Jazz is African American Classical music. Along with gospel music, ragtime, and blues contributed to the formation of Jazz Music.
New Orleans had a presence of French, Spanish and Creole and African American populations created diverse mixture for Jazz Music. Chicago’s southside clubs also produced a lot of young musicians.
Jazz Musicians
Louis Armstrong- Armstrong defined expansive improvisational style which went on to become the hallmark of jazz. He moved away from melodic paraphrase to more elaborate improvisation guided by underlying harmonies rather than the melody alone.
Duke Ellington- Ellington created new brass like jungle sounds, he also used augmented chords.
Thelonius Monk- His reputation stemmed more so from the originality of his compositions.
Thelonius Monk
Louis Armstrong
Duke Ellington
Charlie Parker
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More Jazz Musicians
Miles Davis
John Coltrane
Dizzy Gillespie
Herbie Hancock
Keith Jarrett
Count Basie
Billie Holiday
Ella Fitzgerald
Ornette Coleman
Wynton Marsalis
Different Forms of Jazz
Cool- style associated with west coast characterized by a feeling of relaxed feeling and light tone color and texture and also emphasized softer tonal colors .
Hardbop- This had an active embrace of African American roots and it also incorporated phrasings and harmonies of blues, R&b, and Gospel.
Modal- this type of jazz was based on the repetition of one or two chords, it gave a greater freedom for scales, voicings, and melodic ideas, and it implied a more open ended approach to form and harmonic voicings.
Free-began 1950’s abandoned the practice of fixed harmonic and rhythmic patterns as the basis for improvisation
Bebop-this type of jazz evolved from big bands,it has fast tempos, and improvisational lines based on harmonic structure rather than melody