Jazz Midterm 1
Snake Rag
As its title suggests, "Snake Rag" is page 77 a rag, following the march/ragtime structure of several disparate strains. (Oliver recorded this piece twice: for Gennett in April 1923 and for OKeh Records two months later. The more accomplished OKeh performance is featured here.) This sly piece, disrupted by a series of pungent two-part breaks, takes its name from Oliver's slang for complicated chromatic lines: he called them "snakes," and the snake here is the descending chromatic scale played, unaccompanied, by the cornets at the end of the A and B strains. The last strain, or trio, is twice as long: thirty-two bars instead of sixteen. The fact that it is played three times in succession contributes to the buildup in excitement and ferment. Yet notice how steady the underlying pulse remains. During the trio, Oliver and Armstrong play quite different two-bar breaks (at the same time), accompanied by the trombone. These breaks preserve an aspect of the band's presentation at Lincoln Gardens that had become a signature routine, and a mystery to visiting musicians. They couldn't figure out how the two cornetists managed to harmonize perfectly on apparently ad-libbed passages. Armstrong later explained that seconds before each break, Oliver would mime the fingering of the upcoming part on his cornet, which cued him as to which break they would play. The two examples on this recording are exceptionally expressive, and we can imagine the audience cheering them on.
What letters denote repetition or contrast? Contrast of What? What songs are in 32 bar form
A statement (8 bars) A repetition (8 bars) B (bridge) contrast (8 bars) A return (8 bars) This structure does not refer to the words, which can be written in any number of poetic forms. It refers only to the melody and harmonic progression. And unlike the blues, here composers can choose any harmonies they like. "A Sailboat in the Moonlight," an A A B A song sung in a classic performance by Billie Holiday. Musicians have found numberless ways to use the A A B A form as a fount for original compositions. Miles Davis's "So What" is among the best known. Any popular song can become the parent to thousands of new compositions, each with a new melody fitting within the A A B A harmonies of the original. The most famous of these is George Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" (1930)
In 1928, Armstrong recorded with this pianist from Pittsburgh, whose single-line improvisations matched his ability to create new melodic lines.
Earl Hines
Chord progression I
I means a chord built on the first note of a particular scale I is known as the tonic
Which chords or harmonies are used in the twelve-bar blues?
I, IV, V
Chord progression
I, V, IV, V is known as chord progression
Chord progression IV
IV means a chord built on the fourth note of a particular scale
Who is King Oliver and what was the Creole Jazz Band
If New Orleans jazz started out, in the Bolden era, as local gumbo flavored by the great variety of music available in that city, by 1922 the gumbo was traveled and seasoned. Instrumental mastery had increased, hundreds of new pieces had been written, and the New Orleans style had assimilated flavors of the cities in which it prospered. Jazz had become a fad in the late teens, tricked up with comical routines and instrumental gimmicks. In refusing to cheapen or remodel his music, Joseph "King" Oliver brought New Orleans jazz to an enduring plateau. Born in rural Louisiana, Oliver moved to New Orleans in early childhood and turned to music (relatively late in life) around 1905, the peak of Buddy Bolden's reign. He served a long apprenticeship as a cornetist in various brass bands and saloon groups, finally achieving local renown in an orchestra led by trombonist Kid Ory, who billed him as King Oliver in 1917, cementing his place as Bolden's heir. Oliver presented quite a sight. Self-conscious about his blind and protruding left eye, the result of a childhood accident (some people called him Popeye), he played seated or leaning against a wall, sporting a derby rakishly angled to cover the affliction, and used an arsenal of mutes to vary his timbre: a rubber plunger, pop bottle, bucket, glass, doorknob, or hat. Oliver's love of muting devices had an immense influence on jazz, and eventually led to the manufacture of professional mutes. Richard M. Jones, a pianist who later became an important record producer, recalled Oliver's resourcefulness one night when his band was playing at a Storyville dance hall called Abadie's and his rival, Freddie Keppard, had drawn a larger crowd across the street at Pete Lala's:
Form of A Sailboat in the Moonlight
32 bar popular song form AABA
A glissando is
an exaggerated slur from one note to the next.
Whole step
an interval made up of two half steps; the distance between do and re.
Syncopation
an occasional rhythmic disruption, contradicting the basic meter.
Down Home Rag
"Down Home Rag" "Down Home Rag" has four strains. The first two (A and B) are nearly identical: they share a chord progression and end with the same fragment of melody. As we might expect, the trio (strain C) offers contrast by modulating to a nearby key; this trio, however, is the same length as the other strains. In between repetitions of C, the fourth strain (D) moves to the minor mode. Throughout this short, exuberant recording, Sweatman is the focus of attention, performing his composed melodies with unmistakable enthusiasm. But when repeating a strain, he is just as likely to take off in unpredictable directions. It may be too much to call what he does "improvising": as with many early jazz artists, his variations have a limited range. Still, the swooping blue notes and the piercing timbre of his clarinet suggest what many ragtime musicians may have been doing in live performance at that time.
Name a song in AABA form
"A Sailboat in the Moonlight," an A A B A song sung in a classic performance by Billie Holiday. Musicians have found numberless ways to use the A A B A form as a fount for original compositions. Miles Davis's "So What" is among the best known. Any popular song can become the parent to thousands of new compositions, each with a new melody fitting within the A A B A harmonies of the original. The most famous of these is George Gershwin's "I Got Rhythm" (1930) More examples in this book of A A B A form (each with its own tune) are "Dinah," Benny Goodman (Chapter 7); "Walkin' and Swingin'," Andy Kirk with Mary Lou Williams (Chapter 8); "Ko Ko," Charlie Parker (Chapter 11); and "Tempus Fugue-It," Bud Powell (Chapter 11).
Dead Man Blues and Doctor Jazz -Who are the Performers? -What are the forms?
"Dead Man Blues" is Morton's interpretation of the New Orleans burial ritual, which he traced back to Scripture: rejoice at the death and cry at the birth. It begins with a scene-setting dialogue in the style of black minstrelsy, a comedic way of announcing Morton's intention to invoke a New Orleans funeral. This leads to the first chorus—each chorus is a twelve-bar blues—in which the musicians collectively improvise in familiar New Orleans style: you can almost see the Grand Marshal leading the mourners, gracefully prancing with his parasol. This particular performance (an alternate take) was rejected by Morton for commercial release, probably owing to the obvious gaffes made by the cornetist during his solo. On this take, however, we can hear a nimble elegance in the collective improvisation that the band failed to capture the second time around. Morton organized his music scrupulously, going so far as to notate the parts for bass (bass lines are usually improvised), and making the most of his musicians. We are always conscious of each instrument: the tailgate smears of the trombone, the snap of the trumpet, the pretty harmonizing of the clarinets, the clanging rhythm of the banjo. For those who think of New Orleans jazz as genial chaos, with simultaneously improvised melody lines tumbling untidily on top of one another, Morton's music may come as a revelation. While "Dead Man Blues" is a twelve-bar blues, it's also organized like a tune in march/ragtime form: choruses 1 and 2 correspond to the first strain (A); choruses 3 and 4, played by cornet and rhythm, to the second (B). The fifth and sixth choruses serve as the trio, a section of the piece for which Morton often reserved his most melodic ideas. For this recording and for these choruses, he hired two extra clarinetists to blend with Omer Simeon in playing block-chord harmonies—it's the only time they appear in the performance. In the sixth chorus, Morton introduces another of his trademark devices to increase tension: against the clarinetists' lissome melody, the trombonist Kid Ory plays a countermelody, his spare phrases adding an understated touch of drama. By the 1930s, Morton's music was dismissed as hopelessly outdated. When he died in 1941, a revival of interest in New Orleans jazz was just getting underway, too late to help Morton, who was broke and largely ignored or belittled. Only later was he acclaimed as one of the guiding figures of early jazz—a genuinely original, thoughtful, sensitive, and permanent artist.
Scott Joplin's most famous composition is
"Maple Leaf Rag"
Reckless Blues -Who are the performers -What is the form and style -What instruments are played and by whom -What decade is this piece from
-Louis Armstrong and Bessie Smith -Form is 12 bar blues -Style is vaudeville blues -Bessie Smith, vocal; Louis Armstrong, trumpet; Fred Longshaw, reed organ -1925
Bessie Smith -What was she shown as -Read about her life and be able to answer questions about it.
-The most popular blues diva of the era, the "Empress of the Blues," - In a career that lasted only fourteen years, Smith made nearly two hundred records, beginning at OKeh Records in 1923 and establishing the standard by which other blues singers were measured. -Smith's career peaked in 1929, the same year she made her only film appearance, as a downhearted lover in the seventeen-minute short St. Louis Blues. Thereafter, the Depression curtailed her audience and her earnings. In the mid-1930s, she agreed to update her sound by recording pop tunes with younger up-and-coming jazzmen. But her attempt at a comeback was cut short, in 1937, as she rode to a gig on the back roads of the Mississippi Delta. Her car plowed into the back of a truck; her arm was torn loose and she went into shock. By the time she reached a hospital, she had lost too much blood. Record producer John Hammond, who had launched his own career by producing her final recording session, angrily wrote an erroneous account claiming that Smith was taken first to a white hospital, where she died shortly after being refused admission.
When Louisiana and other southern states adopted the "Jim Crow" laws, the special privileges of the Creoles ended in the year
1894
Symphonic Jazz, what was that?
A cursory look at early jazz suggests a long dry spell between the 1917 triumph by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the classic recordings of King Oliver and others in 1923. Yet the interim was a period of great ferment, especially in New York, where jazz came face to face with a simmering pot of musical styles: Tin Pan Alley popular songs, ragtime, New Orleans jazz, marching bands (especially popular after 1918, in the aftermath of World War I), and vaudeville, which featured anything that could keep an audience attentive during a fifteen-minute act—comical saxophones, blues divas, self-styled jazz or ragtime dancers. Jazz also found its way into elaborate ballrooms and concert halls. Oddly enough, two leading figures in this process, Art Hickman and Paul Whiteman, came east from San Francisco. Art Hickman Hickman (1886-1930), a pianist, drummer, and songwriter, encountered jazz in the honky-tonks of the Barbary Coast in San Francisco, where he believed jazz originated: "Negroes playing it. Eye shades, sleeves up, cigars in mouth. Gin and liquor and smoke and filth. But music!" In 1913, Hickman organized a dance band, which soon included two saxophonists. Though he did not harmonize them in the manner of a reed section (where two or more reed instruments play in harmony), he did assign them prominent roles, creating a smoother sound than the brass-heavy ensembles associated with New Orleans jazz and marching bands. The dual saxophones gave an appealing character to a band that otherwise consisted of trumpet, trombone, violin, and a rigid rhythm section with two or three banjos (a remnant from minstrelsy). Hickman's success served to establish saxophones as an abiding component in the jazz ensemble.
The phrases of thirty-two-bar popular song form are best represented as
AABA
What is a 32- bar pop song form
AABA popular song Two sections: -introductory verse which is a transition between spoken verse and song in a musical -refrain or chorus which is the melody that made the song successful
Gertrude "Ma" Rainey was
A vaudeville/classic blues artist
Jazz can be traced to
Africa
Blues form has its origins in
African American folk poetry.
Jazz is an art form known as
America's Classical Music
This San Francisco bandleader was not famous, but he established the saxophone section as part of a jazz ensemble.
Art Hickman
Who is Duke Ellington? -What was his initial career like? -Know about the Cotton Club -Who opened the Cotton Club
As the most important composer that jazz—and arguably the United States—has produced, Duke Ellington played a vital role in every decade of its development, from the 1920s until his death in 1974. His music is probably more widely performed than that of any other jazz composer. Ellington achieved distinction in many roles: composer, arranger, songwriter, bandleader, pianist, producer. He wrote music of every kind, including pop songs and blues; ballets and opera; theater, film, and television scores; suites, concertos, and symphonies; music for personal homages and public dedications; and, most significantly, thousands of instrumental miniatures. page 101 All of his music contains decisive elements of jazz, even where there is no improvisation. He made thousands of recordings, more than any other composer or bandleader, some inadvertently (he rarely discouraged fans with tape recorders) and others privately and at his own expense, to be released posthumously. Ellington's early breakthrough, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, defined four aspects of New York's musical culture. The first three were strictly musical. (1) He clarified the nature of big-band jazz, demonstrating potential beyond Whiteman's imagination or Henderson's achievement. (2) He solidified the influence of stride piano as a jazz factor, employing it not only as a pianist himself but also as a foundation in orchestrations. (3) He proved that the most individual and adventurous of jazz writing could also be applied to popular songs.
The instrumentation of New Orleans jazz derived from which two sources?
Brass bands and string ensembles
Paul Whiteman hired ______ to be the full-time featured vocalist with his orchestra.
Bing Crosby
Among the jazz soloists added to the Paul Whiteman Band in the mid-1920s was
Bix Beiderbecke
Which musician, whose career ended with his nervous breakdown in 1906, is generally acknowledged as the first important musician in jazz?
Buddy Bolden
Timbre variation can be produced by
Changing the sound of the instrument
Single Reed Instruments
Clarinet Saxophone
_______ was known for his legato performance style.
Coleman Hawkins
Listen to 'The Buzzard Lope" and be able to answer questions about it Listen to Down Home Rag and be able to answer questions about the piece Listen to "Dixie Jass band One Step" Listen to and review "Dead Man Blues" and "Doctor Jazz" Listen to and review "Snake Rag" Listen to and review "Cake Walking Babies" Listen to and review "Changes" Listen to and review "Copenhagen" Listen to and review "You've Got to be Modernistic" Listen to and review "Black and Tan Fantasy" Listen to and review "Hotter than That", "West End Blues" Listen to and review "Weather Bird" Listen to and review "Singing the Blues"
Cyclic form, African American Folk style, Bessie Jones is the song leader, Chorus is sung by Joe Armstrong, Jerome Davis, John Davis, Peter David, Henry Morrison, Willis Proctor By Wilbur Sweatman (clarinet) style: ragtime/early jazz form: march/ragtime First commercially released jazz song. By ODJB Morton: Piano -George Mitchell: Cornet -Kid Ory: Trombone -Omer Simeon, Barney Bigard, Darnell Howard: Clarinets -Johnny St Cyr: Banjo John Lindsay: Bass Andrew Hilaire: Drums Form: 12 bar blues Style: New Orleans George Mitchell: Trumpet Kid Ory: Trombone Omer Simeon: Clarinet Morton: Piano John St Cyr: Guitar John Lindsay: Bass Andrew Hilaire: Drums Form: 32 bar popular song (ABAC) Style: New Orleans Jazz 1923 composed by King Oliver. Trumpet: Oliver Cornet: Louis Armstrong Piano: Lil' hardin form: march/rag time polyphonic, collective improvisation 1924 New Orleans style collective improvisation 40-bar popular song (ABA'CA") Cornet: Louis saxophone: Sidney Bechet Piano: lil Hardin scat break (wordless vocalizing)" Director: Paul Whiteman Trumpets: Henry Busse, Charlie margulis Cornet: Bix Beiderbecke Style: early new york big band Form: 32 bar popular song (ABCA) with interlude and versus. 1924 composed by Charlie Davis Recorded by Wolverine Orchestra in a foxtrot tempo cornet: Bix Beiderbecke 1923 style: harlem stride form: march/ragtime form piano: james P johnson 1927 composed by Duke Ellington style: early New York big band form: 12-bar blues (contrasting 16 bar) piano: Duke Ellington -Improvised call and response between trumpet and piano -Cadence figure at the end of each strain -Unpredictable rhythms 12-Bar blues, composed by Joe King Oliver. Best known recording is by Louis Armstrong and his Hot five (pianist Earl Hines) trumpet: Louis Armstrong Piano: Earl Hines -1st Chorus has solo by Trumbauer on C-melody sax, answered by Lang's guitar -2nd chorus has delicate cornet solo by Beiderbecke -Chicago-style collective improvisation and solos
"Tailgate trombone" features
Exaggerated glissandos
Stride Piano -Who is James P. Johnson
Fittingly, the city that established orchestral jazz also encouraged the ripening of the most orchestral brand of jazz piano, initially known as "Harlem style" but eventually recognized internationally as stride piano. Here was an aggressive, competitive, joyous way of playing piano that directly reflected the musical vigor of New York. Where ragtime was graceful and polished, stride was impetuous, flashy, and loud. Where ragtime produced a contained repertory, stride was open to anything. The evolution from one to the other occurred gradually. James P. Johnson, the "Father of Stride Piano," perfected the East Coast style as a progressive leap from its ragtime roots. Almost every major jazz pianist who came along in the 1920s and 1930s—not just Waller, Tatum, and Ellington, but also Earl Hines, Count Basie, and Teddy Wilson—learned from him. Although he never achieved the fame of his protégés, stride revivalists regard him as the most accomplished innovator of the stride style.
Now's the Time
Form: 12 bar blues
West End Blues
Form: 12 bar blues
Before 1800, New Orleans was owned by
France and Spain
Brass bands
Having learned during slavery that literacy meant power—why else would it be systematically denied to them?—musically inclined African Americans were drawn to the mysteries of notation and theory. In the all-black schools and universities that sprouted throughout the South after Emancipation, music became a central part of formal education. Children learned to play string instruments like the violin, and some—like Joseph Douglass, grandson of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass—became skilled performers. Musicians brought up in the concert tradition carried with them a social ambition, a dream of becoming something more in the world. If the symphony orchestra proved a remote goal for most of these classically trained youngsters, the brass band provided a more practical alternative. An import from Britain, the brass band was originally a military institution that in peacetime became a local "people's" orchestra, with new brass instruments like the sousaphone designed for ease in marching.
What did Louis Armstrong learn through his gig on the Mississippi riverboats?
He improved his ability to read music. He learned to adapt New Orleans-style improvisation to written arrangements. He learned songs outside the New Orleans repertory. each answer shown
What pattern of chord changes below is used in the basic twelve-bar blues form?
I I I I IV IV I I V V I I
Jazz rhythmic contrast
In jazz rhythmic contrast is used to prevent boring repetition
Improvisation
Improvisation happens within a cycle or chorus
History of the minstrelsy and Jim Crow -What political, social, racial, and performance ramifications did this have?
In 1843, a quartet of white musicians called the Virginia Minstrels presented New York audiences with an evening's amusement that claimed to depict the culture of plantation slaves. They performed in blackface—a mask of burnt cork, with grotesquely exaggerated eyes and mouths. Their success was astonishing, prompting numerous imitators. Within a decade, the "minstrel show" had become the most beloved theatrical production in the country, touring everywhere on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Minstrels invented new and sadly lasting stereotypes of blackness, influencing the perception of blacks particularly in areas were there were none. As "Ethiopian delineators," their wigs were mops of unruly curls, wild and woolly, and their stage clothes tattered and outrageously loud in style and color. To be sure, one of the main minstrel stereotypes, Zip Coon, was an overdressed dandy whose foppish behavior savagely parodied upper-class whites. But the most memorable characterizations were based on a poisonous racial contempt. Happy-go-lucky plantation "darkies" combined savvy musical talent with foolish, childlike behavior that no adult could take seriously. A crippled stable hand known as Jim Crow morphed into a character so thoroughly identified with racial exploitation that the phrase "Jim Crow" became shorthand for the entire Southern legal system of post-Reconstruction segregation.
Tin Pan Alley
In New York's midtown section, Broadway, the thoroughfare running north to south, offered plays, musicals, ballet, opera, revues, movies, vaudeville, and every other kind of show business. Midtown was also home to Tin Pan Alley, the first songwriting factory of its kind. The name has come to represent the popular music written for the stage and cinema from the 1890s through the 1950s, until rock and roll began to change the business. Originally, it was the nickname for buildings on 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue, where music publishers had their offices and passersby could hear the cacophony of a dozen or more competing pianos—songwriters demonstrating their wares. The Alley introduced the idea of the professional songwriter, who wrote specific songs to order: ballads, novelties, patriotic anthems, rhythm songs, and so forth, as commissioned by performers or to meet a public demand.
Harlem Renaissance -How did it develop?
In 1904, the Afro-American Realty Company organized a campaign—not unlike the Chicago Defender's crusade to bring Southern blacks to Chicago—to lure African Americans to Harlem, a vast, mostly white settlement stretching from 110th Street to 155th Street. The movement accelerated over the next fifteen years, producing a massive migration involving especially large numbers of Southern and West Indian Negroes that was matched by a simultaneous exodus of whites. By 1920, central Harlem had become what poet and memoirist James Weldon Johnson described as "not merely a Negro colony or community, [but] a city within a city, the greatest Negro city in the world." page 97 In 1925, philosopher and critic Alain Locke edited a book of essays called The New Negro, one of the most influential manifestos ever published in the United States. Locke's anthology argued that African American artists represented a political and cultural force in literature, art, dance, and theater—it was the foundation for what would become known as the Harlem Renaissance. Most leaders of this renaissance disliked jazz, which seemed to them coarse, commercial music wrapped up in stereotypes they preferred to leave behind. Unhappily, the very forces that turned Harlem into a cultural carnival also turned it into a slum and a profit center for organized crime. The crammed residents, unable to spread out to racially restricted neighborhoods, fell victim to landlords who increased the rents while partitioning apartments into ever-smaller units. As an added insult, mobsters financed ornate nightclubs—including the Cotton Club, which featured top black performers and sexy floor shows—that refused entrance to black patrons. In these Harlem getaways, the New Negro was banned from witnessing the fruits of his own renaissance.
Changes
In 1927, the Whiteman band served as a microcosm of the three-way battle involving jazz, symphonic jazz, and pop. Bill Challis favored Crosby and the jazz players, but when the band's old (symphonic) guard complained of neglect, he found ways to bring everyone into the mix. His arrangement of Walter Donaldson's "Changes" opens with strings, incorporates pop and jazz singing, and climaxes with a roaring Bix Beiderbecke solo, the sound of his cornet tightened by a straight mute inserted into the bell of his horn. page 90 The title itself is significant, suggesting changes in the band, changes in taste as ballroom music assimilated the vitality of jazz, and changes in improvisation techniques as harmonic progressions (noted in the lyrics) took the place of elaborations of the melody. The title also signifies broader cultural changes that were transforming the United States. In the several months before the recording was made, Charles Lindbergh had flown the Atlantic Ocean, Babe Ruth had hit sixty home runs, and talking pictures had premiered. The national mood was optimistic, as reflected in songs like "Good News," "Hallelujah," "'S Wonderful," "Smile," "There'll Be Some Changes Made," and many others. Challis emphasizes changes between new and old with contrasting rhythms and vocal groups. Rhythmically, a Charleston beat (two emphatic beats followed by a rest), usually enunciated by the trumpets, alternates with the more even rhythms stated by the violins. The performance never sticks to any one sound, preferring to cut back and forth between strings, brasses, saxophones, and voices, with solo spots interspersed. Although six vocalists are listed among the personnel, they never sing in tandem. Three of them, representing Whiteman's old guard, were full-time instrumentalists (trombonist Jack Fulton and violinists Charles Gaylord and Austin Young) who were occasionally deputized to sing pop refrains. Shortly after Crosby and his pianist and harmonizing partner Al Rinker joined Whiteman, they recruited singer-pianist Harry Barris to form a novel group called the Rhythm Boys. Of the singers, Crosby was by far the most gifted. Accordingly, Challis divided the vocal chorus into sections, employing both vocal trios and Crosby as soloist. The chorus begins with the old guard ("Beautiful changes"), then—with Barris signaling the change by imitating a cymbal ("pah")—switches to the Rhythm Boys, who blend high-pitched harmonies and a unified scat break (wordless vocalizing). This is followed by the old guard setting up a solo by Crosby, who mimics a trombone slide on the words "weatherman" and "Dixieland." Crosby's solo leads to the record's flash point: Beiderbecke's improvisation.
Whole-tone scale
In music, a whole tone scale is a scale in which each note is separated from its neighbors by the interval of a whole step.
What changed in the 1920's with regard to Jazz -With regard to society in general?
In the 1920s, recordings, radio, and movies were refined in ways that changed forever the customs and habits of American lives. The development of electrical recording (in 1925) as a replacement for the primitive technology of acoustical recording meant that records, formerly inadequate for reproducing certain instruments and vocal ranges, now boasted a stunning fidelity that especially benefited jazz, with its drums and cymbals and intricately entwined wind instruments. The recording industry, in a slump since 1920, came back to life with dramatically reduced prices in phonographs and discs. Radio, which had been little more than a hobby for most people, blighted by static and requiring headphones, sprang to life as a broadcast medium in 1921 (KDKA in Pittsburgh), achieving a lifelike clarity with the invention of the carbon microphone and, subsequently, the much-improved condenser microphone. The first radio networks (NBC, CBS) united the nation with simultaneous broadcasts. Advances in radio and recording gave entertainment seekers a kind of permission to stay at home—a permission that quickly became a national habit, as people grew emotionally attached to broadcasts or obsessed with collecting records. The cinema responded to these technological challenges with an innovation of its own. In 1927, Warner Bros. introduced the first feature film with synchronized dialogue—an adaptation of a Broadway play significantly, if deceptively, called The Jazz Singer.
What became known as the New Orleans style?
In the decade from Bolden's heyday until the success of recorded jazz in 1917, New Orleans musicians continued to develop their own distinctive style. We can't know precisely what their music sounded like, but by extrapolating backward from later recordings, and by drawing information from photographs and interviews, it's possible to offer a general portrait of early New Orleans jazz. Its instrumentation derived from two sources. Brass band societies, which spawned smaller dance groups, gave the music its melody instruments: trumpet or cornet, trombone, and clarinet. Together, these instruments are called the front line, reflecting their position at the head of a marching band. (Fans who loyally followed a parade band came to be known as the second line.) Brass bands also, inadvertently, fostered the drum set, combining the elements of parade percussion—bass drum, snares, cymbals. The other source was string ensembles, which featured violin, banjo, mandolin, and other instruments—including guitar and bass, which became indispensable to the jazz rhythm section. The piano began to find a stable role in jazz bands with the advent of ragtime in the early decades of the twentieth century. Originally, the earliest New Orleans bands also included a lead violinist, whose job was to play the melody straight, without improvisation or ornamentation. Against this, the cornet probably improvised a syncopated or ragged version of the melody. By 1917, the cornet had simply displaced the violinist, offering the tune in a more compact, spontaneous form, while the clarinet page 67 played a countermelody to him—an improvised accompaniment (mostly in eighth notes) that danced around and between the sharply articulated cornet notes. As clarinetists learned to create their own lines, they drew increasingly from the underlying chord progressions. Similarly, the trombone originally played parts written for cello or baritone horn, but soon found its own role in filling out the ensemble. The trombone played fewer notes than the clarinet, many of them exaggerated slurs or glissandos (sliding from one note to the next) facilitated by the slide. (Musicians called this tailgate trombone, or smear; when bands toured the streets in a horse-drawn wagon, the trombonist sat in front on the tailgate, to minimize the risk of his slide cracking another musician's skull.) Collective Improvisation By the time they began recording, New Orleans bands had already attained an unmistakable ensemble style. There was no obvious star or stand-out soloist. The front line improvised a dense, polyphonic texture—a collective improvisation, with each instrument occupying its own musical space (clarinet on top, cornet in the middle, trombone at the bottom), rhythm (clarinet is fastest, trombone slowest), and timbre. During the trio section of a piece, the band often switched to block-chord texture or, more rarely, presented a single horn plus accompaniment. Breaks and stop-time (where the band stops to let a single musician briefly solo) were common; soloing as we think of it was rare. In this sense, New Orleans jazz embodied the folk aesthetic, in which the group almost always subsumes the individual. This was especially true of the rhythm section, which provided a steady, unrelenting pulse. Forms Formally, New Orleans bands usually relied on ragtime-type compositions with multiple strains (as well as the novel structure of the twelve-bar blues). At the beginning of a number, each strain was often played only once. The trio offered a point of contrast: modulating to a new key, dynamic level, or texture. The musicians' performances were tied to the composition, with little opportunity to break loose from it to play improvisations (solo or collective). Only toward the end, when the band had hit a groove with itself and with the audience that no one wanted to stop, would a strain be repeated with various embellishments, until the leader called a halt.
What was distinctive about Bix Beiderbecke's recording "Singin' the Blues" when it was recorded in 1927?
It is a slow ballad.
Which is true about ragtime
Its "ragged" polyrhythmic syncopation contributed to jazz. It was a form of composition first published in 1897. It consisted of multiple distinct melodic strains each answer shown
Among the great stride virtuosos of the 1920s was _______, a pianist whose composition "Carolina Shout" became a test-piece for the New York elite.
James P. Johnson
The Great Migration and Freddie Keppard
Jazz began to leave New Orleans in the years of the Great Migration, the largest internal relocation of people in the history of the United States. It had started in the late nineteenth century, when former slaves began to drift away from their agricultural labors toward cities like New Orleans. With the coming of World War I, the movement became a torrent, as blacks pushed northward and ended up in the ghettos of Chicago and New York. The migration, a long time coming, was inevitable. Very few Southern blacks owned land. Under the system of sharecropping, they were living a life of agricultural peonage, while enduring, at every turn, reminders of their second-class status. They were forced to use segregated transportation, waiting rooms, water fountains, lavatories, doorways, stairways, and theaters, as well as schools and housing. Politically powerless, they were subject to the double standards of white laws. Outside the law, the iniquity extended to murder an
Jazz forms derived
Jazz forms are derived from African Music
"Dead Man Blues" was recorded in 1926 by
Jelly Roll Morton And His Red Hot Peppers
Who is Fletcher Henderson -Who is the trumpet player he hired in 1924
Like every other bandleader in New York, black and white, Fletcher Henderson initially looked to Whiteman for inspiration, seeking to emulate his opulent sound and diverse repertory as well as his public success. Yet he would ultimately take big-band music down a very different, far more influential route as he developed into an outstanding arranger. An unassuming, soft-spoken man who initially had no particular allegiance to jazz, Henderson, like Whiteman, grew up in a middle-class home with parents who disdained jazz. Born in Cuthbert, Georgia, he studied classical music with his mother. Soon after traveling to New York in 1920 for postgraduate study in chemistry, he learned how to play piano well enough to record with Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith. He went on to organize dance bands for nightclubs and ballrooms. In 1924, Henderson began a lengthy engagement at the luxurious Roseland Ballroom at 51st Street and Broadway, New York's preeminent dance palace. As a black musician working in midtown venues with exclusively white clienteles, Henderson offered polished and conventional dance music: fox-trots, tangos, and waltzes. At the same time, he had access to the best black musicians, including an attention-getting young saxophonist named Coleman Hawkins, and, like Whiteman, felt a need to keep up with the ever-changing dance scene.
Among the musicians hired by Fletcher Henderson in the 1920s was
Louis Armstrong
Bing Crosby's vocal style was inspired by
Louis Armstrong
______ is considered by many the most important figure in the development of jazz.
Louis Armstrong
Mode
Modes are alternative tonalities (scales) that can be derived from the familiar major scale by starting on a different scale tone. Music that uses the traditional major scale can be said to be in the Ionian mode.
Jazz is also a popular
Music and a folk music
The __________ was the first jazz band to be recorded, in 1917.
Original Dixieland Band
How does AABA form differ from ABAC form? What has changed
Other tunes in this book may be diagrammed a different way: A B A C, or A A′, an elegant variation on A A B A form. While A A B A adds contrast (the bridge) precisely halfway through the song, A B A C uses that same location to return to the opening melody. A (8 bars) statement B (8 bars) contrast A (8 bars) return of statement C (8 bars) conclusion or A (16 bars) statement A' (16 bars) statement with new conclusion Tunes that fall into this form include "Hotter Than That," Louis Armstrong (Chapter 6); "Singin' the Blues," Bix Biederbecke (Chapter 6); "Star Dust," Artie Shaw (Chapter 7); and "E.S.P.," Miles Davis (Chapter 14).
This bandleader, widely known as the "King of Jazz," was an early pop superstar who championed "symphonic jazz."
Paul Whiteman
African music has traditional aspects which were characterized by
Polyrhythm, call and response, blue notes, timber variation, and combined ideas. These became an important part of jazz, especially early jazz
Jazz nightlife was affected by the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which
Prohibited the sale and manufacture of alcohol
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band
Reading this excerpt from Victor's publicity sheet for the all-white Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB), we may surmise that "jazz"—at the dawn of the "Jazz Age"—was often misspelled, that many people did not know where San Francisco was, and that no one had heard about New Orleans, though all five members of the ODJB were natives of that city. The reason for Victor's interest was that the band had come to New York to play at Reisenweber's Restaurant in January 1917, causing a sensation. It was the talk of the town, and the record industry wanted some of the action. To most listeners, the ODJB had no precedent. Many ragtime records had preceded those of the ODJB (from as far back as 1897), and elements of jazz can be detected in records made between 1914 and 1916 by such African American performers as Bert Williams, James Reese Europe, and Wilbur Sweatman, as well as the white "Mammy singer" Al Jolson. But those elements—robust rhythms or embellishments beyond written ragtime—merely hint at the real thing. The ODJB was the real thing, a musical eruption genuinely new to the market.
Cake Walking Babies
Recorded in New York, where jazz and Tin Pan Alley pop songs first became inextricably entwined, "Cake Walking Babies (from Home)" combines New Orleans jazz polyphony with the popular music of the day. The title refers to the cakewalk, a comic dance supposedly dating from the time of slavery and one of the first dances to cross over from black to white society. As a song publisher who put his name on songs he may or may not have worked on, Clarence Williams saw records as a way to boost sheet music sales, and usually included vocal choruses on his recordings to promote words and music. The vocal chorus of "Cake Walking Babies" underscores the high-stepping cheerfulness of this forty-bar song (singer Alberta Hunter went on to enjoy a long career as an entertainer, mixing blues and standards). The rest of the performance offers a different kind of excitement, as cornet and soprano saxophone transform the usual New Orleans front line into a battle of wits. The first chorus begins with the usual collective improvisation. Bechet seems to anticipate Armstrong's every rest, filling those spaces with melodic figures. This chorus is followed by a statement of the sixteen-bar verse—a seldom-heard contrasting melody used as a way of introducing the chorus. The vocal (second) chorus is accompanied only by banjo and piano, and is lively if dated. It's hard to imagine a singer today performing in this style, whereas the bravura interpretations by Armstrong and Bechet, especially in choruses 3 and 4 (the last two), would be impressive in any day.
George Gershwin composed and performed
Rhapsody in Blue
______ was Louis Armstrong's nickname.
Satchmo
Who is the best-known composer of ragtime music?
Scott Joplin
Copenhagen
Several historic threads come together in Fletcher Henderson's 1924 recording of "Copenhagen," a multistrain composition by a Midwestern bandleader (Charlie Davis), named not for the capital of Denmark but after a favorite brand of snuff. The Wolverines, a scrappy little band featuring Bix Beiderbecke, had recorded it in May, and its publisher issued a stock arrangement of the song. To this Don Redman added his own variations, employing aspects of New Orleans jazz (orchestrated polyphony), block-chord harmonies (standard for large dance orchestras), brief breaks, hot solos, old-fashioned two-beat dance rhythms, and sectional call and response. Conceived in the ragtime tradition, the piece combines twelve-bar blues with sixteen-bar ragtime strains. Louis Armstrong's jolting blues chorus is an undoubted highlight in a performance also notable for the spirit of the ensemble and of individual contributions such as Charlie Green's trombone smears and Buster Bailey's whirling clarinet. Bailey joined Henderson around the same time as Armstrong, extending the New Orleans tradition of clarinet obbligato into big-band jazz a decade before, as we will see, the clarinet came to symbolize the Swing Era. Note the contrasting trios featuring three clarinets in the B strain and three trumpets in the D strain, and compare the notated polyphony in the A strain with the improvised polyphony (played against block-chord trumpets) in the E strain. The harmonically surprising finish is an arranger's trick, which in 1924 inclined listeners to shake their heads in wonder and move the needle back to the beginning.
Sidney Bechet and his influence -Ability to improvise, perhaps the first great improviser in jazz history
Sidney Bechet, page 79 who played clarinet and soprano saxophone, is considered by some to be the first great improviser in jazz history. During the early years of jazz, when the saxophone was on the margins of this music, Bechet turned the instrument into one of its leading voices. He was a moody, impassioned man whose tendency toward violence occasionally landed him in jail; but his emotions were imparted through the very timbre of his playing. He was one of the music's first global stars: he spent a good deal of the Jazz Age overseas, and was among the first Americans to perform in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Will Marion Cook and London Bechet was born in New Orleans to a musical Creole family. Primarily self-taught on the clarinet, he played in every important marching band in the city, occasionally doubling on cornet. In 1916, he left to travel with touring bands; one took him up to Chicago, where, three years later, he attracted the attention of Will Marion Cook (1869-1944). A classically trained violinist and conductor, Cook made his name as a songwriter and composer. In later years, he organized the first concerts in New York devoted exclusively to black composers, including jazz musicians. When he and Bechet met, Cook was about to take his Southern Syncopated Orchestra to London, and he recruited Bechet—a momentous decision. In London, Bechet purchased a straight (no bell curve) soprano saxophone, the instrument with which he ultimately made his mark. He also played clarinet in several prestigious halls with Cook's orchestra (they appeared before King George V), inspiring the first serious essay written about jazz. This lengthy review, by the conductor Ernest Ansermet, singled out "an extraordinary clarinet virtuoso who is, so it seems, the first of his race to have composed perfectly formed blues on the clarinet." He concluded: I wish to set down the name of this artist; as for myself, I shall never forget it—it is Sidney Bechet. When one has tried so often to rediscover in the past one of those figures to whom we owe the advent of our art,—those men of the 17th and 18th centuries, for example, who made expressive works of dance airs, clearing the way for Haydn and Mozart who mark, not the starting point, but the first milestone—what a moving thing it is to meet this very black, fat boy with white teeth and that narrow forehead, who is very glad one likes what he does, but who can say nothing of his art, save that he follows his "own way," and when one thinks that his "own way" is perhaps the highway the whole world will travel tomorrow. By the time Cook left England, Europe had taken American Negro music to its heart, an affection that would continue throughout the twentieth century. Bechet liked the way he was treated there and, with a contingent of musicians from the Southern Syncopated, played in both Paris and London, clearing the way for an invasion of black entertainers. But his involvement in a violent argument in London ended with his deportation in 1921.
During the 1920s, Louis Armstrong recorded with
Sidney Bechet, Bessie Smith, and Earl Hines.
Bass Instruments
String Bass (Pizzicato vs bowing)
Wilbur Sweatman
Sweatman's career page 57 parallels the tumultuous changes in the ragtime era as musicians began to favor recordings over sheet music. He began performing professionally in minstrel shows and circus bands, where his signature gimmick involved playing three clarinets simultaneously. Musicians admired his know-how and showmanship. Sweatman composed several rags, of which the most successful was "Down Home Rag" (1911), a multistrain piece in march/ragtime form built around a type of polyrhythm known as secondary ragtime: while the meter is duple, the main melody insistently repeats a pattern of three notes, implying a cross-rhythm—a rhythmic layer that conflicts with the underlying meter. (This device, also called "novelty ragtime," was carried on by pianists such as George Gershwin.) When Sweatman recorded his own version, in 1916, his performance included ad-lib embellishments that hinted at a new era of bluesy improvisation. Though rarely heard, his recording survives as a crucial link between ragtime and jazz.
Among the African American dances that shocked and invigorated the country in the early twentieth century was
The Charleston
Rhapsody in Blue's premiere, in 1924, featured
The Paul Whitman Orchestra
Blues form origins
The blues form has its origins in African American folk poetry
March form (AABBCCDD or AABBACCDD)
The brass band's primary contribution to jazz turned out to be the structure of its music. The defining unit of a march is a sixteen-bar strain, which marries a distinctive melody to an equally identifiable chord progression. Marches are made up of a succession of strains, each usually repeated before passing on to the next. A typical march with four strains could be diagrammed as A A B B C C D D or A A B B A C C D D (with the returning A offering a hint of closure and transition). No attempt is made to round things off at the end by reprising the first strain.
Life and influence of Jelly Roll Morton -Who were the Red Hot Peppers?
The development of jazz may be viewed as an ongoing alliance between improvisers and composers: soloists who spontaneously create music and writers who organize frameworks for them. They influence each other, much as Creoles and Uptown blacks did. So it's fitting that the first great jazz composer was a Creole who endured expulsion from his family in order to learn from and eventually work with the kind of musicians epitomized by Buddy Bolden. Jelly Roll Morton's genius is extensively documented on records: his legacy is not a matter of speculation, unlike Bolden's—though it, too, is encrusted in myths, chiefly of Morton's own devising. One of the most colorful characters in American music, Morton worked as a bordello pianist, pimp, pool hall hustler, and comedian before establishing himself as a fastidious musician and recording artist—a pianist, singer, composer, arranger, and music theorist. He was also a diamond-tooth dandy, insufferable braggart, occultist, and memoirist. He claimed that he had invented jazz in 1902, giving his own date of birth as 1885. In fact, New Orleans baptismal records indicate that he was born Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe in 1890. But if Morton didn't exactly invent jazz, he certainly helped to define it, propelling the New Orleans style forward at a time when no one knew precisely what jazz was.
Scott Joplin
The first "rags," appearing in 1897, were translations of improvised piano techniques into written form. These pieces adopted the march form, fitting their rhythmic contrast into a succession of distinct melodic strains. (March form, as it applies to jazz, is perhaps better understood as march/ragtime form.) Over the next two decades, thousands of rags were published—many of them by piano virtuosos who tailored their extraordinary technique to the level of the ordinary pianist. Those that have proved most durable were painstakingly notated by pianist-composers from the hinterland, none of whom was more celebrated or gifted than Scott Joplin. Joplin was born in the backwaters of East Texas, a child of Reconstruction who believed in the power of literacy to lift black people out of poverty. He left home as a teenager to become a professional pianist, touring up and down the Mississippi River. In 1894, Joplin settled in Sedalia, Missouri, a small but bustling railroad town. There he took a leading role in the musical affairs of page 56 the black community, organizing a brass band (he also played cornet) while studying music theory at the local black college. In 1899, he published the "Maple Leaf Rag" (named after a Sedalia saloon), a piece that wedded an irresistible polyrhythm to the harmonies and structure of a concert march. Joplin was shrewd enough to insist on royalty payments rather than the usual flat fee; the income from that one piece, which eventually sold hundreds of thousands of copies, supported him for the rest of his short-lived career. Spurred by his success, Joplin moved to St. Louis and then to New York City. He wrote more than fifty rags, some in collaboration with other pianist-composers, as well as a ballet and two operas. Joplin did not live to witness the Jazz Age. By the time he died (from syphilis), in 1917, recordings had displaced sheet music as the most effective way to market ragtime, and Joplin was largely forgotten. True recognition came much later. In 1970, he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame; in 1976, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Most surprisingly, he reached No. 3 on the Billboard pop chart in 1974, after his melodious 1903 rag "The Entertainer" was featured in the movie The Sting.
Name of Blues form
The form is known as 12 - bar blues
Where are there 32 bars
The idea behind the form is simple. Compose an eight-bar phrase. Repeat it. Contrast it with a new eight-bar phrase (known as the bridge, or release). Finally, repeat the original phrase one last time. All thirty-two bars make a single chorus.
Buddy Bolden
The most frequent boasts concerning Bolden's prowess relate to the loudness of his playing and the seductiveness of his approach to slow blues. Jelly Roll Morton claimed that "on a still night," Bolden's cornet could be heard as far away as twelve miles, the distance between the Mississippi Riverfront and Lake Pontchartrain. On the stillest of nights, that would not be possible. Yet Bolden would sometimes step outside the hall his band was working and play a few phrases to attract customers in adjacent neighborhoods, who preferred his livelier, raunchier brand of music. Although other musicians of his generation were remembered for their overall musicianship, only Bolden is consistently recalled in terms of a personal style. He was the first figure whose individuality was a decisive element, the first for whom the "how you do it" is more important than the "what you do." That made him the first jazz celebrity: the father figure on which the New Orleans story (and by extension, the jazz story) is grounded. Did Bolden invent jazz? We can't know for certain, but a qualified yes seems reasonable. Eyewitnesses to the musical life of New Orleans at the dawn of the twentieth century fail to cite a precursor to Bolden, or a significant rival to him during his glory days. He arrived at the right time, amid a musical cornucopia in which schooled and unschooled musicians worked together to provide a broad range of functional music—for picnics, concerts, dances, funerals, parades, and publicity events. Bolden, who could read music (he had studied with a neighbor), played in every kind of setting. The demand for music was so great that, perhaps inevitably, musicians devised ways to perform away from written scores.
John Philip Sousa
The sousaphone was inspired by John Philip Sousa (1854-1932), a conductor and composer whose name was synonymous with brass band excellence. In 1892, Sousa formed his first ensemble, and for the next forty years the Sousa Band toured the world, bringing to brass band music the highest level of virtuosity and precision. He also inspired thousands of lesser ensembles, ranging in size from large professional bands (often led by former Sousa soloists) to small, local amateur groups. Indeed, it was said that "a town without its brass band is as much in need of sympathy as a church without a choir." Staffed by townspeople who mastered as much notation as necessary, local bands played for dances, concerts, and parades. Towns with a significant African American population had their own brass bands, with black players just as keen to display their skills as their white counterparts.
You've Got to be Modernistic
The transition from ragtime to stride, from formal composition to jazz variations, is illuminated in Johnson's dazzling 1930 recording of "You've Got to Be Modernistic." Consider two aspects of its modernism. First, the introduction and first two strains are ornamented by advanced harmonies, drawing on the whole-tone scale, that keep the listener in a state of perpetual surprise. Second, Johnson switches midway from the formalism of ragtime to the theme and variations of jazz: the structure consists of three sixteen-bar strains (with a four-bar interlude), but with the introduction of strain C, the piece romps through seven choruses of variations with no reprise of strains A or B. Significantly, the C strain, unlike the virtuosic A and B strains, has the most traditional melody. It begins with a two-bar riff (which Johnson later set to the words "You've got to be modernistic!"), yet suggests a simple Scott Joplin-style ragtime harmony in measures 7 and 8. Johnson, for all his flashing speed and hairpin changes, always exercises a composer's control. Each strain is so distinct from the others (and in the C series, one chorus accents blue notes, another bass notes, another an insistent triple-chord pattern) that the listener is never lulled by repetition or familiarity. The entire performance is a well-ordered whirlwind.
New Orleans -How did this area enhance the development of Jazz
The world thinks of jazz as American, and Americans think of it as a national phenomenon—like the Mississippi, snaking through one state after another, fed by numerous tributaries such as blues, ragtime, marches, and dance bands, not to mention the overall traditions of Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. But in the beginning, jazz was local, even provincial—a performing tradition unique to the port city of New Orleans. The style known as New Orleans jazz (or Dixieland)—featuring a highly unusual polyphonic technique called collective improvisation—proved irresistible enough to attract the attention of the whole country. The reasons for this tradition's birth lie in the city's geographical, racial, political, cultural, and musical peculiarities.
Dixie Jass Band One Step
This enduringly popular Dixieland theme retains ragtime's multistrain form; at the same time, the musicians burst through with their embellishments—especially the clarinetist and the drummer, and especially in the third strain (or trio). From the opening, which juxtaposes sharp staccato (detached) chords with collective improvisation, to its triumphant conclusion, this music is very well organized, even as it suggests the feeling of carefree spontaneity. The trio is the most famous part of the piece, borrowed from one of the leading rags of the day ("That Teasin' Rag," written by pianist Joe Jordan in 1909) and sometimes played alone. It's a thirty-two-bar chorus, played three times. But because the chorus is made up of two similar sixteen-bar sections, we get a sense that the ensemble is playing the same melody six times, and growing increasingly rowdy with each repeat. In 1917, this outpouring of energy, underscored by repetition, had no precedent in recorded music—and it struck listeners as either exciting and optimistic or unruly and subversive. The Victor engineers did a remarkable job in capturing the sounds of the instruments, including the drummer's cymbal and woodblocks. The instrumentation allows us to hear polyphonic details as clarinet and trombone swirl around the cornet lead.
The center of the songwriting industry in New York was known colloquially as
Tin Pan Alley
Name a song in ABAC form
Tunes that fall into this form include "Hotter Than That," Louis Armstrong (Chapter 6); "Singin' the Blues," Bix Biederbecke (Chapter 6); "Star Dust," Artie Shaw (Chapter 7); and "E.S.P.," Miles Davis (Chapter 14).
Chord progression V
V is known as the dominant
Harmonic substitutions
Variety can be added through harmonic substitutions
Rhythm and Harmony Instruments
Vibraphone Organ Synthesizer Electric piano Guitar Banjo Piano
__________, known as the "Father of the Blues," was a cornet-playing bandleader who first heard the blues in a Mississippi train station.
W.C. Handy
Dance music and its influence on Ragtime
While Sousa enjoyed international renown, another kind of music was coming to the fore, one that embodied—as jazz itself would—the collision of African American music with the white mainstream, absorbing and combining the disparate aspects of folk music, popular music, and art music. Ragtime probably got its name from the phrase "ragged time," a colorful description of African American polyrhythm. At the time of the Civil War, "ragged time" would have been heard chiefly on the banjo, the black instrument par excellence. But over the next half century, black performers were able to take up piano—the very symbol of middle-class gentility, and yet sturdy enough to find a home in the lower-class saloons on the fringe of every urban community, white or black. Musicians who stumbled onto this instrument found that the same polyrhythms that enlivened banjo playing fit naturally under a pianist's fingers. The left hand kept a steady, two-beat rhythmic foundation: low bass notes alternating with higher chords. Against this background, the right hand was free to add contrasting rhythms that contradicted the duple meter. To "rag" a piece meant to subject it to this process of rhythmic complication. Ragtime could mean a type of song, a dance, or a piano style. These varied associations remind us how this genre saturated American music at the turn of the century.
What did jazz musicians like about I Got Rhythm
While the melody and words to a tune are legally protected, the chord progression is not. Any popular song can become the parent to thousands of new compositions, each with a new melody fitting within the A A B A harmonies of the original.
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band was a ______ band.
White
The Great Migration was a response to the manpower shortage created by
World War I
Cup Mutes
an orchestral mute with an extension that more or less covers the bell of a brass instrument.
Scale
a collection of pitches within the octave, forming a certain pattern of whole and half steps, from which melodies are created.
What is collective improvisation?
a collective improvisation, with each instrument occupying its own musical space (clarinet on top, cornet in the middle, trombone at the bottom), rhythm (clarinet is fastest, trombone slowest), and timbre.
Minor mode
a diatonic scale similar to the major scale, but with a different pattern of half steps and whole steps (W H W W H W W); normally used in Western music to convey melancholy or sadness.
A short improvised passage by a drummer is known as
a fill
Groove
a general term for the overall rhythmic framework of a performance. Grooves include swing, funk, ballad, and Latin.
Harmon Mute
a hollow mute, originally with a short extension but usually played without it, leaving a hole in the center and creating a highly concentrated sound.
Stride style is defined by
a left-hand technique, alternating bass notes and chords.
Call and response
a pervasive principle of interaction or conversation in jazz: a statement by one musician or group of musicians is immediately answered by another musician or group.
"Secondary ragtime" is
a polyrhythm, featuring a meter of three superimposed on a meter of two.
Creoles were
a racially mixed people of color.
In addition to being a leading exponent of the "Chicago style," Frankie Trumbauer was
a saxophonist whose delicate solos influenced later black soloists.
Scale degree
a scale degree is the name given to a particular note of a scale to specify its position relative to the tonic (the main note of the scale).
Backbeat
a simple polyrhythm emphasizing beats 2 and 4 of a 4/4 measure (rather than 1 and 3).
Vibrato
a slight wobble in pitch produced naturally by the singing voice, often imitated by wind and string instruments.
Straight Mutes
a standard orchestral mute that dampens the sound of a brass instrument without much distortion.
The bandleader and composer Duke Ellington was also
a stride-piano player
At the turn of the century, the term "ragtime" meant
a type of song. a piano style. a syncopated dance. each answer shown
A cornet is
a version of the trumpet with a mellower timbre and deep mouthpiece.
Bix Beiderbecke was
a white cornet player from Iowa.
James Reese Europe was
an accomplished black conductor and arranger active during World War I.
When individual notes of a chord are played one after another it is called
an arpeggio.
Don Redman was
an arranger
A sideman is
any musician employed by a bandleader.
Ballads
ballad (1) - a slow, romantic popular song; (2) a long, early type of folk song that narrated a bit of local history.
Which instrument was originally in the rhythm section but is rarely encountered in jazz today?
banjo
Big bands
big bands - large jazz orchestras featuring sections of saxophones, trumpets, and trombones, prominent during the Swing Era (1930s).
Blue notes
blue notes - notes in which the pitch is bent expressively, using variable intonation; also known as blue notes.
Blues
blues - a musical/poetic form in African American culture, created c. 1900 and widely influential around the world.
A harmony consisting of three or more different pitches is called a
triad
Triad
triad - the standard three-note chord (e.g., C-E-G) that serves as the basis for tonal music.
Frank Trumbauer and Bix Beiderbecke created the "Chicago style.
true
The minstrel show's characteristics, including blackface, lingered in American show business until the early 1950s.
true
Brass Instruments
trumpet cornet trombone
Which are common brass instruments in jazz?
trumpet and trombone
Walking bass
walking bass - a bass line featuring four equal beats per bar, usually used as a rhythmic foundation in jazz.
Manuel Perez
was a Creole musician. led the Onward Brass Band. studied classical music, focusing on the cornet. each answer shown
Jelly Roll Morton
was a Creole musician. played piano. led the Red Hot Peppers. each answer shown
Louis Armstrong's All Stars
was a band that played in the New Orleans style that Armstrong played with and led for the last twenty-five years of his life.
Sidney Bechet
was the first great jazz saxophone soloist.
Country blues musicians change the timbre and pitch of their guitars by using
bottlenecks
The popularity of the trumpet (cornet), clarinet, and trombone in jazz was due mostly to the influence of
brass bands
A big band consists of three sections:
brass, reeds, and rhythm
Breaks
break - a short two- or four-bar episode in which the band abruptly stops playing to let a single musician solo with a monophonic passage.
Cadence
cadence - stopping places that divide a harmonic progression into comprehensible phrases. See half cadence, full cadence.
A statement by one musician or group of musicians immediately answered by another musician or group is known as
call and response
Chart
chart - a shorthand musical score that serves as the point of reference for a jazz performance, often specifying only the melody and the harmonic progression; also known as a lead sheet.
Chords
chord - a combination of notes performed simultaneously.
a turnaround is
chords played in the last few bars of a chorus, leading on to the next.
Chromatic harmony
chromatic harmony - complex harmony based on the chromatic scale.
The trumpet (or cornet), trombone, and ________ constitute the front line of a New Orleans band.
clarinet
Comping
comping - a rhythmically unpredictable way of playing chords to accompany a soloist; typically one of the variable layers in the rhythm section.
In addition to inventing the sousaphone, John Philip Sousa
composed many marches, including "The Stars and Stripes Forever."
a "head" is the
composed portion of a small-combo jazz performance.
Consonant harmony
consonant - the quality of a harmony that's stable and doesn't need to resolve to another chord.
Counterpoint
counterpoint - polyphonic texture, especially when composed.
Country blues
country blues - an early style of blues, first recorded in the 1920s, featuring itinerant male singers accompanying themselves on guitar.
In his later years, Louis Armstrong
had a number one hit single in 1964 ("Hello, Dolly!"). maintained his old-fashioned "grinning and shuffling" stage demeanor despite its uncomfortable connections to minstrel traditions. shocked the establishment by protesting Orval Faubus's takeover of Central High School. each answer shown
Harmonic Improvisation
harmonic improvisation - a new melodic line created with notes drawn from the underlying harmonic progression; also known as running the changes.
Half valving
depressing one or more of the valves of a brass instrument only halfway, producing an uncertain pitch with a nasal sound.
Harmonic progression
harmonic progression - a series of chords placed in a strict rhythmic sequence; also known as changes.
Will Marion Cook
discovered Sidney Bechet.
Dissonant harmony
dissonant - the quality of an unstable harmony that resolves to another chord.
Pop songs were originally written as a verse followed by a refrain. Musicians typically
drop the verse, repeating the refrain as a cycle
In a jazz ensemble, the "ride pattern" is played by the
drummer
Which instrumentalist might drop "bombs" during a performance?
drummer
A typical rhythm section in a jazz ensemble comprises
drums, piano, guitar, and bass.
The most common meter used in jazz is
duple
the minstrel show
each answer shown was established as early as the 1840s. featured performers in blackface makeup. reinforced many degrading stereotypes of African Americans.
Field hollars and work songs
expressed the loneliness and hardship of African Americans.
"Race records," kept by the U.S. Census, were designed to prevent African Americans from voting in the South.
false
Like Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson came from a disadvantaged background in New Orleans, steeped in the blues.
false
The Harlem Renaissance celebrated jazz musicians and bandleaders alongside its poets, painters, and playwrights.
false
The Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings are influential because they
feature soloists and highlight individual expression.
Field hollars
field holler - an unaccompanied, rhythmically loose vocal line sung by a field worker.
Fill
fill - a short drum solo performed to fill in the spaces in an improvised performance.
How many notes does a pentatonic scale have?
five
Harmonic substitutions
harmonic substitution - the substitution of one chord, or a series of chords, for harmonies in a progression.
______ is the simultaneous sounding of pitches.
harmony
In jazz terminology, "changes" refers to
harmony.
What is a Head?
head - a composed section of music that frames a small-combo performance, appearing at the beginning and again at the end.
A break is an interruption of ________ texture by ________ texture.
homophonic; monophonic
Homophony
homophony - a texture featuring one melody supported by harmonic accompaniment.
Shake
for brass instruments, a quick trill between notes that mimics a wide vibrato, often performed at the end of a musical passage.
Thirty-two-bar pop song form is made up of
four eight bar phrases
When the Swing Era began, in 1935, Louis Armstrong
fronted his own big band and made dozens of hit records.
When musicians invent music in that space and moment, they are
improvising
Louis Armstrong grew up
in a poor neighborhood in New Orleans.
Percussion Instruments
in the rhythm section of a jazz band, the drums, cymbals, congas, and other instruments that are struck to provide the musics rhythmic foundation. Drum kit, or drum set, or trap set Bass drum Snare drum Cymbals Ride cymbal Crash cymbal High hat cymbal Congas Bongos Timbales Maracas Guiro
Wind Section and the Rhythm Section
instruments that provide accompaniment for jazz soloing: harmony instruments (piano, guitar), bass instruments (string bass, tuba), and percussion (drum set).
The "chorus" of a composition in popular song form
is thirty-two bars long. is also known as a refrain. contains the central melody or tune. each answer shown
Swing
jazz from the period 19351945, usually known as the Swing Era; (2) a jazz-specific feeling created by rhythmic contrast within a particular rhythmic framework (usually involving a walking bass and a steady rhythm on the drummers ride cymbal).
Storyville was
known as "the district." a precinct of saloons, cabarets, and bordellos. contributed to the development of jazz. each answer shown
When jazz bassists pluck the strings with their fingers, that technique is called
pizzicato
Licks
licks - short melodic ideas that form a shared basic vocabulary for jazz improvisers.
Sections within the chorus are usually represented
like basic melodies with letters like A, B, C
Melodic Paraphrase
melodic paraphrase - a preexisting melody used as the basis for improvisation.
The grouping of pulses (beats) into patterns of two, three, or more per bar is known as
meter
Joe King Oliver
played the cornet. was Louis Armstrong's mentor. moved his band from New Orleans to Chicago. each answer shown
Polyphony
polyphony - texture in which two or more melodies of equal interest are played at the same time.
Modal Improvisation
modal improvisation - the process of using a scale as the basis for improvisation.
Monophony
monophony - a texture featuring one melody with no accompaniment. See also break, stop-time.
Motives
motive - a short melodic or rhythmic idea.
Pulse Rhythm
moving at a given tempo (speed)
Tonal music
music characterized by an overall tonal center (the tonic) that serves as the center of gravity: all other harmonies are more or less dissonant in relation to this tonal center.
Free Rhythm
music that flows through time without regularly occurring pulses.
The rhythmic contrast resulting from the simultaneous use of contrasting rhythms is known as
polyrhythm
Trading fours
often occurs between the drummer and other soloists. occurs when soloists exchange short improvised solos. all of these. can involve call and response.
Freddie Keppard was
one of the first jazz musicians to travel widely.
Duke Ellington's compositions number
over a thousand
Pedal Point
pedal point - a passage in which the bass note refuses to move, remaining stationary on a single note.
Pentatonic scale
pentatonic scale - a scale of five notes; for example, C D E G A.
What is a pentatonic scale
pentatonic scale five-note scale, as C D E G A
Vaudeville blues - also known as classic or urban blues - were
performed on black theater circuits
Louis Armstrong changed the way jazz musicians improvised by
performing with a rhythmic energy that was quickly imitated.
Mutes
physical devices inserted into the bell of brass instruments to distort the timbre of the sounds coming out. See cup mute, Harmon mute, pixie mute, plunger mute, and straight mute.
By 1900, the syncopations of ragtime music had shifted from the banjo to the
piano
In addition to playing the roots to the harmonies, the string bass also
provides an underlying rhythmic foundation.
Jazz was transformed by the following technological advancements, new in the 1920s:
radio, electrical recording, and movies
"March form" was widely used in the following genre:
ragtime
Ragtime
ragtime - a style of popular music in the early twentieth century that conveyed African American polyrhythm in notated form; includes popular song and dance, although its primarily known today through compositions written for the piano.
Although its specialty was the finest in Harlem jazz, the Cotton Club
refused to admit black patrons
In African music, improvisation happens within a repeated
rhythmic cycle
Ride pattern dropping bombs
ride pattern - a steady pulsation played on the ride cymbal that forms one of the foundations for modern jazz.
Riffs
riff - a short, catchy, and repeated melodic phrase.
An octave is
the interval on a piano from any key to the next key, above or below, of the same letter name.
Vocal improvisation that uses nonsense syllables instead of words is called
scat-singing.
Rhythmic contrast
see polyrhythm.
Collective improvisation is
several instruments improvising their parts simultaneously. a dense, polyphonic texture. a defining characteristic of New Orleans jazz each answer shown
Glissando
sliding seamlessly from one note to another, as exemplified on the trombone; also known as smear.
Small Combos
small combo - the standard small group for jazz, combining a few soloists with a rhythm section.
The blues scale is best described as a scale that is
somewhere between major and minor.
"Tempo" refers to the _______ of the music.
speed
Spirtuals
spiritual - African American religious song.
Some songs become popular over the years among jazz musicians because of their improvisational possibilities. These are called __________.
standards
Stop-time
stop-time - a technique in which a band plays a series of short chords a fixed distance apart (e.g., a measure), creating spaces for an instrument to fill with monophonic improvisation; often used in early jazz.
Coleman Hawkins was an influential soloist on the
tenor sax.
Texture
texture - the relationship between melody and harmony: a melody supported by harmonic accompaniment (homophony), a melody by itself (monophony), or two or more melodies played at the same time, creating their own harmonies (polyphony).
Plunger Mute
the bottom end of a sink plunger (minus the handle), used as a mute for a brass instrument.
The contrasting B section in pop song form is known as
the bridge
Downbeat
the first beat of a measure, or bar.
Tonic
the first degree of the scale, or the chord built on the first scale degree.
Major mode
the most common scale in Western music, sung to the syllables do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti do. The pattern of whole and half steps is W W H W W W H.
Meter
the organization of recurring pulses into patterns. See also duple meter, irregular meter, and triple meter.
Timbre
the quality of sound, as distinct from its pitch; also known as tone color.
Chromatic scale
the scale containing twelve half steps within the octave, corresponding to all the keys (black and white) within an octave on the piano (e.g., from C to C).
Polyrhythm
the simultaneous use of contrasting rhythms; also known as rhythmic contrast.
Half-step
the smallest interval possible in Western music.
timbre is
the sound quality or "tone color" of an instrument.
Tempo
the speed of a piece of music.
Trading Fours
trading fours - in a jam session, "trading" short (usually four-bar) solos back and forth between the drums and the soloists, or between soloists.
Playing pitches with a great deal of flexibility, sliding through infinitesimal fractions of a step for expressive purposes, is known as
variable intonation. blue notes. bent notes. each answer shown
Timber Variation
the use of a wide range of timbres for expressive purposes. Came to jazz through African American folk culture, but it lies deep within the idea of all folk traditions
The blues has ____-line stanzas.
three
Which of the following is a set of two drums, mounted on a stand, that are played with sticks instead of hands?
timbales
Vaudeville or classic blues
vaudeville blues - an early theatrical form of the blues featuring female singers, accompanied by a small band; also known as classic blues.
Work songs
work song - a type of folk song used during work to regulate physical activity or to engage the worker's attention.