Tips for Building a Deck
If you posed this question to the late, great Louis Armstrong, he would answer ” Man, if you gotta ask you’ll never know”.
Jazz is a genre of American music created, mainly by African-Americans in New Orleans around 1900. It is an amalgam of European-American and tribal African music. The earliest form, New Orleans Jazz, was a fusion of ragtime and blues, with variety of popular music. A strong, prominent meter, combined with distinctive tone colors, characterizes jazz. It contains syncopated rhythmic patterns, and is unique because it is entirely improvised. Jazz music is not written down or scored. It is not the result of choosing a tune, but and ideal that is created by the performers passion and willed next in playing the music. Jazz is found in the creating of the form itself.
Most music involves the listener into the completed work as it was scored. Jazz, on the other hand invites the listener into a partnership of sorts. The listener is invited along as each new phrase is created, often as the result of audience involvement.
Unlike Classical music that conforms to musical tones, Jazz music thrives on diversity.
The performers individual “sound” becomes the desired proficiency. It is in this “improvisation” that we find the passion, a kind found nowhere else.
“The real power of Jazz…is that a group of people can come together and create…improvised art and negotiate their agendas…and that negotiation is the art” – Wynton Marsalis from Jazz, a film by Ken Burns.”
Because of the improvisation that distinguishes this genre, Jazz continues to evolve. This evolution has given rise to approximately two- dozen distinct jazz styles. This spawned Bop, Cool, Dixieland and Mainstream jazz (a modified version of Swing). In the early 1960’s, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane introduced Modal and avant-garde free Jazz. Later, Davis acted as a catalyst for jazz-rock or “fusion music”. This new form united jazz with amplified instruments and the rhythmic character of rock.
From the first Jazz recordings, made in 1917 by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, to the music produced electronically today, Jazz will continue to be an inspiration for any music that draws from life experiences and human emotion.
