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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
As the name suggests, ‘modern’ jazz is heavily dependant on what era you’re living in.
Back in the 1940s, for example, bebop was considered modern compared to the big band swing that came before it.
But, in 21st century jazz speak, we’re usually referring to…