New Orleans call-and-response grew a century of styles
Jazz arose in late nineteenth-century African-American New Orleans from blues, ragtime, spirituals, marches, and European harmony—swing, blue notes, and improvisation its hallmarks. Since the 1920s Jazz Age it spread into swing, bebop, modal, free, and fusion branches worldwide.
The word itself has a colourful past. It probably grew out of jasm, slang from 1860 meaning pep or energy, and its earliest known appearance in print is a 1912 Los Angeles Times piece in which a minor-league pitcher described his wobbling jazz ball. A musical sense turns up in the Chicago Daily Tribune by 1915, and New Orleans followed on 14 November 1916, when the Times-Picayune wrote about jas bands. Eubie Blake remembered the older spelling with a double s as too crude to say in front of ladies, and the American Dialect Society later named jazz the Word of the 20th Century.
New Orleans jazz emerged in the early 1910s, stirring marches, quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues into group improvisation, though it had no single birthplace. The 1930s belonged to swing big bands, hard-driving Kansas City jazz and gypsy jazz. Bebop in the 1940s turned jazz into faster, chord-based music for musicians rather than dancers, and cool jazz smoothed the edges as the decade closed. Hard bop brought gospel and rhythm and blues in the mid-1950s, modal and free jazz loosened scales and metre later that decade, fusion added rock beats and amplification around 1970, and smooth jazz won heavy radio play in the early 1980s.
Improvisation, inherited from the call-and-response work songs and field hollers of enslaved African Americans, is the constant thread. Where a classical player tries to honour the written score, jazz prizes interplay, from Dixieland musicians trading melodies and countermelodies to bebop groups that state a tune briefly and improvise nearly all the rest. Definitions stay slippery: Joachim-Ernst Berendt stresses a special feel for time called swing, Travis Jackson lists group interaction and a personal voice, and Duke Ellington simply said it's all music. A tug of war between commerce and art has followed every revival and experiment.
The white Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first jazz records, and bandleader Papa Jack Laine was dubbed the father of white jazz. Pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong and trumpeter Valaida Snow worked in the shadow of celebrated singers such as Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, and when men were drafted in the Second World War, all-female bands stepped in. The International Sweethearts of Rhythm, founded in 1937, became the first integrated women's band in the country and toured Europe with the USO in 1945. Benny Goodman, leading a racially mixed band, played the first jazz concert at Carnegie Hall in 1938.
Source: Jazz
