1920s Jazz (Trad jazz, New Orleans jazz & Early jazz)
Early jazz developed in the 1910s in the ‘melting pot’ of New Orleans, as players combined influences including ragtime, blues and marching band music to create a style of jazz that was heavy on collective, polyphonic improvisation. Trumpeter Louis Armstrong was jazz’s first…

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Swing Music & Big Band Jazz
From the early 1930s until the late 1940s big band swing was the most popular style of music in the USA, and many of the most important bandleaders were huge mainstream stars. Bands usually containing between 11 and 20 musicians would play music…

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Bebop
The swing era largely focused upon music for dancing and entertainment. As a reaction against this came bebop, a style that was fiercely intellectual and very much meant for serious listening. From the mid-1940s alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and pianist…

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Gypsy jazz
Guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stéphane Grapelli created the first major European jazz group when they established the Quintette du Hot Club de France in the late 1930s. With an instrumentation that only featured string instruments, without drums (Reinhardt, Grapelli, two rhythm guitarists and…

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Cool Jazz
In the late 1940s and through the 1950s a softer, more relaxed style of playing was marketed as an alternative to the ‘hotter’, more frantic bebop that was dominant at the time. Miles Davis’ Birth of the Cool, with impressionistic arrangements by Gil Evans,…

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Hard Bop & Soul Jazz
In the mid-1950s the sounds of bebop began to be blended with the influence of rhythm and blues and gospel music, to create a funkier type of music with simpler melodies and a more overt blues influence. Some view this as a conscious…

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Modal jazz
Western harmony traditionally relies upon a tonal key centre with related chords and cadences. Modal harmony, however, takes a chord and corresponding scale (or mode), where it may remain for some time or move to another, possibly unrelated mode. Jazz musicians began to…

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Bossa nova and Latin jazz
Jazz has always included what Jelly Roll Morton referred to as a ‘Spanish tinge’, dating back to the music’s origins in the melting pot of New Orleans in the early 20th Century. In the late 1940s Dizzy Gillespie pioneered Afro-Cuban jazz with his big…

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Free Jazz & Avant Garde
Free jazz developed in America during the late 1950s and early ‘60s, as musicians sought to break down and reject conventions within bebop and hard bop that they found restrictive, including harmony and chord changes, regular tempos, and compositional forms. Ornette Coleman’s ground-breaking quartet…

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Jazz Fusion
In the late 1960s jazz musicians began to use electric instruments and take on the influence of the rock music and funk that were popular at the time. Larry Coryell’s Free Spirits was an important band early in the new music’s development, as was…

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Early jazz developed in the 1910s in the ‘melting pot’ of New Orleans, as players combined influences including ragtime, blues and marching band music to create a style of jazz that was heavy on collective, polyphonic improvisation.

Trumpeter Louis Armstrong was jazz’s first major soloist, and his recordings with his Hot Five and Hot Seven are some of the most important of the 20th Century.

Bix Beiderbecke played in a lighter, ‘sweeter’ way than the more operatic Armstrong, with Bix’s trumpet often accompanied by the saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer.

Ragtime pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton was another key innovator of 1920s jazz and you can find out more about this joyous style of music in our article dedicated to Dixieland Jazz.

Albums 

Louis Armstrong – Complete Hot Five & Seven Recordings Alligator Crawl 

Bix Beiderbecke – Young Man With a Horn Tiger Rag 

Jelly Roll Morton – Complete Recorded Work, 1926-1930 Wild Man Blues 85

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