Buy Jazz NBA Gear. We Have the Best Collection For Fans!
- Ladies NBA Gear
Ladies, Rep Your Favorite Team
With Official Gear From Fanatics!
- Kids NBA Apparel
Shop for Kids NBA Apparel
With The Best Collection for Fans!
- Ladies NBA Gear
Search results
Smooth Jazz Music with the sound of Ocean Waves - relax to this 3 hour collection of smooth jazz background music combined with the soothing sound of ocean w...
- 184 min
- 30.2M
- DrSaxLove
Learn about the origins, development, and characteristics of jazz, a music genre that emerged in the African-American communities of New Orleans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Explore the etymology, subgenres, fusion, and regional scenes of jazz, as well as its cultural and artistic impact.
Relaxing Jazz Music - Background Chill Out Music - Music For ...
- 213 min
- 106.1M
- Cafe Music BGM channel
Here are the 50 most popular (or so) Jazz songs of all times.
- 219 min
- 1.5M
- PLAYaudio - Smooth Jazz and more
- Overview
- West Africa in the American South: gathering the musical elements of jazz
- GeneratedCaptionsTabForHeroSec
jazz, musical form, often improvisational, developed by African Americans and influenced by both European harmonic structure and African rhythms. It was developed partially from ragtime and blues and is often characterized by syncopated rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, varying degrees of improvisation, often deliberate deviations of pitch, and the use of original timbres.
Any attempt to arrive at a precise, all-encompassing definition of jazz is probably futile. Jazz has been, from its very beginnings at the turn of the 20th century, a constantly evolving, expanding, changing music, passing through several distinctive phases of development; a definition that might apply to one phase—for instance, to New Orleans style or swing—becomes inappropriate when applied to another segment of its history, say, to free jazz. Early attempts to define jazz as a music whose chief characteristic was improvisation, for example, turned out to be too restrictive and largely untrue, since composition, arrangement, and ensemble have also been essential components of jazz for most of its history. Similarly, syncopation and swing, often considered essential and unique to jazz, are in fact lacking in much authentic jazz, whether of the 1920s or of later decades. Again, the long-held notion that swing could not occur without syncopation was roundly disproved when trumpeters Louis Armstrong and Bunny Berigan (among others) frequently generated enormous swing while playing repeated, unsyncopated quarter notes.
Jazz, in fact, is not—and never has been—an entirely composed, predetermined music, nor is it an entirely extemporized one. For almost all of its history it has employed both creative approaches in varying degrees and endless permutations. And yet, despite these diverse terminological confusions, jazz seems to be instantly recognized and distinguished as something separate from all other forms of musical expression. To repeat Armstrong’s famous reply when asked what swing meant: “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.” To add to the confusion, there often have been seemingly unbridgeable perceptual differences between the producers of jazz (performers, composers, and arrangers) and its audiences. For example, with the arrival of free jazz and other latter-day avant-garde manifestations, many senior musicians maintained that music that didn’t swing was not jazz.
Most early classical composers (such as Aaron Copland, John Alden Carpenter—and even Igor Stravinsky, who became smitten with jazz) were drawn to its instrumental sounds and timbres, the unusual effects and inflections of jazz playing (brass mutes, glissandos, scoops, bends, and stringless ensembles), and its syncopations, completely ignoring, or at least underappreciating, the extemporized aspects of jazz. Indeed, the sounds that jazz musicians make on their instruments—the way they attack, inflect, release, embellish, and colour notes—characterize jazz playing to such an extent that if a classical piece were played by jazz musicians in their idiomatic phrasings, it would in all likelihood be called jazz.
Britannica Quiz
Pop Culture Quiz
The elements that make jazz distinctive derive primarily from West African musical sources as taken to the North American continent by slaves, who partially preserved them against all odds in the plantation culture of the American South. These elements are not precisely identifiable because they were not documented—at least not until the mid- to late 19th century, and then only sparsely. Furthermore, Black slaves came from diverse West African tribal cultures with distinct musical traditions. Thus, a great variety of Black musical sensibilities were assembled on American soil. These in turn rather quickly encountered European musical elements—for example, simple dance and entertainment musics and shape-note hymn tunes, such as were prevalent in early 19th-century North America.
Special offer for students! Check out our special academic rate and excel this spring semester!
Learn More
The music that eventually became jazz evolved out of a wide-ranging, gradually assimilated mixture of Black and white folk musics and popular styles, with roots in both West Africa and Europe. It is only a slight oversimplification to assert that the rhythmic and structural elements of jazz, as well as some aspects of its customary instrumentation (e.g., banjo or guitar and percussion), derive primarily from West African traditions, whereas the European influences can be heard not only in the harmonic language of jazz but in its use of such conventional instruments as trumpet, trombone, saxophone, string bass, and piano.
The syncopations of jazz were not entirely new—they had been the central attraction of one of its forerunners, ragtime, and could be heard even earlier in minstrel music and in the work of Creole composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (Bamboula, subtitled Danse des Nègres, 1844–45, and Ojos Criollos, 1859, among others). Nevertheless, jazz syncopation struck nonblack listeners as fascinating and novel, because that particular type of syncopation was not present in European classical music. The syncopations in ragtime and jazz were, in fact, the result of reducing and simplifying (over a period of at least a century) the complex, multilayered, polyrhythmic, and polymetric designs indigenous to all kinds of West African ritual dance and ensemble music. In other words, the former accentuations of multiple vertically competing metres were drastically simplified to syncopated accents.
The provenance of melody (tune, theme, motive, riff) in jazz is more obscure. In all likelihood, jazz melody evolved out of a simplified residue and mixture of African and European vocal materials intuitively developed by slaves in the United States in the 1700s and 1800s—for example, unaccompanied field hollers and work songs associated with the changed social conditions of Blacks. The widely prevalent emphasis on pentatonic formations came primarily from West Africa, whereas the diatonic (and later more chromatic) melodic lines of jazz grew from late 19th- and early 20th-century European antecedents.
Learn about jazz, a musical form developed by African Americans and influenced by both European harmonic structure and African rhythms. Explore its history, styles, genres, and key figures from Louis Armstrong to free jazz.
- Gunther Schuller
We are just having some fun listing and presenting our Classic Jazz favorites. Picking our 100 top recordings was kind of difficult. We could not find everything on Youtube, and I am sure we...
Listen live to your favourite music and presenters at Jazz FM. Keep up with the latest news and shows, enter competitions, and check out our playlists.
8.0/10 (1522 reviews)
Amazon offers products from hundreds of top brands at great prices. Shop low prices on holiday essentials. Free shipping, exclusive discounts, and more.
Jump Queues with Skip the Line Tickets. Instant Confirmation & E-Tickets Available. Full Refund if You Cancel at least 24 Hours in Advance. Book Now. Do More with Viator.