JAZZ. THE AMERICAN ARTFORM

THE ORIGINS OF JAZZ

‘Whose music is it anyway?’ and other

stupid questions

• Approaches to jazz history:

–Tracing cultural influences

• African influences
• European influences
• West Indies influences

–Tracing social trends which influenced jazz history
–Tracing demographic trends which influenced jazz

history

• Jazz – in its early history often referred to as ‘race

music’ IS NOT ‘race music’, which is not to say race did

not play a part in its creation and evolution
• The American artform

•Most ethnically diverse and racially integrated American
city of the 19

th

century

•Part of Lousiana purchase
•French and Spanish influences
•Descendants of French and Spanish colonists and African
slaves – Creoles of Color – the largest non-slave Black
population in the South
•Significant presence of Carribean culture

New Orleans

African influences in jazz

• Slave songs and dances

–Original African rhythms / Syncopation
–Congo Square, New Orleans

• Plantation worksongs
• Baptist Church’s Gospel spirituals

–Call and response
–Ring shouts

• Blues

–Simple chord structure – three chords
–Stress on individual performer’s skill and aptitude –

technique and the feeling

–The story (uplifting rather than depressing)

First confusions: Minstrelsy

• Minstrel shows
– White performers with ‘blackface’
to pass for Black performers
– At times Black performers blacked
to pass for white performers blacked
to pass for Black performers
– A wide repertoir of hugely popular
songs (including ‘Jim Crow’)
– Original American popular culture
– Strengthening racist stereotypes

European influences

•Military bands popular in New Orleans after the Civil War
•Dixieland
•European instrumentation
•European folk music
•Further confusions:

•Creoles of color – classically trained musicians, playing
‘European music’ for mostly white audiences

»This changes after Civil Rights Cases of 1880’s and after Jim
Crow laws are introduced in Lousiana
»Creole musicians are now forced to seek new audiences and
look for new artforms
»Ragtime (the most popular music of the turn of the century)

Further confusions: Creole culture

•Mardi Gras parade

– introducing the Brass band

•Ragtime

–Scott Joplin

•Creole musicians combine brass band tradition with new
syncopated music (ragtime), the blues, West Indies
influences – earliest jazz

–roots of the traditional New Orleans Jazz Band

Before jazz was jazz

Territory bands
Jass bands



Further confusions – ‘inventors of jazz’:

First recorded jazz (or jass)
Original Dixieland Jassband (1917)
Massive commercial success
Other recordings follow

Jelly Roll Morton

The Jazz Age (1920’s)

Migrations to the north - two
directions: Chicago, New York

Prohibition Era
The Speakeasy

Louis Armstrong

scat singing

(Heebie Jeebies 1926)

Duke Ellington

‘jungle music’

first broadcast from the

Cotton Club – jazz goes national

The Blues

Besie Smith

Ethel Waters

The Swing Era

• Jazz primarily dance music

–Charlston
–Foxtrot

• Swing

–Strong swing rhythm – strong rhythm section
–Improvised solos

• Benny Goodman
• Count Basie

Towards improvisation

– jazz is no longer

about dancing

• Virtuosity

– Louis Armstrong
– Art Tatum

• The birth of Bebop

– Usually fast tempos (although the blues returns as a major

inspiration)

– Arrangements not as crucial as in swing – certain harshness of

form / Departure from the Big Band format

– Virtuosity
– Improvisation (against a strong rhythm section, following simple

chord progressions taken from swing melodies or blues)

• Shifts of tempo, departures from the theme

– Coleman Hawkins, Body and Soul
– Dizzie Gilespie
– Charlie Parker
– Clifford Brown

• Arrangments again important
• Smoothing out the dissonances of bebop
• Gerry Mulligan
• Stan Getz
• Lester Young
• Early records by Miles Davis
• Yet – revolutionary compositional techniques are

often incporporated: The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Time

Out (1959)

–Sometimes leading to avantgarde, anticipating free

improvisation: Jimmy Giuffre

• Later – influenced massively by Brazilian music –

Bossa nova (João Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Stan

Getz, Charlie Byrd, Coleman Hawkins, etc.)

Cool Jazz / West Coast Jazz

• Extension of Bebop – reaction to Cool Jazz (yet

obviously influenced by later cool jazz)
• Simpler melodies, even more blues based, often

incorporating other influences
• Rhythm sections often playing outside 4/4 time

signatures
• Blue Note – the birth of the ‘hard bop label’
• The golden age of modern jazz (approx. 1955 – 1970)
• Massive influence of hard bop on later (and

contemporary) avantgarde forms of jazz
• Sonny Rollins, Saxophone Collossus (1956)
• Some hard bop artists became major figures of the

avantgarde (John Coltrane, Giant Steps, 1960)

Hard Bop

Modal Jazz

• In bebop improvisations built around

specific keys (tonal centers) -whole

compositions were also built ‘in keys’
• Modal music builds from changes of

modes – several within one composition,

improvisation is then built around not

specific keys but the musician’s choice of

mode. As the modes are changed – the

tonal center of music is also changed, so

these changes of modes are often

surprising, challangeing not only to

musicians, but also listeners. Hence –

modal musicians often stick to melodic

playing, not to make the music too

complex and dissonant.
• Result – for laymen listeners – more

‘abstract’, ‘meditative’ (repetitions)

sound
• Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (1959)

Avantgarde / Free improvisation / Free

jazz

• Free Jazz is not all avantgarde jazz
• OUT is in
• Cecil Taylor, Jazz Advance (1956)
• Ornette Coleman, The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959)
• Free Jazz

– John Coltrane, A Love Supreme (1964)

• Anthony Braxton, For Alto
• Albert Ayler
• Andrew Hill
• Eric Dolphy
• Roland Kirk
• Collective improvisation

– Joe Harriott, Free Form (1960)
– Jimmy Giuffre, Free Fall (1964)
– Art Ensemble of Chicago

What I did not manage to speak about

• Fusion / electric jazz
• Jazz in 1970s-1980s (crisis…)
• European jazz
• Contemporary jazz scene
• Jazz and other art forms

– Jazz as subculture
– Beat generation
– Political activism and jazz

• Jazz in contemporary popular music

– Hip hop influences
– Funk
– R’n’B
– Smooth ‘jazz’

• Etc, etc, etc.