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THE JAZZ HISTORY

KELLY QUEVEDO English

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THE JAZZ HISTORY

Jazz is a surprising human expression, born from the suffering of the African people in slavery. What that race has given the world makes it different; from so much cruelty and so much destruction, it gave back beauty and creation
- Origin and birth
  - Jazz is a musical genre, born in the mid-19th century in the United States, that expanded globally throughout the entire 20th century.
  - Its beginning is somewhat peculiar: slaves of African origin, residing in southern parts of the United States, had the habit of manifesting their traditions by playing different types of drums and singing.
  - - However, the ban was not enforced in the so-called Place Congo in New Orleans, where slaves were free to gather, sing and be accompanied by real artisan percussion instruments.
      - Even so, jazz did not only influence the traditional music of these people.
Singing, percussion, and the imitation of natural voices was part of the legacy that Africans brought with them to America between the 17th and 19th centuries.
- In that life of imposed despair, their songs became stories of oppression, work and supplication, and together with the European rhythms of the colonizers, they set the tone for the creation of new rhythms and musical forms.
An important contribution to highlight was the minstrel, a show that mixed elements of the operetta with musical numbers based on the "songs of the plantations".
- They became widespread from 1820, played by white actors and singers who acted with smudged faces.
  - His music was based on English operas. Beginning with the Civil War, important changes emerged in American musical life. In 1865, slaves were declared free and were able to enjoy their rights. This gave rise to the appearance of new styles such as ragtime, in the southern United States, in Saint Louis (1870), which were the antecedents of jazz that we know today.
  - "It was on age of miracles. It was an age of art. It was an age of excess and it was an age of satire. […] Who could tell us any longer what was fashionable and what was fun? […] The Jazz Age now raced along on its own power", F. Scott Fitzgerald."
  - Jazz in 1910
    - 1930s
      - In the thirties jazz achieved a high professional level and the great soloists appeared who improvised following the appropriate harmonic scheme for each song. The Swing had arrived, the Big Bands and mythical characters such as Duke Ellintong, Count Basie, Benny Goodman and Joe King Oliver. Oliver's disciple Louis Armstrong was one of the great revolutionaries of this genre. Jazz "had been dignified" and was also played by whites. This was the dance music that was heard both in the great halls and in the small American slums of the time.
        The thirties sprint mainly to the creative talent of trombonist Glenn Miller. Also contributing to the expansion of the swing were Benny Goodman, a great clarinetist and conductor, and Fletcher Henderson, a pianist and arranger who led to the development of the Big Bands. This era is characterized by the improvised rhythms of blues and riff bases (repetitive phrase) and by the rise of the singers.
      - 1940s
        s After the swing era, jazz was known and appreciated worldwide, recognized even by classical composers of the stature of Stravinsky. However, the term swing enjoyed a bad reputation among musicians: only the least talented professionals were considered to engage in this type of commercial music, so more serious musicians - such as Duke Ellington - were moving away from the style. The decline of swing big bands gave rise to a radically different new type of music, the only common features of which were similar instrumentation and an interest in improvisation, the Be Bop.
        The birth of the style took place in 1941 when Dizzy Gillespie, Milt Hinton, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke met at Minton’s Playhouse in New York for a series of informal concerts. Dizzy Gillespie was one of the leaders of the movement, with a trumpet style that perfectly summed up the characteristics of new music and a series of themes that quickly became part of the basic repertoire of bop musicians, such as A Night In Tunisia or Salt Peanuts
        Some big bands, such as those of Charlie Barnett, Woody Herman, Lionel Hampton or Stan Kenton, knew how to adapt their sound to new demands, while others, such as that of Earl Hines, established bridges between the old and the new sound. Only a few managed to become true be-bop big bands, as is the case with the Boyd Raeburn, Billy Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie orchestras. A characteristic feature of the music of this era is the diminished fifth interval used by soloists. In addition, the drums stop playing a regular rhythmic accompaniment and become an instrument with more autonomy within the ensemble, something that will also happen with the rest of the instruments.
        Charlie Parker was the other great father of bebop, introducing a new improvisational language, extending the melodic aspect and the rhythmic range of jazz until that moment. With a surprising emotional style that was immortalized in classics such as Yardbird Suite, Ornithology, Donna Lee, Billie’s Bounce or Anthropology, among many others.
    - The precursor genres of jazz were as follows: the dixieland, born around 1910, performed by groups composed of three basic instruments: the tuba, cornet and saxophone plus the drums, bass, clarinet and trombone that were in charge of the rhythmic base; and later ragtime, whose maximum exponent was Scott Joplin. This last genre was based on a particular mixture of accents and syncopations, being usually performed by a pianist.
      - jazz MUSIC 90s to present
        From the 90's, this musical genre coexisted with others such as rock, pop, blues etc. The first jazz musicians of these times were saxophonist John Zorn; guitarist Elliot Sharp, whose compositions are an example of a synthesis of dissonance, repetition and improvisation; Eugene Chadbourne, who integrated elements of avant-garde jazz with original white music rural; guitarist Henry Kaiser; cellist Tom Cora; Irish guitarist Christy Doran and Jewish drummer Joey Baron.
        The New York revolution was felt both in the type of material in which the musicians were embarking and in the type of techniques they used to improvise, collecting influences of all kinds and merging them without conceptual limitations. Thus, saxophonist Ned Rothenberg established himself among the first line of the new generations of improvisers. Other musicians, such as trombonist Jim Staley, or Tom Varner, a horn virtuoso, were among the most original of their generation. Much better known, guitarist Bill Frisell assimilated influences from jazz and rock, but also from folk, marching band music and even ecclesiastical music. Soloists such as cellist Hank Roberts or Mike Shrieve (former drummer from Santana) also put their integrating ability on the front line.
        The Argentine Guillermo Gregorio or the Canadian Paul Plimley, had already released albums in the middle of the same decade. Yugoslav Stevan Tickmayer, for his part, co-led The Science Group, an attempt to merge chamber music with improvised music. Other prominent musicians of this first generation of the new century are Greg Kelley and Canadian violinist Eyvind Kang, one of the most eclectic musicians of his generation. Also in the early 2000s, confirmation albums by musicians such as trombonist Josh Roseman, bassist Ben Allison, saxophonist David Binney, or pianist Jason Lindner, all of them North American, appeared.
        The second half of the 1990s saw a revival of music for big bands, a trend that had originated in the previous decade, in the work of musicians such as bassist Saheb Sarbib or cornet player Butch Morris. Keyboardist Wayne Horvitz developed his idea of “progressive chamber jazz”, while veteran multi-instrumentalist Marty Ehrlich reflected the influence of traditional jazz, improvisation, light music and avant-garde classical music, and the American María Schneider, a student of Gil Evans, revived the style of his teacher in various albums for orchestra. Beyond the borders of New York, a series of artists continued to appear in the last years of the last century, who would develop the bulk of their work - in which they reworked the concepts established by generations of previous jazz players in multiple and creative ways - already in the new century. For example, bassist Michael Formanek had debuted in 1990, and Argentine Guillermo Gregorio or Canadian Paul Plimley had already released
        The works of the French Erik Truffaz and the Israeli trumpeter Avishai Cohen also stand out. The revolution that electronic music had brought with it also had an influence on the development of jazz. A new generation of improvisers emerged who came from the tradition of free jazz but who harbored the influence of the classical avant-garde and electronics: Ben Neill, the
    - 1920s jazz
      - In Saint Louis there was a custom of accompanying funerals with band music. They did it slowly, sadly and slowly when they went to the cemetery and happy when they returned, causing people to dance after them. These bands became so popular that they began to be hired in brothels to play dance music. In 1917, authorities closed the Storyville brothel neighborhood of New Orleans, where they operated, and the gangs migrated north to the cities of Chicago and New York, where they were hired by clubs that were mostly owned by mafias, starting thus the expansion of jazz.
        These bands consisted of six members: piano, banjo or guitar, tuba or double bass in the rhythm section; and in the melodic, the trombone, the trumpet and the clarinet. The jazz of this decade is characterized by the rhythmic pulsation in the weak times, the rhythmic accents shift towards the second and fourth beat, especially in the drums.
      - The formal birth of the cool movement took place in 1948 with the release of Miles Davis' album Birth of the Cool. This record work was a self-defining manifesto and one of the most influential recordings in the history of jazz. The new style was derived directly from bebop, but it was a more cerebral music, whose main objective was to establish a "calm and meditative" atmosphere. Cool jazz was particularly popular with white musicians like Lennie Tristano - in part because of its departure from African jazz roots - but it also found a gap between the preferences of black musicians who became simple entertainers to take a more active role and serious in the search for his musical identity.
        Gunther Schuller was the official initiator of the third stream, a stream that established a bridge between classical music and jazz. A paradigmatic example was his Jazz Abstractions (1959). Among its main representatives it also has Bob Graettinger and Gil Evans who produced, within this style, three important musical works: Gil Evans and Ten (1957), Out of the Cool (1959) or Into The Hot (1961). Bill Evans, along with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian, also introduced a new sound to the jazz trio influenced by European classical music. Another outstanding musician of this current was George Russell who excelled as an interpreter of manners.
        1950's
        JAZZ 1960
        In the early sixties, there was an irresistible rise of free jazz that, in parallel, received a large number of rejections that can be summarized in a single sentence: "this is not music." Criticisms that, on the other hand, they came not only from the public or specialized journalists, but from jazz musicians, such as Roy Eldridge or Quincy Jones. By the mid-decade, virtually all young jazz musicians were influenced for the "free". By 1965, free jazz had become a richly articulated form of expression that it covered all the subjects and commanded all the routes of jazz development. However, from 1967 began to see a clear recession in favor of the public regarding free jazz.
        A number of bop musicians had developed more advanced improvisation concepts in the late 1950s, performing modal jazz directly powered by figures such as Miles Davis or, most especially, John Coltrane as early as the 1960s. Their “ sound sheets ”, as critic Ira Gitler named the sound of the saxophonist's quartet, they paved the way for a style that has become known as post-bop. This one adopted to the hard bop experiences a good number of the innovations that free jazz had brought, becoming the main development line (mainstream) of modern jazz, common thread until reaching the neo bop or neo-traditionalism, of the 1980s , headed by Wynton Marsalis. With few exceptions, such as Bill Evans, the record label Blue Note picked up the main musicians of the style: Wayne Shorter, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock or Lee Morgan.
        jAZZ 1970'S
        The 1970 release of Bitches Brew, a Miles Davis album that featured Tony Williams, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter or John McLaughlin, among others, was a new revolution in jazz sound, introducing instrumentation and rhythmic schemes closer to rock and marking the beginning of a new genre that would later receive the name of jazz fusion. The influence of rock groups that were experimenting with jazz at the time ended up outlining a genre that would later give rise to many other sub-styles, being particularly evident in aspects such as the instrumentation of the new jazz rock bands.
        Jazz musicians of the 1970s integrated different musical cultures into jazz. This mixture of genres, I create jazz-rock, Latin jazz, Afro-Cuban jazz, flamenco jazz, among others. Except for the pianist Keith Jarret, jazz performers of this time used electronic instruments. The characteristic of jazz of the seventies was fusion, but the jazz style of the previous decades continued to be interpreted for a minority public.
        80s The rise of "neo-traditionalism" that took place with the arrival of the 1980s marked the highest point of the crisis that had affected jazz since the massive popularization of rock in the 1960s. Jazz represented for American blacks were the popular alternative to classical music, but as it began to drift, first towards free jazz and then towards the various mergers that took place in the 1970s, it became increasingly distant from its origins, entering in an identity crisis that at the end of that decade had not yet been resolved.
        In that period the term "jazz" used to be identified, simply with instrumental music, white musicians were achieving more success than blacks and the overall creative landscape was quite discouraging. However, the arrival of the neo-traditionalists changed the order of things: instead of championing a new revolution in the genre, they claimed a return to their origins, transferring the terms of the debate from the free jazz / jazz fusion dichotomy to the debate between the defenders of the purity of the style (neo traditionalism) and the supporters of its evolution.
        In reaction to bebop's intellectualism, the hard bop musicians claimed the return of jazz to its origins, with a special emphasis on the energy and spontaneity of music. The rhythmic element was reinforced and the solos derived from the language of the bebop musicians acquired more strength and vitality, forming an aggressive and intense music. In fact, the adjective hard has in this expression the connotation of intense. It had special incidence among the musicians of the East Coast and is especially linked to black musicians from the cities of the Great Lakes, such as Chicago or Detroit. They "liked full-blown improvisations, warm sounds, pure angle phrases, and explosive rhythms." Intimately related to hard bop, a jazz style was developed based on the use of blues structures in slow or medium tempo, with a firm and sustained beat, with interpretive emotion, which was called funky or, later, soul jazz .