The All Music Guide to Jazz – 5th Edition

All Music Guide to Jazz – 5th Edition: The Definitive Guide to Jazz Music is the most comprehensive and authoritative guide to jazz ever written.

Introduction

Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, United States. It emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a musical expression of the New Negro movement, which celebrated black culture and artistry. Jazz styles range from the early marches and ragtime to more recent styles such as bebop, hard bop, fusion, and straight-ahead jazz.

The term “jazz” was first used in print by writer Matt Gibson in his 1906 article “Jassamine” in Metronome Magazine. The term originally referred to African-American music specifically, but was later applied to other genres of music that showed influence from or shared characteristics with African-American music, such as blues, gospel, and R&B.

In its early years, jazz was closely associated with dance music and light entertainment. It was only later that it came to be seen as a serious art form on its own. Today, jazz is considered one of the most important American art forms, and its performers are some of the most revered musicians in the world.

What is Jazz?

Jazz is a complex mix of African and European music traditions. The word jazz itself is thought to be derived from the West African word “jasi,” meaning “to energetically summon up.” While there are many different styles of jazz, all jazz performances have certain common elements, such as improvisation, syncopation, and swing.

Jazz originated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in African American communities in the Southern United States. The first jazz recordings were made in 1917, but it was not until the mid-1920s that jazz began to achieve widespread popularity. By the 1930s, jazz was being performed all over the world.

During the 1940s, a style of jazz known as bebop emerged. Bebop was faster and more complex than previous styles of jazz and featured intricate melodies and solos. In the 1950s, another style known as hard bop developed. Hard bop incorporated elements of blues and gospel music into the Jazz idiom.

In the 1960s, a style known as free jazz emerged. Free jazz abandoned traditional melodies and chord progressions in favor of improvisation and experimentation. Since then, many different styles of jazz have developed, including fusion, smooth Jazz, Latin Jazz, and avant-garde Jazz.

The History of Jazz

The history of jazz is closely tied to the history of African Americans in the United States. Jazz originated in New Orleans in the late 1800s, a city with a large population of African Americans. At that time, New Orleans was also a major port, and there was a lot of interaction between cultures, which helped to shape the development of jazz.

Jazz is a style of music that is characterized by improvisation, R&B rhythms, and blues harmonies. Jazz musicians often use elements of other musical styles, such as European classical music, to create their own unique sound.

Jazz became popular in the 1920s, when it spread from New Orleans to other parts of the United States. Jazz clubs began popping up in cities like Chicago and New York, and jazz became the soundtrack of the “Roaring Twenties”. Famous jazz musicians from this era include Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Ella Fitzgerald.

Jazz continued to evolve in the 1930s and 1940s, with artists like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie developing the style known as bebop. Bebop was faster and more complex than earlier forms of jazz, and it emphasized improvisation even more than previous styles.

In the 1950s, a new style of jazz called hard bop emerged. Hard bop was influenced by bebop but also by R&B and blues music. Hard bop quickly became popular with young people, who were drawn to its energy and exciting sound.

Jazz has continued to evolve since then, branching off into different subgenres like fusion and smooth jazz. Today, jazz is enjoyed by people all over the world, and it continues to be one of America’s most important cultural exports.

The Birth of Jazz

The first stirrings of jazz took place in the late 1800s in New Orleans, a port city with a cosmopolitan mix of cultures. African Americans, who had been brought to America as slaves, were exposed to the music of their homeland, as well as to the music of Europe. This unique blend of cultures and influences gave birth to a new style of music that combined elements of both African and European traditions.

Jazz began to evolve in the early 1900s, with New Orleans serving as a hub for the new art form. Musicians such as Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton helped to shape the sound of jazz, infusing it with a distinctive blend of swing and blues. By the 1920s, jazz was becoming increasingly popular, and reach beyond the confines of New Orleans. Jazz bands began appearing in cities across America, and the genre began to gain mainstream appeal.

In the 1930s and 1940s, jazz underwent a major transformation, influenced by artists such as Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker. This new style of jazz, known as bebop, was faster-paced and more complex than earlier forms of the genre. Bebop would go on to have a profound impact on subsequent generations of musicians, paving the way for styles such as hard bop, cool jazz, and free jazz.

Today, jazz is enjoyed by listeners all over the world. Thanks to its rich history and its willingness to embrace change, jazz continues to evolve, keeping its place at the forefront of American music.

The Early Years of Jazz

Although the origins of jazz are closely related to West African music, the form that developed in the United States was strongly influenced by the harmonic structure of European classical music. Jazz began as a primarily improvised music, with collective improvisation being an important characteristic. The early years of jazz were also characterized by a strong influence from ragtime and blues.

Jazz emerged in the early 20th century, with New Orleans, Louisiana being a key location in its development. New Orleans was a port city with a large population of African Americans and a diverse range of musical traditions. The city was also home to many prominent Italian and Creole musicians. These factors all contributed to the unique sound of early jazz.

Some of the earliest recorded examples of jazz date back to 1917, when The Original Dixieland Jass Band made their first recordings. These recordings were made in New York City and were originally released on 78 RPM records. The band’s name provides us with one of the first uses of the word “jazz”, which would come to be used as a catch-all term for this new style of music.

The Original Dixieland Jass Band’s recordings were met with great popularity, helping to spread jazz outside of its New Orleans roots. In the years that followed, many other bands and musicians would make their own contributions to the developing genre, including Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington.

The Swing Era

The Swing Era is commonly accepted to have started in 1935 and ended in 1946. The big bands were in their heyday,and the style of music was marked by a strong, rhythmic pulse and improvisation. Vocalists became more prominent, often taking on the role of “front person” for the band. The most famous exponent of this style was undoubtedly Louis Armstrong, whose records from the 1930s are some of the most influential in all of jazz. Other important artists from this era include Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Lester Young.

The Bebop Era

The Bebop Era, which can be generally dated from 1943 to 1955, was one of the most important and influential periods in the history of jazz. It was during this time that the music moved away from the smooth, Swing Era style towards a more angular and discordant sound. This new style, which came to be known as Bebop or sometimes just Bop, was pioneered by a group of young musicians based in New York, including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell.

While Bebop was initially met with resistance from the general public, it soon found an audience amongst other musicians and intellectuals. The complex harmonies and fast tempos of Bebop made it unsuitable for dancing, but this didn’t bother its proponents who were more interested in making music for music’s sake. The Bebop Era saw the birth of many important jazz recording labels, including Blue Note and Prestige, who documented the scene’s many groundbreaking sessions.

The Hard Bop Era

The Hard Bop Era (1955Ð1965) was jazz’s golden age, when the music’s popularity was at its peak and when some of its greatest musicians were in their prime. It was a period when bebop, the postÐWorld War II jazz style that revolutionized music, became part of the mainstream and acquired a mass audience without losing its edge or its appeal to dedicated fans. The term hard bop was coined in the late 1950s to describe an approach that combined bebop’s complicated harmonies and improvised solos with the bluesy feel and rhythms of rhythm & blues and gospel; it was also influenced by the soulful sounds coming out of Kansas City and other parts of the Midwest. While it could be argued that hard bop is really just a variation on bebop, it developed into a style with its own identity, one that reached beyond bebop’s relatively small circle of devotees to become massively popular without sacrificing its musical integrity.

The Free Jazz Era

The 1950s were the beginning of a great change in jazz. This was the decade that saw the birth of bebop, hard bop, and cool jazz as well as the emergence of Miles Davis and John Coltrane as two of the most important figures in jazz. The 1960s would see even more changes with the advent of free jazz, modal jazz, and fusion.

The Avant-Garde Era

In jazz, the “avant-garde” describes a progressive approach to improvisation that arose in the late 1950s and which continued into the 1960s. The music was characterized by extended solos, complex harmonic structures, and frequently by convoluted melodies. Although there are significant exceptions, in general the avant-garde jazz of this era was less interested in danceable grooves than were other types of jazz. Avant-garde jazz often made use of atonal (that is, non-key-based) harmonic structures.

The best-known exponents of avant-garde jazz include Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Anthony Braxton, and Sun Ra. These musicians often rejected the conventional harmonic structures and chord changes of bebop and post-bop jazz; instead they preferred to play “free” or “out” (that is, without adhering to any specific chord changes), or they created new harmonic structures of their own devising.

In addition to Coleman and Coltrane, some of the most important innovators during the avant-garde era include saxophonists Albert Ayler and Eric Dolphy; trumpeters Don Cherry and Bill Dixon; trombonist Roswell Rudd; pianists Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, and McCoy Tyner; bassist Charlie Haden; drummer Sunny Murray; percussionist Karl Berger; and bandleader Sun Ra. These musicians pushed jazz in new directions—widely varying directions—and their innovations had a profound impact on the music’s development.

The Jazz Fusion Era

In the late 1960s, a number of developments occurred in the jazz world that would have a profound effect on the direction of the music in the 1970s and beyond. First and foremost was the overthrow of John Coltrane’s modal jazz by what came to be known as “free jazz.” This approach to improvisation, which had first been hinted at by Coleman and Ornette Coleman in the late 1950s, was brought to fruition by saxophonist Albert Ayler, who recorded a series of influential albums for Impulse! Records beginning in 1965. Free jazz was characterized by an abandonment of melody, harmony, and rhythm in favor of an emphasis on texture and timbre; solos were often exercises in pure sound rather than melodic development. Rather than adhering to specific chord changes, free jazz musicians would simply play “over” a given set of changes (or none at all), relying on their shared history and knowledge of harmonic convention to guide them. The result was often an emotionally charged form of music that could be both exhilarating and frustrating for listeners accustomed to more traditional forms of jazz.

The Neo-Bop Era

If bebop was the hip new happened in the jazz world of the 1940s, then neo-bop was its logical progression in the 1980s. Taking bebop’s harmonic innovations as a starting point, musicians like Wynton Marsalis brought a renewed interest in small-group jazz to young fans weaned on rock & roll and funk. As bebop had done 40 years earlier, neo-bop reestablished jazz as a vital, living art form rather than an academic exercise or a musical museum piece. While purists may have snickered at the idea of “Young Lions” making “neo-classic” jazz for major labels, there’s no question that their efforts invigorated the music and introduced it to a whole new generation of listeners.

The Post-Bop Era

The All Music Guide to Jazz is a reference work published by the music website AllMusic. It is one of the largest and most in-depth guides to jazz ever published, with over 3,500 reviews covering not just every jazz release ever made, but every significant jazz artist who has recorded since the dawn of the LP era.

In addition to the traditional jazz canon, the book also includes reviews of more avant-garde and “fusion” artists whose work incorporates elements of jazz into a broader musical context. As such, it is an invaluable resource for both casual fans and serious students of the genre.

The 5th edition, published in 2010, features updated reviews and information on more than 1,200 artists. It is available in both print and digital formats.

The Contemporary Era

The Contemporary Era is the fifth and final era in The All Music Guide to Jazz, 5th Edition. It covers the years 1945 to the present, and includes information on more than 2,000 artists from around the world.

The Contemporary Era began with the bebop revolution of the 1940s, led by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Bebop quickly spread throughout the jazz world, and its influence can be heard in virtually all subsequent jazz styles. The 1950s saw the emergence of hard bop, a style that combined bebop’s intricate harmonization with African-American vernacular rhythms. Hard bop was followed by a number of other important schools of jazz, including modal jazz (led by Miles Davis), free jazz (led by Ornette Coleman), and fusion (a blend of jazz and rock music pioneered by Miles Davis and others).

In addition to these major styles, there are also many smaller subgenres and regional variations of jazz that have developed since the 1950s. These include Latin Jazz, Afro-Cuban Jazz, Brazilian Jazz, European Jazz, Indian Jazz, Japanese Jazz, and many others. No matter what your taste in jazz may be, there is sure to be something for you in The All Music Guide to Jazz – 5th Edition.

The Future of Jazz

The future of Jazz is always in question, as the music has always been in a state of flux, constantly evolving and changing. The one constant in Jazz is that there will always be new directions to explore, new sounds to be heard, and new ways to interpret the music. The only thing that is certain about the future of Jazz is that it will continue to be a vital and relevant force in music for years to come.

Conclusion

With the fifth edition of The All Music Guide to Jazz, editor-in-chief Michael Erlewine and his team of 27 experts have produced the most comprehensive guide to jazz ever assembled. This updated edition contains more than 20,000 reviews and profiles of artists—from traditional greats such as Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday to contemporary stars such as Wynton Marsalis and Diana Krall—making it an indispensable reference for any jazz fan. In addition, the guide includes a history of jazz, a glossary of important terms, and more than 100 photographs.