Free jazz

Without African music we would not have some of the most popular genres of music that we have today. African music influence helped create genres like jazz, gospel, blues, soul and even hip hop and reggae. The traditional song and dance created by native Africans spread all over the world as its fusion with other type of song helped create the music we all know and love today. The spread of the African music can be traced to the slave trade that shipped Africans all over the world. The one thing…

Coleman was a jazz saxophone player who started his career in the 1950s by defying cultural, and musical standards. David Ake, composer, performer, and musicologist, analysed how Ornette Coleman created dramatic change in the jazz realm by defying the bebop era standards. Ake brings up many points of the standards that Coleman defied, such as: jazz virtuosity and masculinity, jazz performance and sex, and cultural perceptions of masculinity and race. David Ake points out how jazz music gave a…

Defending Jazz As African-American artists, LeRoi Jones, poet, playwright, and jazz critic, and Max Roach, drummer and jazz lecturer, believe that jazz is a representation of African-American culture and attitudes about the world. More importantly, they believe that the creation of jazz music is reserved for only African-Americans. This is evident when Roach says in his essay, “Beyond Categories”: “I am often asked, ‘Can whites play your kind of music?’ My answer is ‘Yes’...But no whites have…

Jazz dance is often styled in parallel to the musical and cultural taste of the time providing it with its ever changing variations and influences throughout the decades especially the fifties and sixties. Jazz dance went from shallow imitations with Hindu/oriental inspiration to social dances that started in the African American community such as the jerk,locomotion, the Monkey and more. Gus Giordano, founder/director of the critically acclaimed Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago, author,…

“Where words fail, music speaks.”-Hans Christian Andersen (Phillip). Jazz was not born on a specific day. It formed over years of slavery, pain, and discrimination. Jazz music led to the exploration of the pain and troubles of slaves and African- Americans went through during the course of many years. Slave music is the basis of jazz music. In 1619, the first slaves arrived in America (Shmoop). Slaves could not speak poorly of their masters, so they used songs to speak in code (History). Often…

In New Orleans the origin of black population was diverse, being most of the time the western part of Africa or the Caribbean. It is in this diverse cultural context in which originated the appearance of musical styles as diverse as Jazz, Cajun music, Zydeco and blues. In many areas of the South of America the drumbeat was prohibited by law, in places like Georgia and it was forbidden the use of any musical instrument for part of the slaves. However in the early 19th century music festivals…

he taught us all to play jazz” (“History of Jazz”). In this quote, Wynton Marsalis was talking about Louis Armstrong. Jazz music has impacted the world and cultures, it shares in so many ways. Modern jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. Now, jazz is exported to the world. Jazz music greatly influenced all kinds of music that is popular today. One of the types of music that was inspired by the elements of jazz was classical. “In…

Jazz by Toni Morrison is set during the Harlem Renaissance, an era in which music, specifically Jazz music, was generating popularity, as well as controversy. Morrison incorporates the importance of music throughout the book in many ways, including, the style in which the narrator tells the story, for example, how characters were introduced and the way certain scenes were explained, as well as the language used. Although the structure of the novel is significant in understanding the role of jazz…

Comparison of Swing and Bop Jazz Jazz music is one of the youngest genres of music that is played in this day and age. This genre of jazz encompasses several different styles such as bebop and swing. Both styles are different but they are still classified as jazz. Swing music is the older of the two styles jazz. Swing became very popular in the 1930’s to the mid 1940’s. Ironically, bebop’s inception came out from creative spins on the already popular swing music. Swing usually consisted of…

segregation, and Vietnam world. They used Jazz as a kind of expression, as a political believes. The most notable musicians in these time were Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, and Dave Brubek. All of them moved the Jazz to another level. A new kind of Jazz became, some improvisation, no guides, new styles such as “Bebop”, many “solos”, different “tempo”, among others. Miles Davis recorded “Kind of Blue”, it was the best seller. He was a Jazz trumpeter. Another icon was Dave…