jazz the most significant form of musical expression of African-American culture and arguably the most outstanding contribution the United States has made to the art of music.

Origins of Jazz

Jazz developed in the latter part of the 19th cent. from black work songs, field shouts, sorrow songs, hymns, and spirituals whose harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic elements were predominantly African. Because of its spontaneous, emotional, and improvisational character, and because it is basically of black origin and association, jazz has to some extent not been accorded the degree of recognition it deserves. European audiences have often been more receptive to jazz, and thus many American jazz musicians have become expatriates.

At the outset, jazz was slow to win acceptance by the general public, not only because of its cultural origin, but also because it tended to suggest loose morals and low social status. However, jazz gained a wide audience when white orchestras adapted or imitated it, and became legitimate entertainment in the late 1930s when Benny Goodman led racially mixed groups in concerts at Carnegie Hall. Show tunes became common vehicles for performance, and, while the results were exquisite, rhythmic and harmonic developments were impeded until the mid-1940s.

Jazz is generally thought to have begun in New Orleans, spreading to Chicago, Kansas City, New York City, and the West Coast. The blues, vocal and instrumental, was and is a vital component of jazz, which includes, roughly in order of appearance: ragtime; New Orleans or Dixieland jazz; swing; bop, or bebop; progressive, or cool, jazz; neo-bop, or hard-bop; third stream; mainstream modern; Latin-jazz; jazz-rock; and avant-garde or free jazz.

Blues

The heart of jazz, the blues is a musical form now standardized as 12 bars, based on the tonic, dominant, and subdominant chords. The "blue notes" are the flatted third and seventh. A statement is made in the first four bars, repeated (sometimes with slight variation) in the next four, and answered or commented on in the last four. In vocal blues the lyrics are earthy and direct and are mostly concerned with basic human problems—love and sex, poverty, and death. The tempo may vary, and the mood ranges from total despair to cynicism and satire.

Basing his songs on traditional blues, W. C. Handy greatly increased the popularity of the idiom. Important vocal blues stylists include Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly , Lightnin' Sam Hopkins, Robert Johnson , Gertrude (Ma) Rainey, Bertha (Chippie) Hill, Bessie Smith , Billie Holiday , Dinah Washington, and Muddy Waters .

Ragtime

The earliest form of jazz to exert a wide appeal, ragtime was basically a piano style emphasizing syncopation and polyrhythm. Scott Joplin and Irving Berlin were major composers and performers of ragtime. From about 1893 to the beginning of World War I this music was popularized through sheet music and player-piano rolls. In the early 1970s, ragtime, particularly Joplin's works, had a popular revival.

New Orleans Jazz

New Orleans, or Dixieland, jazz is played by small bands usually made up of cornet or trumpet, clarinet, trombone, and a rhythm section that includes bass, drums, guitar, and sometimes piano. When the band marched, as it often did in the early days, the piano and bass were omitted and a tuba was used. The three lead instruments provide a contrapuntal melody above the steady beat of the rhythm, and individualities of intonation and phrasing, with frequent use of vibrato and glissando, give the music its warm and highly personal quality. The music ranged from funeral dirges to the exuberant songs of Mardi Gras.

The pioneer black New Orleans jazz band of Buddy Bolden was formed in the 1890s. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, both white bands, successfully introduced jazz to the northern United States. The closing in 1917 of the notorious Storyville district of New Orleans produced an exodus of jazz musicians. Many went to Chicago, where the New Orleans style survived in the bands of King Oliver , and later in the music of Louis Armstrong , Jelly Roll Morton , and Johnny Dodds. Fate Marable, who had played on Mississippi riverboats since 1910, now began to organize riverboat jam sessions with outstanding musicians.

Meanwhile, distinctive styles developed in many cities, evolved by younger musicians who stressed a single melodic line rather than the New Orleans counterpoint. Bix Beiderbecke , a cornetist and pianist and a major Chicago-style musician, was influential in developing more complex melodic lines. Jazz spread to Kansas City, Los Angeles, and New York City.

Swing

Originating in Kansas City and Harlem in the late 1920s and becoming a national craze, swing was marked by the substitution of orchestration for improvisation and a rhythm that falls between the beats. The average big band had about 15 members (five reeds, five brass, piano, bass, and drums) and could generate overwhelming volume or evince the most subtle articulations. The bands led by Duke Ellington and Count Basie were the finest practitioners of this idiom, while those of Fletcher Henderson , Jimmy Lunceford, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw , Glenn Miller , Tommy Dorsey (see under Dorsey, Jimmy ), and Harry James were also outstanding. The music was often written to showcase soloists who were, or were intended to be, supported by the ensemble.

Bop

The vigor of the music notwithstanding, a revolt against the confining nature of the harmony, melody, and rhythm of swing arose in Kansas City and Harlem in the 1930s and reached fruition in the mid-40s. The new music, called "bebop" or "rebop" (later shortened to "bop" ), was rejected at first by many critics. Bop was characterized by the flatted fifth, a more elaborate rhythmic structure, and a harmonic rather than melodic focus. Charlie Parker , Dizzy Gillespie , Thelonius Monk , Kenny Clarke, and Charlie Christian were major influences in the new music, which became the basis for modern jazz. The influence of two swing musicians, the tenor saxophonist Lester Young and the drummer Jo Jones, was of paramount importance in influencing the harmonic and rhythmic direction of bop.

Progressive Jazz

After beginning in New York City, progressive, or cool, jazz developed primarily on the West Coast in the late 1940s and early 50s. Intense yet ironically relaxed tonal sonorities are the major characteristic of this jazz form, while the melodic line is less convoluted than in bop. Lester Young's style was fundamental to the music of the cool saxophonists Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh, and Stan Getz . Miles Davis played an important part in the early stages, and the influence of virtuoso pianist Lennie Tristano was all-pervasive. The music was accepted more gracefully by the public and critics than bop, and the pianist Dave Brubeck became its most widely known performer.

Recent Trends

By the mid-1950s a form of neo-bop, or hard-bop, had arisen on the East Coast. John Coltrane , Sonny Rollins , Cannonball Adderley, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, and Max Roach led various small groups that produced an idiom marked by crackling, explosive, uncompromising intensity. About the same period, a number of outstanding musician-composers, including Gunther Schuller and John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet, produced "third stream" jazz, essentially a blend of classical music and jazz. Jazz has also been successfully combined with Afro-Latin music, as in the music of Candido, Machito, Eddie Palmieri, and Mongo Santamaria.

In the last half of the 1950s there were three major trends in contemporary jazz. First, a general modern jazz form had developed in the period since World War II, which can be called "mainstream," best exemplified by the music of Gerry Mulligan's various bands. Second, a number of instruments that either had never been used seriously in jazz, such as the flute, oboe, and flügelhorn, or had been unpopular, such as the soprano saxophone, were used to bring new instrumental voices into the music. Third, avant-garde or free jazz leaders such as John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman , Eric Dolphy, Pharaoh Sanders, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk continued to explore new harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic relationships. The new jazz is often atonal, and traditional melodic instruments often assume rhythmic-percussive roles and vice versa.

In the late 1960s many jazz musicians, such as Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Larry Coryell, Gary Burton, Keith Jarrett, and Chick Corea, investigated the connections between rock and jazz in a musical style known as fusion. After the rapid innovations of the 1960s and 70s, the jazz of the 1980s appeared less form-bending and somewhat revivalist, with musicians reluctant to follow trends and accept labels. Emerging in the early 1990s was a style often called acid jazz, a hybrid form that combined traditional jazz, soul, and funk with Latin and hip-hop rhythms. Some of the prominent jazz artists of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s include Wynton and Branford Marsalis , Terence Blanchard, David Murray, John Carter, Henry Threadgill, Cyrus Chestnut, and Joshua Redman.

Jazz has always been a distinctively American idiom, with Europeans largely forming an appreciative audience and Europe's jazzmen following trends begun in the United States. At the end of the 20th cent., however, many Scandinavian and French musicians, feeling that mainstream American jazz expression had retreated into the past, began creating a new genre nicknamed "the European." Returning to jazz's roots as dance music, they combined elements from European house, techno, drum and bass, and jungle music with acoustic, electronic, and sampled sound to create a more popular and populist variety of jazz. Musicians involved in this movement include Norwegian pianist Bugge Wesseltoft and trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer, French pianists Martial Solal and Laurent de Wilde, French saxophonist Julien Lourau and flutist Malik Mezzadri, Sweden's Esbjorn Svensson Trio, and France's Ludovic Navarre and St. Germain groups.

Jazz artists in America have suffered much and received little. In many cases the misery of their lives and public indifference have driven them to find relief in drugs and alcohol. Despite hardships they have produced a richly varied art form in which improvisation and experimentation are imperative; jazz promises continued growth in directions as yet unforeseeable.

Bibliography

See G. Schuller, Early Jazz (1968) and The Swing Era (1989); A. McCarthy et al., Jazz on Record: The First Fifty Years (1969); F. Kofsky, Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music (1970); M. Williams, The Jazz Tradition (1970); D. Kennington, The Literature of Jazz (1971); L. G. Feather, ed., The New Edition of the Encyclopedia of Jazz (1972); H. Panassié, The Real Jazz (1960, repr. 1973); J. Berendt, The Jazz Book (1984); W. Balliett, 56 Portraits in Jazz (1986); G. Giddens, Visions of Jazz: The First Century (1998); B. Kernfeld, ed., The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (1998); G. Giddens and S. DeVeaux, Jazz (2009). For blues see C. Keil, Urban Blues (1966); P. Oliver, Aspects of the Blues Tradition (1970); A. Murray, Stomping the Blues (1976); G. Giddins, Riding on a Blue Note (1981); E. Gioia, The History of Jazz (rev. ed. 2011). For ragtime see W. J. Schafer and J. Riedel, The Art of Ragtime (1974).

Jazz. The 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 term “jazz” (originally a reference to sexual activity, perhaps of distant African origin) became the world's name for the new music.

After 1920, commercial New York City bands and songwriters further popularized the ODJB's comic cacophony. Southern musicians in search of commercial advancement joined the great black migration to northern cities. In Chicago, Joe “King” Oliver's group popularized “hot” jazz, and the band member Louis Armstrong, a brilliantly extroverted trumpeter, soon launched an independent career. In New York, pianists such as Eubie Blake blended ragtime dexterity with “swinging” jazz rhythms. Fletcher Henderson and Edward (“Duke”) Ellington independently built the first large black jazz orchestras, but white groups such as Paul Whiteman's—playing in comic, symphonic, or “sweet” styles—continued to shape the public's perception of jazz. The music came to symbolize a decade that witnessed the rebellion of white adolescents, northern blacks, and speakeasy customers against restrictive codes of behavior, and F. Scott Fitzgerald labeled the 1920s the “Jazz Age.”

The Great Depression eliminated many musicians' jobs, but the rise of radio, recordings, and sound films continued to aid jazz. Ellington's complex and sophisticated work and the blues‐oriented, aggressively improvisational “Kansas City” style of the William (“Count”) Basie Orchestra refined the “hot” band traditions pioneered by Oliver and Morton. Ellington, Armstrong, and Cab Calloway, aided by effective management, became commercial successes. Hot jazz gained mass popularity, however, only after the white clarinetist Benny Goodman made a successful 1935 tour. “Swing” bands suddenly became the vogue. Leaders such as Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, and Woody Herman carefully tailored “hot” jazz to more sedate white tastes. Jazz became a topic of serious inquiry in the 1930s, as writers researched its history and young white critics proclaimed aesthetic standards. Carnegie Hall concerts conferred respectability on “swing,” and Manhattan's Fifty‐second Street became a stylish mecca for curious listeners. While highly publicized racial integration occurred in some bands, and new black stars such as the vocalists Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, the pianist Art Tatum, and the saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young appeared, discrimination and segregation continued to hinder jazz.

During World War II, the draft, labor disputes, and rationing limited recording and touring, but armed‐services swing bands such as Glenn Miller's proved highly popular. This turbulent era saw both the nostalgic revival of “Dixieland” music and the rise of a group of assertive young black innovators. The saxophonist Charlie Parker, a Kansas City native, along with the New Yorkers John (“Dizzy”) Gillespie (trumpet), Kenny Clarke (drums), and Thelonious Monk (piano), pioneered a fleet, technically demanding blues style that scorned swing clichés and intimidated older, less gifted improvisers. This new style, soon labeled “bebop,” created intense critical controversy. After 1945, the players' dress, unusual slang, and drug use made them notorious, but critics acknowledged their skill. Postwar inflation and changing public tastes forced most swing orchestras to disband, and jazz became the province of smaller audiences and more experimental musicians. Pedagogues introduced conservatory‐style training in jazz. The composers John Lewis, George Russell, Pete Rugolo, and Boyd Raeburn introduced avant‐garde classical dissonances and experimentation, and the bandleader Stan Kenton championed a strident “progressive” jazz style. The trumpeter Miles Davis (a bebop pioneer) created a more subdued new sound in his 1949 Birth of the Cool recordings.

In the 1950s, the federal government enlisted jazz in Cold War diplomacy. The Gillespie, Armstrong, and Goodman bands made goodwill tours. “Cool” jazz proved highly popular in the staid Eisenhower era. The white pianist Dave Brubeck advocated a “West Coast” style, while Davis, the arranger Gil Evans, and the saxophonist John Coltrane explored the static pastels of modal improvisation. Younger musicians such as Charles Mingus, Horace Silver, Max Roach, and Abbey Lincoln, however, considered jazz the voice of a new African American militance, in favor of civil rights and against ghetto despair. Their emphatic “hard bop” was abetted by the folklike improvisations of the Texas saxophonist Ornette Coleman. After 1960, Coleman and Coltrane's embrace of atonal “free” improvisation initiated a decade of dramatic jazz innovations. Atonality, distorted timbres, and chance improvisations characterized the music of Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler. Black musicians forged closer ties with the avant‐garde but also contributed to artistic projects in riot‐torn inner cities. Their innovations won small audiences, though, as rock, soul, and the mass‐market–oriented sound promoted by Motown Records dominated popular music. Miles Davis, the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, the pianist Joe Zawinul, and others responded by blending soul dance rhythms and electronic instruments with jazz. The resulting 1970s rock‐jazz “fusion” brought success to the group Weather Report, the pianist Chick Corea, and others, and somewhat revived jazz's popularity. In a time of increasing opportunities for women, musicians such as the trombonist Melba Liston and the pianists Carla Bley and Toshiko Akiyoshi also gained well‐deserved recognition.

As the twentieth century ended, jazz remained a prestigious music, supported by academe, foundation grants, and worldwide networks of festival organizers, producers, and fans. Indeed, young advocates of bebop improvisation such as the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and the pianist Marcus Roberts stimulated a revival in jazz's popularity. While avant‐garde, big‐band, fusion, and other jazz forms were underfunded and relatively neglected, jazz's heritage was widely celebrated, and the music continued to influence genres—such as rock, rhythm and blues, soul, rap, and New Age—that dominated the world's musical culture.
See also African Americans; Music: Popular Music; Popular Culture; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Gunther Schuller , Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development, 1968.
John Litweiler , The Freedom Principle: Jazz after 1958, 1984.
Gunther Schuller , The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz, 1930–1945, 1989.
Ted Gioia , West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945–1960, 1992.
Paul F. Berliner , Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, 1994.
Thomas J. Hennessey , From Jazz to Swing: African‐American Jazz Musicians and Their Music, 1890–1935, 1994.
Lewis Erenberg , Swingin' the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture, 1998.

Burton W. Peretti

JAZZ

JAZZ as a term can act as an adjective, noun, or verb, and refers to a performance method or the music itself that is called jazz. The term was only applied to music around 1915 and was even then disliked by some musicians because it was a vulgar term for sexual intercourse. Jazz music encompasses many substyles that can be characterized by comparative time periods, geography, style, ensemble, function, venue, and audience. The importance of individuality and improvisatory interaction in jazz, requiring mastery of expression and technical skill, should not be underestimated.

Origins

Like the blues, jazz was at first an oral tradition founded by African Americans as a passionate expression of social condition, combining both African American and European American influences. New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz, was a slave trade port, and its Congo Square was a gathering place on Sundays for the African Americans who danced, sang of their history and ritual with expressive African inflections, and played drums. In the late

1800s, European American music, spirituals, Creole music, and the same African American field hollers and work songs that influenced blues infuenced this oral tradition.

Another early influence on New Orleans jazz was Ragtime, which began to be published around 1890 and became the first African American tradition to gain widespread popularity. Ragtime's primary musical model was the marching band, and most of its repertoire was for piano, such as the rags of St. Louis's Scott Joplin and Harlem's James P. Johnson. Larger ragtime ensembles called syncopated orchestras (syncopation was a prominent ragtime feature) were also popular in America and Europe; one of the most famous was James Reese Europe's Clef Club Orchestra. In addition, Europe founded what could possibly be the first modern association of African American musicians, also called Clef Club.

New Orleans was a melting pot of African, Caribbean, Creole, European, and local traditions. Its small bands played in parades, funerals, and other social gatherings and were typified by a celebratory spirit and rhythmic intensity. Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton began their careers in New Orleans and became some of the greatest soloists of the time. Most jazz in New Orleans was performed as dance music in the venues of Storyville (the red-light district between 1896 and 1917). When Storyville closed, many musicians migrated to Chicago, Kansas City, and New York to find employment.

The Jazz Age and Modernity (1920s)

The displaced Dixieland sounds characterized the Jazz Age. Some believe the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (founded 1916), set a standard that started the Jazz Age, while others point to King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band (founded 1922) in Chicago. Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five (1925) are often credited with exemplifying the spirit of the era. New York became the center for jazz performance and recording after 1925. By 1930, successful artists included Coleman Hawkins, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, and Benny Carter.

The Jazz Age characterized the sound of modernity because it emphasized the individual voice and had a great impact on genres and styles in the visual arts, including film, and modernist literature, in works by such authors as Langston Hughes and T. S. Eliot. Socially, musicians were successful in presenting jazz to the general public as well as making strides in overcoming racial boundaries.

The Big-Band Swing Era (1930–1940s)

As early as 1924, Louis Armstrong was in New York playing with Fletcher Henderson's orchestra, and by the mid-1930s, swing style was already widely popular. The term "swing" was first used to describe the lively rhythmic style of Armstrong's playing and also refers to swing dance music.

Duke Ellington, best known for his colorful orchestration, led a group that played at Harlem's Cotton Club; Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and Count Basie led other successful orchestras. While these big bands came to characterize the New York jazz scene during the Great Depression, they were contrasted with the small, impoverished jazz groups that played at rent parties and the like. During this time the performer was thoroughly identified by popular culture as an entertainer, the only regular venue was the nightclub, and African American music became synonymous with American dance music. The big-band era was also allied with another popular genre, the mainly female jazz vocalists who soloed with the orchestras. Singers such as Billie Holiday modernized popular-song lyrics, although some believe the idiom was more akin to white Tin Pan Alley than to jazz.

Some believe that the big band at its peak represented the golden era of jazz because it became part of the cultural mainstream. Others, however, consider it furthest from the ideal of jazz's artistic individuality.

Bebop, Post-Bop, Hard Bop, and Free Jazz (1940s–1960s)

Post–World War II jazz contrasted with the big bands and had parallels with abstract expressionist painters and Beat writers. It was not dance music and was primarily played by smaller ensembles and often called combo jazz. The new style was more harmonically challenging, maintained a high level of virtuosity, and pushed the established language to its extremes. Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie "Bird" Parker, and Stan Getz played in this new style. In the late 1940s and 1950s this style, described onomatopoeically as bebop, became even more complex.

A smoother, more relaxed "cool" sound, a reaction to the intensity of bebop, was developed by Miles Davis in his 1949 album Birth of the Cool; it is often called mainstream jazz and was successful into the 1970s. Cool performers in the 1950s, including Davis, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Dave Brubeck, gained popularity for jazz as an art. There were many other post-bop styles, such as

modal jazz (based on musical modes), funk (which reprised early jazz), and fusion, which blended jazz and rock and included electronic instruments. Miles Davis in his later career and Chick Corea were two influential fusion artists.

Hard bop was a continuation of bebop but in a more accessible style played by artists such as John Coltrane. Ornette Coleman (1960) developed avant-garde free jazz, a style based on the ideas of Thelonius Monk, in which free improvisation was central to the style.

Postmodern Jazz Since 1980

Hybridity, a greater degree of fusion, and traditional jazz revivals merely touch the surface of the variety of styles that make up contemporary jazz. Inclusive of many types of world music, it is accessible, socially conscious, and draws almost equally from its vast musical past. Performers such as David Grisman, B. B. King, Wynton Marsalis, Harry Connick Jr., Toshiko Akiyoshi, and Tito Puente attest to this variety. Since the 1980s, mainstream jazz education has developed, along with more serious concern for the study of jazz documentation and scholarship.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Clark, Andrew, ed. Riffs and Choruses: A New Jazz Anthology. London and New York: Continuum, 2001.

Erlewine, Michael, et al., eds. All Music Guide to Jazz: The Experts' Guide to the Best Jazz Recordings. 3d ed. San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1998.

Gridley, Mark C. Jazz Styles: History and Analysis. 7th ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2000.

Kirchner, Bill, ed. The Oxford Companion to Jazz. Oxford, U.K., and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Monson, Ingrid. Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Inter-action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Townsend, Peter. Jazz in American Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000; Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000.

Christina Linsenmeyer-vanSchalkwyk

See alsoMusic: African American .

JAZZ

Black Geniuses

Another musician remarked that no trumpet player could do anything that Louis Armstrong had not already done. Armstrong's contemporaries included pianist-composer Jelly Roll Morton, blues singer Bessie Smith, and orchestra leader-composer Duke Ellington. The innovations and achievements of these and other black musicians in the 1920s proved to be the first widespread fulfillment of black American talent and genius. There were no doubt mute black geniuses in the arts before then who were deprived of the opportunity to utilize their genius. Art requires an audience, an interaction between the maker and the perceiver by means of the work; and artists, however compelling their creative urges, require incomes. Jazz provided black musicians with an art and a cross-racial public during the 1920s. The bootleggers functioned as patrons of American musical culture. The speakeasies were concert halls. The phonograph extended the popularity and the profitability of jazz.

Definitions

The term jazz, current before World War I (variably as jass), was applied to a way of dancing, to a type of music, and as a synonym for sexual inter-course—each meaning being disputably "the original." As music it is characterized by informality, syncopation, and a strong beat, and as dance by liberation from the more inhibited mating rituals that were—and are—traditional social dance. The erotic associations of jazz music were reinforced by its incubation in the brothels and saloons of New Orleans, especially in the Storyville district, closed by the government during World War I. There is disagreement about every aspect of jazz history except for the indisputable fact that it came out of New Orleans.

Dixie

Among the sources of jazz music were the brass marching bands of black New Orleans. Known generally as Dixieland but also called creole jazz because of the French-Spanish-African heritage of its early musicians, the style of jazz that flourished in New Orleans has four beats to the measure and features collective improvisations or, as it became more sophisticated and rehearsed, simulated collective improvisations.

Black and Blue

The blues—derived from "call and response" field-work songs and spirituals—became a major strain of jazz. The melancholy mood was achieved by what were called "blue notes"—flatted thirds and sevenths. W. C. Handy's 1914 "St. Louis Blues" became the most popular and influential blues composition, and a major portion of early or classic jazz was in the blues genre.

Jelly Roll

Nearly all of the great 1920s jazz figures were black. Jelly Roll Morton (Ferdinand La Menthe, 1885—1941), whose pride in the French portion of his ancestry offends some commentators and has diminished his current reputation, claimed that he "invented jazz" around 1902 while playing ragtime piano in a New Or--leans sporting house. A great bragger, he was also a genius and an innovator; critics who accept certain rhythmic intricacies and improvisational flourishes as definitive of jazz find merit in his claim. Other jazz pioneers were cornet players Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, and Bunk Johnson and clarinetist Johnny Dodds. A key event in the evolution of jazz occurred when Louis Armstrong was taught to play the cornet at the New Orleans Colored Waifs Home.

Chicago

From New Orleans, jazz worked its way up the Mississippi, without acquiring respectability. Chicago became the second major venue for jazz; the speakeasies employed jazz musicians, and white patrons became educated by exposure to jazz. Bix Beiderbecke (Leon Bismark Beiderbecke, 1903-1931) probably first heard Armstrong play on a riverboat in Davenport, Iowa, but as a schoolboy he developed his style by listening to the Chicago jazz greats. Beiderbecke was eventually labeled "The Greatest White Trumpet Player"—meaning that he did not threaten Armstrong's supremacy.

Whiteman

Paul Whiteman was the most influential figure in making jazz respectable by moving it from the speakeasies and black dance halls to theaters and cabarets patronized by whites. Promoted as the Jazz King, Whiteman provided smooth arrangements for relaxation and for dancing. The peak of Whiteman's successful efforts to enlarge the appeal of jazz was the 1924 concert for which he commissioned George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Whiteman's "symphonic jazz" was a long way from the spontaneity of Dixieland.

Swing

In the late 1920s and early 1930s jazz evolved into swing, which replaced improvisation with elaborate arrangements. As arranger and bandleader Fletcher Henderson was a key figure in the transition to swing and the big-band sound. Duke Ellington's 1931 composition "It Don't Mean a Thing If It Aint' Got That Swing" is sometimes credited with giving currency to the term swing.

An American Art

Jazz outlasted the Jazz Age, but during the 1920s it expressed the exuberance of the era. Jazz is regarded as the only art form generated in America, and it has reached a world audience. Change was inevitable as new talents appeared, but jazz has always been dominated by Americans.

Popular Songs

Many of the white songwriters and composers inspired by the innovations of black musicians were Jews, In the melting-pot tradition, American popular music in the 1920s represented a collaboration between Africa and Russia. Russian-born Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, the son of Russian immigrants, adapted black blues and jazz; and Russian-born Al Jolson sang their songs. Gershwin's hugely popular "Swanee" is representative of a cheerfully vulgarized amalgam of American emotions.

Sources:

James Collier, The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History (New York: Dell, 1979);

Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968);

Barry Ulanov, A History of Jazz in America (New York: Da Capo, 1972).

jazz / jaz/ • n. a type of music of black American origin characterized by improvisation, syncopation, and usually a regular or forceful rhythm, emerging at the beginning of the 20th century. Brass and woodwind instruments and piano are particularly associated with jazz, although guitar and occasionally violin are also used; styles include Dixieland, swing, bebop, and free jazz. ∎ inf. enthusiastic or lively talk, esp. when considered exaggerated or insincere: all this jazz about how they can't afford it is preposterous. • v. [intr.] dated play or dance to jazz music. PHRASES: and all that jazz inf. and such similar things: oh, love, life, and all that jazz.PHRASAL VERBS: jazz something up make something more lively or cheerful: jazz up an all-white kitchen with red tiles.DERIVATIVES: jazz·er n.

jazz Style of music that evolved in the USA in the late 19th century out of African and European folk music, and spiritual and popular songs. It is traditionally characterized by improvization, steady rhythm, and prominence of melody, often with elements derived from the blues. Early jazz developed in New Orleans, becoming known as Dixieland music. In the 1920s, it spread to Chicago and New York City. In the 1930s, swing enjoyed great popularity, as did the be-bop style of the 1940s. Modern jazz incorporates many musical forms.

Jazz ♂ Mostly a nickname for the bearer of any given name beginning with J-, especially James (in this case arising probably from the written abbreviation Jas., which was formerly in common use), but sometimes used as an independent given name and in part associated with the vocabulary word referring to the style of music so called. This word came into English from African-American slang of the southern United States in the early 20th century, and is of unknown origin. (There have been innumerable speculations.)

jazz a type of music of black American origin characterized by improvisation, syncopation, and usually a regular or forceful rhythm, emerging at the beginning of the 20th century. Brass and woodwind instruments and piano are particularly associated with jazz, although guitar and occasionally violin are also used; styles include Dixieland, swing, bebop, and free jazz.

jazz XX. orig. U.S.; of unkn. orig.

jazz •Abkhaz, as, Baz, has, jazz, pizzazz, razz, whereas •Boas, Boaz •topaz • Shiraz • Alcatraz • razzmatazz