Jazz techniques

For my own virtual jazz band, I wanted to try and pick jazz musicians who could mend well with a dance or a swing band. Max Roach on drums, Charles Mingus on bass, Benny Goodman on clarinet, Lester Young on tenor sax, Cannonball Adderly on alto sax, Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton on trombone, Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, Ella Fitzgerald and Cab Calloway as singers, and Duke Ellington on piano and as the bandleader. The group would have the style of early 20th century dance bands and do a live…

The song “Flamenco Sketches” by the Miles Davis Sextet has the cool jazz sound with the modal jazz style. The song has a light and soft sound with simple melodic improvisations. A traditional rhythm section maintains a steady rhythm throughout the song, but this rhythm section uses countermelodies to add colorations during the improvisations. The pianist is constantly playing a soft melody underneath the improvisations and sometimes mirroring the melody played by the improviser. The bassist…

excerpt from Miles Davis’s cool jazz double album The Big Fun. Album consists of many tracks that were not included in Miles’ previous studio albums and one of those “rejects” was this piece of beauty. Originally recorded on March 7, 1970, Go Ahead John is brought to life by many musicians like Miles Davis on trumpet, Steve Grossman on the soprano saxophone, John McLaughlin with his electric guitar and Jack DeJonette on the drums. Miles Davis, the now legendary Cool Jazz pioneer from Illinois,…

which has withstood the test of time. In today’s world we have experienced some of the greatest compositions that have or will ever be written. Everything resulting from classical music, inspiring other eras of music such as Baroque, Romantic and Jazz, to these types of music inspiring music genres that we listen to daily, music is simply the theme song to life, with a very versatile palate to fit every desire. The…

time periods and genres. Even in two distinct genres, such as hip-hop and jazz, two greats can be found with similarities in their tutelage, rise to fame and personas. Miles Davis and Kanye West, despite having so much between them, contain many parallels when observing what made them into icons. Miles Davis is one of the greatest, if not the greatest jazz musician ever. His album, “Kind of Blue”, is the best selling jazz album of all time, going platinum four times. That is nearly four times…

creation of jazz, jazz has evolved into various different forms over time directly influenced by certain artists and events in America. There are a number of extremely influential jazz musicians over the years, but I argue to say that the most influential of them were trumpet players. I believe that the most influential trumpet jazz players were Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Milles Davis and Roy Eldridge. These four artists were all musically gifted and were involved in the early days of…

the newly popular jazz music, which took everyone by storm. Through the popularity and influence of jazz, Americans of all different ethnicities and cultures were brought together. The roots of jazz music are typically accredited to African Americans of the 1700’s, who sang work songs while in slavery. Many of the work songs were in a form called “call-and-response”.…

prevailed for his composition techniques and mongrel forms of African American culture, style, and music with a twist of European literary cultures to mirror Kerouac's ambitions of both to join the standard artistic convention furthermore to restructure it (Johnson). The Beats Generation offered a critique of middle class American values. "Beat" differently characterizes as a curtailed form of "beaten down" or of "beatific." The word additionally proposes the "beat" of jazz, whose act of…

new chord progressions that led to the emergence of jazz music. Bebop and cool jazz incorporated fast tempos from African American cultures with European harmonies in order to create new music, representing the existing ethnic diversity in the US. The sociocultural environment of Harlem allowed for African American musicians to gather and produce bebop music by drawing from their folk rhythms and other sounds. The intricate arrangements of cool jazz represented a style of music more…

There has never been anyone like Art Tatum, who is one of the greatest jazz musicians in history. Tatum was born on October 13, 1909, in Toledo, Ohio, and he was the child of amateur musicians. His father was a mechanic, and his mother was a housemaid who worked in white homes. Although he was not born into a wealthy family, his unique talents helped propel him into the spotlight. If anything, Tatum proved that it was not impossible to become a world-class extraordinaire despite growing up with…