Jazz

I

Introduction

Jazz, type of music developed by black Americans in about 1900 and possessing an identifiable history and describable stylistic evolution. Jazz has borrowed from black folk music, and popular music has borrowed from jazz, but these three kinds of music remain distinct and should not be confused with one another.

II

Characteristics

Since its beginnings jazz has branched out into so many styles that no single description fits all of them with total accuracy. A few generalizations, however, can be made, bearing in mind that for all of them, exceptions can be cited.

Performers of jazz improvise within the conventions of their chosen style. Typically, the improvisation is accompanied by the repeated chord progression of a popular song or an original composition. Instrumentalists emulate black vocal styles, including the use of glissandi and slides, nuances of pitch (including blue notes, the microtonally flattened tones in the blues scale), and tonal effects such as growls and wails.

In striving to develop a personal sound or tone colour—an idiosyncratic sense of rhythm and form and an individual style of execution—performers create rhythms characterized by constant syncopation (accents in unexpected places) and also by swing—a sensation of pull and momentum that arises as the melody is heard alternately together with, then slightly at variance with, the expected pulse or division of a pulse. Written scores, if present, are used merely as guides, providing structure within which improvisation occurs. The typical instrumentation begins with a rhythm section consisting of piano, string bass, drums, and optional guitar, to which may be added any number of wind instruments. In big bands the winds are grouped into three sections—saxophones, trombones, and trumpets.

Although exceptions occur in some styles, most jazz is based on the principle that an infinite number of melodies can fit the chord progressions of any song. The musician improvises new melodies that fit the chord progression, which is repeated again and again as each soloist is featured, for as many choruses as desired.

Although pieces with many different formal patterns are used for jazz improvisation, two formal patterns in particular are frequently found in songs used for jazz. One is the AABA form of popular-song choruses, which typically consist of 32 bars in ¹ metre, divided into four 8-bars sections: section A; repeat of section A; section B (the “bridge” or “release”, often beginning in a new key); repeat of section A. The second form, with roots deep in black American folk music, is the 12-bar blues form. Unlike the 32-bar AABA form, blues songs have a fairly standardized chord progression.

III

Origins

Jazz is rooted in the mingled musical traditions of American blacks. These include traits surviving from West African music; black folk music forms developed in the New World; European popular and light classical music of the 18th and 19th centuries; and later popular music forms influenced by black music or produced by black composers. Among the African survivals are vocal styles that include great freedom of vocal colour; a tradition of improvisation; call-and-response patterns; and rhythmic complexity—both syncopation of individual melodic lines and conflicting rhythms played by different members of an ensemble. Other Afro-American music forms include field hollers, rowing chants, lullabies, and later, spirituals and blues.

European music contributed specific styles and forms—hymns, marches, waltzes, quadrilles, and other dance music, light theatrical music, Italian operatic music—and also theoretical elements, in particular, harmony, both as a vocabulary of chords and as a concept related to musical form. (Much of the European influence was absorbed through specific training in European music, even when the musicians so trained could find work only in low-life entertainment districts and on Mississippi riverboats.)

Black-influenced elements of popular music that contributed to jazz include the banjo music of the minstrel shows (derived from the banjo music of slaves); the syncopated rhythmic patterns of black-influenced Latin American music (heard in southern United States cities); the barrelhouse piano styles of tavern musicians in the Midwest; and marches and hymns as they were played by black brass bands in the late 19th century. Near the end of the 19th century another influential genre emerged. This was ragtime, a composed music that combined many elements, including syncopated rhythms (from banjo music and other black sources) and the harmonic contrasts and formal patterns of European marches. After 1910 the bandleader W. C. Handy took another influential form, the blues, beyond its previously strictly oral tradition by publishing his original blues songs. (Favoured by jazz musicians, his songs found perhaps their greatest interpreter later, in the 1920s, in the blues singer Bessie Smith, who recorded many of them.)

The merging of these multiple influences into jazz is difficult to reconstruct, because it occurred before the phonograph could provide valuable documentation.

IV

History

Most early jazz was played in small marching bands or by solo pianists. Besides ragtime and marches, the repertoire included hymns, spirituals, and blues. The bands played this music, modified frequently by syncopations and acceleration, at picnics, weddings, parades, and funerals. Characteristically, the bands played dirges on the way to funerals and lively marches on the way back. Although blues and ragtime had arisen independently of jazz, and continued to exist alongside it, these genres influenced the style and forms of jazz and provided important vehicles for jazz improvisation.