Jazz your Lifes

Posts Tagged ‘improvisation’

Jazz roots run so deep in American Culture that further attempts to define the elements of jazz become murky at best. Yet there are a few other facts that need mentioning.
Jazz pulls from the blues
Jazz is partly built on the blues, and some jazz pulls straight from the blues, utilizing the song structures of the traditional blues song structure known as 12 – bar blues. See the article “What is Jazz” where the 12 – bar blues is in action as explained in the improvisation part.
In good blues, jazz, and gospel, players listen intently to each other’s playing, and have an almost intuitive connection to each other – an uncanny sixth sense felt between musicians. In the gospel church, the preacher sings out a line of sermon, and his congregation tosses it back to him. In blues and jazz, one musician plays or sings something, and another player throws it back in slightly new, altered form, adding a new variation to the theme and exploring a song further. Still another player may take a swing at the musical phrase, even adding a new melodic run. This tradition of call and response, and more simply improvisation, is a big part of jazz.
Jazz pulls from European traditions
European musical traditions are also a vital part of jazz. Elements like swing and improvisation found their way into jazz from Africa, but jazz’s major instruments, including piano, saxophone (invented in Belgium about 1840 by Adolphe Sax), and assorted horns, came to jazz by way of Europe. Note that is you talk to a musicologist – someone who studies origin of music and instruments – you may hear that many European instruments are modified versions of instruments from the Middle East and Africa.
Jazz’s basic system of notes is also derived from the European musical tradition. You can think of these notes as all the notes on a piano – together known as the western chromatic scale. This is in contrast to many systems of notes from other traditions in Africa and the Middle East which use quarter tone – notes that, if they were on a piano, would appear between keys – and gaps in scales where western ears would expect to hear a note. Within the western chromatic scale are all the various scale (major, minor, the various modes, and so on) that jazz players use to create melodies and improvise.
Jazz musicians added their own twist to the European scales, or group of notes. For example, blues is distinguished by blue notes, and the sound of these note combinations is popular in jazz as well. To understand this, take a piano and find middle C, the note at the center of the keyboard. Now find B – flat. The fifth note up from C. play these two at the same time – what you are playing is called a flat seventh interval. B-flat is the seventh in relation to C, and adds that blues sound to it. Blue, or seventh notes, exist for every note on the piano – not just middle C. Read the rest of this entry »

Waves of change swept America between the Civil War and the turn of the century. Agriculture and rural life gave way to industry and urbanization. With the end of the war and slavery, many African Americans moved to American Cities.

Life was still relatively simple. Automobiles, airplanes and electricity had not yet replaced riverboats, steam trains, and gas lamps. While some American cities wrestled with ah new multicultural identity, New Orleans was more accepting ethnic diversity due to its roots as a French – ruled city. African Americans, French, Spanish, Europeans, and Native Americans mixed more freely than in most cities, and the atmosphere was conducive to new combinations of culture and fresh forms of expressions.

In this cultural gumbo of a city, the earliest jazz was born during the 1880s and 1890s, played primarily by African Americans who brought their blues, spirituals, and worksongs together with European music and instruments (especially brass). Improvisation, the spontaneous innovation of rhythm and melodies that is part of authentic African music, was a vital element in jazz from the beginning.
Read the rest of this entry »

When jazz musicians finally connected with sound recording studios in a big way during the 1920s, jazz was quickly carried beyond clubs and ballrooms and into America’s living rooms. Jazz’s most creative players soon relied upon 78-rpm (revolutions per minute) records to document each new development in their style – preserving each new piece of music, making it available to music fans in the United States, and even overseas.
Heavily reliant upon improvisation, jazz could never be effectively captured or passed around via sheet music. But with the advent of records, the new music spread quickly as musicians heard what their peers elsewhere were playing.
So who made the first jazz recording? While African American musicians such as Buddy Bolden, Sidney Bechet, and King Oliver laid the groundwork, the all – white Original Dixieland Jass Band (ODJB), made the first jazz record. The group formed in New Orleans, and after a stint in Chicago, opened at a popular restaurant in New York in 1916. Their performances in New York had an immediate effect on the music scene, so the Victor Talking Machine Company seized on their popularity and recorded the band in early 1917. Read the rest of this entry »