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In this era of jazz, the use of electric instruments and rebellion of what was considered jazz began to expand quickly. Artists such as Sun Ra, Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock began to make music that was meant to stretch and push the boundaries of what jazz was. In avant garde jazz elements of classical music and the use of atonal and arrhythmic concepts were used to broaden the palette of what is considered acceptable. Miles Davis incorporated similar elements as well as a more Rock oriented rhythm section with the album Bitches Brew. At this point the use of electric guitar and bass or electric organ or piano became much more of a feature. From the 1980s until present day Jazz continues to evolve and reflect both the sociopolitical and musical trends of the time. Jazz continues to borrow elements from other styles of music ranging from classical to hip Hop and electronic music. The styles and traditions of past eras of jazz can still be heard in their traditional forms as well as bor...

Faith is another strong concept that ties Jazz and Gospel music together. A spiritually guided direction gives sustenance to our hopes and dreams, from a biblical standpoint. The other direction of faith is found in daring to articulate an artistic vision and expressing something that’s both broader in scope and far more personal.  In Gospel music, faith is essential, while in Jazz music, it’s more of a distant goal. Though aims may differ however, both paths continually influence one another. For example, gospel music would not have evolved apart from the artists who felt the need to hear and express something beyond the ecclesiastical music that preceded them. In an interview with New York jazz trumpeter, composer, and educator John Raymond, conducted by TGC, The Gospel Coalition, considered this question, How has becoming a Christian shaped your work?... The Lord has used Jazz to make me into someone who trusts him. Jazz is improvised and messy. When performing, I don’t know exa...

Yet jazz embodied freedom, multiethnic democracy and was even censored by the Nazis during World War II. Jazz gained popularity in the Big Band Swing Era. Hollywood jazz musicals emerged with sound era talkies, as in Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s original score for Love Me Tonight, 1932... As the war commenced, Abel Meeropol penned blues number Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday’s jazz hit, which she later performed on British television. The protest song critiqued the lynching and racial violence against Blacks in the American South and would continue to have cultural resonance in its call for social justice decades later in an era of civil rights... The filmic rendering of jazz shifted from seedy, underground and illicit to stylish, cultured and aspirational during the war and postwar years. The hip, sophisticated iconography in Bert Stern’s Jazz on a Summer’s Day, for instance, was shot in expansive outdoor spaces at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, as yachts sail by on the water, rat...

Montgomery is also the location of Montgomery’s underground music club, Sous La Terre on Commerce Street. Look for the stairs leading to the basement to enter the after hours club that opens weekends at midnight. La Salle Bleu operates at the same location, except on the ground floor... Special events are held throughout the year in The Alley Entertainment District. Birmingham’s music heritage runs deep. African American a cappella quartet singing that developed in Jefferson County as the Birmingham Sound in the 1930s and 40s is played today by the local group the Birmingham Sunlights. The Birmingham Sound has been called the direct line ancestor to the most popular versions of African American harmony later made famous by The Tempta­tions. Starting in the 1960s, top artists from around the world including Aretha Franklin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones recorded their mu­sic in Alabama making Muscle Shoals the Hit Recording Capital of the World. Source: History of J...

A List of Record Player Terms Image by Dima Junglist The turntable became the basis of the record player and understanding the different parts of a record player can help you appreciate the magic of this analog sound system. Some have an automatic turntable tonearm moved by an anti skating feature that brings the needle to the center of the groove. Others will leave it up to you to steady your own arm to move the metallic one. Image by The Retro Store 45 Adapter - The 45 adapter allows for 7 inch, 17cm, records that have the larger center to fit your turntable. There are single play and multiplayer adapters. Multiplayer adapters are usually specific to certain turntables. Anti Skate - The anti skate mechanism is a vital component that prevents the tonearm from drifting towards the center of the record during playback. This drifting, if uncontrolled, can cause uneven wear on the vinyl and result in audio distortion. Automatic Turntable - A turntable equipped with both the ability to ...

Music is a unique, powerful, and special human phenomenon. It’s universal in that, as far as we know, all human cultures everywhere have ever had some form of expression we would call music. Music is deeply embedded in our everyday lives, and it features in every major social and personal event in our culture, parties, birthdays, weddings, sporting events, political rallies, religious ceremonies, social functions, graduations, funerals, etc. All music is fundamentally social. We use musical sounds to express ideas and emotions and to communicate with others. We use music to explore our notions of group and individual identity. We use music to document and disseminate our shared cultural history and common human experiences. We use music to make sense of the world and of being human, and we use it to communicate things that are impossible, or at least difficult, to say using verbal language. With any music, we can always ask, what does it mean for these people to make these sounds in th...

As a specific stylistic term, Jazz Blues can refer either to a) a blues artist who employs more advanced harmonies and/or rhythms which break out of traditional, straightforward blues patterns or b) to a jazz artist who keeps his harmonies and/or rhythms relatively simple, making the music more visceral and emotional than intellectual or sophisticated. The results might sound more like one side of the equation with a touch of the other mixed in, or even approach R&B. Blues and jazz were rooted in the same African American musical traditions in the first place, and they have always intersected enough that an absolute dividing line has never been a reasonable, or, to many listeners and musicians, desirable, proposition. In blues and jazz, the element I find so enriching, is the freed up interpretation of a tune in very individual ways. One never plays the same composition exactly the same way twice, depending upon the performer’s mood and personal experience, interactions with other ...

Outside of the Five Points neighborhood, other dancehalls including the Lakeside Ballroom and the Elitch Gardens Trocadero Ballroom attracted musicians too. But few rivaled the Rainbow Ballroom. Located just outside of Five Points on 5th and Lincoln, the Rainbow Ballroom had the largest dance floor west of the Mississippi. Leroy Smith was responsible for booking some of the biggest names in music at the time, including Count Basie, Lester Young, and Dizzy Gillespie. This was a stark difference from the clubs located in Five Points, which welcomed everyone to the dance floor. Just as white folks in New York traveled uptown to Harlem to dance, white Denverites went to Five Points for the best music and dancing. Fast forward to the jazz scene in Denver today and you will still find a few niche spots where the community is as vibrant as it was 70 years ago. Though outside of Five Points, Dazzle and the Nocturne Jazz and Supper Club are the new staples, and the annual Five Points Jazz Fest ...

Jazz thrived in Boston during the post World War II years of the 1940s and ’50s. One notable venue remains from this era, Wally’s Café Jazz Club. Established in 1947, Wally’s is an institution for live acts in an intimate atmosphere. In the evening, catch Wally’s long running open jam session. Both The Beehive and Scullers Jazz Club have been lauded by DownBeat Magazine as among the top U.S. jazz clubs, so be sure to add them to your agenda for tasty food and creative tunes. Hear live music outdoors by timing a visit to coincide with two acclaimed events, the Boston Art & Music Soul Festival in June in Franklin Park and the Boston Jazz Fest in August at the Seaport. See touring acts at the Berklee College of Music’s Berklee Performance Center or enjoy the coffeehouse vibe of the student run Red Room at Café 939. Seattle was another destination with a lenient attitude toward alcohol and speakeasies during the Prohibition Era, and that allowed the jazz scene to flourish. Performers s...

There is considerable agreement amongst competent hearer members to use the name Urban Blues to denote the male urbanized blues of the period 1928-1942. This is somewhat confused by some writers who use the term to denote post war dow n home blues and modern, electrified, blues, down home and modern being competent hearers' terms for urban blues of the 40s-50s and post 50s respectively. Prior to the urban bluesman's adoption of the piano there had been a famous style of Negro piano playing, located in Texas and known as fast western. This style eventually moved North and became known as barrelhouse or boogie woogie. The boogie rhythm, base progressions of DO RE ME RE SOL LA TF LA, etc., was adopted by urban bluesmen, along with the instrument. It later be came a particular feature of rhythm n' blues. Though a hearers' rule such as, Listen for falsetto vocal work in urban blues would be a weak rule in that examples of it are to be found in country blues, particularly in ...

Whatever jazz today has lost in the size of its audience as compared with forms of popular music with bigger market shares, it has gained in the high esteem in which it is held in the business and art worlds as a sophisticated artistic expression it is frequently used as mood music in upscale business establishments, in museums and galleries, and in commercials promoting upscale products, and in the institutionalization it has experienced as a formal course of study at many colleges and universities. Indeed, if it were not for colleges, universities, and high school jazz bands, and institutions such as Jazz at Lincoln Center and SF Jazz, it is quite possible that few young people in the United States would be playing or hearing jazz today. The art music known variously as jazz, swing, bebop, America’s classical music, and creative music has been associated first and foremost with freedom. Freedom of expression, human freedom, freedom of thought, and the freedom that results from an ong...

The story of jazz in Italy begins, interestingly enough, with a description of the American music industry penned by an Italian diplomat named Chevalier Bruno Zuculin. Italian readers wanted to know more about the origins of jazz, and in August 1919 Zuculin published a somewhat glib, yet telling, description of the New Orleans jazz scene in La Lettura, a monthly illustrated supplement to Corriere della Sera, Italy’s most widely read newspaper at the time. There are two categories of jazz bands, those that are mostly black, which perform in the hotels, restaurants, dance halls and social clubs, and those, often Italian, that play in the cinemas, in variety shows and in those numerous theaters where the most genuine theatrical product of North America flourishes, namely the entertaining productions called Musical Comedies or Girls and Music Shows, wherein the plot, if it exists at all, is of little importance to anyone, and the success of the performance is based primarily on the quality...

The music of the 50’s thus constitutes a canon. For three decades this canon has been analyzed, codified, reinterpreted, extended, and refined. But it has not been superseded. What this means, briefly, is that jazz today, like jazz in the 50’s, is a music of themes, briefly stated, and solo improvisations, elaborated at length. It is played by small groups, rarely larger than a sextet. It is a music neither of arrangements nor of compositions, but of songs. Songs, moreover, are conceived of not primarily as melodies but as chord progressions or forms. Any particular performance is unified primarily by the form of the song that is being played, the improvised solos that compose the bulk of the performance have, as a rule, no melodic connections either with the song’s original theme or with one another. In these crucial respects, and in many others, the bop revolution was a revolution indeed. For example, while all jazz is supposed to swing, the way in which this happens has changed dram...

It is also important to note that with the passage of the Sound Recording Act of 1971, musical works and sound recordings are not treated equally. Under the 1971 amendment, the publication of a phonorecord stripped away common law rights, and the copyright owner had to abide by the 1909 Act’s notice requirements to avoid the copyright being forfeited... In order to understand all of this, some background on the issue of notice is in order. Prior to the effective date of the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988, notice of copyright refers to the affixation of the name of the copyright owner, the date of the first publication of the work, and the symbol c with a circle around it in a reasonably visible location on the work... The 1976 act states that the publication of a sound recording publishes not only the sound recording, but also publishes the recorded musical composition imbedded in the disc. Before moving on to a discussion of how music copyright laws have affected blues an...

While melody and harmony are all important parts of any song, Jazz emphasizes something that is so important to the development of music, improvisation. In Jazz, each performer takes a turn experimenting with different notes to create an overall new sound experience. Every time they step out on stage, Jazz musicians may perform songs that no one has ever heard before, and no one will hear again. Since the beginning of Jazz, people have been using its improvisation factor to express how they feel. Jazz has contributed a great deal to the style of Hip hop music. Some critics have said that Hip hop is just a way to ruin or vulgarize Jazz, but what those people don’t understand is that the artists of today are taking the influences of past Jazz musicians and adding their own new elements to create new music. Hip hop takes all the elements that Jazz contains, like infectious rhythms and intense melodies, and develops it into something new. Just like with Jazz, improve-or freestyling is a la...

Blues is the genre of music that emerged at the intersection of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. Birthplace of the blues are the United States. The basis of blues rhythm involves lyrical melodies that came from the African countries. The term blues first became known in 1895. The very origin of the term of an English blues is the phrase blue devils, which means longing or depression, or sadness. Referring to the sources, they need to be searched for in the period of the slave system. Just at the time Christopher Columbus discovered a new continent, which eventually began to import African labor. Africans are true ancestors of the present-day African Americans, which in most cases were servants or worked hard in agriculture and were hired servants; they were working exclusively in the homes of wealthy Americans whites. Blacks were often harassed and even humiliated, which lasted until the abolition of the slavery period that occurred in 1863. Initially, the songs were performed...

The role of jazz music and jazz musicians in political participation began in the initial phases of jazz development in the early 1920s. As African Americans engaged the new musical techniques and traditional African traditions to build music collections, popular radio shows also emerged. There were amateur concerts and big band jazz performances broadcast, which attracted a considerable public for entertainment. Other significant advancements that came with the rise of Jazz include nightclubs, dancehalls, and theatres where black entertainment thrived. In this regard, between 1925 and 1943, the New Negro era political groups integrated Jazz in building up political interests. Funding political activities was one of the activist organizations' main concerns. However, they solved the fund's challenge by capitalizing on the emergence of platforms that expanded jazz music and musicians' reach... After the 1930s, the role of jazz music and jazz musicians in political participat...

Jazz music is essentially a conversation. In classical music, by contrast, the musicians are expected to learn their parts perfectly and deliver consistently, according to a high standard of perfection. Jazz and blues, while also committed to high standards of performance, use a language that is more conversational, employing song structure, but with infinite ways to deliver a song. The song gives a context and excuse for conversation. Is it possible that the way jazz musicians learn to speak with one another could offer new approaches for the way we speak to one another in organizations? Every conversation you’ve ever had was improvised. You were unscripted. Someone said something and you responded in the best way that you were able, even if that response was silence. Herein is of course the joy and the risk. Because they are unscripted, conversations can go pear shaped. We can say the wrong thing at the wrong time, or we can listen with half a heart and suddenly we are in deep water....

More than other forms of popular music Jazz is particularly fraught with these kind of debates, but some of the most heated arguments among jazz aficionados are even more fundamental,  what qualifies as jazz? Does jazz have some essential ingredient? Where does the term jazz even come from? One hundred years after the first jazz recording, the answers remain elusive. But as to who actually invented jazz, if such an achievement could be attributed to one person, that’s a tricky matter. Some say Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry invented rock n’ roll, others would argue DJ Kool Herc or Grandmaster Flash created hip hop. Nick La Rocca, the Original Dixieland Jass Band’s cornet player and composer, claimed that he personally invented jazz... calling the Original Dixieland Jass Band the first great jazz orchestra and that LaRocca had an instrumentation different from anything before, an instrumentation that made the old songs sound new. But LaRocca’s later statements follow a long tradition ...

Along the way, there was jazz, which admitted heaps of blues influence but developed, more than is often acknowledged, apart from these other traditions. Jazz began in New Orleans, among the professional ensembles that had evolved out of the city’s longstanding brass band tradition... they played most of the music of the time: quadrilles, schottisches, polkas, ragtime tunes. The blues was certainly jazz’s nucleus. It was there in the African derived harmonies, the tapestries of syncopation, and the bent notes that often seemed to imitate the grumbles and whinnies of the human voice. But jazz’s roots were cosmopolitan and relatively commercial. They sprang from the vocationalism of society bands and the hamming of vaudeville as much as from the unselfconscious patois of the blues. Baraka points out that as big band jazz became more popular, it hewed more closely to the demands of a paying concert audience. The blues inside the music, the self styling, the low furor, the professions of p...

For its supporters, the advent of modern jazz signified progress, both artistic and social, a necessary and inevitable evolution in creative vision and technique as well as in racial opportunity and parity. This position met with fierce and often bitter opposition from partisans of older jazz, the small group collective improvisation model associated with New Orleans and Chicago in the 1920s. Proudly calling themselves moldy figs, this group argued that the earlier music evinced qualities of warmth, intimacy, and soulfulness that disappeared in the noise of mechanistic big bands and the cool, detached, affectless posture of the beboppers.  The figs saw themselves as defenders of authentic jazz, which, in their unyielding formula, required proper instrumentation, a front line of trumpet, trombone, and clarinet, but not saxophone, blues harmony and tonality, and a natural swing feeling... A group of 14 or 16 players, in the traditionalists’ view, was simply too big to swing with the ...

Certainly, any historical narrative that emphasizes the immense contributions to jazz by individuals of color is understandable and well founded, it remains irrefutable that the vast majority of the genre’s most influential players have originated from Afro diasporic communities. This Afrocentric historiographical stance appears especially warranted in light of the deplorable white washing of the music’s history that has surfaced on occasion. However, such narratives tend to ignore the fact that racial identity among jazz musicians and their attendant audiences within the various camps of this supposed black/white dichotomy has been marked by contradiction and antagonism as well as by cultural pride and unity. And what I hope to demonstrate in this article is that lived realities in the jazz world, as in the broader American social and cultural world, are more complex than our simple biracial categories would lead us to believe. Moreover, given the present tendencies to anoint jazz as ...

Jazz music has created a sense of integration between blacks and whites in the industry. Discrimination still existed, but in the jazz community, musicians were somehow considered as equals. Whites were hired to perform in several black bands... jazz music created black white contact where a black musician received full acceptance as an equal and was often admired as superior, without condescension. Jazz music has not only integrated people in the United States, but also brought them together internationally. It has been influenced by third world countries such as Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and India. Great jazz musicians integrated international ideas into their music, for instance, Duke Ellington has an album named Far East Suite, and two of Coltrane’s albums are named Africa and India. Today, jazz music is progressing in many ways. Despite its economic decline and struggle to survive because of the developed wealth of rock and pop, there have been many opportunities for...

As the predecessors of hip hop, both jazz and blues had a great impact on the cultural dimension of the black communities of the US during their respective periods. Faced with widespread racial segregation and discrimination, members of the black community often resorted to music to gain a sense of peace and as a source of consolation. Jazz and blues helped in creating a strong sense of identity, social cohesion, and originality among the black musicians. Due to their origin among the blacks, jazz and blues music became the primary means by which frustrations and desire for inclusion transformed into greater positive energy for the Africans. Given that a greater majority of the jazz musicians, composers and originators were African Americans, they use jazz and blues music as a cultural tool for addressing the circumstances facing the entire black community. But because of their cross cultural appeal, jazz and blues were widely used as a tool for promoting cultural integration between t...