Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Jazz Music: The Beginning

The roaring 20's featured some of the most famous Jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Paul Whiteman and Duke Ellington. These artists were some of the most popular ones, the actual number of great 1920's Jazz musicians, is incredibly huge. Most of the Jazz musicians played in bands, like King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, instead of going solo. However, many artists later parted ways with bands like Louis Armstrong, who played cornet for the Creole Jazz Band and later decided to perform solo. Pianist Jelly Roll Morton, along with the Red Hot Peppers are other such examples. In the 1920's, Jazz bands were made up of three voices and a rhythm section. The voices consisted of the cornet, clarinet and trombone, which were the prominent Jazz instruments.

Jazz Sub-Genres

In the early 20th century, musicians conceived a variety of sub-genres of Jazz. New Orleans Dixieland dating from the early 1910's, big band-style swing from the 1930's and 1940's, bebop from the mid-1940's, a variety of Latin Jazz fusions such as Afro-Cuban and Brazilian Jazz, free Jazz from the 1950's and 1960's, Jazz fusion from the 1970's, acid Jazz from the 1980's (which added funk and hip-hop influences), and NuJazz in the 1990's are some of the sub-genres of Jazz that are still prevalent.

Jazz music in the 1920's, established Jazz as a music genre, in the true sense. Many changes, improvisations and experiments have taken place in Jazz since then. But even today, the genre cannot be defined in a few simple words. Paul Whiteman-The King of Jazz described Jazz as "the folk music of the machine age." Personally, I feel Jazz is the music that flows from the heart and appeals to the soul. 


credited to; http://www.buzzle.com/articles/jazz-music-in-the-1920s.html

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