Events for 10 — 10 - 26 — 10

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…