jazz

• The Jazz Saxophonists
• The Jazz Trumpeters
• The Female Jazz Vocalists
• The Male Jazz Vocalists
• The Jazz Pianists
• The Jazz Guitarists
• The Jazz Bassists
• The Jazz Drummers
• The Jazz Big Band
• The Jazz - Other Instruments
• The Jazz Terms (for terms like swing, bop etc.)
• The Jazz Anecdotes

Also, pingouin has chosen to node the Ken Burns' Jazz Metanode. You can see some jazz-related stuff there.

comments & suggestions welcome. /msg me

So that's jazz. Jazz is hip and sophisticated. You need read no further.

Actually, that's just a lie used to sell you stuff (including CDs). Jazz is neither hip nor sophisticated; it's just music. There are traits that vary from era to era, but there is a commonality to those traits that transcends the epochs.

There's improvisation at the center of it all. First and foremost, improvisation refers to the spontaneous creation of melody, and of its rhythm. Traditionally, that creation was buttressed by a framework - a song, with its preset melody and chords. An improvisor soloes, i.e. creates a new melody based on those chords; singers became part of the mix, thanks a great deal to Louis Armstrong, who evolved a vocal translation of his trumpet style, influencing singers like Billie Holiday and Bing Crosby, and just about any other jazz singer since.

But even the background was improvised. The remaining musicians often had only the melody and chords to fall back on, just the basics one would find on a minimally-scored piece of sheet music, so there was no indication of, say, how exactly the drummer should keep the 4/4 time, or what exact notes the pianist should play to voice the E Major chord. In early jazz, you also had horns improvising melodies in support of the lead (or soloist) horn, a concept of collective improvisation brought back over the decades in various forms, like the contrapuntal duets of Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, and, in its most enduring form, the all-out each-in-one's-own-musical-plane simultaneity of free jazz, often far removed from the song form and blues roots of earlier forms, but still containing the ineffable essence of jazz.

But if it's just about improvisation, that means Merle Haggard (from the tradition of "country jazz", i.e. the Western Swing of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys) and Eric Clapton (improvisational roots in the blues, without which there would be no jazz) are jazz musicians too, right? Maybe so. That's part of the problem: if there is no "jazz police", patrolling the streets with eternal vigilance, then everything can ultimately call itself jazz.

Jazz harmony, for most of the 20th Century, has been based on seventh chords: a root note, with three other notes, successively a third higher than the previous one. The "seventh" comes from the fact that that last note is a seventh away from the root. The flavor of the chord comes mainly from the quality of the underlying triad - major, minor, diminished, or augmented. So Steely Dan is a jazz band, and so are The Beatles, since such chords occur in many of their songs. And both bands featured a little improvisation as well.

But none of these aforementioned examples (from Merle to Lennon & McCartney) are jazz. Something is missing, and it's not melanin. But what is it? Jazz might be best described as the set of jealously-guarded canons that have endured over the decades, even musics that divided one set of jazz police from another, once upon a time. Big band jazz, the orchestras of the likes of Fletcher Henderson, Paul Whiteman, Duke Ellington, and many others, introduced detailed, written-out arrangements of instrumental parts, but it still included improvisation, and was, musically, thoroughly in the then-young jazz tradition. The big rift came in the 1940's, with the advent of bebop, a loose, small-group form of the music, not really all that far-removed, in retrospect, from swing-era jazz. But the added harmonic and melodic complexity, plus the change from making-music-to-dance-to to an art for art's sake aesthetic, alienated much of the jazz audience of the day.

Bop would become the mainstream, i.e. the center of gravity of the collection of canons, and would evolve over the decades into its own little subgenres, like cool jazz, hard bop, and such. The mainstream of today would include swing-era stuff, and bebop in all its forms - the NPR version of "what jazz is". The more adventurous would include the 80s/90s mainstream: music derived from Miles Davis' pre-fusion groups, music championed by the likes of the latter-day alumni of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, such as Wynton Marsalis. And, yes, they all wear nice clothes, something especially important for the marketing of "Young Lions" like Joshua Redman.

But since the 1950's, jazz musicians have been extending the tradition in ways that alienated critics and audiences, akin to the days of the boppers; pianist Lennie Tristano had even tried free improvisation as early as the 1940's. Cecil Taylor began to find a way to fuse his love of Ellington and Thelonious Monk with the Prokofiev and Stravinsky and Henry Cowell of his conservatory training, and to improvise from structures completely removed from the preset chords and melodies of jazz tunes. This came to be known as free jazz, which, in turn, developed its own amorphous, overlapping set of subgenres over the decades, like free improvisation, "energy music", or freebop, for instance. Via the aforementioned Miles influence, some of this music has made its way, in somewhat manicured (and often subtle) form, into the mainstream, while the wilder or more non-conformist aspects remain as underground as they were in 1961. Those who sit in hope of the canonization of the avant-to-the-max Frank Wright or Sunny Murray will wait in vain, but many musicians, over the years, have become elder statesmen of the avant-garde, like the members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Taylor, Peter Kowald, and Peter Brotzmann, among many others. Some have received subsidies, such as MacArthur Foundation Grants, or have found careers in the academic world. But you will probably never hear them on NPR, nor see their latest CD hyped by retailers and portals.

The most commercially popular form of jazz over the years is Not Jazz, that is, watered-down jazz-like musics that are user-friendly enough to be hyped by the retailers and portals of the day. Often the music is made by real jazz musicians, which gives it even more of a veneer of validity, from the saccharine balladry of Harry James, to soul jazz, to the trendy R&B instrumentals of Ramsey Lewis, to the smooth jazz and the it's-jazz-by-virtue-of-sampling-old-jazz records of today. While indie labels have pretty much always been the media midwife of real jazz, large labels, aggressively marketing a combination of Not Jazz and conservative jazz vocalists, have usually been able to define, by sheer brute force, "what jazz is", much as Intel and Microsoft define all that is "computing" for a large number of people. Not Jazz is a varied tradition in its own right, and is often the centerpiece of "jazz" festivals worldwide.

Which is why the word tends to be a bit off-putting. If someone intones the word "jazz" (especially if it's preceded by an adjective like "cool"), I get the same sort of queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach that I would if a telemarketer were calling. Someone is trying to sell me something that I, a casual/hardcore jazz fan since childhood, wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, or it's a product, musical or not, being sold by invoking the idea of "jazz". Miles Davis, once the embodiment of the hip, well-dressed jazzman, abandoned the word sometime around 1965, for various reasons, including not wanting to be lumped in with the swirling commercial ghetto of musics called, rightly or wrongly, "jazz", especially in the face of the commercial ascendence of Beatles-era rock.

Other terms have sprung up since then. The musics Miles made after abandoning the word came to be known as fusion, and "smooth jazz" has its roots both in soul jazz and the more dumbed-down aspects of fusion; someone coined the word "fuzak" back in the 70's, in the wake of major labels like Warner (now part of AOL Time Warner) and CBS Records (now owned by Sony) flooding the market with slickly-recorded Not Jazz (also known, very briefly, as "Triple Z" jazz). Those two record labels, either for fear of alienating jazz fans, or fear of scaring away pop buyers, even had ads that extolled the new products of their jazz divisions, but deliberately failed to mention the word "jazz".

Others, irreparably divorced from the marketers' definition of jazz, would come up with new names: "creative music", "creative improvised music", "music in the (jazz) tradition", or the AACM's notion of "Great Black Music", part of the Art Ensemble of Chicago's motto, tying together the Dogon, the field holler, Charlie Parker, and James Brown, et al. These terms were mainly meant to invoke the connection between free jazz and the jazz musics that came before; fancier than the term "free jazz" - a relevant quote from saxophonist Chico Freeman: "Free jazz" means I don't get paid, a quip with multiple truths to it, from an era when loft jazz musicians were not yet welcome in large numbers. (The same applies to the "free music" of Germany's FMP). Dr. Billy Taylor, a mainstream pianist and educator whose career goes back to the late swing era, promoted jazz as "America's Classical Music", a uniquely home-grown musical artform that had grown as high-falutin' as anything in Carnegie Hall, and, now, the advent of such latter-day institutions as Jazz at Lincoln Center is a testament to the high-falutin' mindshare that the mainstream has won over the past quarter-century.

But, at the end of the day, it's just music. And "jazz" is still a loaded word, always ripe for more loading.

Good jazz is when the leader jumps on the piano, waves his arms, and yells. Fine jazz is when a tenorman lifts his foot in the air. Great jazz is when he heaves a piercing note for 32 bars and collapses on his hands and knees. A pure genius of jazz is manifested when he and the rest of the orchestra run around the room while the rhythm section grimaces and dances around their instruments.

-Charles Mingus

Jazz to Mingus wasn't music. The music of great jazz players was a byproduct of their genius, their knowledge of the rhythm, their feel of the beat. Jazz was a feeling expressed through spontaneous composition. You couldn't capture real jazz on paper, there was no emotion in ink. The heart of jazz was with the musician, giving the music meaning and ad-libbing himself to you during solos. It wasn't the music...it was what you did with it.

...anything Milhaud has done in classical music, McPherson and Bird, alone, do with ease as well as human warmth and beauty.

-Let My Children Hear Music

Like they say, It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing...

Transforms from race car to robot and back!

AUTOBOT: JAZZ

FUNCTION: SPECIAL OPERATIONS EXPERT
"Do it with style or don't bother doing it."

JAZZ loves Earth culture. Always looking to learn more. His knowledge of Earth makes him the indispensable right-hand man to Optimus Prime. Takes most dangerous missions. Very cool, very stylish, very competent. Equipped with photon rifle, flamethrower, full-spectrum beacon, 180db stereo speakers. Creates dazzling, disorienting sound and light shows. Versatile, clever, daring, but prone to be distracted.

• Strength: 5
• Intelligence: 9
• Speed: 7
• Endurance: 7
• Rank: 8
• Courage: 9
• Firepower: 5
• Skill: 10

Not only were all of the 1984/85 Autobot cars based on real vehicles, some of them were based on very specific cars. Jazz, for instance, was modelled after the Martini Porsche 935 racing car. According to http://www.geocities.com/kidk0rrupt/porsche/porsche.htm, four of these cars were built, one each year between 1978 and 1981; the 1981 car was appropriately numbered "4" and became Takara's model for the toy that eventually became Jazz. Wheeljack and Smokescreen were also modelled after real-life racecars.

The cartoon played up on the "180db stereo speakers" described in Jazz's tech specs and made them so they could pop out of the rear of the car, pointing forward and playing loud enough to scramble Decepticon sensors whenever they were within range. The character himself talked in a sort of jive slang and got a whole lot of airtime (he often acted like Optimus Prime's second-in-command) in return for being cool.

"Jazz" is one of those words that seems just right to express what it means or what it means to you. But like the difficulty there is in finding a single comprehensive way to define just what jazz is, the question of the derivation of the word is, at best, speculative, in all probability: unknown.

It's not that there isn't a grab-bag of theories as to just what the etymology is, though.

The earliest recorded use of the word in reference to the musical style comes from 1916 (though Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have coined it, himself, in 1902 to "differentiate the style from ragtime"). An earlier usage, meaning "full of vigor and energy" dates from 1913. By 1918, it was "known" to be slang for sexual intercourse—though "jass," an alternate form of the word was already known to carry that meaning (and like the contemporary favorite similar four-letter word, it had a variety of meanings and usage within the context of profanity). Also, it was said in 1924 that the word "jazz" had had that meaning in and around dance halls for at least thirty years.

Of course, that doesn't mean it was coined with that meaning but that the meaning was certainly attached to it. And it was a part of the quasi-culture of dancing, parties, and such—generally speaking, a word of "low origin" that was used by those of "low origin" (meaning primarily blacks and the poor) who frequented such places. It's no wonder, with the stigma of low-class profanity attached, that those of more 'refined God-fearing' sensibilities would react negatively to it and the music with which it was associated. H.L. Mencken wrote:

According to Raven I. McDavid Sr. of Greenville, S.C., the 1919 announcement of the first "Jazz band" to play in Columbia, where he was then serving in the state legislature, inspired feelings of terror among the local Baptists such as might have been aroused by a personal appearance of Yahweh. Until that time "Jazz" had never been heard in the Palmetto State except as a verb meaning to copulate.

Other similar musical terms reportedly had origins in sexual slang (or association with it). "Boogie-woogie" was once slang for syphilis. "Gig," though more directly related to a dance or party, was (along with "gigi" or "giggy") used as slang for vulva. "Jelly roll" was another slang term for vulva (though like that other word, had a variety of related meanings up to and including the sex act. It may derive from the use of "jelly" as slang for semen. "Juke" came from "juke house," another term for brothel (later more generally, a dance hall—though with similarly negative connotations). It is thought to come from a Gullah word meaning "disorderly" or "wicked." One of the places the music was often played (early on) was in brothels which offered dancing and partying in addition to their primary purpose. An earlier, now archaic form of swing—swinge—was used to mean intercourse. An interesting quote from a 1622 poem contains both of last two: "Give her cold jelly to take up her belly, And once a day swinge her again" (John Fletcher, "The Beggar's Rush"). But all that aside, the origin may lie elsewhere.

Some theories think the origin comes from another language. One suggestion is that it is from jasi, a Mandingo word meaning "to act out of character." Another is the word yas, from the Temne language meaning "to be energetic." Lending some credence to those is that many of the former slaves and their descendants from whom the music derived came from West African nations. Similar terms drawn from those sources filtered through Creole were used to mean "hurry up" (which nicely describes the rhythms of jazz, particularly in a context of a time when rock and roll did not exist). Another suggestion is that of a French, by way of New Orleans, word—jaser or jazer—meaning "to chatter" (interestingly, yet another slang term for copulation).

Then there are the "historical" theories. One posits that it came from the abbreviations of early musicians' names (like "Chas." for Charles or "Jas." for James). Supposedly (as the theory goes) there was either a "dancing slave" named Jasper from New Orleans (around 1825) or a drummer from Vicksburg, Mississippi named Charles "Chas" Washington or a musician from Chicago who went by the name Jasbo Brown. Take your pick, I find them all equally implausible.

Another story is of a time (1916 or 1915) when a New Orleans band was playing that music in Chicago. An inebriated patron of the club (supposedly a retired vaudeville entertainer) became overly aroused by the exciting music and leapt atop a table, shouting "Jass it up, boys." The manager of the club then used it for its commercial potential, having the man repeat his catchphrase on other occasions and the next day the band was billed as "Stein's Dixie Jass Band." Recall that this was, technically, an obscene word. Only because of the many contexts and ways in which it could be used was this gotten away with...if it happened at all (the band existed and the name existed, though).

Perusing several sites on the band, it is unclear of the actual origin of their name. One claim is that it was an insult from a heckler in a crowd (still Chicago). Another is that was used by union musicians in reference to the band. There seems some disagreement among members as to at what point the band took the title, as well.

Then there is a story from a certain Gavin Bushell, a worker with circus bands around 1900 or so. According to him:

They said that the French had brought the perfume industry with them to New Orleans, and the oil of jasmine was a popular ingredient locally. To add it to the perfume was called "jassing it up." The strong scent was popular in the red light district, where a working girl might approach a prospective customer and say, "Is jass on your mind tonight, young fellow?" The term had become synonymous with erotic activity, and came to be applied to the music as well.

Unfortunately, no one may ever learn the exact source for the word jazz and how it became associated with the music so beloved today.

(Sources: www.apassion4jazz.net/eoj.html, http://users.netstarcomm.net/etjs/jazz_tidbits_and_other_things_by.htm, www.uselessknowledge.com/word/jazz.html, www.wordwizard.com)