Jazz Styles

There are different styles to jazz. It is a music that has evolved with
time. Recognizing the styles won't make you enjoy the songs any more, but it
may help you for instance, if somebody tells you, "this is a great bebop CD," you
will have an idea what it is, and you can recognize which styles you have a
preference for. I don't think there is a person alive who likes ALL jazz. A
lot? Yes. All? No. There is surely some guy out there who grates your nerves.
:)
With that in mind, here are some of the different styles...not all the
styles (because I don't know them all), but some of them:

Dixieland -- This is the style that is most closely related to New Orleans

and especially the marching funerals from the area. It is a very happy music.
The instrumentation consists of a trumpet, that plays the main melody -usually with a lot of bounce and flair, the trombone, which plays a countermelody; the clarinet dances around the melody (kind of like a yapping Chihuahua
nipping at your ankles :); the piano played the chords, the tuba was frequently
used in place of a bass, and it kept the rhythm, along with the drums. It is a
2/4 rhythm (or "Ooom pah, Ooom pah", if 2/4 means nothing to you).
Sometimes, the early Dixieland groups recorded with a banjo keeping rhythm,
since they didn't have microphones (they used something resembling a
megaphone) and the drums were too overpowering. Examples of this style are
the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and Wild Bill Davidson and the Commodores.

Hot Jazz -- This is a music style I am not very familiar with. I would like

to learn more about it, but my money is spent elsewhere, jazz-wise. This music
is from the "Jazz Age" in history (also known as the "Roaring 20s"). It is the
link between Dixieland and Big Band Swing. The combos got bigger and started
using, for instance, 2 trumpet players. It's not as polished as Swing music.
The music really cooks from this era, though--don't get me wrong. Examples of
this music are Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers and Louis Armstrong's Hot
Fives (and Hot Sevens) as well as Fletcher Henderson's orchestra.

Swing (or Big Band) -- This is jazz that is more formal and usually less

improvised. The structure is very tight. The instrumentations often consists

of "sections", such as 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, and 4 "reeds" (Saxophones of

various types and/or clarinet.) as well as drums, guitar, piano, and bass. They
used techniques such as "call and response", where a section would play a riff
and another section would repeat it. The music uses a lot of riffs, or a musical
phrase played over and over (check out Glen Miller's "In the Mood" for an
example of this). This music was very popular and very danceable. It nearly
died in the late 1950s and all but disappeared in the 1960s and 1970s, due to
decreasing popularity and high expenses (a lot of members to pay), but it is
making a comeback. Examples of this music are the big bands of Benny
Goodman, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, and Duke Ellington.

Bebop -- During the early 1940s, some very talented musicians grew tired

of playing the same music in their jobs with swing bands. After the band
played, they would stick around for jam sessions. A group of enormously
talented musicians: Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny
Clarke, and Charlie Christian invented a style that became known as bebop. It
was less structured than say, swing, but depended heavily on improvisation and
because these guys were leading the way, it required virtuosity, as well. The
improvised solos, rather than being based on ornamenting the melody, was
based on complex chords that changed rapidly. The music is very driving and
you can usually recognize it, because a) You probably cannot whistle the melody
after hearing it, and b) the drums drive hard, especially when keeping time on
the cymbals! Examples of this music, other than those listed above, would also
include Dexter Gordon, Fats Navarro, and Bud Powell.

Cool (or West Coast jazz) --This music came to be as a result of the Miles
Davis' nonet and a series of recordings that later became known as The Birth
of the Cool (Click link to view album). The style uses the chord changes, like

bebop, but lacks the intensity and the "piss and vinegar" of bebop. The music is
more laid back. Many say it lacks the "emotional intensity" of bebop. The
drummers in cool music often use brushes, and hence, you do not get that
driving rhythm from the drums. This music was very popular in the early to mid
1950s and some examples of players from this genre include Stan Getz, Gerry
Mulligan, Paul Desmond, and Chet Baker.

Hard Bop -- This music was a outgrowth from bebop. It also uses complex

chord changes. However, hard bop mixes bebop with gospel and blues,
providing a more "emotional" music. Sometimes, the line between the music
styles gets blurred (and you will see me refer to both as "bop"). This music was

also known as "East Coast jazz" during the 1950s. Examples of this genre
include: Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Lee Morgan, and Cannonball Adderly.

Third Stream -- This was an attempt by George Russell to fuse classical

music with jazz during the mid-1950s. Improvisational music with structured,
composer-oriented music. Go figure. I hear his 3 movement piece "All about
Rosie" is very good, though. I don't have any music from this genre.

Progressive Swing -- An attempt in the 1950s to fuse Swing (Big Band)

music with elements of bebop. An example of this is Stan Kenton's Big Band. I
don't have any of this music.

Modal -- This music was an extension of theories that George Russell

presented in his book The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for
Improvisation. (Sounds more like a thesis!) In the late 1950s, bop was starting

to run its course. The chord changes were becoming more rapid and
constrictive, since soloist had to play follow the chords,) and also because after
playing their 32 measures (click here for a more detailed explanation), the
soloist had to play the same chord changes again. .Also, the style was about 15
years old, so the novelty and to some extent, the creativity, was disappearing.
What modal improvisation did was use slower moving chord changes, and freed
up the soloist to improvise more based on scales, rather than the rapidly
changing chords of bebop. The result more melodic solos. Miles Davis' groups
of the late 1950s popularized this music and John Coltrane spent the early
1960s taking this form of jazz to new heights. Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner are
two more examples of fine modal players.

Free jazz (a.k.a. "The New Thing"). Free jazz took the concepts of modal

one step farther: It based it's solos on no structure (hence, it "freed" up the
soloist to play anything). The solo became the melody and the players played
off of musical ideas that each other were playing. This sometimes comes off
as sounding dissonant, especially when multiple people play their own thing
simultaneously. A little bit of it usually goes a long ways with me, so I don't
listen to much. The music had something of an "angry" edge to it, and was a
musical reflection of the turbulent 1960s. Although he mastered hard bop and
modal jazz, John Coltrane played this music during the last years of his life and
became the musical figurehead who lent credibility to it (and the music's
popularity basically died with him). The father of this genre is Ornette

Coleman. Cecil Taylor is another example of an important figure from this

style.

Bossa Nova -- Stan Getz popularized this music, and it became an

outgrowth of Cool jazz. It uses Latin Bossa Nova music mixed with jazz
improvisation. If you have heard the song "The Girl from Impanema," you have
heard Bossa Nova (and Getz plays the saxophone solo). Getz was not supportive
of Free Jazz and decided to go in this direction. It was popular in the 1960s
(and some say it saved jazz during this period), but became something of a fad.

Fusion -- Miles Davis created this music form of jazz with his record
Bitches Brew. The music blends jazz with rock music. It was enormously

popular in the 1970s. During the 1960s, a lot of younger people were no longer
interested in jazz and looked upon it as something you keep under glass in a
museum. This was the time of rebellion and "trust no one over 30", so
unfortunately, jazz became of casualty of this type of thinking. Miles decided
to "take the music to the audience" and this was the result. The music used
traditional jazz instruments, such as the trumpet, drums, and saxophone, but it
added electrical versions of other instruments, such as keyboards, guitar, and
bass (and Miles, for instance, used a "wah wah" pedal with his trumpet during
this period). Blood, Sweat, and Tears was a popular band from this genre (you
have probably heard "Spinning Wheels"). Many of Miles' sidemen went on to
become some of the bigger names in this genre, such as Chick Corea's group
Return to Forever; John McGlaughlin's group The Mahavishnu Orchestra; or
Tony Williams' Lifetime; and Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter's group Weather
Report.

Neo-Classical -- At the end of the 1970s/early 1980s, jazz had become so

fused with Rock and other forms of music that it was beginning to become hard
to tell where jazz began and ended. Many people were proclaiming that "Jazz
is dead." Some of the younger players didn't care for the directions jazz took
with Free Jazz and Fusion in the 1960s and 1970s and decided to look
backwards for inspiration. The result is bop-based music (and some other
forms, such as Dixieland) with some modern touches. The biggest name from
this genre is Wynton Marsalis. Other "young lions" (as they have become known
as) include: Joshua Redman, Roy Hargrove, and Branford Marsalis.