May 15, 2016 Jazz is a music genre that originated from African American communities of New Orleans in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It emerged in the form of independent traditional and popular musical styles, all linked by the common bonds of African American and European American musical parentage with a performance orientation.[1] Jazz spans a period of over a hundred years, encompassing a very wide range of music, making it difficult to define. Jazz makes heavy use of improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swing note,[2] as well as aspects of European harmony, American popular music,[3] the brass bandtradition, and African musical elements such as blue notes and African-American styles such as ragtime.[1] Although the foundation of jazz is deeply rooted within the black experience of the United States, different cultures have contributed their own experience and styles to the art form as well. Intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as "one of America's original art forms".[4] As jazz spread around the world, it drew on different national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to many distinctive styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass-band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. In the 1930s, heavily arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz, a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisational style and Gypsy jazz (a style that emphasized musette waltzes) were the prominent styles. Bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging "musician's music" which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed in the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, linear melodic lines. The 1950s saw the emergence of free jazz, which explored playing without regular meter, beat and formal structures, and in the mid-1950s, hard bop emerged, which introduced influences from rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues, especially in the saxophone and piano playing. Modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock music's rhythms, electric instruments and the highly amplified stage sound. In the early 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called smooth jazzbecame successful, garnering significant radio airplay. Other styles and genres abound in the 2000s, such as Latin and Afro-Cuban jazz. The question of the origin of the word jazz has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well documented. The word began [under various spellings] as West Coast slang around 1912, the meaning of which varied but did not refer to music. The use of the word in a musical context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune.[5] Its first documented use in a musical context in New Orleans was in a November 14, 1916Times-Picayune article about "jas bands."[6] The American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Twentieth Century. Jazz has proved to be very difficult to define, since it encompasses such a wide range of music spanning a period of over 100 years, from ragtime to the 2010-era rock-infused fusion. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions, such as European music history or African music. But critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt argues that its terms of reference and its definition should be broader,[7] defining jazz as a "form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of the Negro with European music"[8] and arguing that it differs from European music in that jazz has a "special relationship to time defined as 'swing'", involves "a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role" and contains a "sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror the individuality of the performing jazz musician".[7] In the opinion of Robert Christgau, "most of us would say that inventing meaning while letting loose is the essence and promise of jazz."[9] A broader definition that encompasses all of the radically different eras of jazz has been proposed by Travis Jackson: "it is music that includes qualities such as swing, improvising, group interaction, developing an 'individual voice', and being open to different musical possibilities".[10] Krin Gibbard has provided an overview of the discussion on definitions, arguing that "jazz is a construct" that, while artificial, still is useful to designate "a number of musics with enough in common to be understood as part of a coherent tradition".[11] In contrast to the efforts of commentators and enthusiasts of certain types of jazz, who have argued for narrower definitions that exclude other types, the musicians themselves are often reluctant to define the music they play. As Duke Ellington, one of jazz's most famous figures, said: "It's all music".[12] "In 1979, I visited the then 92-year-old Blake at his home in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. He said that when this music made its way to the New York stage, it was a given a racier name — one that Blake says was derogatory. He wouldn't even say the word, only spell it. "When Broadway picked it up, they called it 'J-A-Z-Z,'" he says. "It wasn't called that. It was spelled 'J-A-S-S.' That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, you wouldn't say it in front of ladies."[13] Although jazz is considered highly difficult to define, at least in part because it contains so many varied subgenres, improvisation is consistently regarded as being one of its key elements. The centrality of improvisation in jazz is attributed to influential earlier forms of music: the early blues, a form of folk music which arose in part from the work songs and field hollers of the African-American slaves on plantations. These were commonly structured around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, but early blues was also highly improvisational. European classical music performance is evaluated by its fidelity to the musical score, with much less discretion over interpretation, ornamentation and accompaniment: the classical performer's primary goal is to play a composition as it was written. In contrast, jazz is often characterized as the product of group creativity, interaction, and collaboration, which places varying degrees of value on the contributions of composer (if there is one) and performers.[14] In jazz, the skilled performer will interpret a tune in very individual ways, never playing the same composition the same way twice; depending on the performer's mood and personal experience, interactions with other musicians, or even members of the audience, a jazz musician may alter melodies, harmonies or time signature at will.[15] The approach to improvisation has developed enormously over the history of the music. In early New Orleans and Dixieland jazz, performers took turns playing the melody, while others improvised countermelodies. By theswing era, big bands were coming to rely more on arranged music: arrangements were either written or learned by ear and memorized, while individual soloists would improvise within these arrangements. Later, in bebop the focus shifted back toward small groups and minimal arrangements; the melody would be stated briefly at the start and end of a piece, but the core of the performance would be the series of improvisations. Later styles such as modal jazz abandoned the strict notion of a chord progression, allowing the individual musicians to improvise even more freely within the context of a given scale or mode. In many forms of jazz, a soloist is often supported by a rhythm section consisting of one or more chordal instruments (piano, guitar, etc.), double bass playing the basslines and drum kit. These performers provide accompaniment by playing chords and rhythms that outline the song structure and complement the soloist.[16] In avant-garde and free jazz idioms, the separation of soloist and band is reduced, and there is license, or even a requirement, for the abandoning of chords, scales and rhythmic meters. Since at least the emergence of bebop, forms of jazz that are commercially oriented or influenced by popular music have been criticized by purists. According to Bruce Johnson, there has always been a "tension between jazz as a commercial music and an art form".[10] Traditional jazz enthusiasts have dismissed bebop, free jazz, the 1970s jazz fusion era and much else as periods of debasement of the music and betrayals of the tradition. An alternative viewpoint is that jazz is able to absorb and transform influences from diverse musical styles,[17] and that, by avoiding the creation of 'norms', other newer, avant-garde forms of jazz will be free to emerge.[10] To some African Americans, jazz has highlighted their contribution to American society and helped bring attention to black history and culture, but for others, the music and term "jazz" are reminders of "an oppressive and racist society and restrictions on their artistic visions".[18] Amiri Baraka argues that there is a distinct "white jazz" music genre expressive of whiteness.[19] White jazz musicians appeared in the early 1920s in the Midwestern United States, as well as other areas. Bix Beiderbecke was one of the most prominent white jazz musicians.[20] An influential style referred to as the Chicago School (or Chicago Style) was developed by white musicians including Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland. Frank Teschemacher, Dave Tough, and Eddie Condon. Others from Chicago such asBenny Goodman and Gene Krupa became leading members of big-band swing during the 1930s.[21] Spoiler lit
May 15, 2016 I only enjoy half of them but quality wise, there's no denying that these are the 15 best albums of the past 6 years, ranked from worst to best.
