ÌìÃÀ´«Ã½

With jazz continuing to inspire musicians, listeners and festival audiences around the world, we asked Neil Sopher, tutor on our popular evening class looking at the history of jazz, to explain what jazz is and why it remains one of the most exciting and influential musical traditions of the modern age.

What is jazz?

Louis Armstrong c.1920

Jazz is one of the most vibrant and inventive musical forms of the modern world. At its simplest, it is a style of music that grew out of African-American musical traditions in the United States, drawing on blues, ragtime, spirituals, work songs, marching bands and popular song. Yet this definition only begins to capture its richness.

From its earliest days, jazz has been a music of rhythm, imagination and exchange. It can be joyful, melancholy, elegant, raucous, intimate or experimental. It might be heard in a street parade, a smoky club, a concert hall, a dance band, a film soundtrack or a global festival. What connects these different settings is a spirit of invention: the sense that music is not simply being reproduced, but created afresh in the moment.

New Orleans and the birth of jazz

Billie Holiday c.1940

Jazz emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in New Orleans, a city shaped by many different cultures, communities and musical traditions. Brass bands, blues singers, church music, dance rhythms and popular entertainment all contributed to a new and distinctive sound.

Early jazz was often a collective music. Trumpets, clarinets, trombones, piano, banjo, bass and drums could weave around one another, creating a lively musical conversation. Musicians did not simply play a fixed tune from beginning to end. They decorated it, varied it, responded to one another and brought their own personality into the performance.

As jazz spread from New Orleans to cities such as Chicago and New York, it became part of the soundscape of modern life. It accompanied dancing, nightlife, migration, urban energy and new forms of entertainment. It was music for a changing world.

Improvisation and musical freedom

Programme for the Cotton Club

One of the defining features of jazz is improvisation. In many forms of Western classical music, performers are usually expected to follow a written score closely. In jazz, the written tune or chord sequence can become a starting point for invention.

A saxophonist, trumpeter, pianist or singer might take a familiar melody and transform it through rhythm, tone, phrasing and imagination. A performance can become a conversation between musicians, with each player listening, reacting and contributing something new.

This does not mean jazz is simply spontaneous or unplanned. Good improvisation depends on skill, memory, discipline and deep musical knowledge. Jazz musicians often work within recognisable structures, but they use those structures as a space for freedom. This tension between order and invention is one of the things that gives jazz its distinctive energy.

Swing, bebop and beyond

Nina Simone, 1968

Jazz has never stood still. In the 1930s and 1940s, swing brought jazz to huge audiences through big bands led by figures such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Benny Goodman. This was music for dancing, but it was also music of extraordinary sophistication, colour and rhythmic drive.

In the 1940s, bebop took jazz in a new direction. Musicians such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk developed a faster, more complex and more demanding style, often intended for close listening rather than dancing. Bebop helped establish jazz as a modern art form, full of daring harmonies, unexpected rhythms and individual expression.

Later developments included cool jazz, hard bop, free jazz, modal jazz, fusion and many contemporary forms. Artists such as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone and Charles Mingus expanded what jazz could be and what it could express.

Why jazz still matters

Jazz is more than a musical style. It is also a story of cultural exchange, identity, creativity and change. It has shaped popular music, film music, modern classical composition and countless musical traditions around the world.

For listeners, jazz offers a different way of hearing. It asks us to notice rhythm, tone, timing, silence and interaction. It brings together freedom and discipline, individuality and collaboration, tradition and innovation.

Interested in exploring this further?

This article introduces just some of the themes explored in our classroom course on the history and appreciation of jazz.

Find out more about this course on our website.