20th Century Music Audio Timeline Part 2: Jazz

According to Wikipedia, jazz is a form characterized by blue notes, syncopation, poly rhythms, call and response, and improvisation. First, some definitions:

Blue Note: You have a major scale, such as CDEFGABC, but you play some notes of it in a different pitch, for example, the Eb (E flat) instead of the E. Usually blue notes are a semitone lower than the "normal" note. And they are played over a major chord, which gives it a slightly dissonant element.
Syncopation: Basically any rhythmic stress that occurs in a place where it normally would not be (in terms of the large-scale rhythm pattern of strong and weak beats).
Poly rhythms: Two different rhythms played at the same time, for example, 3 evenly space notes against 2, played so that they both start and end at the same time (the 3 notes are faster than the 2).

Jazz is also notable for being the first form of music to come out of the United States (rock and roll and all its offshoots being the second one...), and it arose directly from the African slave trade. Art is Resistance, etc.

Ragtime, as a genre, developed at the turn of the century while black entertainers were enjoying some popularity as lowbrow entertainment in clubs and vaudeville. Wikipedia claims that this arose largely in part because newly segregated blacks had trouble finding work in other avenues, but that's neither here nor there. Ragtime was taken up by more high class patrons; here is a ragtime song by the white classically trained pianist Scott Joplin, "The Entertainer."



In New Orleans, a crop of entertainers who played the red-light bars and brothels and came from a tradition of African funeral marches sprang up. Jelly Roll Morton (a New Orleans creole) published his Jelly Roll Blues in 1915 as the first jazz composition on paper.



With the passing of Prohibition, jazz moved into the venue of the speakeasy, where it became synonymous with decadence and degenerate virtues. In the 1930s, big band swing became popular and with it, famous performers such as Glen Miller, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington. Here is a Benny Goodman song from the Swing Kids movie, which is a film about young German youngsters in Nazi Germany who secretly listen to the music of Jews and black people while hating Hitler.



In the 1940s, a Dixieland revival returns to the elements of the original New Orleans style. Wikipedia describes it as a "contrapuntal" style. The idea of counterpoint (which is basically two different melodies that when played at the same time, sound good together) is a really old concept that goes back to Bach, who actually published a song that is supposed to be the pinnacle of counterpoint. In particular, Louis Armstrong's All Stars band becomes popular around this time.

As a sort of reaction to the swing movement, bebop arose in the 1940s, which is a less danceable and more performance oriented movement of jazz, commonly associated with chromatic scales (playing all the notes moving up one semitone at a time), the tritone (basically just a chord that is the one and the flat five, like C-F#), more dissonance, and improvisation. It is also faster than big band swing and features drumming where the cymbal is used to keep time and the other drums used for accents. Famous bebop musicians include Charlie Parker (Bird) and Thelonius Monk.





In the 1950s, bebop gave way to "cool jazz" which was slower and had more of an emphasis on long melodic lines. Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool is recorded around 1950.



Since that basically takes us up to 1950s and the birth of rock and roll, I'm going to leave off the jazz timeline here. Apologies to all the hardcore jazz fans.