Introduction

Welcome to Wikipedia's portal for jazz music.

The first music called jazz originated with southern blacks, however the accepted cultural birth place of this style of music is New Orleans, Louisiana, United States around the start of the 20th century. Jazz uses blue notes, syncopation, swing, call and response, polyrhythms, and improvisation, and blends African American musical styles with Western music technique and theory. Jazz musician and teacher Bill Evans, described jazz as more than just a musical genre but a process of making music whereby, "one minutes music is made in one minute's time". This is a key difference to composed music where there is less spontaneous creation of music and only limited space for the artist's own interpretation. (more)

Selected article

Jazz harmony is the harmonic idiom or harmonies used in jazz. Similarities between jazz harmony and traditional or common practice harmony or tonality include, notational techniques, (e.g. the musical staff, clefs, accidentals etc.) many chord progressions, and many musical scales. In jazz harmony, however, additional tensions are added to harmonic progressions and jazz scales are also used.

Jazz music is characterized by its unique sound which is a combination of instruments such as the trumpet, trombone, clarinet, saxophone etc.

In jazz, chord construction is similar to traditional harmony but includes the wider use of 7th chords as well as chords containing compound intervals. Also, the principles of voice leading, the practice of smoothly moving individual notes of one chord to another, are considerably different from traditional harmony.

The piano and guitar are the two instruments which typically provide harmony for a jazz group. Players of these instruments deal with harmony in a real-time, flowing improvisational context as a matter of course. It is one of the biggest challenges in jazz.

In a big-band context, the harmony is the basis for the writing for the horns, along with melodic counterpoint, etc. The improvising soloist is expected to have a complete knowledge of the basics of harmony, as well as their own unique approach to chords, and their relationship to scales. A style of one's own is made from these building blocks, along with a rhythmic concept.

Selected biography

Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926 – September 28, 1991) was an American jazz musician, widely considered one of the most influential of the 20th century. A trumpeter, bandleader and composer, Davis was at the forefront of almost every major development in jazz from World War II to the 1990s. He played on various early bebop records and recorded one of the first cool jazz records. He was partially responsible for the development of modal jazz, and jazz fusion arose from his work with other musicians in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Davis was late in a line of jazz trumpeters that started with Buddy Bolden and ran through Joe "King" Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie. Many of the major figures in post-war jazz played in one of Davis' groups at some point in their career.

Davis was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on March 13, 2006. He has also been inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame, and the Big Band and Jazz Hall of Fame. (more)

Selected world jazz article

Jazz is an American musical genre largely originated by African Americans but the style was rapidly and enthusiastically taken up by musicians all over the world, including Australia. Jazz and jazz-influenced syncopated dance music was being performed in Australia within a year of the emergence of jazz as a definable musical genre in the United States.

Until the 1950s the primary form of accompaniment at Australian public dances was jazz-based dance music, modelled on the leading white British and American jazz bands, and this style enjoyed wide popularity.

It was not until after World War II that Australian jazz scene began to diversify as local musicians were finally able to get access to recordings by leading African-American jazz musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, and bebop, cool jazz and free jazz exerting a strong influence on Australian musicians in the late 1950s and beyond. (more)

See also

• Jazz by nationality

Did you know...

• ...that Crossover Jazz retains an emphasis on improvisation but attempts to make that improvisation commercially successful by couching it in a variety of marketable formats?
• ...that Loose Tubes were called "...the best instrumentalist of their generation (...) the most important band to appear on the British jazz scene" by Time Out?
• ...that The Sound of Jazz was a landmark television program that was part of CBS's Seven Lively Arts series?
• ...that Dakota Staton's success lead her to win Down Beat magazine's "Most Promising New Comer" award in 1955?

Quotes

• "By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with."
  • Duke Ellington

• "Jazz is something Negroes invented, and it said the most profound things—not only about us and the way we look at things, but about what modern democratic life is really about. It is the nobility of the race put into sound ... jazz has all the elements, from the spare and penetrating to the complex and enveloping. It is the hardest music to play that I know of, and it is the highest rendition of individual emotion in the history of Western music."
  • Wynton Marsalis

• "Improvisation is a desperate attempt to remember the tune.
  • Leonid S. Sukhorukov, All About Everything (2005)

(more)

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Jazz news

• October 6: Jazz FM relaunches across the UK on digital radio.[1]
• July 20: Monterey Jazz Festival Records to Release Six Archival Recordings[2]
• July 18: American jazz singer Jo Stafford dies at the age of 90. [3]
• July 18:Chicago Jazz Philharmonic Tribute to Nelson Mandela [4]
• June 16: Jazz champion Svensson dies at 44 [5]

See also

• Jazz portal archive of previous news stories
• Latest jazz news from All About Jazz.
• Latest jazz news from Google News.
• Latest jazz news from BBC News.

Anniversaries

• October 6, 2008: UK jazz radio station, Jazz FM launches on digital radio in the United Kingdom.

WikiProjects

• WikiProject Jazz

Related portals

Categories

Jazz genres

Associated Wikimedia