Jazz is a unique form of music that has been around for centuries. It is a combination of African and European musical influences, and it has evolved over time to become one of the most popular genres in the world. Jazz is characterized by improvisation, collective playing, and a range of styles from traditional to modern. In this article, we'll explore how jazz works, its history, and its influence on other genres. At its core, jazz is a form of music that is based on improvisation.
Non-solo performers play quietly in the background, or compete, short for accompaniment. Most traditional jazz recordings follow this same basic sequence of events, called the head-soloist-head form. The band plays the melody, with or without an intro. Then, different musicians play solos in the form of the melody.
Finally, the whole band plays the melody again and the melody ends. There are endless variations in this basic structure that can be explored by listening to different versions of songs like “Someday My Prince Will Come”.Jazz is made by organizing chords, melodies and rhythms in units called songs. Contemporaries of the young Jazz Messengers, including Roy Hargrove, Marcus Roberts, Wallace Roney and Mark Whitfield, were also influenced by Wynton Marsalis' emphasis on jazz tradition. In the early 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz succeeded, garnering significant radio coverage. The history of jazz dates back to the late 19th century when Buddy Bolden is commonly considered the first jazz musician.
It is said that the first jazz bands appeared on the scene around 1885. Jazz implies a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role and contains a sound and a form of phrasing that reflect the individuality of the jazzman. In 2001, the documentary Jazz by Ken Burns premiered on PBS, with Wynton Marsalis and other experts reviewing the entire history of American jazz up to that point. He rose to popularity at the height of the jazz era, emerging as the first major soloist to break out of the collectively focused jazz movements of Chicago and New Orleans. Jazz arrangements with a Latin A section and an oscillating B section, with all the choruses balanced during the solos, became common practice with many Latin melodies from the standard jazz repertoire. According to jazz writer Stuart Nicholson, just like free jazz, it appeared on the verge of creating a completely new musical language in the 1960s. A more precise term could be Afro-Latin jazz, since the jazz subgenre usually employs rhythms that have a direct analogue in Africa or exhibit an African rhythmic influence beyond what is normally heard in other types of jazz. It ranges from combining live instrumentation with house jazz rhythms (as exemplified by St Germain, Jazzanova and Fila Brazillia) to improvised jazz more band-based with electronic elements (for example, The Cinematic Orchestra, Kobol and the future Norwegian jazz style initiated by Bugge Wesseltoft, Jaga Jazzist and Nils Petter Molvær).Music really began to take hold of the United States and the world during the jazz era of the 1920s when advances in radio and recording technology allowed millions of people to embrace jazz culture.
Since then creative jazz centers have been developed in Europe such as Amsterdam's creative jazz scene. Since only a limited number of American jazz records were released in Europe, European jazz has many of its roots in American artists such as James Reese Europe, Paul Whiteman and Lonnie Johnson who visited Europe during and after World War I.The 1960s saw bebop and its variants as well as swing's last breath alongside strange new beers like Stan Kenton's progressive jazz, plus a whole new phenomenon called revivalism: rediscovering jazz from past records or performed live by old musicians out of retirement. Pianist Keith Jarrett whose bands from 1970s had played only original compositions with outstanding elements of free jazzy established his so-called 'Standards Trio' in 1983 which although he also occasionally explored collective improvisation has performed and recorded mainly jazz-standards. But critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt argues that his terms of reference and definition should be broader defining jazz as a form of artistic music that originated in United States through confrontation between blacks and European music arguing it differs from European music in that jazz has relationship with time defined as 'swing'.
