Jazz

• By: mrbongo
• On: 09/01/2008 18:19:57
• In: Uncategorised
• Comments: 1

Jazz is an original American musical art form which originated around the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States out of a confluence of African and European music traditions. Jazz borrowed heavily from blues, sharing both it's blue notes (flattened 3rd flattened 5th and flattened 7th) and also it's philosophy "the idea is not to make yourself unhappy but to make the listener unhappy". The main difference is in the delivery, while blues is delivered in a way to induce pathos for both the player and self pity for the listener (typically following a I-IV-I-V-I preogression) jazz attempts to make the listener feel bad while the player gloats shamelessly.

Below is a diagram showing the different faces of musicians taking solos in 3 different styles:



Jazz has, from its inception in the early 20th century, spawned a variety of subgenres, each bringing with it more outlandish slang, from the southern fried tinge of New Orleans Dixie land to the mind stomping psychodelic jibba jive of acid jazz. Below is a diagram of time plotted against slang with each of the key stages of jazz marked on as milestones, the graph indicates a possible future outcome of jazz slang based on previous trends usings oslow's meen trajectory of multiple regression trend prediction.

Origins

By 1808 the Atlantic slave trade had brought almost half a million Africans to the United States. The slaves largely came from West Africa and brought strong tribal musical traditions with them. Lavish festivals featuring African dances to drums were organized on Sundays at Place Congo, or Congo Square, in New Orleans until 1843

In the early 19th century an increasing number of black musicians learned to play Western instruments, particularly the violin, which they used to parody European dance music in their own cakewalk dances. In turn, European-American minstrel show performers in blackface popularized such music internationally, combining syncopation with European harmonic accompaniment.

Similarly many African slaves formed wandering bands where they whited up and played chamber music to a primarily African audience

Ragtime

Rag time was popularised between 1899 and 1918, rag time was probably created by the white composer William H. Krell. Krell was working on the first car wash (technically a carriage wash as cars were still not common place) he'd trained a young slave to wash the windscreen of incoming carriages and he'd personally entertain the dignitry while they waited with a piano recital. Unfortunately his classical pieces would last longer than time it took his slave to cleen the carriage windows (leading to long queues). So he invented a fast shuffle music based on cakewalk in 4/4 with the accents on the odd beats, he called it rag time as it matched nicely with the amount of time it took his slave to cleen the windows of a carriage with a wet rag.

In 1897 Krell published his "Mississippi Carriage-wash Rag" as the first written piano instrumental ragtime piece. The classically-trained pianist Scott Joplin produced his "Original Rags" in the following year, then in 1899 had an international hit with "On the Rag." He wrote numerous popular rags combining syncopation, banjo figurations and sometimes call-and-response, which led to the ragtime idiom being taken up by classical composers including Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky.

New Orleans Music

New Orleans music refers to music played in New Orleans. A typical dixieland band would consist of a large brass section, a banjo, a washboard and some guy punching an array of miniature dogs.

Many early jazz performers played in the brothels and bars of red-light district and anywhere in public that allowed dogs. Among the peformers on the circuit was one Jelly Roll Morton

In around 1900 Afro-Creole pianist Jelly Roll Morton toured with vaudeville shows around southern cities, also playing in Chicago and New York. Jelly Roll Morton claimed that he had actually invented jazz, this was not unusual for MOrton though as he had previously claimed to have invented shoes, the television (which hadn't even been invented yet) and trees.

Jelly Roll Morton claimed that his name had been given to him because of his ability to fit 9 jelly rolls in his mouth without chewing. Unfortunately just before a show folklorist Alan Lomax challenged Jelly Roll to eat the nine Jelly Rolls which he had stored in his attache case. Jelly Roll later (after the gig) confessed to Lomax that his "Jelly Roll" nickname is a sexual reference and proceeded to explain the whole scordid tale to him, unfortunately it was so rude that Lomax fell into a coma for 38 years.

In 1938 Lomax awoke from his coma, Lomax invited Morton to record music and interviews for the Library of Congress.

Lomax was very interested in Morton's Storyville days and some of the off-color songs played in Storyville. Morton was reluctant to recount and record these, but eventually obliged Lomax. Some of the Library of Congress recordings were unreleased until near the end of the 20th century due to their nature and the fact that some of the swearing was so far ahead of it's time that noone except Jelly Roll could understand them.

Swing

In 1994 R-Kelly unleashed a form of music on the world based on laid back soul and hip hop, he decided to call this music "swing". Unfortunately he didn't realise that Glenn Miller, Count Basie and Duke Ellington had already beaten him to the term swing 66 years ealier. Undetered by this setback he renamed his musical form r'n b unaware that in 1947, the term rhythm and blues was coined as a musical marketing term in the United States by Jerry Wexler of Billboard magazine. R-Kelly was about to rename his musical format skiffle when several police officers burst into his home and arrested him.

The original swing music had of course already been invented and was known for it's slightly SWINGY feel.

European Jazz

Le jazz manouche est le style révélé par Django Reinhardt et Stéphane Grappelli. La relève a tout d'abord été prise par ceux qui côtoyaient Django, c’est-à-dire entre autre la famille Ferret dont les représentants actuels sont Boulou Ferré et Elios Ferré. La musique manouche — pas le « jazz manouche » — existait bien entendu avant Django ; mais ce dernier, en introduisant le jazz dans la culture manouche, a réussi à créer un nouveau folklore. Les musiciens manouches lui vouent un véritable culte, dont la célébration se concrétise par un festival qui a lieu tous les ans à Samois-sur-Seine en seine et marne, vers fin juin, où l'on va même jouer sur la tombe de Django pour lui rendre hommage.

bebop

In the mid-1940s bebop performers helped to shift jazz from danceable popular music into the inaccessible music which jazz fans love today.

In February 1940 saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianists Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk gathered for a meeting about how jazz had become too accessable and acceptable, they yearned for the days when respectable folk ran away from Jazz. During this meeting they discussed a number of theories where you could play every note that wasn't in the accompaniment and still sound like you were playing with the band.

The basic idea was that if you know enough musical theory and are able to play the right notes then you can play the wrong notes all of the time and noone will notice. If however you walk up to an instrument without at least a strong knowledge musical theory and try and play everything wrong then it will just sound like noise.

Thus jazz became unpopular again. Where it has proudly remained to this day.