Overview
Despite their apparent stylistic diversity, different jazz pieces share common elements, such as improvisation and swing feeling, and on a more basic level, common forms and instrumentation. This section’s focus on form and timbre in jazz will hopefully give you a deeper understanding of jazz improvisation. To fully appreciate jazz improvisation, you should be familiar with the standard jazz forms, the sound of various instruments and their role in an ensemble—whether a musician is playing written parts or improvising.
This section also looks at the various cultures that contributed to the early development of jazz’s distinctive style and flavor. Learning where and how jazz was first created will help you understand it better.
Objectives
Upon completion of this part of the lesson, you will be able to do the following:
- Recognize the standard forms of jazz.
- Understand the roles of the various jazz instruments.
- Identify the sounds of these instruments.
- Identify the cultural origins of jazz.
- Identify the musical contribution of brass bands to jazz.
- Identify the significance of ragtime music.
- Identify the blues as a musical style.
- Identify some call-and-response genres that predate jazz.
- Identify New Orleans as a fertile culture that “birthed” jazz.
Brass Bands and the Musicians of New Orleans
New Orleans in the late nineteenth century was full of musicians. Brass bandsA musical ensemble consisting of brass instruments, occasionally woodwind instruments, and a percussion section. played for parades by day, while string bands were preferred for evenings. Dancing was the principal entertainment, and mazurkas, waltzes, polkas, cakewalks, and other dance pieces were part of the musicians' repertoire. During the last two decades of the century, string bands began to include brass and woodwind players, moving toward an instrumentation that would characterize the sound of early New Orleans jazz. The mandolin and violin of the earlier string bands eventually gave way to the cornet or trumpet, the trombone, and the clarinet.
New Orleans brass bands tended to perform a mix of European-style military marches and African folk music. This eclectic blend of music was par for the course for New Orleans. Its community of musicians heard and played music of great diversity: marches, opera, religious music, slave music (field hollers and spirituals), and perhaps even spectacular displays of West African dance and music in nearby Congo Square. These musicians, of all ages and abilities, found employment in the red-light district just outside the French Quarter, a place known as Storyville. Together, they created a style of performance we now call jazz, although in its earliest years, it was known as ragtime.
Watch and listen now to an excerpt from the 1999 video "I'll Make Me a World: 1 - Lift Every Voice," which provides a description of the culture and music of early New Orleans.
In 1935, Louis Armstrong suffered from a severe lip rupture due to his aggressive style of playing and was forced to stop playing for one year.
