Legacy Radio 4 "The Jazz Quarter"

Hard Bop & Soul Jazz
2022-02-22 08:00 - 2022-03-11 17:00 UTC | Legacy Radio 4, 721 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
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 move towards a more Afrocentric sound as a reaction against Cool jazz, which placed relatively little emphasis upon the blues.
Blue Note Records released many of the artists pioneering this new sound: Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers (initially with Horace Silver on piano – Silver’s church-influenced ‘The Preacher’ is a good example of the style), Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Hank Mobley, Donald Byrd and others.

Modal jazz
2022-01-15 08:00 - 2022-02-12 17:00
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 experiment with composing in this way in the late 1950s, inspired by theoretical work of George Russell. Miles Davis’s ‘Milestones’ (from the album of the same name) and ‘So What’ (from Kind of Blue) are key early examaples, where players improvise within a mode for extended periods; John Coltrane would intensify this approach with his classic 1960s quartet.
During the mid-1960s composers like Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock and Joe Henderson further utilised ‘non-functional harmony’, writing music that moved more quickly between chords and corresponding scales in sometimes surprising ways.

Bossa nova and Latin jazz
2021-12-20 08:00 - 2022-01-08 17:00
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 band, and in collaboration with the composer and percussionist Chano Pozo, who wrote the Latin jazz standards ‘Manteca’ and ‘Tin Tin Deo’.
In the mid-1960s Bossa nova, a fusion of Brazilian samba and jazz harmony, became incredibly popular, with American saxophonist Stan Getz recording a Grammy-winning collaboration with Brazilian guitarist/singer Joao Gilberto, which has remained one of the most important jazz albums of all time.
The album’s biggest hit was ‘The Girl from Ipanema’, which like many of the most famous Bossa novas was composed by Antônio Carlos Jobim.
Numerous jazz musicians have since taken inspiration from various types of Latin music.

Free jazz & Avant garde
2021-11-25 08:00 - 2021-12-12 17:00
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 played music that was swinging, bluesy and based upon memorable melodies, but with solo sections that dispensed with rigid form and harmony.
American free jazz in the 1960s was often proudly Afrocentric, with links to the civil rights movement.
The term Avant garde jazz is often used interchangeably with free jazz, but it may also use more written material, often taking influence from contemporary classical music.
European ‘improvised music’ began to develop later in the 1960. It tends to be less connected to the jazz tradition than earlier American free jazz, and often doesn’t contain any prepared material at all.

Jazz Fusion
2021-10-10 08:00 - 2021-11-11 17:00
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 Charles Lloyd’s quartet, which played to large audiences and was associated with the psychedelic rock scene of the day.
Miles Davis recorded Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way in 1969, both of which were controversial with jazz purists, with long tunes and loose, improvised forms.
Herbie Hancock’s funky brand of fusion in the 1970s also incorporated elements of disco and soul, while others, like Weather Report and some of Wayne Shorter’s solo work utilised intricate forms and chord sequences.

Modern / Contemporary Jazz
2021-09-06 08:00 - 2021-09-25 17:00
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 a type of music that has emerged from the 1990s onwards and covers a range of sub-genres in a more current way than styles like swing, bebop and modal jazz.
As ever, though, lines can be blurred and it may incorporate elements of all these styles.
From a musical perspective, modern jazz today can be highly demanding to play, often utilising non-functional harmony, intricate melodies and odd time signatures.
It might take influence from other genres, such as 20th Century classical music or sounds from non-western cultures.
And while it can sometimes have a reputation for being rather challenging for the listener, a number of modern jazz artists have managed to create accessible and highly melodic material from relatively complex source materials.
