Jazz History - Timeline

A Video History of Jazz Music

 * Jazz is a constantly evolving art form that began from influences of Ragtime, Creole, Gospel, early Blues and the African-American folk music of the pre-Civil War South. its beginnings in the early 20th century jazz has spawned a variety of sub-genres.


 * thumb|left|250px|New Orleans Jazz1910-1920s New Orleans traditional music, a blend of cajun folk music, African-American music, and traditional American band music.
 * It spawned the broader Southern Dixieland sound that ran the breadth of Old Dixie and the length of the Mississippi River and defined a generation of sights and sounds in the Old South.


 * thumb|left|250px|Chicago Jazz1915-1930s Chicago Jazz, the sound that traveled originally with New Orleans musicians looking for work in the big city and evolved into the syncopated sounds of Chicago that spread across college campuses nationwide as the Jazz became the wild music of the youth of the "Roaring Twenties." White musicians fascinated with the sounds of New Orleans joined in the movement. Players like Bix Beiderbecke popularized the sound with young white audiences who otherwise might not have seen an African-American band play the music.
 * "Jazz" turned into a craze that everyone, from its traditional practitioners to all-girl college bands played, talked about, etc.
 * World War I sent Americans overseas, and they took the jazz craze with them. It displaced traditional concert band music as the "popular" music, and opened the doorway to all of the other forms that came behind, including Rock-and-Roll. The music of this period would also eventually come to represent the excesses and moral decay of the 1920s that was largely blamed for the Great Depression in 1930.


 * thumb|left|250px|Big Band JazzIn the 1930s and the 1940s bands grew in size and complexity. Jazz was exploding in New York as Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Cab Calloway, and many others brought up the scale of the bands to New York's super size. It eveolved into to the Big Band sound and then Swing during WWII.
 * These two decades have been called the "Golden Age" of Jazz as the music was at the height of its popularity.


 * thumb|250px|left|BeBop JazzFrom the mid-1940s through the 1970s jazz exploded and diversified into its modern forms.


 * BeBop, a style of jazz characterized by fast tempo, instrumental virtuosity and improvisation based on the combination of harmonic structure and melody, began in the early 1940s, but took off after WWII, and featured a whole new departure for Jazz, lead by legends like Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Thelonius Monk, among others.


 * thumb|left|250px|Latin JazzThe 1950s and 1960s saw several new varieties of jazz spring up. Modal jazz, Latin jazz such as Afro-Cuban and Brazilian jazz, and Free jazz.
 * Modal Jazz reinvents the form and pushes the soloist and improvisation to its limits. Pianist, composer and bandleader George Russell chose not to write his pieces using conventional chord changes, but instead developed a form of jazz that relies on playing modal scales.
 * Latin jazz employs straight rhythm, rather than swung rhythm. Latin jazz rarely employs a backbeat, using a form of the clave instead. The conga, timbale, güiro, and claves are percussion instruments which often contribute to a "Latin" sound.
 * Free Jazz, also known as "avant-garde", "energy music" and "The New Thing," emerged in the 1950s from the BeBop movement. It was a search for the outer limits of the musical form. It was experimental, avant-garde, and deconstructionist. The rules, limited as they were, of BeBop and Modal jazz were thrown out of the window in an attempt to bring jazz back to its most primitive roots. The emphasis was on collective improvisation, and often the collection of soloists is so extreme as to almost dare not to play with each other. The head of the song was familiar, but after that, "the adventure," as Ornette Coleman would describe it, began, where no one in the band was sure where the improvisation would lead. The later years of John Coltrane, and the careers of Coleman and Cecil Taylor, among others, were dedicated to free jazz.
 * Latin jazz employs straight rhythm, rather than swung rhythm. Latin jazz rarely employs a backbeat, using a form of the clave instead. The conga, timbale, güiro, and claves are percussion instruments which often contribute to a "Latin" sound.
 * Free Jazz, also known as "avant-garde", "energy music" and "The New Thing," emerged in the 1950s from the BeBop movement. It was a search for the outer limits of the musical form. It was experimental, avant-garde, and deconstructionist. The rules, limited as they were, of BeBop and Modal jazz were thrown out of the window in an attempt to bring jazz back to its most primitive roots. The emphasis was on collective improvisation, and often the collection of soloists is so extreme as to almost dare not to play with each other. The head of the song was familiar, but after that, "the adventure," as Ornette Coleman would describe it, began, where no one in the band was sure where the improvisation would lead. The later years of John Coltrane, and the careers of Coleman and Cecil Taylor, among others, were dedicated to free jazz.
 * Free Jazz, also known as "avant-garde", "energy music" and "The New Thing," emerged in the 1950s from the BeBop movement. It was a search for the outer limits of the musical form. It was experimental, avant-garde, and deconstructionist. The rules, limited as they were, of BeBop and Modal jazz were thrown out of the window in an attempt to bring jazz back to its most primitive roots. The emphasis was on collective improvisation, and often the collection of soloists is so extreme as to almost dare not to play with each other. The head of the song was familiar, but after that, "the adventure," as Ornette Coleman would describe it, began, where no one in the band was sure where the improvisation would lead. The later years of John Coltrane, and the careers of Coleman and Cecil Taylor, among others, were dedicated to free jazz.


 * thumb|left|250px|Jazz FusionIn the late 1960s Jazz Fusion developed from a mixture of elements of jazz such as its focus on improvisation with the rhythms and grooves of funk and R&B and the beats and heavily amplified electric instruments and electronic effects of rock. While the term "jazz rock" is often used as a synonym for "jazz fusion", it also refers to the music performed by late 1960s and 1970s-era rock bands when they added jazz elements to their music such as free-form improvisation.
 * thumb|left|250px|Smooth Jazz
 * While its roots go back to the 1960s, smooth jazz, is down-tempo (the most widely played tracks are in the 90–105 BPM range), layering a lead, melody-playing instrument (Saxophones – especially soprano and tenor – are the most popular, with guitars a close second) over a backdrop that typically consists of programmed rhythms and various pads and/or samples.


 * thumb|left|250px|Acid JazzIn the 1980s acid jazz, a musical genre that combines elements of jazz, funk and hip-hop, particularly looped beats. It developed in the UK over the 1980s and 1990s and could be seen as tacking the sound of jazz-funk onto electronic dance: jazz-funk musicians such as Roy Ayers, Donald Byrd and Grant Green are often credited as forerunners of acid jazz. Acid jazz has also experienced minor influences from soul, house, acid rock, and disco.


 * The term contemporary jazz is usually a misnomer for smooth jazz, but can refer to any modern jazz movement.


 * As jazz has spread around the world, it has drawn upon local, national, and regional musical cultures. Its aesthetics are adapted to these varied environments and cultures, giving rise to many new and distinctive styles. It continues to grow and change and adapt as new generations of musicians both honor the past, and explore the future of the genre.