Jazz

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Jazz

A genre of music that developed in the early twentieth century in the United States, jazz represents a mixture of European, American, and African tribal musical elements linked to African-American folk traditions and often performed by ensembles of African-American musicians. The word jazz is believed to have come from the Creole word jass, which refers to African dance or to copulation. The term jazz first appeared in print in a March 1913 edition of the San Francisco Bulletin in reference to peppy dance music. Associated from its beginning with New Orleans, nightlife, decadence, alcohol, loose living, sexuality, primitivism, and African Americans, jazz became an immensely popular and influential form of musical performance that nonetheless retained its sexy and licentious connotations.

Since its appearance as popular music, jazz has been associated with sexuality. Originally linked to what were believed to be the more openly sexual attitudes of African Americans, jazz's connections to most forms of dance and courting during the first half of the twentieth century perpetuated its association with sex. The foundation of much of the dance music from the 1920s on, jazz's syncopations provoked changes in styles of dance from more formal waltzes and fox-trots to dances that permitted more suggestive touching, bodily intimacy, and athleticism. The association between jazz and loose living lingered even in the big band performances of the 1930s and 1940s, continuing the fascinations of a sexually inflected nightclub culture in big cities (often linked to speakeasies) and to ballrooms and other sites where dance led to other, more sexual forms of entertainment.

In the early twentieth century the term jazz applied to a broad range of musical styles and there was no consensus about what the term jazz meant. Early-twenty-first-century music critics and historians generally agree that jazz consists of a "collectively improvised music, with syncopated rhythms over a strong underlying pulse" (Shipton 2001, p. 5). The seeds of jazz originated in a combination of ragtime—or songs with a syncopated rhythm—blues, and marching band music played in New Orleans around the turn of the twentieth century. Developed in Louisiana during the first decade of the twentieth century by such pioneering musicians as Buddy Bolden, jazz went north to Chicago in the late 1910s with some New Orleans jazz groups and performers, such as King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band and Jelly Roll Morton. Joining Oliver in the north was trumpet prodigy Louis Armstrong, who helped develop the rapid rhythmic style known as "hot jazz."

Going north with jazz was its association with what was regarded as the more primitive sexuality of African-American nightlife. Continuing to develop more or less simultaneously in New Orleans, Kansas City, and Chicago, jazz became the basis for a social dancing and nightclub life that became more openly sexual. As more mainstream orchestra leaders such as Paul Whiteman began adapting jazz styles to larger ensembles, jazz itself became more mainstream, centering jazz's sexual connotations as a permanent aspect of popular music.

Through the early part of the twentieth century, jazz bands were segregated. Although black bands played in popular venues and clubs in the urban north, they were often less commercially successful because they did not have as lucrative or mainstream possibilities for recording their music. But they did find more acceptance in Europe, as jazz spread quickly to France, where American black jazz musicians were often welcomed with open arms. Europeans were not unaware of the link between jazz and sexuality as they, too, flocked to nightclubs featuring jazz bands and more licentious forms of dancing. Europeans were fascinated with what they regarded as the erotic suggestiveness of jazz and other African-American performances, such as Josephine Baker's dance routines.

The swing jazz style of the 1930s and 1940s completed the merger of jazz and popular music, making orchestral jazz the primary music for dating, dancing, and most entertainment. Band singers such as Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Doris Day, and Rosemary Clooney emerged from the nightclub swing scene to become either romantic crooners or blues icons of the day. In the 1940s, many musicians who would form the center of jazz's next significant transition—including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie Christian—began to work in large swing bands. In the mid-1940s, these musicians, along with Miles Davis, Art Blakey, and others, emerged with a new form of jazz known as "bop" that countered the white appropriation of jazz forms. Bop, or "bebop," transformed jazz from big band swing entertainment into an art characterized by the prominence of soloists who played complex, rapid improvisations in business suits and developed an entire aesthetic of cool. No longer the popular music of the masses, jazz became more aloof, intellectual, and difficult, and aimed at connoisseurs.

Although its musicians were still linked to the club life with which jazz had always been associated, bebop jazz began to move away from the more openly sexual connotations of jazz into a "cooler" jazz culture in which music, drugs, and sex were increasingly sophisticated. Bebop led into the invention of other jazz movements such as "cool jazz," which was less frenetic, but still as focused on artistry. Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, and Chet Baker developed the cool style, still played by small ensembles of soloists. Cool jazz was joined by "hard bop," a bluesy style developed by the Jazz Messengers, which included Blakey, Horace Silver, and Lee Morgan.

After the rise of bebop in the 1940s, jazz produced a number of styles and theories, but other than continuing to influence popular music styles from a greater distance, it no longer played as direct a role in popular entertainment—especially as the music for social dancing. It retained an aura of nightclubs, drugs, and loose living, but became less associated with the sexual freedom of earlier styles. The 1950 and 1960s saw the continued development of multiple jazz styles—such as free jazz and soul jazz—that were associated in part with another attempt to reappropriate jazz as a black tradition. Although jazz was still associated with sexuality, its aura had shifted from the free and easy aura of a sexualized entertainment to the mysterious world of cool artistry that fascinated such "Beat" artists as Jack Kerouac.

Jazz evolved through the twentieth century as a musical form derived from folk practices that became popular mass entertainment. It continues as a form more appealing to cognoscenti but still influencing other musical forms. Jazz musicians, like most entertainers, became objects of curiosity. Their lives were under scrutiny, and their relationships under pressure from the demands of performance.