Jazz History 101

Dixieland is a style that could be considered a variant of classic jazz and New Orleans jazz. It's real roots as a musical form stem from the Chicago music jazz scene of the 1920s. The musicians in essence were seeking a revival of the classic jazz and New Orleans jazz of yesteryear, and were quite successful in beginning a tradition of Dixieland revivals that continue to this day, thanks to subsequent generations. The first of such re-revivals took place during the 1940s. Pioneers of Dixieland included such artists such as guitarist Eddie Condon, saxophonist Bud Freeman and trumpeter Jimmy McPartland.

The style of Dixieland involved collective improvisation during the first chorus of playing, with players entering solos against riffing by other horns, followed by a closing ensemble with, usually, the drummer playing a four-bar tag who in turn is answered by the whole band. Unlike other forms of jazz, the song set for Dixieland musicians has remained rather limited, offering endless variations on themes of tunes first developed during the '10s years of the 20th century.

The music developed around trumpet and cornet leaders, such as Joe Oliver and Louis Armstrong, performed as an ensemble-oriented style, with trumpeters stating the melody, and harmonies and countermelodies coming from the trombonist and/or clarinetist. The rhythm section developed into an ensemble of banjo, drums, tuba or bass, and piano. Overall, the thrust of New Orleans jazz was to emphasize the ensemble more than any one soloist. The music continued to flourish during the 1920s, eventually being eclipsed by the nascent swing music which soon replaced it. Dixieland jazz overlapped with it, maintaining the basic structure of New Orleans jazz.

The reputedly brilliant New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden never recorded and the Memphis music of W.C. Handy was published and performed long before the public heard of jazz or the ODJB recording. Cornetist Freddie Keppard and the Original Creoles were to have recorded several months prior to the ODJB, but reportedly turned down the invitation for fear that recordings would make their music easier to copy.

Given credit as the first black musician to make a jazz recording was trombonist Kid Ory, who had to travel from New Orleans to California to pursue musical opportunities. That 1922 recording, not widely circulated, was followed in 1923 by studio efforts from cornetist King Oliver, soprano saxophonist/clarinetist Sidney Bechet, pianist Jelly Roll Morton and singer Bessie Smith. The early Oliver recordings included Louis Armstrong as the band's second cornet. Like nearly all of the famed New Orleans bands, Oliver went to Chicago for recording and found fame.

Armstrong, the acknowledged jazz fountainhead, recorded with Clarence Williams, Fletcher Henderson, Bessie Smith and others before making his leader debut in late 1925.

Jazz more or less reached big-time popularity in 1924 with the early recordings of Paul Whiteman.

Armstrong and Goodman eventually made their way to New York, helping create a critical mass that has served the city well, making it the jazz capital of the world. And while Chicago was a recording center, it was New York that truly became the center not only of recording but of performing as well, ushering in such legendary clubs as Minton's, the Cotton Club and the Village Vanguard, and such performance arenas as Carnegie Hall. Bebop was born in New York City, created and played by such luminaries as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk.

During the 1960s, alternate performance opportunities allowed for even more creative music to surface in both cities. In Chicago, the emergence of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and a variety of loft-type venues nurtured a new kind of rough, in-your-face avant garde, headed up by musicians such as saxophonist Fred Anderson. In New York, the loft scene was defined by all manner of musician, especially during the 1970s and '80s, offering up players as diverse as saxophonist Sam Rivers, members of the World Saxophone Quartet and the Vanguard Orchestra.

By establishing sections of trumpets, trombones, saxophones and rhythm, Henderson and other arrangers were able to create music of greater color, range, texture and power. At almost the same time, Duke Ellington began expanding his smaller groups into larger ensembles and big band music had found its greatest composer and arranger. The early recordings of the Henderson and Ellington bands appeared in 1931.

Many of the early aggregations started as territory bands, which became famous if they happened to click with the public in recordings or on the radio. The big bands of Paul Whiteman, Jean Goldkette and Ben Pollack found brief fame early in the era but their music rarely achieved any lasting value.

As the '30s progressed, bands led by Don Redman, Luis Russell, Jimmie Lunceford, Earl Hines, Andy Kirk, Benny Carter and Count Basie expanded the variety of sounds offered by the larger aggregations.

Other early units considered more in the dance-band genre were Glen Gray, The Dorsey Brothers, Glenn Miller and Bob Crosby.

Big band became the popular music of its day, hitting its peak in the mid 1930s. It fueled the nation's Lindy Hop and swing dance crazes. Well-known bandleaders like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Chick Webb, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, Jimmy Lunceford and Glenn Miller wrote and recorded a virtual parade of hit tunes that were played not only on radio but in dancehalls everywhere. Many big bands featured improvising soloists who excited audiences to near hysteria in well-publicized battles-of-the-bands.

Although big band declined after World War II, orchestras led by Basie, Ellington, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton and numerous others toured and recorded for several decades afterwards. The music became highly modernized as groups led by Boyd Raeburn, Sun Ra, Oliver Nelson, Charles Mingus, Thad Jones-Mel Lewis and Muhal Richard Abrams explored new concepts in harmony, instrumentation and improvisational freedom.

Today, big band remains as a standard in jazz education. Repertory orchestras such as the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra and the Chicago Jazz Ensemble regularly play original arrangements of big band compositions.

Recognizing bebop as a musician's music that demanded instrumental virtuosity and a sophisticated knowledge of harmony, jazz players caught on quickly. They wrote melodies that zigzagged and spun over chord changes of increasing complexity. Soloists incorporated dissonant scale tones in their improvisations, giving the music a more exotic, edgier sound. A fascination with syncopation resulted in unprecedented accents. And the tempos began to burn faster and faster.

Bebop played best in a small-group format; quartets and quintets proved ideal for both economic and artistic reasons. The music thrived in urban jazz clubs, where audiences came to listen to inventive soloists rather than dance to their favorite hits. In short, bebop musicians made jazz into an art form that appealed not only to the senses, but the intellect as well.

New jazz stars emerged from the bebop era, among them trumpeters Clifford Brown, Freddie Hubbard and Miles Davis, saxophonists Dexter Gordon, Art Pepper, Johnny Griffin, Pepper Adams, Sonny Stitt and John Coltrane, and trombonist J.J. Johnson.

In the 1950s and '60s, bebop went through several mutations: hard-bop, West Coast, cool-jazz and soul jazz among them. Bebop's small-group format of one to three horns, piano, bass and drums remains the standard jazz combo instrumentation to this day.

Trumpeter Miles Davis, one of the first bebop players to "cool it," emerged as the greatest innovator of the genre. His Birth Of The Cool nonet recordings of 1949-'50 are the epitome of Cool Jazz lyricism and understatement. Other notable instrumentalists of the Cool school include trumpeter Chet Baker, pianists George Shearing, John Lewis, Dave Brubeck and Lennie Tristano, vibraphonist Milt Jackson and saxophonists Stan Getz, Lee Konitz, Zoot Sims and Paul Desmond.

Arrangers, too, contributed significantly to the Cool Jazz movement, most notably Tadd Dameron, Claude Thornihill, Gil Evans and baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. Their compositions focused on instrumental colors and slower-moving, more suspended harmony, which created an illusion of spaciousness. Dissonance played some part in the music as well, but in a softened, muted way. Cool Jazz allowed room for slightly larger ensembles; nonets and tentets were more common than during the lean-and-mean bebop years. Some arrangers experimented with altered instrumentation, including conical brass like french horn and tuba.

Jazz players making their livings in the recording studios of Los Angeles picked up on the Cool Jazz movement in the 1950s. Largely influenced by the Miles Davis nonet, these L.A.-based players developed what's now known as West Coast Jazz.

Like Cool Jazz, West Coast Jazz was much more subdued than the frantic bebop that preceded it. Most West Coast Jazz was scored out in great detail, and it often sounded a bit European with its use of contrapuntal lines. However, the music left wide-open spaces for long, linear solo improvisations.

While West Coast Jazz was played mostly in recording studios, clubs like the Lighthouse on Hermosa Beach and the Haig in Los Angeles often presented top players of the genre, which included trumpeter Shorty Rogers, saxophonists Art Pepper and Bud Shank, drummer Shelly Manne and clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre.

The result was a harmonically static, almost purely melodic form of jazz. Soloists sometimes ventured outside of the preset modes and back again to create a sense of tension and release. Tempos ranged from slow to fast, but overall, the music had a wandering, unrushed feel to it. For a more exotic effect, players sometimes used non-European scales (e.g., Indian, Arab, African) as a "modal" basis for their music. The vague tonal center of modal jazz would serve as a launching pad for free-jazz experimenters who followed, including tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders.

Some classic examples of Modal Jazz include Davis' "Milestones," "So What" and "Flamenco Sketches," and Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" and "Impressions."

In 1955, drummer Art Blakey and pianist Horace Silver formed the Jazz Messengers, the quintessential Hard Bop group. An ever-evolving septet that lasted well into the 1980s, the Jazz Messengers produced many of the genre's top players, like saxophonists Hank Mobley, Wayne Shorter, Johnny Griffin and Branford Marsalis, and trumpeters Donald Byrd, Woody Shaw, Wynton Marsalis and Lee Morgan. One of the biggest jazz hits of all time, Morgan's 1963 tune "The Sidewinder," was performed in a definite, though somewhat simplified, Hard Bop style.

Most of jazz's great organists spent time on the Soul Jazz scene: Jimmy McGriff, Charles Earland, Groove Holmes, Les McCann, Donald Patterson, Jack McDuff and Johnny Hammond Smith all led groups in the '60s, often playing small rooms with at trio. Tenor saxophone was also prominent, adding a preacher-like voice to the mix; notables included Gene Ammons, Jimmy Smith, Eddie Harris, Stanley Turrentine, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Houston Person. Saxophonists Hank Crawford and David "Fathead" Newman and other members of Ray Charles' ensembles of the late '50s and '60s are often regarded as members of the Soul Jazz congregation, as is bandleader Charles Mingus.

Like Hard Bop, Soul Jazz stood in contrast to West Coast: The music evoked passion and a strong sense of community, rather than detachment and emotional coolness. Soul Jazz's hook-like melodies, along with the frequent use of ostinato bass and repeated rhythm patterns, made the music quite accessible. Hits borne of Soul Jazz include pianist Ramsey Lewis' "The In Crowd" (1965) and Harris and McCann's "Compared To What" (1969).

People should be careful not to confuse Soul Jazz with what's now known as "soul music." While both share a gospel influence, Soul Jazz grew out of Bebop, and soul music traces directly back to popular r&b.

What these two musicians and others such as John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and aggregates such as the Sun Ra Arkestra and a group called the Revolutionary Ensemble did amounted to a variety of changes in the structure and feel of the music. Among the innovations, when performed with imagination and great musicianship, was dispensing with chord progressions, allowing the music to go in any of a number of directions. Another primary change could be found with rhythm, where "swing" was either redefined or ignored altogether. In other words, pulse, meter and groove were not an essential element anymore. Another key ingredient was atonality, where musical pitch was no longer relegated to the conventional tonal system. Shrieks, barks, split tones were all part of this new sonic world.

Free jazz continues to emerge as a viable form of expression, and is actually less controversial.

Artists such as saxophonist Hank Mobley, pianist Horace Silver, drummer Art Blakey and trumpeter Lee Morgan actually started this music during the mid '50s, and helped usher in what is now the predominant form of jazz. With simpler melodies and a more soulful beat, the listener could hear traces of gospel and r&b mixed in. To some extent, this style met with some refinement during the '60s as compositional elements were added to create new textures. Saxophonist Joe Henderson, pianist McCoy Tyner and even such stalwart beboppers as Dizzy Gillespie made music that was both hummable and interesting harmonically.

One of the most significant composers to emerge during this period was saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Shorter, who came up through the ranks with Blakey, recorded a string of strong albums under his own name during the 1960s. Along with keyboardist Herbie Hancock, Shorter helped Miles Davis' '60s quintet (a more experimental version of Davis' highly influential '50s post-bop group with John Coltrane) become one of the most significant groups in jazz history.

The term fusion was introduced shortly thereafter to include a variety of bands and individuals that came later, such as John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report and Chick Corea's Return To Forever. Throughout, the emphasis on improvisation and musicianship remained constant, linking it and its practitioners with the history of jazz, despite detractors claimed they had "sold out" to commercial interests. In fact, these early experiments, when heard today, sound hardly commercial, challenging the listener to engage in what was music of a highly interactive and developed nature.

During the mid '70s, fusion devolved into a variant of easy-listening and/or r&b music with little or no edge, compositionally or from a performance standpoint. As a musical form, jazz musicians reclaimed it as a means to express themselves with authenticity during the '80s. Such artists as drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, guitarists Pat Metheny, John Scofield, John Abercrombie and James "Blood" Ulmer as well as veteran saxophonist/trumpeter Ornette Coleman creatively took this music in different direction.

A major (though not widely acknowledged) presence in the growth of Latin jazz, trumpeter/arranger Mario Bauza brought a Cuban orientation from his native Havana into Chick Webb's band in the '30s, later in the decade moving on to the bands of Don Redman, Fletcher Henderson and Cab Calloway.

Working with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie in Calloway's band of the late '30s, Bauza brought in an influence that clearly led to Gillespie's big bands of the mid '40s, as well as a continuing love affair with Latin musical forms for the remainder of Gillespie's long career. Bauza went on in 1940 to become the musical mastermind of Machito's Afro-Cubans, a band fronted by his brother-in-law, singer Frank Grillo, whose nickname was Machito.

There was a continuing flirtation with Latin rhythms through the '50s and '60s, with the addition of Brazilian samba elements in the bossa nova movement.

The musical melting pot of Latin jazz has spread further in the '80s and '90s to include not only bands and combos with first-rate improvisers of Latin American heritage but also a blending of domestic and Latin players creating some of the most exciting music on the scene.

This most recent Latin jazz renaissance has clearly been fueled by the influx of foreign players-some of them defectors from Fidel Castro's Cuban regime-flocking to wider opportunities in New York City and Florida. There's also a sense that the often intense yet danceable polyrhythmic qualities of the music have created a larger audience for jazz-something visceral to go with the cerebral.

While the Young Lions clearly were linked to the ascendance of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis after his stint with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, they also were the impetus for the ongoing revival of interest in the music. As a corollary to the increasing popularity of these young mainstream players, the music's avant-garde wing gained a widening audience of listeners seeking newer viewpoints and sounds.

In many ways, the real story of the Young Lions can't be told yet. While they remain among the stars of the current scene, they are not yet considered to be among the all-time jazz greats since they have shed their Young Lions fur. Only their creative strivings toward individuality will determine that.

Preplanned structure mixed with more "out" soloing, reminiscent of free jazz. Compositional styles merged with improvisation in a way that made it difficult to determine where one led off and the other began. In fact, the structure of the music in general was designed to have solos be an outgrowth of arrangements, lending coherence to what might normally be construed as a form of abstraction or even chaos. Swing rhythms, even melodies could be incorporated, but no as a rule necessarily.

Early pioneers might include pianist Lennie Tristano, saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre and composer/arranger/conductor Gunther Schuller. Later practitioners included pianists Paul Bley and Andrew Hill, saxophonists Anthony Braxton and Sam Rivers, drummers Sunny Murray and Andrew Cyrille and members of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians) such as the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

Although other clubs-some of which have not survived-have played a role in this mostly quiet revolution, Smalls has made its reputation as a spot with a more mainstream jazz orientation, while the Knitting Factory caters to a cutting-edge crowd in both jazz and rock veins. The sounds emanating from Smalls often tend to merge standard tunes and original compositions with occasional tinges of hip-hop rhythms. A more edgy, experimental, often free-form quality is found in the mixture of music found at the Knitting Factory.

Opened in 1994, Smalls became the mecca for combos and big bands with a revolving cast of players, as well as a place for all-night jamming-the sort of jazz training ground largely missing from the scene since the '50s. It also has become a hangout for record producers seeking new artists, as well as a place for live recordings.

Established roughly a decade earlier, the Knitting Factory has made its name with more avant-garde players, has grown to include recording facilities and its own recording label, as well as a continuing and growing involvement in the New York summer music festival scene. Tonic on the Lower East Side has emerged as perhaps the most progressive and interesting venue in the area, as it features the likes of Dave Douglas and John Zorn in regularly curated musical series.

Other Big Apple clubs-not necessarily downtown in location but in essence-also contribute to this somewhat incomplete picture of a small but growing jazz movement.

Jazz continued to incorporate non-Western musical traditions when other artists started using the musical elements of India, such as flutist Paul Horn's recordings inside the Taj Mahal, or when the "world music" groups Oregon and John McLaughlin's Shakti, whose musics are primarily jazz-based, incorporated tablas, intricate rhythms and raga forms.

The Art Ensemble of Chicago was an early pioneer in merging African and jazz forms. Later developments included such artists as saxophonist/composer John Zorn's explorations of Jewish culture with his band Masada and beyond, inspiring a whole other group of jazz musicians such as keyboardist John Medeski (recording with the African musician Salif Keita), guitarist Mark Ribot and bassist Anthony Coleman. Trumpeter Dave Douglas was inspired to incorporate Balkan influences, while the Asian-American Jazz Orchestra emerged as a leading proponent of the convergence of jazz and Asian musical forms.

As the world continued to shrink, globally, the impact of other musical traditions was felt in jazz, providing ripe fodder for future explorations, proving that jazz is, indeed, a world music.

The age-old tradition of mentoring continues apace with artists like trumpeter Wynton Marsalis bringing along a whole crew of acolytes for his own small groups as well as the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, which he heads up. Musicians who have come under his wing, or who have benefited from their association with Marsalis, include pianists Marcus Roberts and Eric Reed, saxophonist Wes "Warmdaddy" Anderson, trumpeter Marcus Printup and vibraphonist Stefon Harris. Bassist Dave Holland has also been a fine recruiter and nurturer of young talent over the years, employing, among many others, saxophonist/M-Base artist Steve Coleman, saxophonist Steve Wilson, vibist Steve Nelson and drummer Billy Kilson. Other great mentors of young talent have included pianist Chick Corea, drummer Elvin Jones and the late singer Betty Carter.

As jazz moves into the future, the potential for creativity is great, as talent is expressed and nurtured along disparate lines, and as collaborative efforts between jazz genres is encouraged. Saxophonist Chris Potter releases somewhat mainstream recordings under his own name while recording with another great mentor, the avant master drummer Paul Motian. Likewise, legends can meet under the same banner from different worlds of jazz, as with the recent recording with Elvin Jones, saxophonist Dewey Redman and pianist Cecil Taylor.