Jazz
has roots in the combination of American music traditions, including
spirituals, blues, ragtime, religious hymns, hillbilly music, and marching band
music. After originating near the beginning of the 20th century, jazz styles
spread in the 1920s, influencing other musical styles. The origins of the word
jazz are uncertain. The word is rooted in American slang, and various
derivations have been suggested. Jazz was not applied to jazz music until about
1915, in Chicago. Earl Hines, born in 1903 and later to become a celebrated
"jazz" musician, used to claim that he was "playing piano before the word
"Jazz" was even invented". For the origin and history of the word jazz, see
Jazz (word).
The instruments used in marching bands and dance band music at the turn of
century became the basic instruments of jazz: brass, reeds, and drums, using
the Western 12-tone scale. Small bands of musicians played a seminal role in
disseminating early jazz, traveling throughout communities in the West, South,
and to northern cities.
In the mid-1940s with bebop performers such as saxophonist Charlie "Yardbird"
Parker, pianist Bud Powell and trumpeters John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie and
Miles Davis helped to shift jazz from danceable pop music to more challenging
"musician's music." Differing greatly from Swing, Bebop divorced itself
early-on from dance music, establishing itself as art form but lessening its
potential commercial value. Other bop musicians included pianist Thelonious
Monk, drummer Kenny "Klook-Mop" Clarke, trumpeters Clifford Brown and Fats
Navarro, saxophonists Wardell Gray and Sonny Stitt, bassist Ray Brown, drummer
Max Roach, and vocalist Betty Carter.
The beboppers borrowed from the innovations of key earlier musicians – in
particular, Coleman Hawkins, Earl Hines, Lester Young and Art Tatum – and
carried their ideas several steps further, introducing new forms of
chromaticism and dissonance into jazz. Where many earlier styles of jazz
improvisation kept close to the basic key and melodic line of the piece, bebop
soloists engaged in a more abstracted form of chord-based improvisation. This
often involved the use of "passing" (i.e. additional) chords, "substitute"
chords, and altered chords which stepped outside of the basic key of the piece.
Notes usually thought of as temporary dissonances in earlier jazz were used by
the boppers as key melody notes – for instance, the flattened fifth (or
augmented fourth) of the scale. The style of drumming shifted too, from the
earlier four-to-the-bar bass-drum pulse to a more elusive and explosive style
where the ride cymbal was used to keep time while the snares and bass drum were
used for unpredictable accents.
These divergences from the jazz mainstream of the time initially met with a
divided, sometimes hostile response among fans and fellow musicians. (Louis
Armstrong, for instance, condemned bebop as "Chinese music.") But it was not
long before bebop's influence was felt throughout jazz: older big-band leaders
like Woody Herman (extensively) and Benny Goodman (briefly) experimented with
the style, for instance. By the 1950s bebop had become an accepted part of the
jazz vocabulary, and it has come to form the bedrock of modern jazz practice.
Soul jazz was a development of hard bop which incorporated strong influences
from blues, gospel and rhythm and blues in music for small groups, often the
organ trio which featured the Hammond organ. Important soul jazz organists
included Bill Doggett, Charles Earland, Richard "Groove" Holmes, Les McCann,
"Brother" Jack McDuff, Jimmy McGriff, Lonnie Smith, Don Patterson, Jimmy Smith
and Johnny Hammond Smith.
Tenor saxophone was also important in soul jazz; important soul jazz tenors
include Gene Ammons, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Eddie Harris, Houston Person, and
Stanley Turrentine. Alto player Lou Donaldson was also an important figure, as
was Hank Crawford. Unlike hard bop, soul jazz generally emphasized repetitive
grooves and melodic hooks, and improvisations were often less complex than in
other jazz styles.
A well-known soul jazz recording is Ramsey Lewis's "The In Crowd," a major hit
from 1965. Soul jazz was developed in the late 1950s, and was perhaps most
popular in the early 1970s, though many soul jazz performers, and elements of
the music, remain popular. Although the term "soul jazz" contains the word
"soul," soul jazz is only a distant cousin to Soul music, in that soul
developed from gospel and blues rather than from jazz.
Soul jazz performers improvise over chord progressions as with Bop. However,
the ensemble of musicians concentrate on a rhythmic "groove" centered around a
strong bassline, and the song often quickly "shifts gears" to new "timefeels."
Horace Silver had a large influence on the soul jazz style, with his songs that
used funky and often Gospel-based piano vamps. Soul jazz ensembles usually gave
a prominent role to the Hammond organ, and some groups, such as 1960s organ
trios, were centered around the Hammond's sound.
|