v.tr.
- Music.
To play in a jazz style.
- Slang.
- To exaggerate or lie to: Don't jazz me.
- To give great pleasure to; excite: The surprise party jazzed the guest of honor.
- To cause to accelerate.
intr. Slang. The jazziest American contribution to the vocabulary of English is jazz itself.
From obscure origins among in New Orleans a century ago, the music and the word we use for it have become familiar the world over. Jazz has been called "the most significant form of musical expression of American black culture and America's outstanding contribution to the art of music," blending elements of , work songs, hymns, dances, marches, and music, and developing through the blues and ragtime into a new syncopated improvisational style. Jazz flourished in New Orleans before , in Chicago in the 1920s, and in New York and throughout the country after that.
White performers learned it from African Americans and added to the variety of jazz styles.
The music hardly needs an introduction. But what about the word?
Unfortunately, its beginnings are especially obscure. It may have come from an African word, or from a performer's name, among other possibilities. But nobody would have dared include jazz in a respectable book or article a century ago because it was decidedly obscene, referring to sexual activity.
Gradually, though, jazz came to mean any vigorous, enthusiastic activity, and eventually it became reputable enough to mention.
Curiously, the earliest evidence of jazz so far discovered is in a newspaper of 1913, referring to a baseball team back from spring training "full of the old 'jazz.'" As the story goes, the name was next used to advertise a local dance band as "the jazziest tune tooters in all the .
" It appears that bandleader Bert Kelly then brought the word to Chicago in 1914. Meanwhile, the music that we now know as jazz had long been developing in New Orleans. It was known as ragtime (1897) until jazz arrived and took over in 1917.
From then on, jazz has jazzed up our lives.
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.
Like the BLUES, jazz was at first an oral tradition founded by 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 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, 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.
'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 '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 displaced sounds characterized the JAZZ AGE. Some believe the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (founded 1916), set a standard that started the , while others point to '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.
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 ; Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and led other successful orchestras. While these big bands came to characterize the New York jazz scene during the , 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.
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.
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. : 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.
Jazz developed in the latter part of the 19th cent. from black work songs, field shouts, sorrow songs, hymns, and 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 led racially mixed groups in concerts at .
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 . The blues, vocal and instrumental, was and is a vital component of jazz, which includes, roughly in order of appearance: ragtime; New Orleans or 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.
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. greatly increased the popularity of the idiom. Important vocal blues stylists include Blind Lemon Jefferson, , Lightnin' Sam Hopkins, Robert Johnson, Gertrude (Ma) Rainey, Bertha (Chippie) Hill, Bessie , Billie , Dinah Washington, and Muddy Waters.
The earliest form of jazz to exert a wide appeal, ragtime was basically a piano style emphasizing syncopation and polyrhythm. Scott and Irving were major composers and performers of ragtime. From about 1893 to the beginning of this music was popularized through sheet music and player-piano rolls.
In the early 1970s, ragtime, particularly 's works, had a popular revival.
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 .
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 , and later in the music of Louis , , 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 , a cornetist and pianist and a major Chicago-style musician, was influential in developing more complex melodic lines.
Jazz spread to , Los Angeles, and New York City.
Originating in Kansas City and 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 of Duke and Count were, and remain, the finest practitioners of this idiom, while those of Fletcher , Jimmy Lunceford, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, 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.
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 , Dizzy , Thelonius , 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 and the drummer Jo Jones, was of paramount importance in influencing the harmonic and rhythmic direction of bop.
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 . Miles 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 became its most widely known performer.
By the mid-1950s a form of neo-bop, or hard-bop, had arisen on the . John , 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 , 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 , 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 , 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.
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).
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). For ragtime see W.
J. Schafer and J. Riedel, The Art of Ragtime (1974).
The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the more it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons. 
Jazz is the big brother of the blues. If a guy's playing blues like we play, he's in high school. When he starts playing jazz it's like going on to college, to a school of higher learning. Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be.
Not for long, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own. 
Jazz trumpeter is a well-known jazz musician.
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