Assignment #3: Read the following page and answer the questions found
on page 2.
Jazz
Jazz is a genre of music 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 music 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 range of music from ragtime to jazz-rock
fusion of the 1970s and 1980s, and has proved to be 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 band tradition, 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 America, different cultures have
contributed their own experience to the music aswhile. Jazz music has led
intellectuals from around the world to hail 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 towards a more challenging
"musician's music" which was played at faster tempos and used more chordbased 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 music, 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 rhythms, electric instruments
and the highly amplified stage sound of rock. In the early 1980s, a commercial
form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful, garnering significant
radio airplay. Other styles and genres abound in the 2000s, such as Latin jazz
and Afro-Cuban jazz.
Assignment: Go to youtube and watch/listen to the following jazz clips then
answer the following questions:
Jeepers Creepers 1958 Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jbZrocd6vs
Darktown Strutters Ball - Original Dixieland Jazz Band
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMHJ8PgVatk
John Coltrane - My Favorite Things (1/2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQsvMf8X0FY
1. What jazz style is “Jeeper Creepers?”
2. What jazz style is “ Darktown Strutters Ball?”
3. What jazz style is “My Favorite Things?”
4. Using a diagram or chart of your choice show Two the similarities and Two
differences between the three jazz styles.
5. What instruments do you find in Jazz?
6. What is your personal reaction to Jazz? Any one Jazz style you like more than
another?