A Brief History of Jazz - excerpt from Chapter 1
The book is coming along. Knee deep in Chapter 2. It's 50 pages so far without graphics or examples. Yikes...
Here's a taste:
The Apple
Congratulations, you’ve graduated through the introduction and made it to the “real stuff”. In other words, welcome officially to The Guitarist in the High School Jazz Band. Many of you probably don’t have a lot of knowledge or awareness of this music even though some of you are already playing and studying it. When we’re asked to define what jazz is, it may be next to impossible, after all how are you supposed to explain something that is only translated through the language of music? I guess the closest thing we can do is point out some of the essential elements that make up what we characterize as jazz. If I think about all of the different music that has come under the label of jazz, it’s very difficult to think of anything or word that would tie all of it together. Listen to Louis Armstrong’s Hot 5, then John Coltrane’s Meditations, then Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain, then Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Birds of Fire, then Ahmad Jamal’s Live at Pershing, then Dexter Gordon’s Go, and then John Zorn’s Naked City and tell me what it all has in common. Probably nothing stylistically, but there is one critical element: improvisation.
To talk about jazz is to talk about the art of “making it up as you go”. Anyone that has done any amount of improvising will tell you that it takes an amazing amount of skill (anyone who says the opposite hasn’t listened to enough great improvisers). Well, you might say, “Hey, it’s simple! You just make it up!” Well yeah, but it doesn’t always mean that what you make up will sound good and/or more importantly, is what you would like to hear.
Imagine an apple. What color is it? Is it on a table? What’s in the background? What’s in the foreground? Is the sun out? Has someone taken a bite out of it? Who? What do they look like? OK, now draw it.
Does your apple look like what you saw it? Mine definitely doesn’t. It would take years of study and practice in drawing (shading, color, perspective, etc) to be able to recreate the exact image we see in our head. Ever heard anyone say that they “play by ear”? Think about what that means: it means that you can literally play anything that came into your head (the musical equivalent of drawing the apple as you saw it). Our goal is to one day be able to say about improvising, “hey, it’s simple! You just make it up!” After all, my artist friends can draw perfect apples with ease all day long. So for now, consider this the time when you’re going to learn the musical equivalents to shading, color, and perspective.
The 2nd Chorus
To be honest, I have not done a lot of study on the history of jazz, but one teacher of mine gave me this summary and it’s stuck with me. I’m sure some of you more ambitious students can research this fascinating field a little more thoroughly, certainly more than I’ve devoted to the subject.
To understand the history of jazz, let’s go back to the turn of the century (that’s 1900 for all you youngsters). Just as we still see today, musical theater was a popular form of entertainment (although more so at that time, what I usually refer to as the PXB period or pre-xbox period). Musical theater contained all of the allied arts and was more accessible for the “common-folk” than the stuffy bourgeois opera with it’s classical music. The popular composers in that field at the time were Gilbert and Sullivan. Similar to today, a musical theater company would take their production on the road (similar to a circus) and stay in a particular city for a certain amount of time (today we see the likes of Phantom of the Opera, Rent, etc). The musicians indigenous to those particular cities found that they could make money in the local bars and nightclubs playing the music from those shows long after the company had left town as most of the patrons had seen those musicals and were familiar with the tunes. Keep in mind that this was a time when people had to either go and see music or play it themselves in order to hear it, not like today when we have music virtually everywhere we are!
At that time, you might see a little combo of piano, trumpet or coronet, bass, and maybe a banjo to keep time. In a typical tune, they might play it through the form or a chorus 3 times, playing the melody exactly the same each time. Well, after a while they began embellishing on the melody in the 2nd chorus, although staying true to it at the beginning and the end. Eventually, the melody was completely abandoned in the 2nd chorus and the soloist became free to improvise over the chord changes of the form. The other members of the band eventually start taking turns in that middle chorus so that the entire tune expanded to accommodate everyone. The tune now would only include the original melody at the beginning and the end of the tune and the form in the middle would be open for however many soloists wanted to take a stab at it. In many respects, this is still the prototype for jazz today.
Intro – Melody – Soloist 1 – Soloist 2 – Soloist 3(etc) – Melody-Ending
Most people today take as many choruses as they want during their solo and cue the next soloist when they’re finished although they switch soloists almost exclusively at the beginning of the chorus never half way or some other fragment through it (unless the form is extremely long or slow as in a ballad).
Time went on and more musicals were written. Composers like Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Cole Porter wrote hit musical after musical and these tunes became known as the Great American Songbook or Standards. Jazz musicians would learn these tunes and use them as a vehicle for improvising. In addition, the jazz musicians began writing their own tunes and adding to the repertoire. Fats Waller, Benny Goodman, and especially Duke Ellington’s tunes were becoming as popular for musicians to cover as the standards. By the time Charlie Parker and his gang came into the picture, musicians were writing and performing their own music regularly as well as still playing the standards. Charlie Parker and the other bebop musicians began writing very complexed melodies (sometimes over the chords of popular standards) that were often played at fast tempos requiring a new level of musicianship in the jazz musician. The sky became the limit after that. Bebop, post-bop, hard bop, free jazz, and the avant garde pushed the limits of musicians and created some amazing music.
The guitar has been on a steady incline in popularity since it’s introduction into the jazz world. The uncle and predecessor to the jazz guitar, the banjo, served as primarily a rhythmic instrument meant to bridge the gap between rhythm and melody. Bands would often use a banjo instead of a drummer in many cases. The guitar carried on this tradition in the beginning until the advent of the electric guitar at which time the band could finally hear us take a solo. Today the guitar is in a lot of cases one of the primary jazz instruments out there. If the saxophone and the trumpet were the instrument of choice in the 50’s, the guitar is the jazz instrument of the new millennium.
Here's a taste:
The Apple
Congratulations, you’ve graduated through the introduction and made it to the “real stuff”. In other words, welcome officially to The Guitarist in the High School Jazz Band. Many of you probably don’t have a lot of knowledge or awareness of this music even though some of you are already playing and studying it. When we’re asked to define what jazz is, it may be next to impossible, after all how are you supposed to explain something that is only translated through the language of music? I guess the closest thing we can do is point out some of the essential elements that make up what we characterize as jazz. If I think about all of the different music that has come under the label of jazz, it’s very difficult to think of anything or word that would tie all of it together. Listen to Louis Armstrong’s Hot 5, then John Coltrane’s Meditations, then Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain, then Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Birds of Fire, then Ahmad Jamal’s Live at Pershing, then Dexter Gordon’s Go, and then John Zorn’s Naked City and tell me what it all has in common. Probably nothing stylistically, but there is one critical element: improvisation.
To talk about jazz is to talk about the art of “making it up as you go”. Anyone that has done any amount of improvising will tell you that it takes an amazing amount of skill (anyone who says the opposite hasn’t listened to enough great improvisers). Well, you might say, “Hey, it’s simple! You just make it up!” Well yeah, but it doesn’t always mean that what you make up will sound good and/or more importantly, is what you would like to hear.
Imagine an apple. What color is it? Is it on a table? What’s in the background? What’s in the foreground? Is the sun out? Has someone taken a bite out of it? Who? What do they look like? OK, now draw it.
Does your apple look like what you saw it? Mine definitely doesn’t. It would take years of study and practice in drawing (shading, color, perspective, etc) to be able to recreate the exact image we see in our head. Ever heard anyone say that they “play by ear”? Think about what that means: it means that you can literally play anything that came into your head (the musical equivalent of drawing the apple as you saw it). Our goal is to one day be able to say about improvising, “hey, it’s simple! You just make it up!” After all, my artist friends can draw perfect apples with ease all day long. So for now, consider this the time when you’re going to learn the musical equivalents to shading, color, and perspective.
The 2nd Chorus
To be honest, I have not done a lot of study on the history of jazz, but one teacher of mine gave me this summary and it’s stuck with me. I’m sure some of you more ambitious students can research this fascinating field a little more thoroughly, certainly more than I’ve devoted to the subject.
To understand the history of jazz, let’s go back to the turn of the century (that’s 1900 for all you youngsters). Just as we still see today, musical theater was a popular form of entertainment (although more so at that time, what I usually refer to as the PXB period or pre-xbox period). Musical theater contained all of the allied arts and was more accessible for the “common-folk” than the stuffy bourgeois opera with it’s classical music. The popular composers in that field at the time were Gilbert and Sullivan. Similar to today, a musical theater company would take their production on the road (similar to a circus) and stay in a particular city for a certain amount of time (today we see the likes of Phantom of the Opera, Rent, etc). The musicians indigenous to those particular cities found that they could make money in the local bars and nightclubs playing the music from those shows long after the company had left town as most of the patrons had seen those musicals and were familiar with the tunes. Keep in mind that this was a time when people had to either go and see music or play it themselves in order to hear it, not like today when we have music virtually everywhere we are!
At that time, you might see a little combo of piano, trumpet or coronet, bass, and maybe a banjo to keep time. In a typical tune, they might play it through the form or a chorus 3 times, playing the melody exactly the same each time. Well, after a while they began embellishing on the melody in the 2nd chorus, although staying true to it at the beginning and the end. Eventually, the melody was completely abandoned in the 2nd chorus and the soloist became free to improvise over the chord changes of the form. The other members of the band eventually start taking turns in that middle chorus so that the entire tune expanded to accommodate everyone. The tune now would only include the original melody at the beginning and the end of the tune and the form in the middle would be open for however many soloists wanted to take a stab at it. In many respects, this is still the prototype for jazz today.
Intro – Melody – Soloist 1 – Soloist 2 – Soloist 3(etc) – Melody-Ending
Most people today take as many choruses as they want during their solo and cue the next soloist when they’re finished although they switch soloists almost exclusively at the beginning of the chorus never half way or some other fragment through it (unless the form is extremely long or slow as in a ballad).
Time went on and more musicals were written. Composers like Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Cole Porter wrote hit musical after musical and these tunes became known as the Great American Songbook or Standards. Jazz musicians would learn these tunes and use them as a vehicle for improvising. In addition, the jazz musicians began writing their own tunes and adding to the repertoire. Fats Waller, Benny Goodman, and especially Duke Ellington’s tunes were becoming as popular for musicians to cover as the standards. By the time Charlie Parker and his gang came into the picture, musicians were writing and performing their own music regularly as well as still playing the standards. Charlie Parker and the other bebop musicians began writing very complexed melodies (sometimes over the chords of popular standards) that were often played at fast tempos requiring a new level of musicianship in the jazz musician. The sky became the limit after that. Bebop, post-bop, hard bop, free jazz, and the avant garde pushed the limits of musicians and created some amazing music.
The guitar has been on a steady incline in popularity since it’s introduction into the jazz world. The uncle and predecessor to the jazz guitar, the banjo, served as primarily a rhythmic instrument meant to bridge the gap between rhythm and melody. Bands would often use a banjo instead of a drummer in many cases. The guitar carried on this tradition in the beginning until the advent of the electric guitar at which time the band could finally hear us take a solo. Today the guitar is in a lot of cases one of the primary jazz instruments out there. If the saxophone and the trumpet were the instrument of choice in the 50’s, the guitar is the jazz instrument of the new millennium.
posted by Hammer at 10:15 AM
1 Comments:
She declines, and goes to the greengrocer, who wants to sell her a peculiar vegetable which is bound up in bundles lithium and of a black color.. That being run over symbolizes sexual intercourse would not be evident from this dream if we were not sure of it from many other sources. flomax. It was not possible for me deliberately to destroy them; but I awoke in depakote the night, and could almost have cursed my dear old grandfather for his gift...
Post a Comment
<< Home