonic devices not typical of previous jazz, engaging in a more abstracted form of chord-based improvisation Charlie Parker while performing “Cherokee” at Clark Monroe’s Uptown House, New York, in early 1942. These divergences from the jazz mainstream of the time initially met with a divided, sometimes hostile, response among fans and fellow musicians, especially established swing players, who bristled at the new harmonic sounds. To hostile critics, bebop seemed to be filled with “racing, nervous phrases”. Despite the initial friction, by the 1950s bebop had become an accepted part of the jazz vocabulary.

Jazz 1950s and 1960s

In the late 1940s 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 1930s. There were two types of musicians involved in the revival. One group consisted of players who had begun their careers playing in the traditional style and were returning to it or continuing what they had been playing all along. This included Bob Crosby’s Bobcats, Max Kaminsky, Eddie Condon, and Wild Bill Davison. Most of these groups were originally Midwesterners, although there were a small number of New Orleans musicians involved. The second group of revivalists consisted of younger musicians, such as those in the Lu Watters band. By the late 1940s, Louis Armstrong’s Allstars band became a leading ensemble. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Dixieland was one of the most commercially popular jazz styles in the US, Europe, and Japan, although critics paid little attention to it. By the end of the 1940s, the nervous energy and tension of bebop was replaced with a tendency towards calm and smoothness, with the sounds of cool jazz, which favored long, linear melodic lines. It emerged in New York City, as a result of the mixture of the styles of predominantly white jazz musicians and black bebop musicians, and it dominated jazz in the first half of the 1950s. The starting point was a series of singles on Capitol Records in 1949 and 1950 of a nonet led by trumpeter Miles Davis, collected and released first on a ten-inch and later a twelve-inch as the Birth of the Cool. Cool jazz recordings by Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Gil Evans, Stan Getz and the Modern Jazz Quartet usually have a “lighter” sound which avoided the aggressive tempos and harmonic abstraction of bebop. Cool jazz later became strongly identified with the West Coast jazz scene, but also had a particular resonance in Europe, especially Scandinavia, with emergence of such major figures as baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin and pianist Bengt Hallberg. The theoretical underpinnings of cool jazz were set out by the blind Chicago pianist Lennie Tristano, and its influence stretches into such later developments as Bossa nova, modal jazz, and even free jazz. 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 coalesced in 1953 and 1954, paralleling the rise of rhythm and blues. Miles Davis’ performance of “Walkin’”, 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. Modal jazz is a development beginning in the later 1950s which takes the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Previously, the goal of the soloist was to play a solo that fit into a given chord progression. However, with modal jazz, the soloist creates a melody using one or a small number of modes. The emphasis in this approach shifts from harmony to melody. The modal theory stems from a work by George Russell. Miles Davis introduced the concept to the greater jazz world with Kind of Blue (1959), an exploration of the possibilities of modal jazz and the bestselling jazz album of all time. Other innovators in this style include Jackie McLean, John Coltrane and Bill Evans, also present on Kind of Blue, as well as later musicians such as Herbie Hancock. A series of recordings with the Classic Quartet in the first half of 1965 show John Coltrane’s playing becoming increasingly abstract, with greater incorporation of devices like multiphonics, utilization of overtones, and playing in the altissimo register, as well as a mutated return to Coltrane’s sheets of sound. In the studio, he all but abandoned his soprano to concentrate on the tenor saxophone. In addition, the quartet responded to the leader by playing with increasing freedom. In June 1965, Coltrane and ten other musicians recorded Ascension, a 40-minute long piece that included adventurous solos by the young avant-garde musicians (as well as Coltrane), and was controversial primarily for the collective improvisation sections that separated the solos. After recording with the quartet over the next few months, Coltrane invited Pharoah Sanders to join the band in September 1965. While Coltrane used over-blowing frequently as an emotional exclamation-point, Sanders would opt to overblow his entire solo, resulting in a constant screaming and screeching in the altissimo range of the instrument. Free jazz quickly found a foothold in Europe—in part because musicians such as Ayler, Taylor, Steve Lacy and Eric Dolphy spent extended periods there. A distinctive European contemporary jazz (often incorporating elements of free jazz but not limited to it) flourished also because of the emergence of musicians (such as John Surman, Zbigniew Namyslowski, Albert Mangelsdorff, Kenny Wheeler and Mike Westbrook) anxious to develop new approaches reflecting their national and regional musical cultures and contexts.

Jazz 1960s and 1970s

Latin jazz is jazz with Latin American rhythms. Although musicians continually expand its parameters, the term Latin jazz is generally understood to have a more specific meaning than simply jazz from Latin America. A more precise term might be Afro-Latin jazz, as the jazz sub-genre typically employs rhythms that either have a direct analog in Africa, or exhibit an African rhythmic influence beyond what is ordinarily heard in other jazz. The two main categories of Latin jazz are Afro-Cuban jazz and Brazilian jazz. In the 1960s and 1970s, many jazz musicians had only a minimum understanding of Cuban and Brazilian music. Jazz compositions using Cuban or Brazilian elements were often referred to as “Latin tunes”, with no distinction between a Cuban son montuno and a Brazilian bossa nova. In addition to common jazz concepts, soloists in Latin jazz draw from the improvisational vocabulary of the Afro-Cuban descarga (jazz-inspired instrumental jams), and popular dance forms such as salsa. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the hybrid form of jazz-rock fusion was developed by combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments and the highly amplified stage sound of rock musicians such as Jimi Hendrix. Jazz fusion music often uses mixed meters, odd time signatures, syncopation, complex chords and harmonies. All Music Guide states that “until around 1967, the worlds of jazz and rock were nearly completely separate. However, as rock became more creative and its musicianship improved, and as some in the jazz world became bored with hard bop and did not want to play strictly avant-garde music, the two different idioms began to trade ideas and occasionally combine forces.” Although jazz purists protested the blend of jazz and rock, some of jazz’s significant innovators crossed over from the contemporary hard bop scene into fusion. In addition to using the electric instruments of rock, such as the electric guitar, electric bass, electric piano and synthesizer keyboards, fusion also used the powerful amplification, “fuzz” pedals, wah-wah pedals, and other effects used by 1970s-era rock bands. Notable performers of jazz fusion included Miles Davis, keyboardists Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, vibraphonist Gary Burton, drummer Tony Williams, violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, guitarists Larry Coryell, Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin and Frank Zappa, saxophonist Wayne Shorter and bassists Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke. Jazz fusion was also popular in Japan where the band Casiopea released over thirty fusion albums. In the twenty-first century, almost all jazz has influences from other nations and styles of music, making jazz fusion as much a common practice as style.

Jazz 1980’s and Beyond

In 1987, the US House of Representatives and Senate passed a bill proposed by Democratic Representative John Conyers, Jr. to define jazz as a unique form of American music stating, among other things, “… that jazz is hereby designated as a rare and valuable national American treasure to which we should devote our attention, support and resources to make certain it is preserved, understood and promulgated.” It passed in the House of Representatives on September 23, 1987 and in the Senate on November 4, 1987. While the 1970s had been dominated by the fusion and free jazz genres, the early 1980s saw a re-emergence of a more conventional kind of acoustic or straight-ahead jazz. Perhaps the most prominent manifestation of this resurgence was the emergence of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who strove to create music within what he believed was the tradition, rejecting both fusion and free jazz and creating extensions of the small and large forms initially pioneered by such artists as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington as well as the hard bop of the 1950s. Acid jazz developed in the UK over the 1980s and 1990s, influenced by jazz-funk and electronic dance music. Jazz-funk musicians such as Roy Ayers and Donald Byrd are often credited as forerunners of acid jazz. While acid jazz often contains various types of electronic composition, it is just as likely to be played live by musicians, who often showcase jazz interpretation as part of their performance. Jazz since the 1990s has been characterized by a pluralism in which no one style dominates but rather a wide range of active styles and genres are popular. Often individual performers will record and play music in a variety of different styles, sometimes in the same performance.
Although jazz-rock fusion reached the height of its popularity in the 1970s, the use of electronic instruments and rock-derived musical elements in jazz continued in the 1990s and 2000s. Musicians using this approach have included Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie, John Scofield and Swedish group e.s.t. among others. Pianist Brad Mehldau and power trio The Bad Plus have explored contemporary rock music within the context of the traditional jazz acoustic piano trio, for example recording instrumental jazz versions of songs by rock musicians. The Bad Plus has also incorporated elements of free jazz into their music. A number of new vocalists have achieved popularity with a mix of traditional jazz and pop/rock forms, such as Diana Krall, Norah Jones, Cassandra Wilson, Kurt Elling and Jamie Cullum. While some musicians such as saxophonists Greg Osby and Charles Gayle have maintained a firm avant-garde or free jazz stance, others such as James Carter have incorporated free jazz elements into a more traditional framework. Established musicians in a variety of styles continued to perform, such as Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Sonny Rollins, Wynton Marsalis, Keith Jarrett, David Murray and McCoy Tyner.
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Thank you Billy Mousser
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