Skip to main content

Adrian Belew - Never Enough

With the addition of a string bass and swung rhythms, jazz began to swing and become a style of music that could be danced to. This gradual change started in the late 1920s and continued through to the 1940s. The swing era brought with it the creation of the big band, an ensemble comprising ten or more musicians.

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. Bandleaders such as Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson became well known through the late 1930s and early 1940s. As big band music developed, more ensembles were being recognised.

With the arrival of a rhythmically and harmonically experimental style, jazz moved out of the dance hall and into the club. The term bebop is derived from a Gillespie tune of the same name. Bebop was seen as a rebellion to the swing era by musicians like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. Bebop musicians would take a standard song and transform it into something almost completely unrecognisable, by adding extra harmony and adjusting the rhythms of the melody.

On the other end of the spectrum came free jazz. Developed in the 1960s by pioneers such as Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, this style of music challenged the boundaries of musical expression. Although the term may suggest otherwise, free jazz is often formulaic in structure with memorised melodies and consistent tempos. It is known as free jazz because musicians are allowed to play whatever they want without having to follow any predetermined chord sequences.


Adrian Belew - Never Enough
  • Released in: 1994
  • Genre: Rock
  • Released on: Salad Days album

"Adrian Belew is a multi instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, producer and guitar guru. Belew has released 20 critically acclaimed solo records and was the frontman, singer, co writer and guitarist for progressive rock powerhouse King Crimson for 30 years."

See previous Song of the Day

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Moondog - Behold

The history of jazz has been one of fusion. Its musicians and composers have continually drawn upon a huge range of different musics to create the rich and diverse tapestry that is world jazz today. Jazz is an evolving tradition of music making. And how often, in the life stories of individual jazz musicians, do we see these same patterns operating at microcosm? The richness of Turkish music and culture sometimes seems at odds with its turbulent and cruel history. In 1979... the country suffered its third military take over in thirty years... Every kind of music was in Turkey at that point. But it was not appreciated. To understand the culture of the country, with those three military takeovers, Turkey could not go anywhere. Musically, it was very difficult. But things were beginning to happen. Traditional Turkish music is essentially monophonic, rich in melody and rhythm but with little by way of harmony. The contrast with western music, with its beautiful harmonies but rhythmic weakn...

Veronica Swift - A Little Taste

There has always been an uncomfortable tension between rhythm and blues and rock and roll, a cyclical influence that vacillates between inspiration, appropriation and separation. Popular music has broken off into categories of rock, pop, country, and R&B, each with their own origin stories. But R&B and rock, usually codified as vastly different, Black and white styles, have long been intertwined in ways our historical memory may have us forget.  Despite the innovation that comes from separation, rock and R&B always find their way back to each other. In recent years, rock veterans have turned to the genre’s classics for inspiration. Queens of the Stone Age veered from their typical hard rock with 2017’s Villains, a dance y album inspired by frontman Josh Homme’s love of 1920s jazz and swing, other Black genres that laid the groundwork for the popular music of today. The whitewashing of rock’s history has oversimplified music’s malleability and silenced the voices of Amer...

The Gap Band - The Sun Don't Shine Everyday

The Gap Band - The Sun Don't Shine Everyday Genre: RnB Released in: 1984 Duration: 5:14 "The Gap Band was most successful when working with producer Lonnie Simmons, with four consecutive gold records. Their party train soon slowed to a stop. They reformed in the 90s and occasionally toured and attempted a comeback album." See Previous Song of the Day