Jazz

Jazz is an improvised, instrument-driven idiom that took shape in early-twentieth-century African American communities. The standard small-group instrumentation is saxophone, trumpet, piano, double bass and drums, but the umbrella covers everything from solo piano to 17-piece big band. The defining mechanism is the cycle: a tune (the head) is stated by the ensemble, then individual players take improvised solos over the underlying chord progression, then the head returns. The rhythmic identity is swing — a triplet-based subdivision of the beat that gives quarter notes a long-short ride feel — combined with the walking bass and 2-and-4 hi-hat or snare accent. Across roughly a century the form has split into Dixieland, swing, bebop, cool, hard bop, modal, free, fusion and contemporary post-bop.

Jazz coalesced in New Orleans between 1900 and 1917, where Spanish, French, West African and Caribbean musical traditions overlapped in a single port city. The marching-band format, the African-American church's blues sense, and rhythms preserved in Congo Square fused into the small-group music heard at funerals, parades and Storyville cabarets. Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Seven recordings (1925–28) gave the soloist primacy. Big bands led by Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Benny Goodman dominated the 1930s; Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie invented bebop in the early 1940s. Miles Davis's Kind of Blue (1959) and John Coltrane's Giant Steps (1960) are the two most-discussed individual records. The contemporary scene runs through Wynton Marsalis's neoclassical project at Lincoln Center, the British wave around Shabaka Hutchings, and the LA scene around Kamasi Washington and Robert Glasper.

The cycle of head–solos–head is the architectural unit; learn to track when one solo ends and another begins. The bassist's walking line gives the harmonic spine of each chorus; the drummer's ride cymbal carries the swing pulse while the snare and bass drum interrupt with comping figures. In a small group the pianist's left hand voices the chords (comping) rather than stating the bass, which is the bassist's job. Two recordings of the same standard by different bands will yield substantially different music — the score is the chord chart, not the performance.

Miles Davis's Kind of Blue (1959) is the single most common starting record — modal, slow-moving, easy to enter. Billie Holiday's Lady Sings the Blues (1956) is the canonical vocal entry. For the contemporary scene, Robert Glasper's Black Radio (2012) bridges hip-hop and instrumental jazz; Kamasi Washington's The Epic (2015) extends the form into spiritual jazz scale.

Bebop's name is widely attributed to Dizzy Gillespie's habit of scat-singing horn lines as bee-bop. Japan developed its own jazz-listening institution, the jazz kissa — coffee bars where patrons sit silently and listen to high-fidelity vinyl playback at concert volume. Tokyo's DUG, opened 1967, is still operating.