Chapter Summary

An Overview

Jazz can be partly defined as a balance between the individual voices that constitute an ensemble and the collective expression unique to that ensemble. It is a music of performers more than composers and understanding jazz requires an understanding of the jazz performer. Each artist contributes a very personal and unique expression to the development and continuing vitality of the music.

In the dawn of jazz history, all music that was not clearly classical was generally considered jazz. Often called “America’s classical music,” jazz was the first music to claim a dominant foothold in the American identity. Jazz is a rich blend of musical and cultural elements like:

• African oral tradition of the Negro slave culture
• hopelessness of slavery
• practices from the Western European musical tradition
• urban and rural folk music
• white and black church music practices
• songs of “Tin Pan Alley” and the sound of the “Roaring Twenties”
• marching bands
• religious fervor of the Great Awakening

What To Listen For In Jazz

To appreciate jazz, or many other forms of music, the listener must be actively involved. Unlike a work of visual art that can be experienced in total at once, music is experienced linearly, over time. Music listeners have the task of remembering a theme or phrase and recognizing it when it occurs again later in the same piece. Learning about and understanding jazz contributes to the pleasure of hearing it.

One technique of active listening is to concentrate on the individual elements that comprise a piece of music. What instruments can be heard? What sound or voice is prominent? Is it a saxophone? The rhythm section? How fast or slow are they playing? Is the soloist playing many notes in rapid succession or just a few? Do you hear repetition? Contrast? (Repetition is the same musical material in two or more parts of a composition. Contrast is the introduction of different musical material.) These are just some questions to consider while listening to jazz.

Form is the overall structure of a musical composition or performance. Most jazz pieces have simple forms. A simple form allows the instrumentalists to internalize the structure freeing them up to embellish, interpret, and improvise. The instrumentalists focus on spontaneous, creative expression.

Many sounds can be uniquely associated with jazz. Certain sounds peculiar to jazz have their origins in oral tradition—growls, bends, slurs, and varying shades of vibrato. These result from instrumentalists imitating vocal techniques. Many sounds of jazz are personified and identified through the musical interpretation of specific artists.

Rhythm, Syncopation, and Swing

Emphasis on rhythm has always been an integral part of jazz. Sometimes jazz players do not always play exactly in rhythm with the established pulse of a tune. (In fact, all elements of jazz—melody, structure, harmony, and rhythm—are fair game for interpretation.) Jazz makes use of a specific type of rhythmic treatment called syncopation. Syncopation is when the notes between the beats are accented more than the notes on the beat. Swing is a combination of delayed notes and their accents give the performance its characteristic momentum; its swing. Jazz performances are usually very rhythmic and syncopated and have varying amounts of swing.

Improvisation and Composition

In jazz, the composition is most often just a blueprint of a performance. Artists infuse the composition with their own spontaneous creativity so that performances of a composition are unique. Performers have several options when approaching a composition. They may play:

• exactly what is written
• a melody that is an accurate reflection of the notation but display a distinctive interpretive style by bending notes
• so many changes in the melody that it is barely recognizable
• over chords of a song but not try to include any of the given melody at all
• the entire musical performance without any reference to any known musical melody or composition
• a “collective improvisation” creating new musical performances

Conclusion

Understanding the historical context of this art form as well as the identifying characteristics that distinguish it from other styles of music will help listeners enjoy and appreciate jazz.