Jazz your Lifes

Posts Tagged ‘musician’

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 »

What Makes Jazz, Jazz? Defining the Jazz Genre of Music
Also known as, “America’s classical music” characteristics of jazz include the following:
• Strong beats or rhythms (often syncopated);
• Sad tones or blue notes;
• A swing element (playing of triplets);
• A call and response element (a musical phrase is echoed by different instruments or human voice);
• Frequent use of syncopation;
• Unique, individualized style of the musicians; and,
• Major emphasis upon spontaneous improvisation (using the harmonies of a composition then creating a spontaneous melody line).
History of Jazz
Where the actual name of jazz came from is anyone’s guess.
But first, work and misery produced the call and response element known to jazz from the plantation fields of southern American slavery. A leader during a work regime might call out a melodic line to be answered by the workers.
Additionally, the African-American spiritual was another root to the jazz genre. The drudgery of the plantation fields and all of the misery experienced by a people once considered less than human was captured in these musical pieces. Thus, these two elements began the foundation that jazz was built upon. Read the rest of this entry »

Classical Music as Vocal Performance
Singing concertos, symphonies, and other instrumental music might seem at first like a gimmick, but this vocal ensemble provides both an enjoyable and light-hearted approach to old standards in the classical music repertoire. In fact, the unusual “instrumentation” causes the listener to pick out nuances that familiarity with the works may have downplayed before.
Imitating instruments with the voices is certainly not a new thing: when the American Federation of Musicians went on strike in 1942-1944, singers (and other “non-musicians”) were recruited to fill in the gap. From imitating instruments to providing vocal back-up, singers enabled record producers to keep turning out more music. Quite possibly this switch to instrumental imitation was aided by the earlier development of scat singing, a technique of wordless singing made famous by jazz musician Louis Armstrong. In classical music, wordless vocals emphasize long vowel sounds, but in scat singing, the syllables are full of soft consonants (such as “b” and “d”), imitating the up-tempo rhythms and slightly percussive timbre of the jazz band. 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 »