Jazz your Lifes

Posts Tagged ‘idea’

Jazz Improvisation Transports the Human Brain to a Different Realtiy
New research by John Hopkins University and National Institute of Health scientists found that the brains of improvising jazz musicians operate in a fundamentally different way than those of musicians playing a memorized, composed melody. .
The study was under the direction of Charles Limb, a hearing specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital and teacher at the University, lecturer on the neuroscience of music and music perception at Peabody Conservatory of Music, is also a jazz saxophonist.
Jazz and the Brain Research Methods
Designing effective equipment for watching the brain at work is difficult. Limb and Allen Braun, who co-authored the paper published in the journal PLoS One, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look into their subject brains. The device emits a strong magnetic field, which creates images based on the movement of blood through the brain. Interpreting the images is based on the idea that blood flows in larger amounts to active areas of the brain.
A Jazz Instrument that would Work inside a Scanner
The researchers created a keyboard with no magnetic parts that could be linked to a computer outside the scanner. It plays like a piano, but when someone presses a key, it actually sends a signal to a computer, which then sends a sound sample from a real piano into a set of headphones worn by the musician in the scanner. Read the rest of this entry »

Born in focus groups conducted in windowless conference rooms, named by a radio station consultant, derided by critics, smooth jazz vanished from Washington’s FM radio dial as the month began. It was 14 years old.
Actually, it was a listener who uttered the phrase that a consultant used to sum up this fusion of instrumental music styles. At a focus group held in Chicago by Broadcast Architecture, the firm that first sold radio stations on the new format in the early 1990s, a woman who was asked to describe the songs being tested blurted out “smooth jazz.”
What she was describing was a jazzlike sound without the jazz essential of improvisation, a melody-driven, generally instrumental set of songs played primarily on instruments used in jazz. But even that fungible definition fell apart as smooth jazz spread to about 200 radio stations, including Washington’s WJZW (105.9 FM), which switched to a 1960s-heavy rock oldies format. In recent years, smooth jazz came to mean not only saxmen Kenny G and Dave Koz but even singers Norah Jones, India.Arie and Sting.
Despite hoots and catcalls from fans of straight-ahead jazz and yawns from pop and rock lovers, smooth jazz was a rare kind of success — a genre of music created not so much by the artists and the record industry as by radio programmers who identified a style, found an audience and inspired musicians to make the product.
As far back as the 1970s, the jazz fusion movement’s lighter hits, from artists such as Bob James, George Benson and Spyro Gyra, won airplay not only on the handful of jazz stations around the country but on light rock and easy-listening stations. Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good” from 1977 was probably the first smooth jazz hit, even if the genre didn’t yet exist. Read the rest of this entry »

“It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).” Duke Ellington wrote that song as an homage to jazz. Singer and bandleader Cab Calloway popularized the uptempo tune. And though critics and historians have since expended thousands of words attempting to define jazz, Cab said most of it in just 11 words. After all the searching there are still a handful of elements musicians and experts commonly accept as defining characteristics of jazz.
THREE KEY ELEMENTS
Although listeners may not agree on which music and musicians qualify as jazz, as a basic level, one should be able to identify jazz by a few distinguishing traits.
Swing and syncopation
the rhythmic momentum that makes you want to dance or snap your fingers to a good jazz tune is called swing. Part of what makes jazz swing is the use of syncopation.
When jazz really swings, the beat bombards you, even if the players emphasize the beat by playing right with it some moments, or just before or after it at other times. This technique of placing accents or emphasis in surprising places, is called syncopation.
To get a better understanding of what is being explained, think of classical music. Classical music is primarily written music – musicians rely on sheet music which shows them phrasing, where the beats fall, and what notes to play. Jazz on the other hand, is felt. Sure, lots of jazz standards (songs that are known and played by many musicians) are available as sheet music, but usually only in at outline form showing the basic changes (chord structure) of the song and a simple melody. The swing feel and syncopation can’t be captured in musical notation, only in live jazz, where players either have rhythmic stuff, or they don’t. Read the rest of this entry »