Portal:Jazz

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A performance at the Jazz in Duketown festival in 2019, located at 's-Hertogenbosch, North Brabant, Netherlands

Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its roots are in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, hymns, marches, vaudeville song, and dance music. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation.

As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. However, jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz (a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisational style), and gypsy jazz (a style that emphasized musette waltzes) were the prominent styles. Bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging "musician's music" which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed near 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 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 21st century, such as Latin and Afro-Cuban jazz. (Full article...)

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Did you know (auto-generated)

  • ... that Burlesque was a hit play of the 1927–28 Broadway season that was marked by its "depiction of seedy glamour and jazzy lingo"?
  • ... that Carmen Moreno was a vocalist with a Polish jazz group in 1951, and performed with her granddaughter Anna Serafińska in 2010?
  • ... that in 1973 Luten Petrowsky played the saxophone in a quartet that made the first record with jazz musicians from both East and West Germany?
  • ... that the album covers of Blue Note Records have been considered to be the "look" of jazz?
  • ... that the jazz artist Aaron Diehl became the organist at St. Dominic Church at the age of seven?
  • ... that the lyrics to Gen Hoshino's "Crazy Crazy" references members of the jazz group Crazy Cats through kanji?

More did you know...

  ... that jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal's first live album At the Pershing: But Not for Me, recorded in 1958, has sold over one million copies? (Jamal pictured)
  ... that Cal Lampley formed the first all-black, 45-piece band, the US Navy B-1 Band, in the then white-only US Navy?
  ... that the Lincoln Theater (pictured) in Los Angeles was known as the "West Coast Apollo" and featured performances by jazz legends before being converted into a church?
  ... that musician David Rothenberg appears in a YouTube video playing jazz with cassini periodical cicadas, insects noted for their synchronized rhythm?
June/July 2011

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Fats Waller: "Viper's Drag" (1934)

credit: public domain

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Jazz writer Dan Morgenstern, left, with record producer George Avakian, right
Jazz writer Dan Morgenstern, left, with record producer George Avakian, right

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