Jazz

Page 1   |   2   |   3   |   4   |   5

By John Edward Hasse and Bob Blumenthal

The challenge of talking about music is compounded when the subject is jazz, a word of clouded origins whose meaning reflects an evolution of astounding rapidity and imposing diversity unlikely to change as we enter jazz’s second century.

The term was originally applied to the music developed in New Orleans around the beginning of the twentieth century. Initially a product of the city’s African American community, it was quickly picked up by several of the city’s young white musicians as well. Within a mere two decades, as many of these early practitioners left home to perform throughout the United States and around the world, jazz became an international phenomenon. The earliest examples of the style, like those of the related blues, were never documented on sound recordings; but once jazz musicians did begin to record, the music expanded its audience rapidly and attracted practitioners and influences from all classes, cultures, and parts of the world.

In the ensuing decades, jazz has experienced moments of dominance, when it was accepted as popular music and produced universally recognized stars; recognition as an art form worthy of serious analysis and the highest cultural honors; and periods of marginalization, wherein even its most accomplished figures earned respect primarily from peers and enthusiasts. Through all of these shifts, the techniques and vocabulary of jazz have continued to influence other forms of both popular and “serious” music. Often acclaimed as America’s greatest art form, jazz has become accepted as a living expression of the nation’s history and culture, still youthful, difficult to define and impossible to contain, a music of beauty, sensitivity, and brilliance that has produced (and been produced by) an extraordinary progression of talented artists.

Jazz is a fluid form of expression, a quality that led critic Whitney Balliett to characterize the music in an oft-quoted phrase as “the sound of surprise.” Several characteristics contribute to jazz’s surprising nature.

A primary factor is the rhythmic energy of jazz, which incorporates both the motion of dance and the inflections of speech. The syncopations and irregular accents of early jazz styles had a visceral effect on listeners and remain central to the music’s appeal. While sometimes oversimplified as a wholesale shift in accent or emphasis— from beats one and three in a four-beat measure to beats two and four— the evolution of jazz rhythm has incorporated more complex subdivisions and superimpositions on the basic beat, while also assimilating the rhythms of other musics and cultures.

This rhythmic freedom feeds the spirit of improvisation at the heart of jazz. Unlike European classical music, which gives primacy of place to the composer, jazz is performer-oriented, with musicians generally allowed the freedom to improvise solos and even ensemble passages on the spot. While a musical score defines a classical piece, jazz’s improvisatory nature requires that it be defined by specific performances. Some performers evolve set-pieces, as a comparison of Art Tatum’s various recordings of “Willow, Weep for Me” will illustrate; but many jazz musicians pride themselves on creating a unique solo each time they play a tune, as Charlie Parker did in his numerous recordings of “Ornithology.” Even the written portion of a jazz performance can evolve, as was the case with “Mood Indigo” and other classics that Duke Ellington revisited over the decades of his career.

Page 1   |   2   |   3   |   4   |   5