Legacy Radio 4 "The Jazz Quarter"

1920s Jazz (Trad jazz, New Orleans jazz & Early jazz)
2022-10-26 | Star Cinems, 312 W 34th St, New York, NY
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.

Swing music & big band Jazz
2022-08-13
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 that combined ensemble passages, often riff-based, with solo sections to entertain large audiences of dancers.
Duke Ellington, considered by many to be the greatest composer in jazz, was a key bandleader, as were virtuoso clarinettist Benny Goodman, pianist Count Basie, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, the ever-popular Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Stan Kenton and Woody Herman.

Bebop
2022-08-01 18:00 - 22:45 UTC
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 Bud Powell all improvised complex linear phrases full of surprising accents and chromatic passing notes, often at very fast tempos.
Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem was a key breeding ground, with Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke and Charlie Christian exploring the new sounds at all-night jam sessions.
Players would often write intricate new melodies over the chord progressions of existing jazz standards, in part so they could claim the composition royalties themselves. Examples of famous jazz songs from the bebop era include ‘Ornithology’ (based upon ‘How High The Moon’), ‘Donna Lee’ (based upon ‘Indiana’) and ‘Anthropology’ (based upon ‘I Got Rhythm’).
You can check out our overview of the best bebop artists in jazz history here.

Gypsy jazz
2022-08-01 17:00 - 18:30 | Legacy Radio 4, 721 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
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 double bass), the Quintette’s softer sound allowed the pair’s virtuosic soloing to be heard clearly.
Gypsy jazz remains popular as a sub-genre that is influenced by the American jazz tradition but is very much a unique style, with its own language and repertoire, much of which is composed by Reinhardt.
This type of jazz has been continued by more recent musicians including Biréli Lagrène and the Rosenberg Trio.

Cool Jazz
2022-07-30 18:00 - 22:45 | Legacy Radio 4, 721 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
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, is a key sound, as are Gerry Mulligan’s chordless quartet and the cerebral work of pianist-teacher Lennie Tristano and his disciples.
Many players, including Stan Getz, Lee Konitz, Zoot Sims and Mulligan, were highly influenced by the swing era saxophonist Lester Young. Artists such as Dave Brubeck and the Modern Jazz Quartet utilised complex arrangements that were influenced by classical music.

Hard Bop & Soul Jazz
2022-02-22 08:00 - 2022-03-11 17:00 | 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 | Legacy Radio 4, 721 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
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 | Legacy Radio 4, 721 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
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 | Legacy Radio 4, 721 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
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 | Legacy Radio 4, 721 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
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 | Legacy Radio 4, 721 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
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.
