Grove - Jazz
Grove - Jazz
Grove - Jazz
https://doi.org/10.1093/omo/9781561592630.013.90000358106
Published in print: 26 November 2013
Published online: 30 June 2020
The term conveys different although related meanings: 1) a musical tradition rooted in performing
conventions that were introduced and developed early in the 20th century by African Americans; 2) a
set of attitudes and assumptions brought to music-making, chief among them the notion of
performance as a fluid creative process involving (group) improvisation; and 3) a style characterized by
melodic, harmonic, and timbral practices derived from the blues and African American religious
musics, cyclical formal structures, and a supple approach to rhythm and phrasing known as swing.
1. Introduction.
Historians and critics using studies of concert music and literature as models have often portrayed the
development of jazz as a narrative of progress. Their accounts suggest that jazz started as
unsophisticated dance music but grew into increasingly complex forms, gradually gaining prestige and
becoming recognized around the world as an art. Over that same period, the attitudes of cultural and
institutional gatekeepers toward the music changed dramatically. In 1924 an editorial writer for the
New York Times called jazz “a return to the humming, hand-clapping, or tomtom beating of savages;”
in 1987 the US Congress passed a resolution designating jazz “an outstanding model of individual
expression” and “a rare and valuable national American treasure.” Those promoting this narrative of
progress have emphasized innovation as a primary driving force, identifying new techniques, concepts,
and structures that presumably inspired musicians to reach ever higher stages of development.
Narratives of evolution and innovation, however, oversimplify a story much broader in scope and more
complex in structure. If some musicians have striven to be innovators, many others have viewed
themselves as proud bearers of tradition. If some have struggled as uncompromising creative artists
whose work reaches only a small, select audience, still others have flourished providing entertainment
with deliberate mass appeal. While its contours are not wholly determined by audiences and markets
or technologies of production and reproduction, jazz is inextricably bound by them. And if the music
has gradually been accorded greater status and respect over the years, it has also consistently
provoked controversy. The term “jazz” itself has often carried negative associations, which is partly
why Duke Ellington and other musicians spurned it, and why Max Roach once told an interviewer, “I
resent the word unequivocally” (Taylor, H1977, p. 110).
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The denotative instability of the word complicates efforts to write the music’s history in at least three
ways. First, the music’s sonic identity is difficult to isolate or delimit: although “jazz” seems to refer to
a single musical idiom, like “classical” or “rock” it describes an extended family of styles, with all
members sharing at least some traits in common yet none capable of representing the whole. Second,
the varying functions of what has been labeled jazz conspire against the perception of those items as a
unified entity. Jazz can present a musical background for social recreation, lively accompaniment for
dancing, or an invitation to close listening and deep concentration—and the same performance or
recording might operate in these different ways simultaneously. Third, the question of the music’s
racial provenance has generated heated debate over the years and shaped its reception. While jazz is a
product of African American expressive cultures, its practitioners have always incorporated influences
from other musical traditions, and since the 1920s jazz has been performed by musicians of varying
backgrounds throughout the world. In different eras, for example, commercially successful white
musicians such as the bandleader Paul Whiteman and the saxophonist Kenny G have been identified by
large segments of the public as major exponents of jazz. Many others, however, have seen these two as
standing outside the tradition and have considered jazz to be a form of black music in which African
Americans have been the leading innovators and most authoritative practitioners. Complications in
attempts to describe the identity, function, and racial character of jazz—and the shifting ideological
terrain on which one encounters them—are, however, unavoidable: they have been intrinsic to the
discussion from the beginning.
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The word “jazz” took on musical connotations in the United States during World War I; before then it
was a colloquialism possibly southern and African American in origin, perhaps derived from (Central)
African roots. Writers have offered several definitions of the term from this pre-war period, claiming it
to be a verb that meant to make something livelier or faster, to demonstrate pep and energy, or to
engage in sexual activity. In its earliest printed appearances, “jazz” turns up as a noun. A San
Francisco sportswriter in 1913 used the word to describe a kind of spirited liveliness shown by baseball
players, for example: “Everybody [on the team] has come back full of the old ‘jazz’” and “Henley the
pitcher put a little more of the old ‘jazz’ on the pill [ball]” (Porter, E1997, p. 5).
A few years later small ensembles from New Orleans playing spirited, sometimes crude dance music
began featuring the term—also spelled as “jass”—in their names. One was Stein’s Dixie Jass Band, a
white group from New Orleans which in 1917 performed and recorded with slightly different personnel
in New York as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Another was the Creole Band, a group of black
American musicians that toured on vaudeville circuits in various parts of the United States (1914–18)
and was occasionally advertised as a “New Orleans Jazz Band” or as the “Creole Band/Sometimes
called the Jazz Band.” These ensembles gave northern urban audiences their first exposure to an
energetic, blues-tinged musical idiom derived from southern black performing traditions. A New York
newspaper article commented on the phenomenon in 1917 (Osgood, G1926, p. 11):
A strange word has gained wide-spread use in the ranks of our producers of popular music. It
is “jazz,” used mainly as an adjective descriptive of a band. The group[s] that play for
dancing, when colored, seem infected with the virus that they try to instil as a stimulus in
others. They shake and jump and writhe in ways to suggest a return to the medieval jumping
mania.
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Novel and entertaining, this music usually accompanied dancing and was performed in places serving
alcoholic beverages: restaurants, nightclubs, cabarets, and dance halls. Such places were themselves
elements of an emergent culture of nightlife which brought patrons into more intimate contact with
performers than concert or theater performances did and which often hinted at illicit pleasures of
various kinds (Erenberg H1984, pp. 119–30). The combination of the music and such spaces led some
reformers to see both jazz and nightlife as threats, as forms of social contagion.
Yet while jazz first drew widespread notice in the years leading up to 1920, some musicians and
historians have claimed that it originated much earlier. Bunk Johnson stated that he and Buddy Bolden
were playing jazz in New Orleans around the period 1895–6; Jelly Roll Morton said he invented jazz in
1902 (he was 12 at the time). Various brass bands from New Orleans, including the Olympia, Golden
Rule, and Eagle, have also been cited as playing in a jazz style before 1910. Since these assertions
have been made retrospectively, often by individuals with a strong personal investment in the histories
they have related, and since there is little contemporary evidence to put such claims in perspective,
questions of specifically when and how jazz performance practices emerged remain unanswerable.
What is more certain, at least for most historians, is that the area in and around New Orleans was the
principal site of emergence for jazz.
New Orleans residents in the early 1900s displayed a syncretic blend of African, Caribbean, and
European cultures unique among American cities. Morton’s Catholicism and belief in vodoun
exemplified the cultural fusions that also characterized the city’s music traditions. A major port and
commercial center, New Orleans attracted black Americans from rural communities in Louisiana and
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The foundations of jazz were established by African Americans in this urban environment before the
music had a name, or when it was still referred to as ragtime or ratty music. The process unfolded as
musicians gradually developed distinctive ways of interpreting a varied repertory that circulated
widely in the United States, the Caribbean, and Western Europe through the movement of people,
published music, and eventually recordings (Bilby, H1985, pp. 140–41). That repertory included
marches, dance music (two-steps, quadrilles, waltzes, polkas, schottisches, and mazurkas), popular
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Although we lack documentation that shows this process unfolding, it is possible to hypothesize some
of the stages involved. Rhythms, for example, gradually may have come to be interpreted more freely
than in earlier 19th-century marches, ragtime, and cakewalks. Phrases were stretched out and either
played in a more relaxed manner or with more vigorous offbeat accents, not just in one instrumental
part but in two or more simultaneously. Drummers enlivened simple duple and triple meters by
introducing multi-metric or hemiola-like patterns and phrasing over bar lines. Players began
embellishing and ornamenting melodies, inventing countermelodies, weaving arpeggiated lines into
the texture, and coloring diatonic harmonies with the pitch-play of blue notes (see Blue note (i)).
Although such techniques may have been applied to music by solo pianists active in New Orleans,
among them Jelly Roll Morton and Tony Jackson, they generally came to characterize a style of
ensemble playing. Precursors to the jazz bands during the period 1915–20 included small dance groups
led by such players as Buddy Bolden, Lorenzo Tio Sr., and Papa Celestin, together with brass bands
(often featuring some of the same players) that provided music for such community functions as
parades, picnics, parties, and funerals. In a Library of Congress interview with Alan Lomax in 1938,
Morton recalled the typical brass band instrumentation as including “a bass horn [e.g. tuba or
euphonium], one trombone, one trumpet, an alto [horn] and maybe a baritone [horn] or clarinet, and a
bass drum and snare drum.” These bands gave employment and ensemble experience to early New
Orleans jazz musicians such as Bunk Johnson, King Oliver, and Louis Armstrong, while in the process
fostering a sense of group identity, pride, and competitiveness. They contributed as well to the
solidifying of a professional sphere comprised almost exclusively of men, a trait that characterized jazz
in the following years, except in the area of singing, where women gained more opportunities; these
bands also helped to create a performance environment in which individual expression was
encouraged yet closely coordinated with the activities of other ensemble members. As the writer Ralph
Ellison later observed, “True jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group … Each
solo flight, or improvisation, represents … a definition of [the jazz artist’s] identity: as individual, as
member of the collectivity, and as a link in the chain of tradition” (Ellison, H1986, p. 234).
Given the scanty documentation for New orleans jazz during these formative stages (c1895–1915), it is
unclear to what extent musicians in the early dance and brass bands improvised. Judging from later
exponents of the style, a description like “collective improvisation”—used by writers to suggest a basic
approach to performing—might lead some to assume that the music was entirely spontaneous,
invented in the moment. Like improvisers in other traditions, however, these musicians developed
conventions that guided their individual and ensemble work: familiar formal plans, ordered sequences
of themes and keys, specific functions for individual instruments within ensembles, and common
techniques of embellishment. When they invented compelling new rhythmic devices and melodic
patterns, these were imitated by others and repeated in different pieces, then passed on through oral
tradition. The way Armstrong once described his approach to soloing—“First I plays the melody, then I
plays the melody ’round the melody, then I routines”—hints at the conventional practice that shaped
his approach to improvising, belying the primitivist myth that “instinct” or “natural feeling” produced
the music and challenging the undisciplined connotations some attach to “collective improvisation.”
Moreover, musicians working in certain New Orleans contexts—at high society balls and parties and on
the excursion boats that went up the Mississippi River—were required to play from written parts, and
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Who created jazz? This has been a controversial issue in the jazz literature, especially since much of
the evidence concerning its origins comes from vague and often conflicting oral testimony.
Nevertheless, extant documents and the most reliable accounts support the contention that New
Orleans musicians of African descent—both the blacks living uptown and the Creoles downtown—
played a leading role both as inventors and expert practitioners of the techniques that came to
characterize jazz. In doing so they drew both on a fund of African-derived musical practices and on
performing techniques and dance forms widely dispersed in Western Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin
America. Concurrently members of other racial and ethnic groups became involved in the development
and dissemination of these same techniques. The white musician Papa Jack Laine, for example, led
brass and dance bands that trained other white musicians later active in jazz, among them Tom Brown,
George Brunis, and Nick LaRocca. These bands furnished music for similar social functions as their
African American counterparts, such as parades and riverboat entertainment. As with the early black
bands, the lack of recorded documentation makes it difficult to know the styles in which these white
groups played. It is conceivable, though, that white New Orleans musicians in the early 1900s were
also beginning to adopt a looser and more rhythmically lively approach to the repertory of brass and
dance bands.
Musicians of Caribbean ancestry and of mixed racial and ethnic heritage also contributed to the
formation of a jazz performance practice. One was the Cuban American cornetist and cellist Manuel
Perez, who played with the Onward Brass Band and led a well-known dance band called the Imperial
Orchestra. The Creole population of New Orleans included many descendants of Haitians and Cubans
who had immigrated to the city in the 19th century, and the New Orleans–Caribbean connection
proved especially important for jazz rhythm. When Morton spoke of the “Spanish tinge” present in jazz,
he partly had in mind patterns like the tresillo (ex.1a), habanera (ex.1b), and cinquillo (ex.1c) that
defined the rhythmic composites of Cuban and other Caribbean and Latin American dance genres.
Such rhythms turn up in some of his own compositions, such as “New Orleans Blues” (c1902–5; 1923,
Gen.) and “The Crave” (c1910–11; 1939, General). They also appear in late 19th-century pieces
published in New Orleans such as W.T. Francis’s “The Cactus Dance,” “Danza Mexicana” (1885), and
his arrangements of pieces played by the Mexican Military Band at the 1885 World’s Exposition in New
Orleans.
The racial and ethnic profile of early New Orleans jazz, then, was multifaceted, reflecting and
refracting the mixed heritage of the city’s residents. At the same time most of the leading musicians
identified with jazz were African Americans. These two generalizations would remain constant as the
music spread beyond New Orleans in the years that followed.
Ex.1a Tresillo
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Ex.1c Cinquillo
It is likely that characteristic rhythmic and metric practices and embellishing techniques employed by
black, Creole, and white musicians in New Orleans might have been heard in small ensembles
elsewhere in the country. Groups that played instrumental ragtime, dance genres such as the
habanera, rumba, and tango, and blues pieces like W.C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues” (1912) and “St.
Louis Blues” (1914) probably displayed features that resembled what might be called proto-jazz. The
Ohio-born reed player Garvin Bushell recalled playing with a circus band in 1916 that performed
marches, ragtime, and blues throughout the South and Midwest; he also identified several
accomplished black clarinetists—Percy Glascoe, J. Paul Wyer (known as the Pensacola Kid), and Fred
Kewley—who traveled with circus and minstrel bands and later could be heard in jazz and blues
settings. Nevertheless, there was something distinctive about the musical fusion that occurred in New
Orleans, a flavor and piquancy that resulted from a subtle blending of many different ingredients.
Together with this intermingling of musical traits, other extra-musical qualities helped to shape an
emerging jazz aesthetic.
In the decade before 1920 players from New Orleans took this emerging style to California, Chicago,
and other parts of the United States offering them employment opportunities. They also began
recording jazz, which quickly catapulted a regional American vernacular idiom into the international
arena.
Audio recordings have played a crucial role in disseminating jazz. From 1917 to 1920, the years when
“jazz” began appearing with increasing frequency as a stylistic label, record companies were mainly
issuing 8-, 10-, and 12-inch discs which were played at 78 r.p.m. and which targeted markets
segmented along lines of race, region, class, and ethnicity. The recordings, most lasting between three
and four minutes, were made using acoustical methods (microphones did not come into widespread
use until after 1925), and their relatively low fidelity limits what they can reveal about early jazz
performance practice. For one thing, their balances of sound and timbral qualities may have been quite
different in live settings. In those same settings, likewise, the durations of individual selections might
have been extended beyond those of their recorded counterparts. The acoustical recording process
also affected instrumentation: drummers often had to limit their activity to wood blocks and cymbals
since drums might have created distortion or overwhelmed other instruments. In addition, the pieces
recorded by bands may not have reflected what they performed regularly outside the studio: record
producers and publishers often selected the repertory as part of a larger effort to market sheet music
copies of newly published compositions. Finally, race influenced producers’ decisions regarding whom
to record and what styles were appropriate for them. Black jazz musicians only started recording in
significant numbers during the period 1923–5 and often found themselves expected to play a repertory
emphasizing blues and “hot” jazz (fast, rhythmically energetic dance music) that ostensibly would
appeal to the African American consumers targeted by record companies in their segregated race
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Sarah Vaughan, 1946. (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, William P. Gottlieb Collection,
LC-USZ62-89643)
The historical distinction for being the first group to record jazz goes to the Original Dixieland Jazz
Band. A quintet of white musicians from New Orleans, it made its first recordings early in 1917 in New
York, where the band had been attracting attention through appearances at Reisenweber’s Restaurant
on 58th Street. Although the Original Dixieland Jazz Band lacked both banjo and a bass instrument
(string bass or tuba), its other instruments became standard for small New Orleans jazz units, which
included three lead or melody-carrying instruments (cornet, clarinet, and trombone) with piano and
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Kid Ory and a five-piece band (cornet, clarinet, trombone, piano, and drums) provide another example
of early jazz by New Orleans musicians, this time an African American group recorded in Los Angeles
in 1922. Although its instrumentation is identical to that of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Ory’s
group displays both a gentler, more lilting rhythmic style and a greater sense of relaxation on “Ory’s
Creole Trombone/Society Blues” (Nordskog) than is evident in work by the Original Dixieland Jazz
Band. In other respects, however, the multi-strain formal patterns, the “set” quality of many of the
instrumental lines (although the cornetist Mutt Carey does take liberties in embellishing parts), the
functions of instruments within the ensemble, and the use of breaks (short passages played by soloists
while the rest of the band stops) all resemble aspects heard in the earlier recordings. As with the
Original Dixieland Jazz Band, virtually nothing played by Ory’s band would qualify as unscripted
“collective improvisation.” Instead it was highly ordered and predictable music with built-in
repetitions, probably intended for dancers; however, as Gushee has suggested (G1977, p. 5), it is likely
that the band’s lack of a full rhythm section (notably bass, banjo, and a complete drum kit) made it
sound different on record from what listeners heard live.
In addition to these early recorded examples by small groups from New Orleans, larger ensembles
playing “syncopated” dance music showed another side of the emerging jazz phenomenon. Black
bandleaders in New York such as James Reese Europe, Ford Dabney, Tim Brymn, and Leroy Smith
performed with groups of up to 15 or more players, including strings together with brass, reeds, and
percussion. The relatively few recordings made by these ensembles during the period 1914–23 have
often been cited as examples of late instrumental ragtime or pre-jazz music. Indeed, in some ways they
seem closer in sound and spirit to the bands of John Philip Sousa and Arthur Pryor or to theater pit
orchestras and polite society dance orchestras than to the convention-flouting strain of jazz that
characterized the Roaring Twenties. Nevertheless, the energy and rhythmic verve of Europe’s
orchestra—especially when the drummer Buddy Gilmore was driving the ensemble as on “Castle
Walk” (Vic., 1914)—along with its loosely embellished performance practice and repertory of rags, pop
songs, and blues, relate his group to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings,
and Ory’s band, even if its overall sonic identity seems quite different. (The frequent unison melody
lines, not just the larger size or stiffer rhythmic practice, account in large part for the difference of
Europe’s orchestra.) Europe, who directed the celebrated 369th US Infantry Regiment Band in France
during World War I, linked his approach to that of jazz players in 1919, explaining that “jazz” was
associated with certain instrumental effects (mutes, flutter-tonguing), strong rhythmic accents, and
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Other bandleaders provided models for organizing and standardizing the instrumental components of
dance orchestras playing jazz. On the West Coast during the mid- to late-1910s, Art Hickman led a ten-
piece ensemble consisting of two brass instruments (cornet and trombone), two saxophones, violin,
piano, two banjos, string bass, and drums. He took the orchestra east in 1919. Evidence of the impact
of New Orleans jazz style upon Hickman can be heard in the final chorus of “Whispering” (Col., 1920),
both in the arpeggiated embellishing techniques of the soprano saxophonist (emulating a New Orleans
clarinetist) and the loose connecting phrases of the trombonist, playing in tailgate fashion. Hickman’s
configuration of brass, reeds, violin, and rhythm section was emulated by Paul Whiteman, another
California-based bandleader who came to New York in 1920. The instrumental line-up of Hickman’s
and Whiteman’s bands required arrangers skilled in composing embellished melodic variations and
exploring different timbral combinations. One was Ferde Grofé, who worked first with Hickman in
California and after 1919 as an arranger and pianist with Whiteman. Grofé helped Whiteman develop a
concept of symphonic jazz through changes in orchestration. He added strings and double-reed
instruments (oboe and bassoon) to the standard brass, single-reed (saxophone and clarinet), and
rhythm sections and borrowed themes from the classical repertory—such as Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Song
on the Indian Guest” (Vic., 1921) from his opera Sadko—to produce dance music that evoked the “high
art” of the concert hall (see Sweet dance music and Concert jazz). In Chicago, Isham Jones was another
prominent white bandleader who by the late 1910s was fronting an ensemble made up of three distinct
sections (brass, reeds, and rhythm instruments) with the addition of violin, which later disappeared
from the standard dance-band ensemble. Jones’s arrangements often featured “hot” sections, such as
the cornetist Louis Panico’s muted, growling statement on “Never Again” (Bruns., 1924), that
emphasized syncopation and improvising soloists.
By the early 1920s, then, jazz and jazz-like music could be heard on recordings made by such small
ensembles as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, and Ory’s group; by
medium-sized dance bands, including those of Hickman and Jones; and by larger ensembles, notably
Europe’s society orchestra and Whiteman’s concert orchestra. Yet another recording outlet for jazz
musicians came in the form of small pick-up groups accompanying female blues singers. Beginning
with the recordings that Mamie Smith made in 1920 with her promoter Perry Bradford and continuing
with the flood of “blues craze” singers that followed, it was customary for producers to hire two to five
instrumentalists to accompany vocalists for recording dates, especially those made for race labels in
Chicago and New York. Often these hired musicians had experience playing jazz in dance bands and
displayed their skills as improvisers in their studio work. In 1920 the New York trumpeter Johnny Dunn
and a small band with rotating personnel took part in a number of sessions with the singer Edith
Wilson. The loose ensemble work on such recordings as “Nervous Blues” and “Vampin’ Liza
Jane” (Col., 1921)—with clarinet, trombone, and trumpet sometimes doubling, embellishing, or playing
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In 1923, six years after the Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded its first sides, African American jazz
musicians started getting more opportunities to distribute their work via recordings. That year
companies in Chicago and Richmond, Indiana, issued the first recordings of such noted New Orleans
figures as Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. In New York, Henderson and his orchestra began recording
regularly for various labels, and Bessie Smith cut her first sides accompanied by jazz instrumentalists.
In St. Louis Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra made its first recordings. From this time on,
recordings offered a more accurate and representative sampling of jazz activity in the United States.
The recordings made in 1923 by Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band reveal the cohesive, relaxed yet hard-driving
rhythmic style of a band of mostly New Orleanians working regularly on Chicago’s South Side.
Although slightly larger than the Original Dixieland Jazz Band or Ory’s band, Oliver’s group featured a
similar two-part configuration: a front line of melody-playing instruments made up of clarinet,
trombone, and two cornets (played by Oliver and the young Louis Armstrong) and a rhythm section of
piano, banjo, drums, and occasionally bass. Oliver’s repertory combined older, ragtime-based strain
forms (“Froggie Moore,” Gen., 1923) with current pop songs (“I ain’t gonna tell nobody,” OK, 1923) and
blues (“Jazzin’ Babies Blues,” OK, 1923). Blues lyricism was central to their brand of jazz and was
epitomized in Oliver’s muted solos—notably his celebrated one on “Dipper Mouth Blues” (Gen., 1923)—
which later trumpeters emulated and embellished. The fuller, more dynamic rhythm section in Oliver’s
band (compared to those of Ory and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band earlier) reflected the group’s
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A contrasting strain of African American jazz in about 1923 is found on recordings made in New York
by Henderson’s orchestra. For its leader “hot jazz” did not circumscribe his group’s identity, as it did
Oliver’s in Chicago; alongside “sweet” popular songs, novelty numbers, and waltzes, hot music
constituted but one of the idioms the group provided for dancers. It was in part Henderson’s versatility,
as Jeffrey Magee (G2005, pp. 33–8) noted, that helped him succeed as a black bandleader competing
with other white and black ensembles for jobs in New York, including a long-term engagement he
secured at the Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan (1924). On recordings, Henderson and his musicians
at times appear to be following commercially published stock arrangements (“Oh! Sister, ain’t that
hot?,” Emerson, 1924); at other times they play arrangements by Don Redman, a member of the band’s
reed section. In general the reliance on notation and the three-section configuration (brass, reeds, and
rhythm) of Henderson’s group placed it more in the dance-band tradition of Hickman and Whiteman
than in the New Orleans mold of Oliver, Ory, and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Nevertheless, traces
of the New Orleans polyphonic weave show up occasionally, notably in the final chorus of “When you
walked out someone else walked right in” (Puritan, 1923), an arrangement by Redman of an Irving
Berlin song. Together with the active sectional interplay and set melodic variations dictated by
arrangements, Henderson’s band also featured “hot” improvised (or improvised-sounding) solos by
such players as Coleman Hawkins (“Dicty Blues,” Voc., 1923), the trombonist Charlie Green (“Shanghai
Shuffle,” Pathé, 1924), and Armstrong (“Copenhagen,” Voc., 1924).
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“Jazzin’, everybody’s jazzin’ now,” sang Trixie Smith in “The world’s jazz crazy and so am I” (Para.,
1925). The song attested to the fever generated by jazz during the 1920s as it spread throughout North
America and to Europe, Latin America, and distant parts of the globe. This expansion occurred in two
concurrent phases. First, American jazz was exported overseas in the form of recordings, published
sheet music, and written arrangements and by traveling ensembles. As early as 1918–19 Louis Mitchell
and his Jazz Kings performed in Paris, and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band undertook a long residency
in England. They were followed in the 1920s by Benny Peyton, Arthur Briggs, Sidney Bechet (who
returned after his first trip in 1919), and other American musicians scattered throughout Europe.
Europeans could also hear jazz interpreted by orchestras touring with such black musical revues as
From Dover to Dixie (1923), Plantation Days (1923), and Chocolate Kiddies (1925–6). The market for
jazz extended beyond Western Europe: Sam Wooding’s orchestra appeared in Hungary, Russia, and
Argentina, and the pianist Teddy Weatherford traveled with Jack Carter’s orchestra to East Asia in the
late 1920s.
At the same time as American jazz reached new listeners abroad, those living in different parts of the
world began to perform, record, and write about the new music. Local jazz bands sprang up
everywhere, from those led by Bernard Etté in Germany and Fred Elizalde in England to those of Dajos
Bela in Hungary and Eduardo Andreozzi in Brazil. A number of these ensembles recorded for such
major labels as Columbia, Decca, Odeon, and Victor. Jazz also made an impact on European composers
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Public reaction to jazz varied widely in the United States during the 1920s. Early on, some
commentators, with concert music as a point of reference and with race and class as subtexts,
condemned the music as improper, even immoral. Jazz “excite[s] the baser instincts,” said John Philip
Sousa (Ogren, E1989, p. 56). It “offends people with musical taste already formed,” charged an
editorial in the New York Times (8 October 1924), “and it prevents the formation of musical taste by
others.” Among those oriented toward the concert hall, however, jazz also had supporters. Carl Engel,
head of the Music Division of the Library of Congress, noted that “jazz finds its last and supreme glory
in the skill for improvisation exhibited by its performers … [Good jazz is] music that is recklessly
fantastic and joyously grotesque” (G1922, p. 187). For some, jazz symbolized the spirit and temper of
contemporary American life, whether it was F. Scott Fitzgerald in Tales of the Jazz Age (1923)
describing the rebellious hedonism of the younger generation or the music critic W.J. Henderson
claiming in 1925 that jazz expressed “ebulliency, our carefree optimism, our nervous energy, and our
extravagant humor” (New York Times Book Review, 8 February 1925). Not everyone linked jazz
exclusively with the United States. For the American cultural critic Waldo Frank, jazz was emblematic
of the “Machine” and symbolized the diseased condition of industrialized society, describing it as “the
music of a revolt that fails” (In the American Jungle (1925–1936), New York, 1937, p. 119). In 1921, the
English critic Clive Bell equated jazz with artistic modernism, identifying such figures as Picasso,
Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot, and Woolf with the “jazz movement,” finding in their work an underlying quality
of “impudence in quite natural and legitimate revolt against Nobility and Beauty” (“Plus de Jazz,” The
New Republic, 21 September 1921).
The varied reactions that jazz occasioned in the 1920s notwithstanding, the music itself served two
primary functions. First and foremost it accompanied dancing, as jazz bands supplied lively music that
inspired people to dance; recordings issued by jazz groups often identified on their labels the
particular dance step for which the music was suitable: Oliver’s “Chattanooga Stomp” (Col., 1923) was
a “shimmy one step,” Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-oo” (Voc., 1926) a “fox trot.” James P. Johnson’s
“Charleston,” written in 1923 for the show Runnin’ Wild, inspired a popular craze for this dance, and
its characteristic rhythmic motive (related to the tresillo; Ex.2) turned up in individual solos and
arrangements played by jazz orchestras. Many jazz instrumentals referred to specific dances or
implied dance movement in their titles, among them “Doin’ the New Low Down,” “St. Louis Shuffle,”
“Birmingham Breakdown,” “Hop Off,” “18th Street Strut,” and “Moten Stomp.” Jazz musicians
accompanied not just social dancers but professional dance acts in vaudeville and musical theater.
When Coleman Hawkins performed during the period 1921–2 as one of Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds, he
and other band members accompanied both the singer and various dancers appearing on the same bill.
Similarly, Count Basie joined the vaudeville act of Gonzelle White (1926) in which fellow band members
danced and performed stunts onstage. The drummer Freddy Crump, Basie recalled, “used to come
dancing back in from the wings and hit the drum as he slid into a split. He used to grab the curtain and
ride up with it, bowing and waving at the audience applauding” (Basie and Murray, F1985, p. 86).
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Basie’s recollection of Crump points up the second main function of jazz in the 1920s: to provide
entertainment that often had a comedic flair or novelty component. Jazz bands were often visually
stimulating, with players throwing objects such as hats and drumsticks in the air, striking dramatic
positions while performing and taking part in stage business, and theaters were a common venue for
presenting musicians on bills with other performers. As a result, audiences often judged a jazz band by
the quality of its visual presentation or act, on one hand, and its ability to play racially prescribed roles,
on the other. Duke Ellington’s band once performed a routine at a Harlem theater in which the set
resembled a backwoods church and Bubber Miley dressed as a preacher to deliver a musical sermon
on his trumpet. Louis Armstrong had a similar preacher’s act, calling himself Reverend Satchelmouth,
when he played in New York with Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra and in Chicago with Erskine Tate
and the Vendome orchestra. Audiences from varying backgrounds could find humor in such
performances. In some cases, though, the routines expected by “slummers” or “racial tourists” seeking
exotic entertainment were haunted by the specter of minstrelsy in plantation and jungle scenarios in
which black musicians and dancers—performing in venues located in transitional areas known as vice
districts—catered to the “night-life fantasies cherished by white customers” (Ogren, E1989, pp. 42–3,
74–5; Kenney, E1993, pp. 15–16, 24–5). Some of the less racially demeaning theatrical aspects of
performance were continued by Cab Calloway and Jimmie Lunceford in the 1930s, avoided by most
after World War II, and revived in the 1960s by Sun Ra and his Arkestra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago,
and Cecil Taylor.
A concert staged by Paul Whiteman at New York’s Aeolian Hall on 12 February 1924 crystallized
conflicting views of jazz in the 1920s. Entitled “An Experiment in Modern Music,” Whiteman’s event
sought, among other things, to suggest that the old “discordant jazz” (the New Orleans small-group
style identified with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band) was being replaced by “the really melodious
music of today,” which he called “modern jazz.” George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, arranged by
Grofé and first performed on this occasion, was described in the press as a “jazz rhapsody.” For
Whiteman and others, then, jazz was a form of American popular music, not necessarily racially
marked, suitable for polite dancing by urban sophisticates, and adaptable by composers for use in the
concert hall. This perspective on jazz also dominated Henry O. Osgood’s So this is Jazz (Boston, 1926),
the first book-length study of the subject in English. The main figures profiled by Osgood were all
successful white bandleaders or composers, among them Whiteman, Gershwin, Berlin, and Ted Lewis.
Jazz in the 1920s was a fluid, unstable construct. Depending on who used the term, it could refer to
Jelly Roll Morton, Vincent Lopez and his Hotel Pennsylvania orchestra, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, or
Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The breadth of its semantic range is demonstrated by the film The Jazz
Singer (1927), in which the lead character, played by Al Jolson, is a white Jewish singer who performs
in blackface, employs jerky body movement, and does trick whistling. Jolson’s taut delivery and
histrionic mode of “jazz” singing contrasted sharply with the work of other contemporary musicians,
such as the stark tonal portrait sketched by Ellington and his orchestra in “Black and Tan
Fantasy” (Bruns., 1927) and the jubilant strains of Armstrong and his Hot Five in “Struttin’ with Some
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If Paul Whiteman programmed his Aeolian Hall concert in 1924 to suggest what type of jazz would
prevail in the years to come, his prediction was completely wrong. It was not his symphonic jazz that
captured the public imagination. Instead, it was the rhythmically charged jazz of black bands like
McKinney’s Cotton Pickers and the orchestras of Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and Bennie
Moten along with that of such white bands as the Casa Loma Orchestra that set the tempo for
developments in the 1930s and 1940s. Unlike Whiteman’s 20-piece orchestra, these ensembles, each
numbering roughly a dozen players around 1930, were sleeker and usually comprised three trumpets,
two trombones, three reeds (including one saxophonist doubling on clarinet), and four in the rhythm
section. By the early 1930s the tuba had been replaced by a string bass and the banjo by a guitar,
yielding a leaner sound overall. Arrangers for these bands, including Benny Carter, John Nesbitt, Eddie
Durham, Don Redman, Horace and Fletcher Henderson, and Gene Gifford, discovered ways to
translate the freedom and flexibility of improvising soloists into the parts they wrote. Sometimes they
played the reeds off against the brass, as in the final “shout” chorus of Fletcher Henderson’s “New
King Porter Stomp” (OK, 1932); this was based on an antiphonal call-and-response figure that reached
back to such older African American musical forms as the work song and spiritual. They also devised
short, repeated melodic-rhythmic cells called riffs that could accompany solos or serve a primary
melodic function, as in “Casa Loma Stomp” (OK, 1930) by the Casa Loma Orchestra and the last chorus
of “Moten Swing” (Vic., 1932) by Moten’s orchestra. In addition, they lightened textures by reducing
the number of doubled parts and streamlining harmonies. Such techniques gave large-ensemble jazz
speed and grace and made the rhythm buoyant and propulsive. The term for this rhythmic quality—
taken from the vocabulary of black musicians— was “Swing,” and it soon became a stylistic designation
synonymous with jazz and a rallying cry for a new generation of listeners, dancers, and critics.
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Benny Goodman played a major role in popularizing the latter two senses of “swing” in the mid-1930s.
Like Whiteman earlier and Elvis Presley a few decades later, Goodman was a white musician who could
successfully mediate between an African American musical tradition and the large base of white
listeners making up the majority of the American population. Wearing glasses and conservative suits
—“looking like a high school science teacher,” according to one observer (Stowe, E1994, p. 45)—
Goodman appeared to be an ordinary, respectable white American. Musically he was anything but
ordinary: a virtuoso clarinetist, a skilled improviser who could solo “hot” on up-tempo numbers and
“sweet” on ballads, and a disciplined bandleader who demanded excellence from his players. With
these combined personal and musical attributes, he built a following through radio network programs
(“Let’s Dance,” 1934–5, and “The Camel Caravan,” 1936–9), recordings made for the Victor label (from
1935), and live performances nationwide. Jazz historians have often used the date of one of these
appearances (21 August 1935, when his orchestra broadcast live from the Palomar Ballroom in Los
Angeles) to mark the beginning of the swing era, a period stretching into the late 1940s during which
the large-ensemble jazz purveyed by Goodman and other bandleaders was the popular music of choice
for many in the United States. Significantly, the pieces that galvanized listeners most during the
Palomar performance were hot jazz numbers from Goodman’s repertory that had been arranged by an
African American musician, Fletcher Henderson.
In some ways Goodman practiced a racial politics that was more inclusive than that of his
predecessors, although he was not the first prominent white bandleader to perform music written by
African Americans: Whiteman, for example, had commissioned arrangements from William Grant Still
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In the guise of swing, jazz appeared domesticated in the 1930s. Earlier, it had been associated with gin
mills and smoky cabarets, illegal substances (alcohol and drugs), and illicit sex. Swing generally
enjoyed a more wholesome reputation, although some preached of the dangers it posed to the morals
of young people. This exuberant, extroverted music, performed by well dressed musicians and their
clean-cut leaders, entered middle-class households through everyday appliances like the living room
Victrola and the kitchen radio. It reached a wider populace as musicians transported it from large
urban centers into small towns and rural areas. Criss-crossing North America by bus, car, and train,
big bands played single-night engagements in dance halls, ballrooms, theaters, hotels, nightclubs,
country clubs, military bases, and outdoor pavilions. They attracted hordes of teenagers who came to
hear the popular songs of the day and dance the jitterbug, lindy hop, and Susie Q. The strenuous
touring schedule of big bands was far from glamorous. Nevertheless, musicians who played in these
ensembles could symbolize achievement and prove inspirational, as the writer Ralph Ellison recalled
from his early years growing up in Oklahoma City (H1986, p. 220):
And then Ellington and the great orchestra came to town; came with their uniforms, their
sophistication, their skills; their golden horns, their flights of controlled and disciplined
fantasy; came with their art, their special sound; came with Ivie Anderson and Ethel Waters
singing and dazzling the eye with their high-brown beauty and with the richness and bright
feminine flair of their costumes, their promising manners. They were news from the great
wide world, an example and a goal.
In less densely populated areas of the United States, bands might be based in one location but travel
regularly within a circumscribed area covering two or more states. These so-called territory bands
were especially active in the Midwestern and south-central parts of the country (see Territory band and
Southwest jazz). Among the better-known leaders of black territory bands were Don Albert and
Alphonso Trent (based in Dallas), Troy Floyd (San Antonio), Jesse Stone (Dallas and Kansas City),
Walter Page (Oklahoma City), and Moten and Andy Kirk (Kansas City, Missouri). Although territory
bands enjoyed modest financial success and made relatively few recordings (with the exception of
those led by Moten and Kirk), they provided black musicians with important professional opportunities
and fused together the vocal expressivity of the blues with the rhythmic drive of dance music and the
spontaneity of improvised solos and ensemble riffs.
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Big bands also provided a training and proving ground for vocalists. Ensembles usually carried with
them at least one solo singer; some had both male and female singers as well as small vocal groups,
and these expanded the timbral palette of big bands as arrangers used harmonized voices to deliver
melody lines as well as to supply background harmonies. (The Boswell Sisters had begun exploring this
vocal jazz territory in the early 1930s.) In 1929 Whiteman became one of the first major bandleaders to
feature singers regularly with his ensemble; these included the soloist Mildred Bailey and a vocal trio,
the Rhythm Boys (Bing Crosby, Harry Barris, and Al Rinker). The practice became standard in the
1930s and 1940s, with the roster of distinguished big band vocalists including Ivie Anderson with
Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald with Chick Webb, Billie Holiday with Basie and Shaw, Peggy Lee with
Goodman, Anita O’Day with Krupa, Frank Sinatra with Harry James and Tommy Dorsey, and Sarah
Vaughan and Billy Eckstine with Earl Hines. The exposure and experience these singers received from
big bands helped them launch successful solo careers: performing each night with 15-piece orchestras,
they absorbed important lessons about rhythm and phrasing and learned how to use limited space (a
32-bar vocal chorus inserted in the middle of a three-minute instrumental arrangement) to maximum
advantage. Singers were also presented as featured soloists who received accompanying support from
big bands; a number of Fitzgerald’s recordings with Webb’s band, such as “A-tisket, A-tasket” (Decca,
1938), “Bei mir bist du schön” (Decca, 1938), and “Undecided” (Decca, 1939), placed her at the center
of attention, dominating the arrangements.
For those aspiring to compose and arrange in the jazz idiom, big bands offered a ready-made outlet.
New pieces were constantly needed, whether original works or fresh arrangements of older ones;
many bands hired staff arrangers to fill the demand. Commercially published arrangements were also
widely used, but it was the specials (distinctive arrangements owned by individual ensembles and often
not circulated) that helped give bands a unique sound, setting them apart from their competitors.
Ellington’s orchestra was identified by its signature muted brass sonorities, its thick polyphonic
textures, and its high level of dissonance, all of which characterized such compositions as “East St.
Louis Toodle-oo” (Voc., 1926), “Ko-Ko” (Vic., 1940), and “Blue Serge” (Vic., 1941). Showmanship,
novelty vocals, and razor-sharp precision contributed to the musical persona of Jimmie Lunceford’s
orchestra, as did the polished, economical arrangements of his staff arranger, Sy Oliver. Shaw’s big
band was distinguished by the leader’s clarinet as well as its employment of a string section,
effectively used by William Grant Still in his arrangement for Shaw of “Frenesi” (Vic., 1940).
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By the late 1930s there were signs that jazz was gaining cultural and institutional respect as a musical
tradition in the United States. It began to be heard more often in Carnegie Hall (where James Reese
Europe’s Clef Club Orchestra had performed several times before 1920), notably during Goodman’s
first concert there (1938), John Hammond’s Spirituals to Swing evenings (1938–9), and Ellington’s
annual series of programs there (from 1943). Winthrop Sargeant’s book Jazz, Hot and Hybrid (New
York, 1938, 3/1976) treated the music as a subject fit for musicological inquiry, analyzing rhythmic,
melodic, and harmonic features in close detail. Interest in reconstructing jazz history was evident in
Frederic Ramsey Jr. and Charles Edward Smith’s Jazzmen (New York, 1939/R), which explored the
origins of jazz in late 19th-century New Orleans and traced the later evolution of hot jazz and blues in
Chicago and New York.
Serious interest in jazz also developed in Europe during the 1930s. Such visiting American musicians
as Armstrong, Ellington, and Hawkins gave jazz lovers in England and on the continent first-hand
opportunities to hear major artists whose careers they had been following on recordings. Some
European writers sought to define what they called authentic or real jazz in order to distinguish it from
the more commercialized forms offered up by Tin Pan Alley songwriters and white “sweet” orchestras.
This was the critical agenda set by the Belgian writer Robert Goffin in Aux frontières du jazz (Paris,
1932) and the Frenchman Hugues Panassié in Le jazz hot (Paris, 1934) and The Real Jazz (New York,
1942/R). Panassié’s passion for traditional and hot jazz led him to help found the Hot Club de France in
1932 and edit its magazine Jazz hot for a number of years. Another member of this group of French
enthusiasts was Charles Delaunay, who published one of the first comprehensive reference guides to
jazz recordings, Hot Discography (Paris, 1936), and started the French jazz record label Swing. Also
affiliated with this group was the Quintette du Hot Club de France, featuring the guitarist Django
Reinhardt and the violinist Stephane Grappelli. The recordings of this ensemble provided a showcase
for the nimble technique and inventive soloing of Reinhardt and Grappelli and established the quintet
as one of the first major jazz groups to emerge from Europe.
The vogue for swing and jazz was widespread in the late 1930s. In Holland the Ramblers (a big band
formed in 1926) made recordings on its own and accompanied Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter. In
England the BBC initiated the program Radio Rhythm Club (1940) that featured jazz on a regular basis.
Political authorities in some nations (Germany and the Soviet Union) perceived jazz as a threat,
branding it as unwholesome and decadent; the Nazis termed it entartete Musik and attempted to put
forward their own sanitized forms of popular dance music allegedly purged of unwanted “black” and
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While big bands offered many musicians steady employment and professional training during the
1930s and 1940s, smaller groups were also prevalent. They approached the problem of balancing
composition and improvisation in different ways, ranging along a continuum from the highly controlled
to the loosely coordinated. The Raymond Scott Quintette and John Kirby Sextet were like miniature big
bands, specializing in precisely executed and, at times, intricate arrangements that displayed the
talents of arrangers as much as performers. Other small groups were less rigorously scripted, relying
more on head arrangements (memorized riffs and harmonized parts scattered throughout a given
piece) or using composed sections to start pieces followed by improvised solos and ad-lib final
choruses for the full ensemble. This latter approach, which shifted the balance away from writers and
arrangers toward improvising instrumentalists, can be heard on recordings by the Kansas City Six
(made up of members of Count Basie’s big band) and the various Ellington and Goodman small-band
units of the late 1930s. Looser still, on the opposite end of the spectrum from Scott and Kirby, were
groups that adopted an informal, jam session approach. Musicians in these settings depended little or
not at all on pre-planned parts, relying instead on familiar performing conventions and a common
musical vocabulary to play a repertory drawn largely from the 12-bar blues and familiar popular songs
such as “I got rhythm,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and “Oh, Lady, Be Good.” Such ensembles could be
heard in many situations: in nightclubs when the regular evening’s entertainment was over; on
recordings, such as those made for Milt Gabler’s Commodore label, that assembled skilled improvisers
in the studio and let them generate performances with minimal rehearsal; on the soundtrack to Gjon
Mili’s film Jammin’ the Blues (1944), which re-created a late-night session using such players as the
saxophonists Lester Young and Illinois Jacquet, the trumpeter Harry Edison, and the drummers Sid
Catlett and Jo Jones; and in the series of Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts launched by the impresario
and record producer Norman Granz (1944) which, like the Commodore recordings and Mili’s film, set
up controlled performing contexts within which jazz musicians were expected to play with freedom and
spontaneity.
Small groups were particularly valuable for soloists honing their skills. Such ensembles gave individual
players more time to develop their ideas than was customary or practical in big-band arrangements.
(The pianist Sammy Price recalled stopping in a Kansas City club one night when a jam session was
underway, going home, then returning more than three hours later to find the same piece still being
played.) In competitive “cutting contests,” musicians took turns building long, virtuosic solos designed
to impress or outdo opposing players. Small-group recordings did not permit such extended
excursions, but they could still let soloists luxuriate in the spotlight. The several sides made for
Commodore in 1940 by the Chocolate Dandies (featuring the trumpeter Roy Eldridge, the tenor
saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, and the alto saxophonist Benny Carter) emphasized individual
statements over ensemble playing. On the ballad “I surrender dear,” Hawkins states the theme in the
first chorus, Eldridge solos in the second chorus, then Hawkins returns for the third; all the while the
rhythm section sustains behind them a steady, secondary accompaniment. This practice of placing a
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The emphasis on solos in small-group jazz of the 1930s and 1940s raised prevailing standards of
virtuosity and instrumental proficiency. Hawkins inspired other saxophonists who wished to learn some
of the advanced ideas he applied to the changes (chord progressions) of popular songs; trumpeters
admired Eldridge’s control of the upper register and daring construction of phrases. The pianist Art
Tatum, who performed both as soloist and with his trio at the Onyx on 52nd Street, brought to jazz a
new combination of harmonic savvy, playful wit, and transcendent technique: what he did seemed so
impossible that it helped raise the ceiling for what other musicians might accomplish. The guitarist
Charlie Christian, with his fluent, horn-like phrasing and clean articulation, demonstrated how his
instrument could assume a leading soloistic role in jazz, and Jimmy Blanton performed a similar
function for the bass through his work with Ellington’s orchestra (1939–41).
The rise of virtuosity in jazz was due not solely to exceptionally talented individuals, however. In the
United States opportunities for instrumental instruction in high schools and colleges helped improve
the general level of musicianship. Such African American teacher-bandleaders as N. Clark Smith and
Walter Dyett in Chicago fostered the development of many young black musicians—among them Lionel
Hampton, Nat “King” Cole, Milt Hinton, and Ray Nance—who later moved into the world of big bands
and instrumental jazz. Jimmie Lunceford’s popular orchestra grew out of the student group the
Chickasaw Syncopators, which he had formed at a high school in Memphis. Another band that
emerged from an institutional program was the all-female group the International Sweethearts of
Rhythm, formed in 1939 at the Piney Woods Country Life School in Mississippi. By the early 1940s the
general technical ability of jazz players was significantly higher than it had been a decade or two
earlier: recordings of both small groups and big bands would soon provide convincing demonstrations
of the improvement.
The swing era reached its apogee in the early 1940s, with the bands of Ellington, Basie, Goodman,
Shaw, Dorsey, Miller, and many others enjoying unprecedented popularity and commercial success.
They faced difficulties nonetheless: wartime conscription thinned the ranks of big bands; record
manufacturing was slowed by a shortage of shellac used in the war effort; shortages of rubber made it
difficult for bands to tour using automobiles or buses; and the musicians’ union called for a ban on
commercial recording which limited distribution of the music between 1942 and 1944 (DeVeaux,
E1997). Generally, however, swing remained the popular music of choice throughout World War II, in
tandem with a craze for the blues-based, ostinato-driven style of boogie-woogie.
Meanwhile other forms of jazz during the 1940s presented alternatives to the swing offered by big
bands. A resurgence of interest in older, pre-swing jazz led to what some critics later called a New
Orleans or Dixieland revival. The musicians identified with this movement came from different places
and backgrounds. Some were older black players from Louisiana such as the clarinetist George Lewis
and the cornetist Bunk Johnson, both of whom had performed mainly in and around New Orleans until
they began receiving national recognition through recordings and live performances in the 1940s.
Johnson in particular was hailed as a living link to an older, “authentic” jazz tradition, since he had
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While some musicians and fans assumed a retrospective stance in the 1940s, seeking to reclaim the
roots of jazz tradition, others began to construct a musical vocabulary that would set them apart from
both the traditional and swing camps. If the New Orleans revival was a nationwide phenomenon, the
impetus to forge a modern jazz idiom was centered in New York, initially in Harlem, and came from a
younger generation of African American musicians born between 1913 and 1925. Major figures
involved in the effort included Kenny Clarke (b 1914), Dizzy Gillespie (b 1917), Thelonious Monk (b
1917), Charlie Parker (b 1920), Bud Powell (b 1924), and Max Roach (b 1924). These players did not
deliberately set out to create a new jazz idiom, but the work they did with like-minded musicians
resulted in one. During informal and after-hours jam sessions held in small nightclubs and musicians’
apartments, a process of collaborative discovery unfolded in which new ideas about harmonic
substitutions, rhythmic vocabulary, and melodic construction were worked out, shared, and tested on
the bandstand.
Among the primary sites for this activity were the Harlem clubs Minton’s Playhouse, Clark Monroe’s
Uptown House, and Dan Wall’s Chili Shack, although what occurred in them is difficult to ascertain.
Musicians who performed in such spaces give conflicting accounts about what happened. Gillespie, for
example, recalled some of the advance preparation he did for informal Monday night jams at Minton’s:
“On afternoons before a session, Thelonious Monk and I began to work out some complex variations on
chords and the like, and we used them at night to scare away the no-talent guys” (Shapiro and Hentoff,
E1955, p. 337). Monk, however, told Nat Hentoff in 1956 that the atmosphere was both more ordinary
and supportive: “I was playing a gig, tryin’ to play music. While I was at Minton’s, anybody sat in who
would come up there if he could play, I never bothered anybody. It was just a job” (Kelley, F2009, p.
67). In addition, journalists and historians have at times exaggerated and embellished data for
dramatic effect. In one famous account, Parker, who first visited New York in 1939, is quoted directly
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Recordings from the early 1940s can provide only limited evidence of the emergence of “modern jazz,”
or Bop and bebop as it was onomatopoeically dubbed by critics. The recording ban of 1942–4 was
partly to blame, but as Scott DeVeaux noted, even without the recording ban it is doubtful that
companies would have found bop to be an appealing, marketable commodity, characterized as it was by
“a loose, improvisatory format and an eclectic repertory of standards studded with harmonic
obstacles” (DeVeaux, E1997, p. 298). There are examples in such recordings, though, of modern
techniques being introduced in conventional swing contexts. Live recordings of sessions at Minton’s in
1941, when Monk and Kenny Clarke were members of the house band, contain the pianist’s dissonant,
chromatically inflected harmonies and the drummer’s explosive accents, the latter of which later
dominated the rhythmic topography of bop. Similarly, a few of Parker’s solos with the Jay McShann
band hint at imminent departures from swing conventions, as in the saxophonist’s asymmetrical
phrasing on “Moten Swing” and double-time lines on “Body and Soul” (both from the 1940 Wichita
transcriptions).
More dramatic evidence of modern jazz practice, however, turns up in recordings from the period
1944–5, by which time the experimentation described by musicians had presumably been going on for
several years. The use of chromatically altered pitches within a diatonic harmonic context (e.g.
flattened 5th and 9th, sharp 9th, flat 13th) can be heard in some of Gillespie’s solos recorded with
Hawkins and his orchestra in February 1944, and the trumpeter’s trademark double-time phrasing can
be heard toward the end of the ballad “I stay in the mood for you” (Deluxe, 1944), recorded with the
Billy Eckstine orchestra. The dissonant syntax, whole-tone runs, and off-kilter rhythmic patterns of
Monk contrast with the longer, spun-out phrases of Hawkins on the latter’s recordings of “On the
Bean” (Joe Davis, 1944) and “Flyin’ Hawk” (Joe Davis, 1944). Differences between the older swing style
and the newer bop idiom are vividly illustrated by instrumentalists on Sarah Vaughan’s recording of
“Mean to me” (Contl, 1945), in which the relaxed, flowing solo of the tenor saxophonist Flip Phillips is
followed by the darting, agitated lines of Parker and Gillespie.
A stylistically cohesive example of bop can be heard in “Shaw’ Nuff,” recorded by Gillespie and his All
Star Quintette (Guild, 1945). The ominous tone of the introduction comes from the flattened 5ths
played in the bass register of the piano by Al Haig, shadowed by Sid Catlett on tom-toms. The
dissonant tritone also figures in the rapidly moving melody, or “head,” played in unison by Gillespie
and Parker, and returns at the end with the repeat of the introduction and the final D♭ to G fillip in the
piano. The rapid tempo, irregular phrase groups (in both head and solos), sudden, sharp drum accents,
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Although bop was primarily a small-group style of jazz, performed usually with two or three lead
instruments (most often trumpet and saxophone) and three or four in the rhythm section, some big
bands played a role in promoting this music. Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine both directed ensembles
that featured young modernists in their ranks, among them Gillespie, Parker, Vaughan, and Fats
Navarro. Gillespie himself led a big band in the second half of the 1940s; his recording of Gil Fuller’s
“Things to Come” (also known as “Bebop,” Musi., 1946), with its breakneck tempo, seemingly frenetic
phrasing, and ubiquitous flattened 5ths, is an attempt to make bop effective in a large-ensemble
format. The big band of Boyd Raeburn in the mid-1940s was known for its provocatively dissonant
harmonies and unusual timbral combinations. Even such an avid exponent of entertaining swing as
Hampton recalled wanting “some of that bebop sound in [his] performances” and he hired Betty Carter
(Lorraine Carter at that time) for that purpose in 1948. Other bands, such as those led by Woody
Herman, Artie Shaw, Claude Thornhill, and Duke Ellington, featured bop-flavored arrangements in
their repertory without necessarily championing the cause of modern jazz.
In addition to drawing upon the newly minted expressive resources of the bop idiom, some modern
groups in the 1940s began incorporating features from Afro-Latin musics. To be sure, sonic elements
from the Caribbean and Latin America had been part of jazz from early on, as in Jelly Roll Morton’s
“Spanish tinge” pieces and in the presence of dance forms like the Argentine tango and Cuban rhumba
in the repertories of jazz orchestras in the 1920s and 1930s. Latin stylistic features had also been
introduced to American dance orchestras by musicians who had come to the United States from
Caribbean nations, such as Ellington’s trombonist Juan Tizol (Puerto Rico), the flutist and reed player
Alberto Soccarras (Cuba), and the trumpeter Mario Bauzá (Cuba). In the 1940s some musicians from
the United States, continuing the “Atlantic world” traffic in sounds and commodities that helped give
birth to jazz in New Orleans, heard new possibilities for their work through the work of Frank
“Machito” Grillo and his Afro-Cubans and the contributions made by the Cuban percussionist Chano
Pozo to Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra in the period 1947–8. Gillespie showcased Pozo’s talents in such
compositions as “Manteca” (Vic., 1947) and the two-part “Cubana Be/Cubana Bop” (Vic., 1947),
composed by Gillespie with George Russell, which fused together forward-looking, dissonant
harmonies with Afro-Cuban conga patterns and vocal chanting led by Pozo. Similar features are heard
in Pete Rugolo’s “Cuban Carnival,” recorded by Stan Kenton’s orchestra (Cap., 1947). The impact of
Afro-Cuban rhythmic practices on small-group jazz performance can be heard in Max Roach’s playing
with the Bud Powell trio on Powell’s composition “Un poco loco” (BN, 1951) and Gillespie’s “A Night in
Tunisia” (BN, 1951). While inspired, these acts of incorporation were mostly superficial: rhythmic
patterns extracted from much larger complexes of interlocking lines were grafted onto existing jazz
formal structures without significantly altering the phrasing of soloists. Nonetheless, they were
another manifestation of the exploratory leanings of some musicians.
In seeking to understand the development of “modern jazz” in the 1940s, historians have tended to
stress either its affinities with swing and earlier jazz (bop as an incremental advance beyond the
harmonic sophistication and virtuosity cultivated in the 1930s) or its radical, self-conscious break with
tradition (bop as a revolt against the watered-down, commodified form of jazz presented by big bands).
Other writers, among them DeVeaux and David Stowe, described bop as a de facto response to the
contingencies of professional music-making and the economic structures of the music industry. These
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Enthusiasm for big-band swing gradually waned after World War II: the postwar generation preferred
to dance and listen to other kinds of music. The popularity of rhythm and blues in the late 1940s
signaled a shift in taste towards non-Tin Pan Alley songs, especially those featuring a strong, shuffling
backbeat. In the emerging styles, the rich, orchestrated textures of big bands gave way to a leaner,
more streamlined sound emphasizing vocals, one or two horns, electric guitar, bass, and drums.
Figures formerly associated with instrumental jazz, such as the pianist Nat “King” Cole and the
saxophonist Louis Jordan, highlighted their vocal talents as they moved into the more commercially
driven fields of contemporary pop and rhythm-and-blues, respectively. Singers who had launched
careers with big bands, such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan, found success as
soloists in the later 1940s and 1950s, often recording pop songs with orchestral accompaniment in
settings removed from the jazz sphere. The appeal of solo singers and close-harmony vocal groups, and
the rise of rhythm and blues and early rock and roll, brought the swing era to a definitive close and
created problems for many jazz musicians whose skills and/or predilections limited them to working
with big bands. While a few of the most successful big bands survived this period and continued as
they were, others were forced to reduce their numbers or broke up altogether. Count Basie led smaller
units in the period 1950–51, then reconstituted a big band that gained popularity with slow, melodious,
gently swinging pieces such as Frank Foster’s “Shiny Stockings” (Verve, 1956) and Neal Hefti’s “Lil’
Darlin’” (Roul., 1957) and riff-driven blues numbers with a heavier backbeat (“Every day I have the
blues,” Clef, 1955, and “Blues in Hoss’ Flat,” Roul., 1959). To survive economically, big bands had to be
conversant with current popular tastes or, in the case of Ellington’s and Kenton’s, assemble a repertory
so distinctive and players so accomplished that they could still command a public following.
With big bands becoming increasingly risky ventures, small-group activity picked up during the 1950s.
But if jazz lost popularity and commercial currency, those musicians who could afford to continue
performing gained the creative freedom to try new approaches. For some this meant finding fresh ways
to integrate composition and improvisation, while for others it meant tapping into the rich vein of
African American vernacular idioms—blending jazz with rhythm-and-blues, blues, and gospel—and, for
musicians like Milt Hinton, working as session players on rhythm-and-blues recordings. This was a
time of synthesis and consolidation, in which techniques from both swing and bop were freely mixed
together. Bop initially may have been, as Baraka noted, “harsh” and “anti-assimilationist,” but during
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The work of Miles Davis and like-minded musicians shows the processes of synthesis and consolidation
in action. Although Davis had been a member of Charlie Parker’s band (1945–8), his own playing
differed from the brilliant virtuoso style of Gillespie: Davis was a slower, sparer, and softer—more
lyrical—performer. During the period 1949–50 he collaborated with such arrangers as Gil Evans, Gerry
Mulligan, and John Lewis and assembled a nine-piece band to record a group of compositions which
were later reissued as a long-playing album entitled Birth of the Cool (Cap., 1957). These recordings
combined the harmonic language and gestural vocabulary of bop with the ensemble precision of big-
band swing; all the musicians had experience playing with big bands, and Evans’s arranging for the
orchestra of Claude Thornhill made a direct impact on the sound and style of the Davis nonet,
particularly in his use of tuba and french horn in the ensemble and in such slow, atmospheric numbers
as “Moon Dreams.” Throughout Birth of the Cool a sense of relaxation prevails quite different from the
constant motion and whirling turbulence of bop. At the same time, the basic idiom on such pieces as
“Move” and “Boplicity” displays features recognizable from the work of Parker, Gillespie, Powell, and
other bop pioneers. Beyond transforming—and to an extent subduing—the language of bop, the Davis
nonet sought in these performances to find a more flexible model for integrating solo improvisation
with group ensemble passages. Improvised and written lines often intertwine symbiotically, departing
from the conventional big-band practice of having soloists play only with a rhythm section or
accompanying riffs.
Some of the same qualities manifest on Davis’s nonet sides (relaxed pacing, understated expression,
softer-edged tone) were evident in the work of other jazz musicians of the 1950s, leading critics to
describe their collective output as Cool jazz. The Modern Jazz Quartet drew upon players formerly in
Gillespie’s big band: the pianist John Lewis, the vibraphonist Milt Jackson, the bass player Ray Brown
(later Percy Heath), and the drummer Kenny Clarke (later Connie Kay). They specialized in classical
music-tinged, small-group swing that was presented with an air of formality reminiscent of the concert
hall. Like the Davis nonet, the Modern Jazz Quartet sought creative solutions to the problem of
combining written parts with improvisation, with Lewis composing many of the vehicles used for such
exploration. The group also introduced new formal models for jazz, not simply with extended works or
suites made up of shorter movements (as Ellington had been doing since the 1940s) but with different
structures used for soloing, as in the 32-bar chorus form for “Django” (1954, Prst.), organized A (6
bars) A (6) B (8) A’ (4) C (8). Another composer-driven small group of the same period that became
identified with cool jazz was the Dave Brubeck Quartet (featuring the alto saxophonist Paul Desmond).
They enjoyed great success with such albums as Jazz Goes to College (Col., 1954) and Time Out (Col.,
1959). The latter of those albums featured pieces whose thematic statements used time signatures
unusual for jazz (5/4 for “Take Five,” 9/8 for “Blue Rondo a la Turk”), but whose improvised passages
did not appreciably depart from standard practice: only Desmond soloed in the conventional sense on
“Take Five,” and the solos for “Blue Rondo …” were restricted to phrases and sections in 4/4. More
experimental and less popular than either Brubeck or the Modern Jazz Quartet were New York-based
groups led by the pianist and teacher Lennie Tristano. Two early recordings by his sextet minus the
drummer Denzil Best, “Intuition” and “Digression” (Cap., 1949), were perhaps the first jazz recordings
to include improvisations not governed by song forms or pre-set harmonic schemes, although Tristano
did provide instructions to the musicians regarding, for example, when to enter and in what order
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As the decade proceeded, Davis did not confine himself to the cool aesthetic mapped out by the nonet.
Drawing inspiration from the Ahmad Jamal trio’s use of space, choice of material, and style of
arrangement, Davis led a quintet in the years 1955–7 with the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, the
pianist Red Garland, the bass player Paul Chambers, and the drummer Philly Joe Jones, which
delivered a mixed repertory of up-tempo bop (“Oleo,” Prst., 1955), medium-tempo blues (“Blues by
Five,” Prst., 1956), and haunting ballads (“My Funny Valentine,” Prst., 1956). Beginning in 1957 he
made a series of albums in collaboration with Evans, in which he held forth as a lead soloist against a
lush orchestral backdrop in album-length suites that resembled extended jazz concertos. (One piece, in
fact, was Evans’s arrangement of a movement from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, included on
Sketches of Spain, Col., 1960). Concurrent with these Evans collaborations, Davis toured and recorded
in a sextet format that contrasted his aphoristic style with the more effusive phrasing of the
saxophonists Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley. Whatever cool aspects might have formed part of
Davis’s musical persona were effectively complemented (or countered) by fellow group members,
especially the propulsive playing of the drummer Jimmy Cobb. Nevertheless, on the album Kind of Blue
(Col., 1959), the Davis sextet reprised the nonet’s cool affect from a decade earlier via subdued tone
poems like “Flamenco Sketches” and “Blue in Green” that, in contrast, relied mostly on individual solos
rather than on pre-arranged parts. Each of the album’s selections, moreover, presented players with
specific modes (other than major or minor) to guide their pitch choices rather than a series of goal-
directed harmonies. In a interview with Nat Hentoff in 1958, Davis explained his approach as part of a
general movement in jazz “away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on
melodic rather than harmonic variation” (Williams, G1962, p. 167) and cited J.J. Johnson and George
Russell as musicians with similar ideas. Davis’s modal experiments on Kind of Blue opened up
liberating possibilities that his groups and others would explore more extensively in the 1960s (see
Modal jazz).
During the 1950s, though, jazz musicians discovered many other ways of assimilating and transforming
the bop idiom that had seemed so experimental and self-contained in the previous decade. Among the
younger players who absorbed the lessons of their “modern jazz” elders but struck out in their own
directions was the trumpeter Clifford Brown, who joined with Max Roach to form a quintet in the
mid-1950s that extended the reach of bop while making it more accessible. Adapting musical
vocabularies from the work of Parker and Gillespie, the Brown–Roach quintet offered renditions of
popular songs and bop standards that were often inventively arranged. As the quintet approached it,
the idiom of “modern jazz” was less a statement of their difference or being part of an artistic
vanguard, as had been the case for the first generation of boppers, than it was an effective and familiar
set of guidelines for group coordination and individual expression. The intense rhythmic drive and
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Although such journalist-coined labels as hard bop and bop tend to restrict jazz to uncomfortably
narrow categories, there were some significant departures in the small-group modern jazz of Blakey,
Silver, and others from the work of those who preceded them. Tempos tended to be more moderate,
allowing drummers and bass players to articulate a more elastic rhythmic groove. Melodies were
smoother and simpler; the jagged intricacies of Parker’s “Donna Lee” and Gillespie’s “Be-bop” gave
way to sectional, riff-based tunes such as Silver’s “Doodlin’” and Bobby Timmons’s “Moanin’” (BN,
1958). The blues presence became stronger in hard bop, and rhythms and harmonies evoking those
used in (Southern) African American churches helped anchor the music solidly in the vernacular, as in
the instrumental “amen” responsorial figures in “Moanin’” and the folksy melody of Silver’s “The
Preacher” (BN, 1955). Even the titles of pieces became friendlier, more familiar: in place of Parker’s
“Klactoveedsedstene” and Monk’s “Epistrophy,” there were Davis’s “Walkin’,” Brown’s “Swingin’,” and
Silver’s “Señor Blues.” As a result, then, when recordings like the latter three were issued as 45-r.p.m.,
7-inch singles, they sold moderately well, especially to jukebox vendors serving African American
communities, and often helped to drive their parent albums’ initial sales to more than twice the point
(2500 units) where a label would start to realize a profit (Rosenthal, E1992, pp. 62–8). If the end of the
swing era meant that jazz had ceased to be the popular music of the United States, these figures
indicate that it remained a popular music in some quarters.
There were many other signs which, taken together, indicate that jazz remained viable and was
continuing to gain respectability in other segments of society as well. Although New York-based jazz
and dance ensembles had been entertaining audiences on a circuit of summer resort towns in the
northeastern United States since the mid-1920s (Tucker, F1991, pp. 183–6) and had occasionally
graced the stages of concert halls, the 1950s saw jazz musicians in general performing in other
prestigious settings. Using a model that had already proved successful in extra-urban classical music
festivals like those established at Ravinia Park, outside Chicago, in 1915, at Tanglewood in Lenox,
Massachsetts, in 1937, and in Aspen, Colorado, in 1949, George Wein mounted the First American Jazz
Festival (which later became the Newport Jazz Festival) in Rhode Island in 1954. The invited musicians
for the first evening—Eddie Condon, Gillespie, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Konitz—represented the
already broad sweep of jazz-related styles and, according to a New York Times article published on 19
July 1954, drew an audience of 7000. Despite inclement weather, the second, final night drew an
additional 4000, and the festival received enough national press coverage to encourage its organizers
to repeat and expand it in subsequent years (Wein, F2003, pp. 133–40). Although Newport had been
preceded by an international festival in Nice, France in February 1948, it received more attention: the
Duke Ellington orchestra’s appearance in 1956, for example, made it the subject of a Time magazine
cover story, and the festival of 1958 was the focus of Bert Stern and Aram Avakian’s documentary Jazz
on a Summer’s Day (1959). This attention was perhaps the impetus for others to organize their own
festivals, such as the one established in Monterey, California, in 1958. In addition, thanks in part to a
generation of writers who came of age before rock and roll became a soundtrack for adolescent white
middle-class rebellion, discussions of jazz appeared more frequently in mass market, literary, and
lifestyle publications in the 1950s, and the musicians themselves enjoyed more opportunities to appear
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Thus, with the fundamentals of 1940s bop having become part of daily practice, forming a common
foundation for many younger musicians to follow, what was once “outside the mainstream,” in LeRoi
Jones’s phrase, moved to the center. A broader, more inclusive conception of jazz began to take hold
that folded bop or “modern jazz” in with other styles that made up a “jazz tradition.” This consolidating
process can be seen in the jazz literature of the time, such as M.W. Stearns’s The Story of Jazz (New
York, 1956), Shapiro and Hentoff’s oral-history anthology, Hear me Talkin’ to Ya (New York, 1955) and
the Jazz Review (1958–61), a journal that gave serious consideration to jazz from all eras.
The perception of a common practice within the multi-layered jazz tradition led to the use of the
adjective “mainstream” as a descriptive label during the 1950s (see Mainstream jazz). The British-born
critic Stanley Dance, often credited with introducing the term, issued a series of albums under the
rubric “mainstream jazz,” featuring artists who had emerged on the scene in the 1930s and 1940s,
among them Coleman Hawkins, Earl Hines, the trombonist Dicky Wells, and the cornetist Rex Stewart.
Dance used “mainstream” as a delimiter, referring to musicians whose work fell both chronologically
and stylistically between the “traditional” and “modern” categories. By the early 1960s, though, bop
had become old and familiar enough to join the jazz mainstream that now was bounded on one side by
New Orleans jazz, or Traditional jazz, and on the other by the experimentation associated with an
emergent avant-garde. From this time on, “mainstream” has remained a popular signifier to imply such
paradigmatic traits as improvised solos over cyclical, repeating chorus forms; the use of popular songs,
blues, and short original compositions as basic units of structure; a pervasive rhythmic feeling of
swing; a reliance on functional harmony within a tonal system; and a greater weight placed on
improvisation than on the playing of pre-set or composed material.
Consensus about a jazz mainstream was also reflected in the term “Third stream,” coined by Gunther
Schuller (1957), which described music that drew upon jazz techniques as well as aspects of the
European art-music tradition. Schuller was particularly interested in finding ways to juxtapose
composed and improvised parts and to integrate post-Schoenberg tonal practice into the active
vocabulary of jazz musicians. These aspirations are apparent in his composition “Transformation” (on
the collection The Birth of the Third Stream, Col., 1957), which was recorded by an 11-piece ensemble
including the trombonist Jimmy Knepper and the pianist Bill Evans and consisted of an improvised
middle section flanked by a pre-composed introduction and coda evoking Webern’s spare textures and
Klangfarbenmelodie. Similar blends and juxtapositions of jazz with European art music (from the
Baroque to the post-tonal) can be heard in compositions from this time by John Lewis of the Modern
Jazz Quartet (“Vendome,” “La Ronde Suite,” “Concorde,” and “Piazza Navona”), George Russell
(“Concerto for Billy the Kid,” written for Bill Evans, and “All about Rosie”), and Charles Mingus
(“Gregarian Chant” and “Revelations”). Much of this repertory was presented not in the nightclub
venues customary for jazz but in concert halls, school settings (for example, at the Brandeis Jazz
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There were other paths that musicians followed in search of fresh modes of jazz expression in the
1950s. In New York, Mingus adopted a workshop format in which players collaborated in rehearsals
and public performances to produce music that grew out of a process of group composition and
improvisation. Such works as “Pithecanthropus erectus” (Atl., 1956), “Haitian Fight Song” (Atl., 1957),
and “Ecclusiastics” (Atl., 1961) contained thematic material supplied by Mingus, but their fluidity and
sense of collective creation reflected the workshop ideals he fostered. At the same time, while some of
Mingus’s work showed the forceful impact made upon him by early 20th-century European musical
modernism, his pieces often drew deeply upon the African American vernacular, particularly blues and
gospel, as in the 12/8 meter and plagal harmonies of “Better get hit in your soul” (Col., 1959), which
displays a soulfulness and exuberance associated more with hard bop than with third stream. Indeed,
even hard bop musicians were experimenting with form and harmony. Horace Silver’s “The
Outlaw” (BN, 1958) featured an unusual structure which was maintained for solos, wherein two A
sections (13 measures, divided into 7- and 6-bar units) were followed by a B section (10 measures), a C
section (16 measures), and a break (2 measures) with shifts in feel from section to section and even
within them. Likewise, Wayne Shorter’s “Simply Diana” (BN, 1960) was a 30-measure theme,
structured AA´A″B and divided into 10-, 8-, 4-, and 8-bar units that only ambiguously favor a single
tonal center (Julien, G2003, pp. 151–75).
The saxophonist John Coltrane was another musician searching for challenges and new means of
expression in the late 1950s. Moving at first further into the realm of density and building upon the
expanded harmonic vocabulary of bop, he employed techniques of chord substitution and
superimposition to loosen his improvised lines from their tonal moorings. Original pieces such as
“Giant Steps” and “Countdown” (both Atl., 1959) used unconventional chord movement, for example,
root motion by 3rds replacing cycles of 5ths, and chromaticism to create rich harmonic environments.
Like Miles Davis, his former bandleader, Coltrane gravitated toward the combination of modal
melodies with stable harmonic fields. He based “Impressions” (from the album Impressions, Imp.,
1961–3) on the two-mode framework (D and E♭ Dorian) of Davis’s “So What” and used pedal points in
“My Favorite Things” (Atl., 1960) and “A Love Supreme” (Imp., 1964) to provide tonal reference points
while permitting melodic excursions to go even further afield. Coltrane’s virtuosity and lyricism
enhanced the appeal of his musical experimentation, and his personal conception of the tenor
saxophone proved greatly influential for several generations of players in the following decades.
Beyond third-stream blends, structural experiments, and the modal techniques taken up by Coltrane
and Davis, other means were adopted by musicians seeking to expand the tonal vocabulary of jazz.
Thelonious Monk brought a high level of dissonance (for jazz, at least) in his piano solos and
compositions, and his interest in chromatically rich chord progressions can be traced back to
compositions written in the early 1940s, such as “Epistrophy” and “Well, You Needn’t.” As an
accompanist, he often stopped playing while a horn player improvised, thus allowing soloists greater
harmonic freedom as they continued with just drums and bass. (Gerry Mulligan also explored the idea
of a pianoless quartet in the 1950s.) Examples of that freedom can be heard in recordings made by
Monk with Coltrane (1957) and in live recordings featuring both artists when they played together at
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In addition to developing new technical resources in the late 1950s and early 1960s, some artists
showed a concern with addressing social and political issues through their music. Jazz had perhaps
always implicitly modeled how individuals might exercise personal freedom within the constraints
imposed by society, but it had rarely been overtly political: Billie Holiday’s performance of the anti-
lynching song “Strange Fruit” (Com., 1939), Duke Ellington’s satirical treatment of racial inequities in
the musical Jump for Joy (1941), and Louis Armstrong’s condemnation of segregationist Arkansas
governor Orval Faubus and President Dwight D. Eisenhower in September 1957 (Giddins, F2001, pp.
127–8) were unusual statements for jazz musicians to make. As already noted, however, some
commentators believed that bop embodied the protest of young African Americans who felt
marginalized and oppressed by Jim Crow racial strictures in the United States. And it was partly the
space opened by Parker and Gillespie as well as Holiday, Ellington, and Armstrong that enabled a
young musician like Mingus to comment directly on current political events and social conditions, as
when he indicted the same Arkansas governor as Armstrong in “Original Faubus Fables” (Cand., 1960)
or protested against the unequal treatment of African Americans in “Freedom” (UA, 1962). During this
period, as the civil rights movement was gathering momentum and black nationalism was emerging as
a powerful political force, other jazz musicians spoke out as well. The liner notes of Sonny Rollins’
album The Freedom Suite (Riv., 1958) contained a statement by the saxophonist decrying the fact that
“the Negro, who more than any other people can claim America’s culture as his own, is being
persecuted and repressed … [and] is being rewarded with inhumanity.” Max Roach collaborated with
the singer and songwriter Oscar Brown Jr. on We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (Can., 1960), which
featured sections entitled “Driva’ Man” and “Tears for Johannesburg”; the album implicitly connected
the brutality of American slavery in the former with the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa (1960) in
the latter. The pianist Randy Weston, in collaboration with the poet Langston Hughes and the arranger
Melba Liston, celebrated the cultural and spiritual homeland of African Americans in Uhuru Afrika!
(Roul., 1960). Abbey Lincoln, similarly, affirmed pride in her black heritage through the songs “When
Malindy Sings” and Weston’s “African Lady” on her album Straight Ahead (Can., 1961). Critics,
however, did not always respond positively to such efforts. Ira Gitler, in a now infamous review of
Lincoln’s album in Down Beat, complained that the work was more propaganda than art and accused
Lincoln of being a “professional Negro.” The ensuing controversy led the magazine’s editors in March
1962 to publish the edited transcript of a heated conversation between critics and musicians, including
Gitler and Lincoln, discussing the issues raised by the review under the heading “Racial Prejudice in
Jazz.”
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The titles of Coleman’s albums sought to reflect the spirit of innovation driving his activity: Tomorrow
is the Question! The New Music of Ornette Coleman (Cont., 1959), The Shape of Jazz to Come (Atl.,
1959), and especially Free Jazz (Atl., 1960), in which a double quartet collectively improvises, at times
producing dense textures, jarring dissonance, and agitated rhythmic activity. While some hailed Free
Jazz as a liberating manifesto, opening a new world of possibilities for adventurous musicians working
in jazz, others saw it as a violent, even destructive act: the Down Beat reviewer John A. Tynan wrote:
This witches’ brew is the logical end product of a bankrupt philosophy of ultraindividualism
in music … These eight nihilists were collected together in one studio at one time and with
one common cause: to destroy the music that gave them birth.
In the 1960s the bold challenges to mainstream jazz posed by such figures as Ornette Coleman and
John Coltrane appealed to younger musicians seeking to find their voices. A movement formed within
the jazz community, analogous in some ways to the ideological formation of the bop school 20 years
earlier, in which proponents of what some called Free jazz (or “the new thing”) distanced themselves
from the mainstream that had gradually taken shape during the 1950s. These musicians, most of them
in their early to mid-20s, sought challenges beyond the constraints of chord progressions, pre-
composed melodies, swing, the Tin Pan Alley songbook, and predictable roles for ensemble players.
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Prominent figures in this group were the saxophonists Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler,
Marion Brown, and John Tchicai, the trombonists Grachan Moncur III and Roswell Rudd, the cornetist
Don Cherry, the trumpeter Bill Dixon, the pianist Cecil Taylor, the bass players Gary Peacock and Buell
Neidlinger, and the drummers Ed Blackwell, Andrew Cyrille, and Sunny Murray. They found outlets for
their music in artists’ lofts, galleries, and small concert halls. Recording studios also formed part of the
free jazz scene. Coltrane’s historic recording session for Ascension (Imp., 1965) brought together
members of his own quartet with seven young players based in New York. The issued disc contained a
40-minute performance that had some elements of pre-planning (melodic motifs and mode choices) but
relied primarily on spontaneous collaboration. “The emphasis was on textures rather than the making
of an organizational entity,” said Shepp, one of the participants. “There is no casual approach to be
taken to this record,” warned A.B. Spellman in the liner notes, observing that the group formed “a
plexus of voices, all of different kinds, but most belonging to that generation which grew up on Charles
Mingus, Thelonious Monk, [Cecil] Taylor, [Jackie] McLean, Coleman, Coltrane, the human rights
struggle, and nuclear weapons.” Impulse, a label which had already built an iconic visual identity with
its black and orange album spines, established its sonic identity in the latter half of the 1960s
beginning with Ascension. It cemented for itself a vanguardist reputation by issuing recordings by
young experimental musicians under the rubric “the new wave in jazz.” Impulse’s activities were
complemented by scattered album releases from Blue Note and Atlantic and much more concentrated
efforts by such independent labels as ESP-disk. Typical among such efforts—musically, politically, and
culturally—were pieces like Shepp’s “Rufus (swung his face at last to the wind, then his neck
snapped)” (Imp., 1964) and Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts: Second Variation” (ESP-disk, 1965). Both recordings
showcase fluid group dynamics: bass players and drummers perform free from their conventional time-
keeping roles, while horn players, liberated from having to relate their pitch choices to repeating
harmonic progressions, explored a much broader range of melodic possibilities. Like other
experimental musicians of the era, moreover, all of the musicians involved exploited the timbral
capabilities of their instruments more extensively than their predecessors, spending more time in
precincts that some listeners might have labeled “noise.”
The styles cultivated by the free jazz players perhaps limited their music’s appeal, especially for
conventional audiences, just at the point when the always volatile financial world of performing venues
became even more unstable. As America’s post-World War II manufacturing and export boom subsided,
the surpluses that provided even African Americans with disposable income to buy recordings and
support the bars and clubs where many musicians plied their trade gradually diminished. In addition,
municipalities in the United States had since the 1950s been mounting a number of urban
regeneration projects which disproportionately affected poor and African American communities and
forced venues that served them to close or relocate (Lewis, E2008, pp. 85–7; Isoardi, E2006, pp. 40–
47). Partially in response to such conditions, a number of musicians formed collectives to help them
present their own performances and connect with sympathetic audiences. These collectives functioned
partially as self-help groups, helping musicians establish firmer economic bases for their activities, but
their members also evinced a concern with the future through their teaching young musicians in their
communities, often at no cost. One such organization, the Underground Musicians Association, later
the Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension, was formed in Los Angeles in late 1961 by Horace
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Other important music collectives supporting experimental jazz improvisation and composition
included the Jazz Composers Guild and the Jazz Composers’ Orchestra Association in New York, the
Creative Arts Collective in Detroit, the Instant Composers Pool in Amsterdam, and New Artists Guild
(later Free Music Production) in Germany. The mystic, pianist, composer, and bandleader Sun Ra
perhaps took those tendencies the furthest in fostering communal structures for Avant-garde jazz. He
lived together with members of his Arkestra first in Chicago, later in New York and Philadelphia,
rehearsing and touring with the group while issuing recordings on small independent labels such as
ESP-disk and Saturn. Sun Ra and his Arkestra, like the Art Ensemble of Chicago after them, used
theatrical elements and costumes drawn from an eclectic range of sources to present performance as
ritualized event and cultural critique.
Because of their novelty and innovative edge, free jazz players of the 1960s have received considerable
attention from historians writing about that period. But they represented only one of many currents in
jazz flourishing by this time. Mainstream or “straightahead” jazz continued to be the dominant style
heard around the world. This category now subsumed both the work of bop and post-bop musicians
like Gillespie, Monk, Sarah Vaughan, Bill Evans, Sonny Rollins, and Art Blakey, as well as older
musicians still active, including Earl Hines, Coleman Hawkins, and Roy Eldridge. Some among them
sought to reach wider audiences by performing popular material: Louis Armstrong with “Hello, Dolly!,”
Ella Fitzgerald with the country-and-western album Misty Blue, and Duke Ellington and the guitarist
Wes Montgomery with songs by the Beatles. Others drew upon African American vernacular idioms
like blues, rhythm and blues, and soul to bring their music closer to prevailing popular music styles.
Horace Silver incorporated rock and urban Latin American boogaloo beats in “The Jody Grind” (BN,
1966) and “Psychedelic Sally” (BN, 1968), as did Les McCann and Eddie Harris on their hit “Compared
to What?” (Atl., 1969). Cannonball Adderley also achieved commercial success with his rendition of Joe
Zawinul’s “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” (Cap., 1966). Some of the most inventive small-group jazz by younger
players who did not exclusively embrace the free jazz aesthetic can be sampled in the series of albums
Blue Note issued featuring such artists as Lee Morgan, Donald Byrd, Freddie Hubbard, Woody Shaw,
Joe Henderson, Andrew Hill, Larry Young, Hank Mobley, Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie
Hancock.
Vital life signs in the field of big-band jazz were also present during the 1960s. Ellington produced
some of the most memorable music of his career during this period on such albums as Afro Bossa
(Rep., 1963) and The Far East Suite (RCA, 1966). He also turned to composing concerts of sacred
music requiring the combined forces of orchestra, solo singers, choir, and dancers; these works,
didactic in tone and devout in character, were performed in cathedrals and churches in the United
States and Europe. Meanwhile, he and his orchestra kept touring steadily and performing for both
listeners and dancers, as did other swing era survivors such as Count Basie, Benny Goodman, and
Woody Herman. Joining these veterans on the scene were newly formed ensembles, including the
Kenny Clarke–Francy Boland Big Band in Germany, the Thad Jones–Mel Lewis Orchestra in New York,
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An important stream of jazz activity during the 1960s flowed from Brazil. The popularity of Brazilian
samba and bossa nova first reached American jazz musicians through recordings by Antonio Carlos
Jobim, João Gilberto, and Laurindo Almeida. In the early 1960s the guitarist Charlie Byrd introduced
Stan Getz to bossa nova this way, and both went on to perform pieces from this repertory together and
with Brazilian musicians on such albums as Jazz Samba (Verve, 1962) and Getz/Gilberto (Verve, 1963).
The latter featured Jobim’s “Girl from Ipanema” performed by João and Astrud Gilberto; its nearly
whispered vocals, gently plucked guitar rhythms, and cool affect occupied vastly different aesthetic
terrain from the free jazz emerging at the same time. The use of Brazilian elements in jazz grew
stronger in the decades to follow, from artistic collaborations between musicians (Shorter and Milton
Nascimento on Native Dancer, Col., 1974) to the series of important Brazilian performers who
contributed to the jazz scene, among them the percussionists Airto Moreira and Alphonse Mouzon, the
singer Flora Purim, and the pianist Eliane Elias.
Japan was another country that began to figure more prominently on the world jazz scene in the 1960s
and 1970s. Beyond developing a significant base of jazz fans that would draw American musicians to
cities like Tokyo and Osaka and for a time support festivals like the one at Mount Fuji, Japan produced
musicians who launched successful international careers as performers and recording artists, among
them the pianist and bandleader Toshiko Akiyoshi, the saxophonist and flutist Sadao Watanabe, the
trumpeter Terumasa Hino, and the pianist Yosuke Yamashita. Record companies in Japan also issued
music by American artists that featured both a higher quality of sound and at times material that had
not been released in the United States and Europe.
Just as Miles Davis in the 1950s had been among those inspiring jazz musicians to embrace a “cool”
aesthetic and to explore modal options, so in the 1960s and 1970s he trod a path others found
attractive. The quintet he led from 1965 to 1968 featured Shorter (saxophone), Hancock (piano), Ron
Carter (bass), and Tony Williams (drums) and specialized in richly textured compositions written by its
members. It perfected a free and fluid performance style that nevertheless remained tonally anchored,
although often modally inflected, and used cyclical harmonic structures derived from earlier jazz
practice. Davis was also increasingly drawn to using static harmonic fields as a basis for lengthy group
jams, and this tendency, together with the adoption of a solid backbeat, even eighth-note rhythmic
motion, and amplified instruments (such as bass guitar and keyboards), brought his music closely in
line with rock and funk on such albums as In a Silent Way (Col., 1969) and Bitches Brew (Col., 1969).
Both albums featured “compositions” that were as much a product of Davis and the producer Teo
Macero’s post-hoc tape editing as they were of performances by the assembled musicians. This Jazz-
rock and Jazz-funk admixture came to be called fusion by the critics, some of whom considered the
music no longer part of the jazz tradition. Davis continued undeterred and later wrote of this time: “I
wanted to change course, had to change course for me to continue to believe in and love what I was
playing” (Davis, with Troupe, F1989, p. 298). He also observed that fewer black musicians were
playing jazz in the 1960s because it was “becoming the music of the museum.”
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While many musicians in the 1970s were intrigued by the possibilities of mingling jazz with rock, funk,
and non-western influences—some of them enjoying commercial success in the process—others
continued to pursue the adventurous artistic agenda set by free jazz exponents in the 1960s. Interest
in free jazz was especially high in Europe. Among the important musicians there contributing to a
robust alternative jazz scene against the backdrop of mainstream and traditional jazz were the
guitarist Derek Bailey, the drummer Eddie Prévost, and the saxophonists John Surman and Evan Parker
in Britain; the trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, the vibraphone player Gunter Hampel, and the pianist
Alex Schlippenbach in Germany; the drummer Han Bennink, the pianist Misha Mengelberg, and the
reed player Willem Breuker in the Netherlands; and the Ganelin Trio and Sergey Kuryokhin in the
USSR. Large ensembles also emerged from this activity, notably Schlippenbach’s Globe Unity
Orchestra (founded in 1966), the Breuker Collective (1974), Mathias Rüegg’s Vienna Art Orchestra
(1977), and Pierre Dørge and the New Jungle Orchestra (1980). These aggregations tended to be
highly eclectic in style and drawn to open-ended forms and spontaneous compositional procedures.
Jazz constituted only part of their musical identities, which also included folk songs, rock, 20th-century
art-music techniques, and liberal doses of satire and Dadaesque humor. The European avant garde also
proved nurturing for American musicians touring or living abroad, such as Don Cherry, Steve Lacy, and
Anthony Braxton.
Stylistic pluralism also characterized approaches to avant-garde jazz in the United States during the
1970s. Two important centers of activity were New York and Chicago. In Lower Manhattan a vibrant
scene developed in lofts and other non-commercial performing spaces that featured artists who sought
alternative venues as well as those whom club owners and concert promoters might have been
reluctant to book. At Sam Rivers’s Studio Rivbea in New York’s SoHo, a series of recordings made over
ten days in May 1976 documented some of what occurred in such spaces; released under the title
Wildflowers, the five resultant albums featured the saxophonists Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Byard
Lancaster, Marion Brown, Anthony Braxton, and David Murray, the drummers Sunny Murray and
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A number of recordings released in 1979 stake out direct and dynamic positions on the idea of tradition
in their selection of material as well as their approaches to it. Ornette Coleman’s progenitive role in
establishing free jazz looms over the work of Old and New Dreams, a quartet consisting of Don Cherry,
Charlie Haden, Ed Blackwell, and the saxophonist Dewey Redman, all of whom performed on
Coleman’s 1960s recordings. The group’s second eponymous release (1979, ECM) provides an
expansive view of tradition, one that reaches back in time with Coleman’s “Lonely Woman,” through
space with the West African timeline patterns in “Togo,” and even across species barriers with “Song
for the Whales.” In a narrower but no less profound sense, the instrumentation of the trio Air—
consisting of Henry Threadgill (saxophone), Fred Hopkins (bass), and Steve McCall (drums)—
presented its musicians both challenges and opportunities on Air Lore (Arista) as they revisited nascent
manifestations of jazz: compositions by Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton. While the group’s two
pitched instruments could only with difficulty reproduce all the inner voices of materials originally
composed with piano or larger ensembles in mind, that seeming limitation facilitated a wider-ranging
exploration of pieces like Joplin’s “Ragtime Dance.” Rather than replicate the piece’s notated version
or a recording of it made from a piano roll, the group treated tempo, form, melody, and timbre as well
as accompaniment patterns and instrumental roles elastically and perhaps blurred any distinction
between looking forward and looking back. Arthur Blythe’s quartet had a similar approach on In the
Tradition (Col.), an album comprising four tunes drawn from the jazz past alongside two compositions
by Blythe. The quartet, which included Hopkins and McCall, treated Juan Tizól’s “Caravan” and Fats
Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz,” for example, in the same open-ended, exploratory manner as they did the
12-bar blues on the new composition “Hip Dripper.”
With the exception of Blythe’s recordings and those issued by Elektra/Musician, such work appeared
mostly on independent labels based in Western Europe, notably ECM and Black Saint, and their US
counterparts, Inner City and India Navigation, among others. In contrast, the recording industry’s
largest companies, such as Warner Brothers and A&M, steered a less adventurous course, devoting
their resources to the kinds of pop and R&B fusions exemplified in recordings by George Benson, Herb
Alpert, and Bob James. In either case, on the cusp of the 1980s, the diverse and multifaceted character
of recorded jazz, given concrete form on the first edition of the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz
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While not always sharing in a spirit of exploration, the jazz festivals of the era were likewise
celebrations of the music’s diversity. Following the establishment of festivals in Montreux (1967) and
New Orleans (Jazz and Heritage, 1970), a number of cities and regions turned to such events as one
strategy among many to encourage tourism and promote (or invent) their contributions to jazz’s
development. Like the theater and film festivals which proliferated during those years, jazz festivals
made good economic sense to some civic and corporate leaders in response to such changes in global
economies as currency devaluation, fuel shortages, and the decreasing viability of manufacturing as a
generator of tax income. The longest-running events, in addition to those already mentioned, took
place annually in Umbria (from 1973), The Hague then Rotterdam (North Sea, 1976), Chicago (1978),
Detroit (1980), Montreal (1980), Lisbon (Jazz em Agosto, 1983), and Guelph (1994), in some cases
consolidating disparate events under a single rubric. Many short-lived festivals emerged in other
locations, often with corporate sponsorship or other private underwriting, showing the continued
commercial and public relations potential of jazz performances, especially those by the music’s most
senior and least controversial practitioners. Nonetheless, definitional questions frequently came to the
fore when presenters included such musicians as Roberta Flack (Newport Jazz Festival New York,
1972) and Van Morrison (Montreux, 1974) on event rosters.
During the 1980s and 1990s many musicians continued to regard all previous jazz styles as well as
other forms of music as potential inputs for individualized hybrids. Among those with experimental
backgrounds, some took a synthetic tack, creating musics neither reducible to stylistic constituents as
varied as hymns, samba, rhythm and blues, and jazz standards nor to sonorities associated with
Hollywood film music or New Orleans brass bands. One can hear such hybrids on releases by the
World Saxophone Quartet (Revue, BS, 1980, and Dances and Ballads, Nonesuch, 1987), the Henry
Threadgill Sextet (Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket, About Time, 1983), and Steve Lacy (The Door,
Novus, 1988). On such recordings, performers perhaps highlighted the importance of authorial voice
(or brand) while downplaying stylistic cohesion, at least in a conventional sense. Some of their
counterparts, while maintaining an emphasis on authorial integrity, opted for something more
stochastic and collage-like. John Zorn’s Naked City (Nonesuch, 1989), for example, features such
compositions as “Snagglepuss,” which present wildly divergent styles sequentially, sometimes in bursts
lasting only long enough for them to register for attentive listeners.
During those same years, however, there were perhaps equal numbers of musicians whose hybrids had
a deliberately more narrow range. On Still Life (Talking) (Geffen, 1987), the Pat Metheny Group used
the harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral elements of a variety of musics from Brazil as its point of
departure, while Latin American musical traditions, particularly those of Cuba and Puerto Rico, were
the focus of recordings by Jane Bunnett, Roy Hargrove, Marc Ribot, and David Sánchez, among others.
These recordings were part of a broad reinvigoration of Latin jazz in the 1990s, although such groups
as Manny Oquendo y Libre and the Fort Apache Band had been mining that vein since the 1970s.
Among the most inventive collections to emerge from attempts to fuse jazz and Latin styles were
Danilo Pérez’s PanaMonk (Imp., 1996) and Conrad Herwig’s The Latin Side of John Coltrane (Astor
Place, 1996). In trio and big band settings, respectively, the bandleaders highlighted what they
regarded as seldom explored rhythmic, melodic, and structural potentials in compositions by or
associated with canonic musicians. A similar focus on musical reimagining characterized the
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While all those musicians had more-or-less explicit imperatives in making those recordings, it is
nonetheless difficult to escape the impression that, as had been the case at the dawn of jazz recording,
concerns in addition to artistic ones governed the selection and treatment of material. This seemed
particularly true of recordings that functioned as homage: the saxophonist Antonio Hart’s For
Cannonball and Woody (Novus, 1993), honoring Cannonball Adderley and Woody Shaw; the pianist
Jessica Williams’s In the Key of Monk (Jazz Focus, 1999); the trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas’s
tribute to Wayne Shorter, Stargazer (Arabesque, 1997); and the saxophonist Joe Henderson’s series of
discs devoted to the music of Billy Strayhorn, Miles Davis, and Antonio Carlos Jobim. Like Wilson on
her mid-1990s work, musicians undertaking such concept albums usually sought to capture distinctive
traits of the artists being honored while retaining their respective individual voices and perhaps
reaching audiences more familiar with their chosen subjects.
In at least one case, a recording label clearly acknowledged its role in molding a product it hoped
would interest youthful, non-jazz audiences in its catalog material. Seeing commercial potential in Acid
jazz—a style of electronic dance music in which producers and DJs fused the sounds of such 1960s and
1970s Soul jazz and jazz-funk artists as the Blackbyrds, Tom Scott, Bobbi Humphrey, and Roy Ayers
with the rhythms, rapping, and textures of hip-hop—officials at Capitol Records gave the British duo
Us3 full access to its archives and released the group’s debut album Hand on the Torch in 1993. The
album’s major hit “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)” employed backing tracks that were sampled from Herbie
Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island” (from Empyrean Isles, BN, 1964) and Pee Wee Marquette’s introduction
of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers from the live recording At the Jazz Corner of the World (BN,
1959), and like other acid jazz recordings it comprised rapping over short, riff-like phrases, layered,
digitally processed sound effects, and collage-like construction. Another recording by the Jazz
Messengers, James Williams’s “Stretchin’” from Reflections in Blue (Timeless, 1979), furnished the
primary samples for another commercially successful fusion of jazz and hip-hop, Digable Planets’
“Rebirth of Slick (Cool like dat)” (Pendulum, 1993). This process of rearranging and updating is
traditional for jazz musicians. Hancock himself had done it with “Cantaloupe Island” on his album
Secrets (Col., 1976). Earlier, bop musicians had supplied new melodies for familiar harmonic
structures: for example, Miles Davis based “Donna Lee” on the harmonies of “(Back Home Again in)
Indiana.” And arrangers had revised older pieces from the repertory, for example, Don Redman’s
transformation of King Oliver’s “Dippermouth Blues” into “Sugar Foot Stomp” for Fletcher
Henderson’s orchestra. While the methods of production used for acid jazz have led some to question
whether it qualifies as jazz, the music is part of the jazz family, no further removed from paradigmatic
work, in some ways, than the third-stream experiments of the 1950s or the free jazz of the 1960s.
Questions of definition and the sales of some acid jazz releases notwithstanding, the style’s impact on
the practices of improvising musicians, who were rarely featured as live performers on its most
representative recordings, was minimal, and the vogue for the style was brief.
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Other musicians in the 1990s incorporated aspects of popular, classical, and non-western traditions on
a more limited basis. On Wish (WB, 1993), Joshua Redman performed his own compositions, standards
from the swing and bop eras, and songs by Stevie Wonder, Eric Clapton, and Pat Metheny. With his
group Masada, the composer and saxophonist John Zorn filtered traditional Jewish musical materials
through the lens of contemporary jazz practice and chamber music performance; in other settings he
explored music from films and cartoons. The pianist Uri Caine released a series of discs exploring the
music of Gustav Mahler, Bach, and Schumann, and the saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom integrated
movement and live electronics into her performances. Fred Ho, Jon Jang, Francis Wong, and Tatsu Aoki
drew upon East Asian musical resources in works conceived for their ensembles, while Hafez
Modirzadeh incorporated Persian modal practices into his compositions and improvisational work.
Among all those players, the clarinetist Don Byron has proven remarkably versatile, exploring post-bop
mainstream styles, free jazz, klezmer music, small-group swing, and jazz-funk fusion inspired by
Funkadelic and Mandrill on a series of albums for Nonesuch and Blue Note.
Simultaneous with these hybridizing projects were those of musicians participating in the jazz
repertory movement who viewed the past and the world around them in more curatorial terms. Their
ensembles, typically big bands affiliated with universities, conservatories, or large cultural institutions
—the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra or Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, for example—
attempted to revive the sounds of earlier well-known ensembles, such as those of Ellington, Basie, and
Goodman, often playing from transcriptions of recordings and reproducing solos as well as ensemble
and rhythm section parts. If the transformative recycling of acid jazz reflected African American
traditions extending back for centuries, the re-creative impulse behind jazz repertory groups derived
from the model of European art music, interpreting finished “works” (scores generated from
recordings) and striving for “authenticity” through historically informed performing practice.
The jazz repertory movement was but one symptom of the larger process of institutionalization that
jazz underwent in the 1980s and 1990s. As the Congressional Resolution of 1987 indicates (see Jazz,
§1), jazz in the 1980s started receiving a level of economic support and recognition previously reserved
for classical music. Private foundations, government arts agencies, museums, and major corporations
became important sources of funding, underwriting special events and media projects and sponsoring
fellowships, awards, and competitions for jazz musicians. Institutions of higher learning established
jazz degree programs and hired seasoned professionals to serve as teachers. Those institutions, in
part, helped to spur renewed interest in big bands, not as repertory units, but as outlets for new
creative work from such artists as Jason Lindner and Maria Schneider. The literature on jazz expanded
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Marsalis, a trumpeter, composer, bandleader, and educator from New Orleans, received such
recognition partly because of the crucial role he had played in popularizing and promoting jazz. After
emerging in the early 1980s as a fiery soloist with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, he was signed
to Columbia Records, which heavily promoted the recordings he made with groups featuring his older
brother Branford on saxophone. After Wynton had won two Grammy Awards in 1984, some critics
considered his work a harbinger of a jazz rebirth (following its presumed death from experimentation
and fusion in the 1970s), and younger musicians who might have gone in other directions drew
inspiration from albums like Black Codes (From the Underground) (Col., 1985), which highlighted
Marsalis’s interest as a bandleader in exploring the rhythmic freedom, expressive vocabulary, and
formal play of Miles Davis’s mid-1960s quintet and John Coltrane’s quartet (Elie, G1990, pp. 272–4).
He sharply changed direction at the end of the 1980s, when he both spent more time investigating pre-
bop jazz styles and became the founding artistic director of the jazz program at Lincoln Center, New
York’s prestigious and powerful sponsor of European-derived performing arts (opera, ballet, and
symphony and chamber music). By that point, however, his celebrity had already encouraged other
record labels, large and small, to invest more money in recording and promoting mainstream jazz
styles. In other words, Marsalis had helped to bring jazz solidly within the embrace of America’s
cultural establishment. He increased visibility for the music through his concerts and recordings,
television and radio programs, and book and video projects; he commissioned new works and
sponsored high-school band competitions; he toured widely with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and
appeared regularly as clinician and lecturer in schools throughout the country. At the same time, he
sparked controversy by articulating views some considered to be unduly rigid and conservative,
particularly through insisting that certain musical features—swing, the blues, and call and response—
must be present in order for music to qualify as jazz. Others criticized his programming at Lincoln
Center, claiming that it excluded members of the jazz avant garde or that it did not adequately
highlight contributions of white and female musicians.
Those criticisms, perhaps, mattered little to the millions of people who watched the Ken Burns
documentary Jazz, a ten-part television series which aired on American public stations in January 2001.
Along with Stanley Crouch and Albert Murray—two of his advisors as well as fellow board members of
Jazz at Lincoln Center—Marsalis was a star of the documentary, an on-camera personality who in
charming but sometimes hyperbolic fashion extolled the artistry of such figures as Louis Armstrong
and Duke Ellington over all others. Viewers without other historical knowledge, upon hearing the
condemnations some commentators offered of 1960s experimentalism, may have come away unaware
that anything of lasting significance, besides Marsalis’s emergence, happened after 1960. As a cultural
event, despite the brief boost it gave to jazz record sales, “Jazz” perhaps represented the end of the era
in which projects addressed the question of tradition head on.
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Of course, the end of “Jazz” was not the end of jazz. Although Columbia Records and other major labels
had released most jazz artists, including Marsalis, from their contracts by 2003 and some independents
in the parlance of the time “diversified” their rosters to include more popular musics at the beginning
of the 21st century, those actions were not necessarily indicative of any specific trouble for jazz as a set
of musical styles. Although the novelty of compact discs was fading and recording and distribution
became more strictly regulated by a few multinational conglomerates, record sales started declining in
the second half of the 1990s, forcing all divisions of major recording corporations to implement
accounting changes and show quarterly profits (Negus, H1999). Such expectations ironically caused
Sony’s classical division to sign the trumpeter Terence Blanchard, who had previously been under
contract to Sony Jazz, and the rock singer-songwriter Joe Jackson, and Blue Note to release recordings
by Al Green and Anita Baker, among others.
As in the past, though, independent labels like ECM, Criss Cross, and Enja released recordings that
represented the variety of approaches that still characterized jazz and related styles. Their work was
complemented by and in many ways surpassed that of newer labels. New York’s Pi Recordings and
AUM Fidelity emerged as specialists in experimental musics, presenting recordings by such
established performers as Muhal Richard Abrams, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and William Parker as
well as the work of newer artists including the drummer Susie Ibarra, the pianist Vijay Iyer (a former
sideman of Steve Coleman), the saxophonist Steve Lehman (some of whose work adapts Tristan
Murail’s ideas about spectral harmony), and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey; the last three played
together in the collaborative trio Fieldwork. The St. Louis-based label Maxjazz gave such mainstream
performers as the guitarist Russell Malone, the pianist Mulgrew Miller, and the trumpeter Jeremy Pelt
continued exposure through instrumental and vocal series presented in visually distinctive packages.
Detroit’s Mack Avenue took a slightly more varied course, including post-Marsalis straight-ahead
artists like the saxophonists Kenny Garrett and Ron Blake and the bass player Christian McBride on a
roster that also features the Gerald Wilson Orchestra and the guitarist Stanley Jordan.
Jazz venues and festivals also experienced changes that were signs less of a decline than they were of
a return to the leaner state of affairs preceding what in retrospect can be seen a boom time for jazz.
The most famous and best-capitalized clubs, including the Village Vanguard in New York and Yoshi’s in
Oakland, California, continued doing business as they had before, although perhaps with fewer tourists
and casual spectators in their audiences. The proprietors of many other venues— particularly such
non-profit arts spaces that had been supportive of jazz musicians as the Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles, the
Hot House in Chicago, and the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia—were forced to become
concert presenters without a fixed location or to alter the balance of jazz in their programming. The
organizers of festivals faced similar issues, and their responses were often to scale down their
offerings and to focus less on variety and more on targeting specific segments (demographics) of the
jazz audience. Ironically, perhaps, the Vision Festival, first presented in 1996, might have furnished a
model for organizers attempting to succeed in difficult financial times. Just as experimental musicians
had formed collectives in the 1960s to help them and sympathetic audiences to find one another, a
number of Lower East Side musicians and their supporters worked together to create this festival
which, although originally ignored by major press outlets, quickly became a critical and financial
success precisely because of its small scale and focus on experimentation rather than the whole of jazz
performance (Currie, H2009, pp. 189–97).
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Partly because of their own desires for challenges, but also in response to such market realities, jazz
musicians continued adapting to new technologies and styles of performance as well as revisiting older
formats. Uri Caine’s trio Bedrock experimented with electronics and the textures of the dance music
subgenre drum ′n′ bass (Shelf-life, Winter and Winter, 2005), and the drummer Karriem Riggins
excelled as a straightahead performer while also producing album tracks for the hip-hop and R&B
artists Erykah Badu, Common, and the Roots. The bass players Dave Holland and Ron Carter, the
pianist Orrin Evans, and the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel undertook big band projects that were far from
nostalgic, and the drummer Brian Blade, in addition to long-term collaborations with the rock producer
Daniel Lanois, led the Fellowship Band, an ensemble that explored the same range of musics as
Cassandra Wilson had in the 1990s, although in new compositions that were both more expansive and
meditative. Blade also held the drum chair in a quartet formed by the saxophonist Wayne Shorter in
2000 which featured the pianist Danilo Pérez and the bass player John Patitucci as well. Revisiting
material from each of the manifestations of Shorter’s career—including his time with Weather Report
in the 1970s and with Miles Davis and Art Blakey in the 1960s—the quartet nonetheless seemed to
bring together both a reverence for what had gone before and a desire for the in-the-moment invention
that had characterized jazz practice through much of the music’s first century.
During that period, Mary Lou Williams, Duke Ellington, and Art Blakey, among others, likened jazz to a
tree, and with that metaphor suggested that the music had roots extending deep into African
American, African, and European musical traditions. Since its emergence, jazz has grown upward and
outward, its branches and limbs representing varied styles all joined to a sturdy trunk that keeps alive
connections to a rich musical past. Music scholars have also described jazz as a family of styles, each
containing enough traits in common with its counterparts to resemble them while remaining
distinctive. However jazz performers have been perceived—as branches on a tree or members of a
global extended family—and wherever they have performed—in nightclubs, concert halls or festival
stages, street parades, or high school jazz programs—they have been able to trace their work back to
late 19th-century New Orleans, a time and place equally alive with mixtures and creative
collaborations and fraught with questions of inequality. They and their audiences have been drawn one
and all to a resilient musical tradition that beckons with a promise of self-discovery and preserves the
hope of freedom.
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A: General reference
GroveJ
L. Feather: The Encyclopedia of Jazz (New York, 1955, suppl. 1956; enlarged 2/1960/R)
J. Chilton: Who’s Who of Jazz: Storyville to Swing Street (London, 1970, 4/1985)
R. Kinkle: The Complete Encyclopedia of Popular Music and Jazz, 1900–1950 (New Rochelle, NY,
1974)
L.G. Feather and I. Gitler: The Encyclopedia of Jazz in the Seventies (New York, 1976)
I. Carr, D. Fairweather, and B. Priestley: Jazz: the Essential Companion (London, 1987)
J.F. Szwed: Jazz 101: a Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Jazz (New York, 2000)
M. Cooke and D. Horn, eds: The Cambridge Companion to Jazz (Cambridge, 2002)
B: Discographies
C. Delaunay: Hot Discography (Paris, 1936, 4/1943, enlarged 1948 by W.E. Schaap and G.
Avakian as New Hot Discography)
B. Rust: Jazz Records, A–Z (London, 1961–5, enlarged 5/1983 as Jazz Records, 1897–1942)
M. Harrison and others: Modern Jazz: the Essential Records, 1945–1970 (London, 1975)
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M. Cuscuna and M. Ruppli: The Blue Note Label (New York, 1988)
C: Bibliographies
A.P. Merriam and R.J. Benford: A Bibliography of Jazz (Philadelphia, 1954/R)
R. Reisner: The Literature of Jazz: a Preliminary Bibliography (New York, 1954, enlarged 2/1959
as The Literature of Jazz: a Selective Bibliography)
C.G. Herzog zu Mecklenburg: International Jazz Bibliography: Jazz Books from 1919 to 1968
(Strasbourg, 1969, 2/1975)
D. Kennington: The Literature of Jazz: a Critical Guide (London, 1970, rev. 2/1980 by D.
Kennington and D.L. Read)
E.S. Meadows: Jazz Research and Performance Materials: a Select Annotated Bibliography (New
York, 1981, 2/1995)
W.H. Kenney: “Jazz: a Bibliographical Essay,” American Studies International, xxv/1 (1987), 3–27
J. Gray: Fire Music: a Bibliography of the New Jazz, 1959–1990 (New York, 1991)
D: Periodicals
Australia: Australian Jazz Quarterly (1946–57); Jazz (1981–); Jazz Australia (1976–)
England: Crescendo (1962–1990); Jazz Journal (1974–7); Jazz Journal International (1977–2009);
Jazz Monthly (1955–71); Jazz Perspectives (2007–); Jazz Research Journal (2007–); Music Mirror
(1954–8); The Wire (1982–)
France: Cahiers du jazz (1959–); Jazz-hot (1935–9); Jazz magazine (1954–); Revue du Jazz (1948–)
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USA: American Music (1983–2008); Annual Review of Jazz Studies (1982–2009); Black Music
Research Journal (1980–); Black Perspective in Music (1973–90); Cadence (1976–); Clef (1946);
Down Beat (1934–); Hot Record Society Rag (1938–41); Jazz (1962–7); Jazz: a Quarterly of
American Music (1958–60); Jazz Review (1958–61); Journal of Jazz Studies (1973–81, 2010–);
Journal of the Society for American Music (2007–); Metronome (1885–1961); Record Changer
(1942–58); Record Research (1955–); Signal to Noise (1998–); Tempo (1933–40)
E: Histories
A. Baresel: Das Jazz-Buch (Leipzig, 1925)
R. Goffin: Jazz: from the Congo to the Metropolitan (Garden City, NY, 1944, 2/1948 as Nouvelle
histoire du jazz: du Congo au bebop; Eng. trans., 1975)
N. Shapiro and N. Hentoff: Hear me Talkin’ to ya: the Story of Jazz as Told by the Men who Made
it (New York, 1955, 2/1966)
N. Hentoff and A.J. McCarthy, eds.: Jazz: New Perspectives on the History of Jazz by Twelve of
the World’s Foremost Jazz Critics and Scholars (New York, 1959)
S.B. Charters and L. Kunstadt: Jazz: a History of the New York Scene (Garden City, NY, 1962)
H.A. Kmen: Music in New Orleans: the Formative Years, 1791–1841 (Baton Rouge, 1966)
D.H. Kraner and K. Schulz: Jazz in Austria: a Brief History and a Discography of all Jazz and Jazz-
Like Recordings Made in Austria (Graz, 1969/R1972 as Jazz in Austria: Historische
Entwicklungund Diskographie des Jazz in Osterreich)
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R. Russell: Jazz Style in Kansas City and the Southwest (Berkeley, 1971)
A. Shaw: The Street that never Slept: New York’s Fabled 52nd Street (New York, 1971/R1977 as
52nd Street: the Street of Jazz)
E. Southern: The Music of Black Americans: a History (New York, 1971, 3/1997)
D. Morgenstern: The Jazz Story: an Outline History of Jazz (New York, 1973)
L.W. Levine: Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk thought from Slavery
to Freedom (New York, 1977)
V. Wilmer: As Serious as your Life: the Story of the New Jazz (London, 1977, 2/1980)
A. Bisset: Black Roots, White Flowers: a History of Jazz in Australia (Sydney, 1979, 2/1987)
F. Driggs and L. Harris: Black Beauty, White Heat: a Pictorial History of Classic Jazz, 1920–1950
(New York, 1982)
S. Placksin: American Women in Jazz, 1900 to the Present: their Words, Lives, and Music (New
York, 1982)
S.F. Starr: Red and Hot: the Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917–1980 (New York, 1983,
2/1994 as Red and Hot: the Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917–1991)
L. Dahl: Stormy Weather: the Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen (New York, 1984)
J. Litweiler: The Freedom Principle: Jazz after 1958 (New York, 1984)
S. DeVeaux: Jazz in Transition: Coleman Hawkins and Howard McGhee, 1935–1945 (diss., U. of
California, Berkeley, 1985)
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R. Gordon: Jazz West Coast: the Los Angeles Jazz Scene of the 1950s (London, 1986)
A. Medvedev and O. Medvedeva: Sovetskiy dzhaz: problemï, sobïtiya, mastera (Moscow, 1987)
C. Small: Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in Afro-American Music (New
York, 1987)
J.L. Collier: The Reception of Jazz in America: a New View (Brooklyn, NY, 1988)
D.D. Harrison: Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick, NJ, 1988)
L.A. Erenberg: “Things to Come: Swing Bands, Bebop, and the Rise of a Postwar Jazz Scene,”
Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War, ed. L. May (Chicago, 1989),
221–45
K.J. Ogren: The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz (New York, 1989)
P.J. Broome and C. Tucker: The Other Music City: the Dance Bands and Jazz Musicians of
Nashville, 1920 to 1970 (Nashville, 1990)
T. Gioia: West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945–1960 (New York, 1992)
M.H. Kater: Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (New York, 1992)
B.W. Peretti: The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race and Culture in Urban America (Urbana, IL, 1992)
D.H. Rosenthal: Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music, 1955–1965 (New York, 1992)
C. Ballantine: Marabi Nights: Early South African Jazz and Vaudeville (Johannesburg, 1993)
P. De Barros: Jackson Street after Hours: the Roots of Jazz in Seattle (Seattle, 1993)
W.H. Kenney: Chicago Jazz: a Cultural History, 1904–1930 (New York, 1993)
C.E. Kinzer: The Tio Family: Four Generations of New Orleans Musicians, 1814–1933 (diss.,
Louisiana State U., 1993)
B. Moody: The Jazz Exiles: American Musicians Abroad (Reno, NV, 1993)
L. Porter and M. Ullman: Jazz: from its Origins to the Present (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1993)
D.G. Such: Avant-garde Jazz Musicians: Performing “Out There” (Iowa City, IA, 1993)
T.J. Hennessey: From Jazz to Swing: African-American Jazz Musicians and their Music, 1890–
1935 (Detroit, 1994)
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D.W. Stowe: Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America (Cambridge, MA, 1994)
E. Kolleritsch: Jazz in Graz: von den Anfängen nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg bis zu seiner
akademischen Etablierung (Graz, 1995)
H.H. Lange: Jazz in Deutschland: die Deutsch Jazz-Chronik bis 1960 (Hildesheim, 1996)
S. DeVeaux: The Birth of Bebop: a Social and Musical History (Berkeley, 1997)
M. Miller: Such Melodious Racket: the Lost History of Jazz in Canada, 1914–1949 (Toronto,
1997)
R.M. Sudhalter: Lost Chords: White Musicians and their Contribution to Jazz, 1915–1945 (New
York, 1999)
L. Tournés: New Orleans sur Seine: histoire du jazz in France (Paris, 1999)
S. Tucker: Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s (Durham, NC, 2000)
E.T. Atkins: Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (Durham, NC, 2001)
L. Björn and J. Gallert: Before Motown: a History of Jazz in Detroit, 1920–60 (Ann Arbor, 2001)
A.F. Jones: Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age
(Durham, NC, 2001)
B. Looker: Point from which Creation Begins: the Black Artists’ Group of St. Louis (St. Louis,
2004)
M. Heffley: Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe’s Reinvention of Jazz (New Haven, 2005)
S.L. Isoardi: The Dark Tree: Jazz and the Community Arts in Los Angeles (Berkeley, 2006)
G.E. Lewis: A Power Stronger than itself: the AACM and American Experimental Music
(Chicago, 2008)
F: Biographies
L. Armstrong: Swing that Music (New York, 1936)
W. Smith: Music on my Mind: the Memoirs of an American Pianist (Garden City, NY, 1964)
A.B. Spellman: Four Lives in the Bebop Business (New York, 1966/R2004 as Four Jazz Lives)
C. Mingus: Beneath the Underdog: his World as Composed by Mingus (New York, 1971)
A. Lomax: Mister Jelly Roll: the Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and Inventor
of Jazz (Berkeley, 1973)
R.M. Sudhalter, P.R. Evans, and W. Dean-Myatt: Bix, Man and Legend (New York, 1974)
J.C. Thomas: Chasin’ the Trane: the Music and Mystique of John Coltrane (Garden City, NY,
1975)
C. Calloway and B. Rollins: Of Minnie the Moocher & Me (New York, 1976)
D. Gillespie and A. Fraser: To be, or not … to Bop: Memoirs (Garden City, NY, 1979)
A. Pepper and L. Pepper: Straight Life: the Story of Art Pepper (New York, 1979, 2/1994)
A. O’Day and G. Eells: High Times, Hard Times (New York, 1981/R1989 with updated
discography)
I. Carr: Miles Davis: a Critical Biography (London, 1982, 2/1998 as Miles Davis: the Definitive
Biography) [incl. discography by B. Priestley]
J. Chambers: Milestones, i: The Music and Times of Miles Davis to 1960 (Toronto, 1983); ii: The
Music and Times of Miles Davis since 1960 (Toronto, 1985); complete edn (1989)
W. Basie and A. Murray: Good Morning Blues: the Autobiography of Count Basie (New York,
1985)
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T. Fitterling: Thelonious Monk: sein Leben, seine Musik, seine Schallplatten (Waakirchen, 1987;
Eng. trans., 1997, as Thelonious Monk: his Life and Music)
G. Giddins: Celebrating Bird: the Triumph of Charlie Parker (New York, 1987)
M. Hinton: Bass Line: the Stories and Photographs of Milt Hinton (Philadelphia, 1988)
J.L. Collier: Benny Goodman and the Swing Era (New York, 1989)
J. Chilton: The Song of the Hawk: the Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins (London, 1990)
R. O’Meally: Lady Day: the Many Faces of Billie Holiday (New York, 1991)
D. Rosenberg: Fascinating Rhythm: the Collaboration of George and lra Gershwin (New York,
1991)
R.M. Radano: New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique (Chicago, 1993)
E.A. Berlin: King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and his Era (New York, 1994)
W.D. Clancy: Woody Herman: Chronicles of the Herds (New York, 1995)
G. Lees: Leader of the Band: the Life of Woody Herman (New York, 1995)
F.M. Hall: It’s about Time: the Dave Brubeck Story (Fayetteville, AR, 1996)
C. Woideck: Charlie Parker: his Music and Life (Ann Arbor, 1996)
J.F. Szwed: Space is the Place: the Lives and Times of Sun Ra (New York, 1997)
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A. Shipton: Groovin’ High: the Life of Dizzy Gillespie (New York, 1999)
G. Wein and N. Chinen: Myself among Others: a Life in Music (Cambridge, MA, 2003)
E. Determeyer: Rhythm is our Business: Jimmie Lunceford and the Harlem Express (Ann Arbor,
2006)
H. Silver: Let’s Get to the Nitty Gritty: the Autobiography of Horace Silver, ed P. Pastras
(Berkeley, 2006)
R.D.G. Kelley: Thelonious Monk: the Life and Times of an American Original (New York, 2009)
A. Hodeir: Hommes et problèmes du jazz (Paris, 1954; Eng. trans., enlarged, 1956/R, 2/1979 as
Jazz: its Evolution and Essence)
M. Williams, ed.: Jazz Panorama: from the Pages of the Jazz Review (New York, 1962/R)
F. Tirro: “The Silent Theme Tradition in Jazz,” MQ, liii (1967), 313–34
M.L. Stewart: Structural Development in the Jazz Improvisational Technique of Clifford Brown
(diss., U. of Michigan, 1973)
R. Wang: “Jazz circa 1945: a Confluence of Styles,” MQ, lix (1973), 531–46
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R. Byrnside: “The Performer as Creator: Jazz Improvisation,” Contemporary Music and Music
Cultures, ed. B. Nettl and others (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1975), 233–51
W.E. Taylor: The History and Development of Jazz Piano: a New Perspective for Educators (diss.,
U. of Massachusetts, 1975)
T.D. Brown: A History and Analysis of Jazz Drumming to 1942 (diss., U. of Michigan, 1976)
C.C. Blancq: Melodic Improvisation in American Jazz: the Style of Theodore “Sonny” Rollins,
1951–1962 (diss., Tulane U., 1977)
L. Gushee: disc notes, Steppin’ on the Gas: Rags to Jazz, 1913–1927, New World NW 269 (1977)
L. Gushee: “Lester Young’s ‘Shoeshine Boy’,” IMSCR XII: Berkeley 1977, 151–69
R.L. Stein: The Jazz Trumpet: Development of Styles and an Analysis of Selected Solos from
1924 to 1961 (diss., U. of Miami, 1977)
M.J. Budds: Jazz in the Sixties: the Expansion of Musical Resources and Techniques (Iowa City,
IA, 1978, 2/1990)
B. Kernfeld: Adderley, Coltrane, and Davis at the Twilight of Bebop: the Search for Melodic
Coherence (1958–59) (diss., Cornell U., 1981)
O. Perguson: The Otis Ferguson Reader (Highland Park, IL, 1982/R1997 as In the Spirit of Jazz:
the Otis Ferguson Reader)
G.F. Smith: Homer, Gregory, and Bill Evans? The Theory of Formulaic Composition in the
Context of Jazz Piano Improvisation (diss., Harvard U., 1983)
P. Alperson: “On Musical Improvisation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xxxxiii (1984),
17–29
G. Giddins: Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and Innovation in the ’80s (New York, 1985)
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W. Balliett: American Musicians: Fifty Six Portraits in Jazz (New York, 1986, 2/1996 as American
Musicians II: Seventy-Two Portraits in Jazz)
G. Schuller: Musings: the Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller (New York, 1986)
C. Suhor: “Jazz Improvisation and Language Performance: Parallel Competencies,” Etc., xxxxiii
(1986), 133–40
O. Keepnews: The View from Within: Jazz Writings, 1948–1987 (New York, 1988)
E.S. Meadows: “Africa and the Blues Scale: a Selected Review of the Literature,” African
Musicology … a Festschrift presented to J.H. Kwabena Nketia, ed. J.C. Djedje and W.G. Carter
(Los Angeles, 1989–92), 263–76
R.F. Rose: An Analysis of Timing in Jazz Rhythm Section Performance (diss., U. of Texas, Austin,
1989)
G. Schuller: The Swing Era: the Development of Jazz, 1930–1945 (New York, 1989)
F. Davis: Outcats: Jazz Composers, Instrumentalists, and Singers (New York, 1990)
L.E. Elie: “An Interview with Wynton Marsalis,” Callaloo, xiii (1990), 271–90
W. Friedwald: Jazz Singing: America’s Great Voices from Bessie Smith to Bebop (New York,
1990)
W. Knauer: Zwischen Bebop und Free Jazz: Komposition and Improvisation des Modern Jazz
Quartet (Mainz, 1990)
G. Potter: “Analyzing Improvised Jazz,” College Music Symposium, xxx/1 (1990), 64–74
S. DeVeaux: “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography,” Black American Literature
Forum, xxv (1991), 525–60
J. Gennari: “Jazz Criticism: its Development and Ideologies,” Black American Literature Forum,
xxv (1991), 449–523
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J. Taylor: Earl Hines and Black Jazz Piano in Chicago, 1923–1928 (diss., U. of Michigan, 1993)
P.F. Berliner: Thinking in Jazz: the Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago, 1994)
G.P. Ramsey Jr.: The Art of Bebop: Earl “Bud” Powell and the Emergence of Modern Jazz (diss.,
U. of Michigan, 1994)
N. Hentoff: Listen to the Stories: Nat Hentoff on Jazz and Country (New York, 1995)
J.A. Prögler: “Searching for Swing: Participatory Discrepancies in the Jazz Rhythm Section,”
EthM, xxxix (1995), 21–54
T.F. Coolman: The Miles Davis Quintet of the Mid-1960s: Synthesis of Improvisational and
Compositional Elements (diss., New York U., 1997)
J. King: What Jazz is: an Insider’s Guide to Understanding and Listening to Jazz (New York,
1997)
P. Julien: The Structural Function of Harmonic Relations in Wayne Shorter’s Early Compositions:
1959–1963 (diss., U. of Maryland, College Park, 2003)
J. Magee: The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz (New York,
2005)
T.A. Jackson: Blowin’ the Blues Away: Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz Scene
(Berkeley, 2012)
H: Other studies
M. Berger: “Jazz: Resistance to the Diffusion of a Culture Pattern,” Journal of Negro History,
xxxii (1947), 461–94
H.S. Becker: “The Professional Dance Musician and his Audience,” American Journal of
Sociology, lvii (1951), 136–44
R.A. Waterman: “African Influence on the Music of the Americas,” Acculturation in the Americas:
… XXIXth International Congress of Americanists: New York 1949, ed. S. Tax (Chicago, 1952),
207–18
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W.B. Cameron: “Sociological Notes on the Jam Session,” Social Forces, xxxiii (1954), 174–82
A.P. Merriam and R.S. Mack: “The Jazz Community,” Social Forces, xxxviii (1960), 211–22
P. Oliver: Blues Fell this Morning: the Meaning of the Blues (London, 1960, 2/1990)
N. Leonard: Jazz and the White Americans: the Acceptance of a New Art Form (Chicago, 1962)
A. Baraka [L. Jones]: Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York, 1963)
A.P. Merriam and F.H. Garner: “Jazz: the Word,” EthM, xii (1968), 373–96
M. Stearns and J. Stearns: Jazz Dance: the Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York, 1968,
rev. 2/1994 by B. Buffalino)
R.A. Stebbins: “A Theory of the Jazz Community,” Sociological Quarterly, ix (1968), 318–31
C.A. Nanry: The Occupational Subculture of the Jazz Musician: Myth and Reality (diss., Rutgers
U., 1970)
J. Buerkle and D. Barker: Bourbon Street Black: the New Orleans Black Jazzman (New York,
1973)
L. Ostransky: Jazz City: the Impact of our Cities on the Development of Jazz (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ, 1978)
D. Sudnow: Ways of the Hand: the Organization of Improvised Conduct (Cambridge, MA, 1978)
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L.A. Erenberg: Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture,
1890–1930 (Chicago, 1984)
U.B. Davis: Paris without Regret: James Baldwin, Kenny Clarke, Chester Himes, and Donald Byrd
(Iowa City, IA, 1986)
A. Baraka and A. Baraka: The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (New York, 1987)
D.J. Elliott: “Structure and Feeling in Jazz: Rethinking Philosophical Foundations,” Bulletin of the
Council for Research in Music Education, no.95 (1987), 13–38
E.S. Meadows: “Ethnomusicology and Jazz Research: a Selective Viewpoint,” Bulletin of the
Council for Research in Music Education, no.95 (1987), 61–70
S. DeVeaux: “Bebop and the Recording Industry: the 1942 AMF Recording Ban Reconsidered,”
JAMS, lxi (1988), 126–165
T. Gioia: The Imperfect Art: Reflections on Jazz and Modern Culture (New York, 1988)
F.A. Salamone: “The Ritual of Jazz Performance,” Play and Culture, i (1988), 85–104
M. Gridley and others: “Three Approaches to Defining Jazz,” MQ, lxxiii (1989), 513–31
R.J. Powell, ed.: The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism (Washington DC, 1989)
R.T. Buckner and S. Weiland, eds.: Jazz in Mind: Essays on the History and Meanings of Jazz
(Detroit, 1991)
P. Chevigny: Gigs: Jazz and the Cabaret Laws in New York City (New York, 1991)
G. Tomlinson: “Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: a White Historian Signifies,” BMRJ, xi (1991), 229–64
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R. Crawford and J. Magee: Jazz Standards on Record, 1900–1942: a Core Repertory (Chicago,
1992)
K. Stratemann: Duke Ellington, Day by Day and Film by Film (Copenhagen, 1992)
P.L. Sunderland: Cultural Meanings and Identity: Women of the African American Art World of
Jazz (diss., U. of Vermont, 1992)
J.L. Collier: Jazz: the American Theme Song (New York, 1993)
B. Johnson: “Hear me Talkin’ to Ya: Problems of Jazz Discourse,” Popular Music, xii (1993), 1–12
G.L. Starks Jr: “Jazz Literature and the African American Aesthetic,” The African Aesthetic:
Keeper of the Traditions, ed. K. Welsh-Asante (Westport, CT, 1993), 143–57
C. Keil and S. Feld, eds.: Music Grooves: Essays and Dialogues (Chicago, 1994)
W. Marsalis and F. Stewart: Sweet Swing Blues on the Road (New York, 1994)
S.A. Floyd Jr: The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to the United States
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W. Minor: Unzipped Souls: a Jazz Journey through the Soviet Union (Philadelphia, 1995)
T. Owens: Bebop: the Music and the Players (New York, 1995)
K. Gabbard: Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (Chicago, 1996)
R. Gottlieb, ed.: Reading Jazz: a Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from
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D. Ake, C.H. Garrett, and D. Goldmark, eds.: Jazz/Not Jazz: the Music and its Boundaries
(Berkeley, 2012)
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