Print
Email
Look It Up
AT A GLANCE
Jazz
6 articles on Jazz
Jazz
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 7925 Includes: New Orleans and the Origins of Jazz | Musical Roots of Jazz | Role of Improvisation in Jazz | Transformation and Dissemination of Jazz | Radio, Recordings, and the Spread of Jazz | Emergence of Duke Ellington and the Ellington Orchestra | Swing | Swing Era, 1930–1945 | Jazz Musicians and Racial Discrimination | African American Women in Jazz | Big Bands and the End of the Swing Era | Bebop Era, 1945–1955 | Cool Jazz, Hard Bop, and Jazz in Hollywood | Jazz Experimentalists: Mingus, Coleman, and Coltrane | Miles Davis: Modal Jazz and Jazz-Rock | Wynton Marsalis and Neotraditionalism since 1980 | Jazz TodayTwentieth-century African American music characterized by improvisation, a rhythmic conception termed swing, and the high value placed on each musician achieving a uniquely identifiable sound. Jazz is one of the crowning achievements of African American culture. It is a profoundly integrative genre, both musically and socially. Drawing on earlier traditions of New Orleans marching bands and Ragtime-influenced society orchestras, jazz has continued to incorporate new musical influences, including the Blues, Gospel Music, Latin American music, European art music, and rock and roll. African Americans have accounted for every significant musical advance in jazz, but the music has been open to all, regardless of race or nationality. During the first half of the twentieth century—a time of pervasive racial discrimination in the United States—jazz was strikingly democratic. Although ...
Read full articleJazz
Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition
Word Count: 14821 Includes: Origins of Jazz | Jazz Is | New Orleans and Traditional Jazz | The Jazz Greats | Bebop | Great Voices of Jazz | Black Women in Contemporary Jazz | BibliographyBetty Carter 's 1958 tune proclaims, “Jazz ain't nothing but soul.” Jazz, America's art music, was born in the late nineteenth century simultaneously in New Orleans, Atlanta, Biloxi, Mobile, and Memphis. As Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio River immigrants moved north, so too did jazz. Like most western music, jazz has eastern roots. Its gene pool is filled with blues and spirituals, along with field hollers and the African hand-drumming that slaves imported to the Americas. It is a form in which black women have participated from its inception. At times, they have fought exclusion, but their achievements have been, nonetheless, remarkable.The immediate predecessor of jazz had no name, unless it could be called “dance music.” It was played ...
Read full articleJazz
Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 1397The most influential American music of the twentieth century, jazz was shaped by 1800s minstrelsy, vaudeville, ragtime, and brass-band music. African-American blues singing of the lower Mississippi Valley, however, was the decisive new influence in local river towns. By 1910, bands were flavoring ragtime marches and dances with indeterminate “blue” notes, rough vocal-style timbres, and imaginative improvisations on tunes. New Orleans's extensive musical culture and diverse racial and ethnic identities nurtured the most distinctive new style. Beginning in 1906, black New Orleanians such as the pianist Jelly Roll Morton traveled the nation, popularizing their “hot” blues-oriented ragtime. In 1917, when a white New Orleans group, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB), made its best-selling first recordings, the local ...
Read full articleJazz
Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 562Toni Morrison's sixth novel, Jazz (1992) takes place in 1926, when the Harlem Renaissance was at its peak, a special time of success and attention for African American artists in all genres, including literature, art, and music, especially jazz. Its story line was inspired by an event that Morrison learned about in The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978), in which Camille Billops records the story behind James Van Der Zee's photograph of a young woman's corpse; she was shot yet refused to identify her assailant before she died.The novel is a multifaceted narrative evolving from the early-twentieth-century migration to New York of a seemingly uncomplicated southern couple. They appear to join the hundreds of thousands of black people who left rural areas for urban areas, the South for the North, between ...
Read full articleJazz
Source: Grove Music Online
Word Count: 28119 Includes: 1. Introduction. | 2. Jazz and the New Orleans background (1895–1916). | 3. Early recorded jazz (1917–23). | 4. The Jazz Age (1920–30). | 5. Swing and big bands (1930–45). | 6. Small groups and soloists of the swing era. | 7. Traditional and modern jazz in the 1940s. | 8. Post-bop developments in the 1950s. | 9. Mainstream, third stream and the emerging avant garde. | 10. Free jazz, fusion and beyond (1960–80). | 11. Jazz at the end of the 20th century (1980–99). | BibliographyThe term conveys different though related meanings: 1) a musical tradition rooted in performing conventions that were introduced and developed early in the 20th century by African Americans; 2) a set of attitudes and assumptions brought to music-making, chief among them the notion of performance as a fluid creative process involving improvisation; and 3) a style characterized by syncopation, melodic and harmonic elements derived from the blues, cyclical formal structures and a supple rhythmic approach to phrasing known as swing. ...
Read full articleJazz
Source: Grove Music Online
Word Count: 28119 Includes: 1. Introduction. | 2. Jazz and the New Orleans background (1895–1916). | 3. Early recorded jazz (1917–23). | 4. The Jazz Age (1920–30). | 5. Swing and big bands (1930–45). | 6. Small groups and soloists of the swing era. | 7. Traditional and modern jazz in the 1940s. | 8. Post-bop developments in the 1950s. | 9. Mainstream, third stream and the emerging avant garde. | 10. Free jazz, fusion and beyond (1960–80). | 11. Jazz at the end of the 20th century (1980–99). | BibliographyThe term conveys different though related meanings: 1) a musical tradition rooted in performing conventions that were introduced and developed early in the 20th century by African Americans; 2) a set of attitudes and assumptions brought to music-making, chief among them the notion of performance as a fluid creative process involving improvisation; and 3) a style characterized by syncopation, melodic and harmonic elements derived from the blues, cyclical formal structures and a supple rhythmic approach to phrasing known as swing. ...
Read full article