Hot Jazz[]
Hot Jazz is the evolution of Chicago Jazz, an urban party music energized by anti-liquor laws and the rise of the "Speakeasy" during Prohibition.
Sidney Bechet in a Hot Jazz Movie 1930 with Lilian Harvey and Willy Fritsch
Hot jazz traveled with the bands that played it, and was picked up by artists and bands outside of Chicago's influences, where it found new variations and wrinkles as those artists added their own existing stylings and regional flavors to it.
Historians and encyclopedic references lump hot jazz into Dixieland jazz. This is a mistake. Hot Jazz is jazz music which is intense and emotionally charged, marked by strong rhythms and improvisation, not the languidly paced Dixieland of the Old South.
Notable Players[]
Sidney Bechet, King Oliver, Bix Beiderbecke, and Fletcher Henderson all had dance bands that were early practitioners of the sound.
Precursor to Big Band[]
- Big band evolved out of hot jazz during the Great Depression, but traded off size and big sound for freedom and improvisational flair.
Hot Jazz Timeline[]
- The hot jazz bands evolved out of the Chicago Jazz sound into their own defined form around 1935 and continued through the Big Band Era, and largely either died off or migrated into small combo sub-genres of jazz like BeBop in the 1950s and 1960s.
Hot Jazz Today[]
- Some small revivalist bands are organized as modern hot jazz bands, such as Hot Jazz Band, the California Honeydrops, Hot Jazz Ambassadors and the Milano Hot Jazz Orchestra.
Videos[]
- Here are some samples of Hot Jazz, past and present: