Talking about Jazz
Oaxaca City, Oaxaca, Mexico
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, United States,in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in blues and ragtime. Jazz is seen by many as ‘America’s classical music’. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, jazz has become recognized as a major form of musical expression. It then emerged in the form of independent traditional and popular musical styles, all linked by the common bonds of African-American and European-American musical parentage with a performance orientation. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation.
musical genre: It is a conventional category that identifies some pieces of music as belonging to a shared tradition or set of conventions. It is to be distinguished from musical form and musical style, although in practice these terms are sometimes used interchangeably. Recently, academics have argued that categorizing music by genre is inaccurate and outdated.
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans or Afro-Americans: are an ethnic group of Americans with total or partial ancestry from any of the black racial groups of Africa.The term typically refers to descendants of enslaved black people who are from the United States.
Blues is a music genre and musical form originated by African Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the end of the 19th century. The genre developed from roots in African musical traditions, African-American work songs, spirituals, and the folk music of white Americans of European heritage.
Ragtime – also spelled rag-time or rag time – is a musical style that enjoyed its peak popularity between 1895 and 1918.[2] Its cardinal trait is its syncopated, or “ragged”, rhythm.
Syncopation involves a variety of rhythms which are in some way unexpected which make part or all of a tune or piece of music off-beat. More simply, syncopation is a general term for “a disturbance or interruption of the regular flow of rhythm”: a “placement of rhythmic stresses or accents where they wouldn’t normally occur.”
Swing :in music, the term has two main uses. Colloquially, it is used to describe the sense of propulsive rhythmic “feel” or “groove” created by the musical interaction between the performers, especially when the music creates a “visceral response” such as feet-tapping or head-nodding.
The term is also used more specifically, to refer to a technique (most commonly associated with jazz but also used in other genres) that involves alternately lengthening and shortening the pulse-divisions in a rhythm. Like the term “groove”, which is used to describe a cohesive rhythmic “feel” in a funk or rock context, the concept of “swing” can be hard to define. Indeed, some dictionaries use the terms as synonyms:
Blue notes: In jazz and blues, a blue note (also “worried” note is a note that—for expressive purposes—is sung or played at a slightly different pitch than standard. Typically the alteration is between a quarter tone and a semitone, but this varies among performers and genres.
Call and response vocals: In music, a call and response is a succession of two distinct phrases usually written in different parts of the music, where the second phrase is heard as a direct commentary on or in response to the first. It corresponds to the call-and-response pattern in human communication and is found as a basic element of musical form, such as verse-chorus form, in many traditions.
Polyrhythm is the simultaneous use of two or more conflicting rhythms, that are not readily perceived as deriving from one another, or as simple manifestations of the same meter. The rhythmic conflict may be the basis of an entire piece of music (cross-rhythm), or a momentary disruption.
Improvisation is creating or performing something spontaneously or making something from whatever is available. Improvisation, in the performing arts is a very spontaneous performance without specific or scripted preparation. The skills of improvisation can apply to many different faculties, across all artistic, scientific, physical, cognitive, academic, and non-academic disciplines.
Improvisation also exists outside the arts. Improvisation in engineering is to solve a problem with the tools and materials immediately at hand. Improvised weapons are often used by guerrillas, insurgents and criminals. Improvising is also sometimes calles “thinking out of the box“.
For many of us, Jazz is a well known word that has grown out of its origins and now belongs to the world. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on different national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to many distinctive styles. In the following section six jazz styles are mentioned. They are not the only existing styles and are simply mentioned to give a general idea of the resulting diversity of this important musical genre.
New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass-band marches, ragtime and blues and others with collective polyphonic improvisation. Polyphony is one type of musical texture, where a texture is, generally speaking, the way that melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic aspects of a musical composition are combined to shape the overall sound and quality of the work. In particular, polyphony consists of two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody.
Bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging “musician’s music” which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation.
Cool jazz developed near the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, linear melodic lines.
The 1950s saw the emergence of free jazz, which explored playing without regular meter, beat and formal structures.
Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock music’s rhythms, electric instruments, and highly amplified stage sound.
Other styles and genres abound in the 2000s, such as Latin and Afro-Cuban jazz. In the 1960s and 1970s, many jazz musicians had only a basic understanding of Cuban and Brazilian music, and jazz compositions which used Cuban or Brazilian elements were often referred to as “Latin tunes”, with no distinction between a Cuban son and a Brazilian bossa nova.
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2 responses to “Talking about Jazz”
Your stories were awe-inspiring to me and With all due respect to your profession.
Thank you so much for your kind remarks