jazz

"Variously called rebop, bebop, or simply bop, the new approach was forged by restlessly innovative musicians who had grown dissatisfied with big-band swing, a dance-oriented style that required a predictable rhythmic groove, a sonic blend that favored tight section playing over improvised soloing, and an atmosphere of unfettered joy and gleaming optimism. Heralded as “modern jazz,” the new music favored small combos playing an opening melodic theme (the “head”) that introduced a set of chords, followed by a succession of solos in which players improvised new versions of the theme with agile, quicksilver runs through the governing chord progression, free to enrich the harmonic texture with substitute and extended chords. The tunes were played at blistering tempos. Drummers accented the soloists’ fractured, serpentine phrasings with abstract, almost ironic, snare drum riffs and—in place of the martial four-to-the-floor style of swing drumming—the deft dropping of bass drum “bombs” in odd corners of the meter. Freed from an obligation to accommodate dancers, these musicians now emphasized technical virtuosity and creative ingenuity. Modern jazz was a listening music, and many of its players insisted on being seen as artists rather than as entertainers."

"Most of the music in the swing era was not improvised and instead written down, but hundreds of jazz improvisers were still employed and a crucial part of the swing scene."

"If Chicago jazz epitomised the devil-may-care mood of the 1920s, it also looked forward to the ’30s: Chicago stars such as Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa spearheaded the age of the big bands."

"Jazz in the late 1940s moved away from big band jazz and morphed into a new expressive form that reflected social developments and postwar realities."

"For guitar players who are studying jazz, taking the next step in jazz improvisation can mean incorporating the distinct language of the bebop style into one’s playing. Most players start out in jazz by matching scales to their parent chord (such as A Dorian or A Aeolian matched to an Am7 chord). But to really enter the authentic historic realm of jazz – and to learn that specific language – means studying the architects of bebop."

"The phrase ‘turnaround’ is used to describe the last two or fours bars of the blues sequence."

"What made [jazz guitarist Joe Pass] so unique and great was his chord-melody style playing combined with fingerpicking and impeccable improvisational skills."

"The urge to move away from the over-familiar chord progressions of bop led Charles Mingus and Miles Davis to develop new approaches to harmonic movement, and the recording of some of the greatest albums in the history of music."

"Jazz music forces us guitarists to learn our fretboards. There is no getting around it. In all of its harmonic complexities and demands for virtuosity, we have no choice but to head on down the bumpy road to fretboard mastery."

"Prior to the advent of electrical amplification, the role of the guitar in jazz was strictly that of a chorded rhythm instrument, chugging along with the bass and drums and helping to propel whatever ensemble it was a part of. Soloing was pretty much out of the question because, without amplification, the guitar couldn't be heard over the horns. As soon as guitarists could plug into an amplifier, however, the electric guitar started making its presence felt as an improvisational voice in jazz."

"For guitar players who are studying jazz, taking the next step in jazz improvisation can mean incorporating the distinct language of the bebop style into one’s playing. Most players start out in jazz by matching scales to their parent chord (such as A Dorian or A Aeolian matched to an Am7 chord). But to really enter the authentic historic realm of jazz – and to learn that specific language – means studying the architects of bebop."

"Even before the close of the 1940s, a reaction against the bop ethos could be heard on both the East Coast and West Coast. In time, this movement got a name -- "cool jazz.""

"When the hot fusion bands came to town, the stage often resembled a mad scientist's laboratory, packed with strange and wonderful equipment of futuristic appearance and unknown powers. This music was often dismissed by purists as a sellout at the time of its initial release, and some feared that jazz was, for the first time in its history, backing away from its mandate to move forward, to experiment, to embrace the most progressive currents. And, true, in some instances, tired commercial formulas got overworked, and the music was dumbed down. But the best fusion work was innovative and expanded the jazz vocabulary at a time when many concluded that everything that could be done in jazz had been done."

"Throughout musical history, the prevalence of jazz has never particularly waned. Countless musicians have come and gone, each leaving their own unique mark on the genre. Despite the musical differences between jazz and rock, the two worlds are invariably linked."

"Cecil Taylor, one of the leaders of [the avant-garde jazz] movement, once made a revealing aside. "To feel" he explained, "is the most terrifying thing in this society." We should approach avant-garde jazz with his injunction in mind, striving to feel rather than merely intellectualize the music."

"The change of pace in the jazz world accelerated during the middle decades of the twentieth century , almost as if music were a kind of science that could only justify itself by relentlessly superseding old paradigms and establishing new ones. The mandate of the day was to overcome obstacles, burst through the barriers, rewrite the laws of jazz, or even throw the whole rule book out the window. By the late 1950s, the final barriers in jazz were the music's continued allegiance to metrical rhythms, phrasing within the constraints of the chord, and maintenance of a tonal center. But within a few short years, these last precepts were challenged and rejected. In a very real sense, anything now seemed possible within the jazz idiom, the music's scope limited only by the imagination and bravado of its most visionary performers. This avant-garde movement, dubbed "free" jazz, asserted its proud independence from all traditions that had that had previously imparted structure to the music and ensured its commercial viability. For its most fervent advocates, the music was not just another style but the inescapable destiny of the art form."

"Many jazz fans simply refer to [hard bop] as the Blue Note sound in deference to the record label most closely associated with the glory days of hard bop in the 1950s and 1960s. As the name hard bop indicates, the leading performers of this new idiom learned from their bebop predecessors. But they also borrowed techniques from other styles of populist music. The resulting hybrid artfully mixed the sophistication of modern jazz with a rough-and-tumble swagger, brash and bluesy, that never let you forget this music's proletarian pedigree."

"Birth of the Cool, recorded in 1949 but released under that title in 1957, took jazz in a sharply different direction than bebop. As the title suggests, the original 78s of this session were the birth of “cool jazz,” although Miles ceeded the genre and much of the credit for creating it to Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan because he spent the four years after its recording addicted to heroin."

"As he learned harmonically from Davis and Monk, and developed his mechanical skills, a new more confident Coltrane emerged. He has used long lines and multinoted figures within these lines, but in 1958 he started playing sections that might be termed 'sheets of sound'."

"While he was with Miles [Davis], Coltrane was tagged with the phrase 'sheets of sound.' Jazz critic Ira Gitler had first used it. These 'sheets of sound' were multinote hailstorms of dense textures that sound like a simultaneous series of waterfalls. 'His continuous flow of ideas without stopping really hit me,' Gitler said. 'It was almost superhuman. The amount of energy he was using could have powered a spaceship.'"

"Jazz is the false liquidation of art—instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture."

"Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny."

"If you have to ask, you'll never know."

"Destructive or redemptive, degenerate or transformative? Jazz is a phenomenon, a true world music."

"Jazz, often called America's classical music, so influenced our culture that Americans named a decade after it. Like the country of its birth, jazz blends many traditions, such as African-American folk, rhythm and blues, French Creole classical form, and gospel. Through the creation and performance of music like jazz, black Americans were better able to exchange ideas freely across racial and cultural barriers."

"When people hear the word "jazzman," the first thing they think is unemployed, then dope and sex, but the young guys aren't like that anymore. I'd like a girl to be able to take me home and introduce me to her parents and hear them say, "Oh, a jazzman. Isn't that fine.""

"When they study our civilization two thousand years from now, there will only be three things that Americans will be known for: the Constitution, baseball and jazz music. They're the three most beautiful things Americans have ever created."

"By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with."

"Well, feel something in B-flat, motherfucker."

"There is a view that jazz is "evil" because it comes from evil people, but actually the greatest priests on 52nd Street and on the streets of New York City were the musicians. They were doing the greatest healing work. They knew how to punch through music that would cure and make people feel good."

"I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday. I take 242 choruses; my ideas vary and sometimes roll from chorus to chorus or from halfway through a chorus to halfway into the next."

"Jazz is something Negroes invented, and it said the most profound things—not only about us and the way we look at things, but about what modern democratic life is really about. It is the nobility of the race put into sound … jazz has all the elements, from the spare and penetrating to the complex and enveloping. It is the hardest music to play that I know of, and it is the highest rendition of individual emotion in the history of Western music."

"Jazz is not a "form" but a collection of tags and tricks."

"Music is a journey. Jazz is getting lost."

"[T]he Negroes invented [Jazz] to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy on the one hand and to excite bestial tendencies on the other."

"What makes the performance is the dialogue created between you and everybody around you spontaneously. And you have to interact with everybody up there, interacting and reacting, throwing out ideas. Jazz is a purely democratic music. It's collective creativity where somebody introduces something and we all get a chance to say something about it. It always amazes me, the whole of it is just a great spirit. It grabs you to the point where it never lets you go until the very last breath."

"Jazz has got to retain its integrity, its spirituality. It's got to mean something. That's No. 1. There are a lot of great players thinking that way in the music. It's all good. I don't think we should lament the fact that, Oh, we can't play in the clubs anymore. That's passing. We'll be able to, as musicians, play serious jazz. I think that will prevail. I can't prophesize, but I have a strong intuitive feeling that it will be stronger than ever and have another shot at trying to turn this world around."

"The basic principles of all jazz styles are the same. Good musical taste, technical skill, and a firm grasp of the principles of chord construction and chord progression make up the sum total."

"You can be a jazz player and be respected by musicians, but the rest of the world doesn’t care. [...] We’re going to play a game: name a jazz player that means something."

"You don't often see a musician that is able to play jazz."

"Even people who don’t know much about jazz are aware that jazz musicians are meant to be ‘characters’ – free-spirited types whose absorption in music generates bizarre behaviour."