MUSIC - jazz

Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in black communities in the Southern United States .

[ 73 ] Swing superimposes six subdivisions of the beat over a basic pulse structure or four subdivisions.

[ 3 ]

Because it spans music from Ragtime to the present day – over 100 years now – jazz can be very difficult to define.

Its African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes , improvisation , polyrhythms , syncopation and the swung note .

Melodic variety is created by transposing the module in accordance to the harmonic sequence, as Rick Davies observes in his detailed analysis of the first moña:

The moña consists of a two-measure module and its repetition, which is altered to reflect the montuno chord progression.

Its African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes , improvisation , polyrhythms , syncopation and the swung note .

[ 2 ]

As the music has developed and spread around the world it has drawn on many different national, regional and local musical cultures giving rise, since its early 20th century American beginnings, to many distinctive styles: New Orleans jazz dating from the early 1910s, big band swing , Kansas City jazz and Gypsy jazz from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s and on down through West Coast jazz , cool jazz , avant-garde jazz , Afro-Cuban jazz , modal jazz , free jazz , Latin ...

Early blues was commonly structured around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, a common element in the African American oral tradition.

In contrast to Davis's earlier work with the hard bop style of jazz and its complex chord progression and improvisation , [ 127 ] the entire album was composed as a series of modal sketches , in which each performer was given a set of scales that defined the parameters of their improvisation and style.

[ 4 ]

Travis Jackson has also proposed a broader definition of jazz which is able to encompass all of the radically different eras: he states that it is music that includes qualities such as "swinging", improvising, group interaction, developing an 'individual voice', and being 'open' to different musical possibilities".

[ 2 ]

As the music has developed and spread around the world it has drawn on many different national, regional and local musical cultures giving rise, since its early 20th century American beginnings, to many distinctive styles: New Orleans jazz dating from the early 1910s, big band swing , Kansas City jazz and Gypsy jazz from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s and on down through West Coast jazz , cool jazz , avant-garde jazz , Afro-Cuban jazz , modal jazz , free jazz ,...

Paul Oliver has drawn attention to similarities in instruments, music and social function to the griots of Africa's western Sudanic belt.

[ 10 ] The avant-garde and free jazz idioms permit, even call for, abandoning chords, scales, and rhythmic meters.

[ 8 ]

The jazz soloist is often supported by a rhythm section who "comp" (ac

comp any the soloist), by playing chords and rhythms that outline the song structure and complement the soloist.

[ 8 ]

The jazz soloist is often supported by a rhythm section who "comp" (ac

comp any the soloist), by playing chords and rhythms that outline the song structure and complement the soloist.

"Maple Leaf Rag" is a multi- strain ragtime march with athletic bass lines and offbeat melodies .

[ 2 ]

As the music has developed and spread around the world it has drawn on many different national, regional and local musical cultures giving rise, since its early 20th century American beginnings, to many distinctive styles: New Orleans jazz dating from the early 1910s, big band swing , Kansas City jazz and Gypsy jazz from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s and on down through West Coast jazz , cool jazz , avant-garde jazz , Afro-Cuban jazz , modal jazz , free jazz , Latin ...

[ 33 ] With this music genre, we see the emergence of a drumming tradition that is distinct from its Caribbean counterparts, expressing a sensibility that is uniquely African American.

The singer improvised freely, and the melodic range was limited, sounding like a field holler.

[ 13 ] On the other hand Ellington's friend Earl Hines 's twenty solo "transformative versions" of Ellington compositions [ 14 ] were described by Ben Ratliff, the New York Times jazz critic, as "as good an example of the jazz process as anything out there."

Later styles of jazz such as modal jazz abandoned the strict notion of a chord progression , allowing the individual musicians to improvise even more freely within the context of a given scale or mode.

[ 1 ] From its early development until the present day jazz has also incorporated music from American popular music .

And it is also true that Duke Ellington adopted and reinterpreted some harmonic devices in European contemporary music.

[ 106 ] These included many of the musicians who were members of his orchestra, some of whom are considered among the best in jazz in their own right, but it was Ellington who melded them into one of the most well-known jazz orchestral units in the history of jazz.

Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins argues that as the creation and dissemination of jazz is becoming increasingly institutionalized and dominated by major entertainment firms, jazz is facing a "...perilous future of respectability and disinterested acceptance."

Gang Starr also collaborated with Branford Marsalis and Terence Blanchard .Groups making up the collective known as the Native Tongues Posse tended towards jazzy releases; these include the Jungle Brothers ' debut Straight Out the Jungle (Warlock, 1988) and A Tribe Called Quest 's People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm ( Jive , 1990) and The Low End Theory (Jive, 1991).

Although inspired by rock and funk, Davis's fusion creations were original, and brought about a type of new avant-garde, electronic, psychedelic-jazz, as far from pop music as any other Davis work.

[ 94 ]

Even the media began to denigrate jazz.

The habanera was the first written music to be rhythmically based on an African motif (1803).

Armstrong's solos went well beyond the theme-improvisation concept, and extemporized on chords, rather than melodies.

Armstrong was a master of his hometown style, but by the time he joined Henderson's band, he was already a trailblazer in a new phase of jazz, with its emphasis on arrangements and soloists.

New forms of chromaticism and dissonance were introduced into jazz; the dissonant tritone (or "flatted fifth") interval became the "most important interval of bebop" [ 112 ] Chord progressions for bebop tunes were often taken directly from popular swing-era songs and reused with a new and more complex melody, forming new compositions.

Early blues was commonly structured around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, a common element in the African American oral tradition.

African-based rhythmic patterns were retained in the United States in large part, through "body rhythms," such as stomping, clapping, and patting juba .

As late as 1861, a traveler in North Carolina saw dancers dressed in costumes that included horned headdresses and cow tails and heard music provided by a sheepskin-covered "gumbo box," apparently a frame drum; triangles and jawbones furnished the auxiliary percussion.

To emphasise the group’s rejection of standard methodology, the album opened with the inscrutable avant-garde atmospheric piece “Milky Way” (created by Shorter’s extremely muted saxophone inducing vibrations in Zawinul’s piano strings while the latter pedalled the instrument).

According to Gillespie, Pozo composed the layered, contrapuntal guajeos (Afro-Cuban ostinatos ) of the A section and the introduction, while Gillespie wrote the bridge.

Unlike hard bop , soul jazz generally emphasized repetitive grooves and melodic hooks, and improvisations were often less complex than in other jazz styles.

They were obsessed with jazz.

[ 12 ] Some critics have even stated that Ellington's music was not jazz because it was arranged and orchestrated.

Early blues was commonly structured around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, a common element in the African American oral tradition.

The album featured a softer sound than would be the case in later years (predominantly using acoustic bass, with Shorter exclusively playing soprano saxophone , and with no synthesizers involved) but is still considered a classic of early fusion.

[ 36 ]

African American music began incorporating Afro-Cuban rhythmic motifs in the nineteenth century, when the habanera (Cuban contradanza ) gained international popularity.

[ 153 ]

In the late 1960s and early 1970s the hybrid form of jazz-rock fusion was developed by combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments and the highly amplified stage sound of rock musicians such as Jimi Hendrix .

The guitar accompaniment was not strummed, but was instead, like a small drum that responded in syncopated accents.

Besides energetic rhythmic textures, Airto added percussion color, using bells, shakers, and whistles to create evocative textures of timbre.

It's a dichotomy that extends from the word to the music as well.

[ 32 ] See: The Ringshout and the Birth of African-American Religion

Two decades after drumming was banned in Congo Square, in the post-Civil War period (after 1865), African Americans were able to obtain surplus military bass drums, snare drums and fifes.

[ 176 ]

In a long research process he developed a philosophical and spiritual concept connecting with certain cultural efforts that express fundamental aspects of nature and human existence in a holistic way.

Although alteration or transformation of jazz by new influences has often been initially criticized as a “debasement,” Andrew Gilbert argues that jazz has the “ability to absorb and transform influences” from diverse musical styles.

A more precise term might be Afro-Latin jazz, as the jazz sub-genre typically employs rhythms that either have a direct analog in Africa, or exhibit an African rhythmic influence beyond what's ordinarily heard in other jazz.

European classical music has been said to be a composer's medium.

A number of new vocalists have achieved popularity with a mix of traditional jazz and pop/rock forms, such as Diana Krall , Norah Jones , Cassandra Wilson , Kurt Elling and Jamie Cullum .

What’s known as the Cuban típico style of soloing on trombone draws upon the technique of stringing together moña variations.

[ 49 ] [ 50 ]

Ragtime appeared as sheet music, popularized by African American musicians such as the entertainer Ernest Hogan , whose hit songs appeared in 1895; two years later Vess Ossman recorded a medley of these songs as a banjo solo "Rag Time Medley".

[ 39 ] [ 54 ] The following excerpt from "Solace" is based on two different variants of the habanera rhythm.

[ 2 ]

As the music has developed and spread around the world it has drawn on many different national, regional and local musical cultures giving rise, since its early 20th century American beginnings, to many distinctive styles: New Orleans jazz dating from the early 1910s, big band swing , Kansas City jazz and Gypsy jazz from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s and on down through West Coast jazz , cool jazz , avant-garde jazz , Afro-Cuban jazz , modal jazz , free jazz ,...

[ 157 ]

Developed by the mid-1970s, is characterized by a strong back beat ( groove ), electrified sounds, [ 158 ] and often, the presence of the first electronic analog synthesizers .

Later styles of jazz such as modal jazz abandoned the strict notion of a chord progression , allowing the individual musicians to improvise even more freely within the context of a given scale or mode.

Jazz, on the other hand, is often characterized as the product of egalitarian creativity, interaction and collaboration, placing equal value on the contributions of composer (if there is one) and performer, 'adroitly weigh[ing] the respective claims of the composer and the improviser'.

[ 44 ] With Gottschalk's symphonic work "A Night in the Tropics" (1859), we hear the tresillo variant cinquillo extensively.

[ 115 ]

These divergences from the jazz mainstream of the time initially met with a divided, sometimes hostile, response among fans and fellow musicians, especially established swing players, who bristled at the new harmonic sounds.

Keith Jarrett has been prominent in defending free jazz from criticism by traditionalists in the 1990s and 2000s.

Melodic variety is created by transposing the module in accordance to the harmonic sequence, as Rick Davies observes in his detailed analysis of the first moña:

The moña consists of a two-measure module and its repetition, which is altered to reflect the montuno chord progression.

Cool jazz recordings by Chet Baker , Dave Brubeck , Bill Evans , Gil Evans , Stan Getz and the Modern Jazz Quartet usually have a "lighter" sound which avoided the aggressive tempos and harmonic abstraction of bebop.

[ 38 ] From the perspective of African American music , the habanera rhythm (also known as congo , [ 39 ] tango-congo , [ 40 ] or tango .

[ 93 ]

Prohibition in the United States (from 1920 to 1933) banned the sale of alcoholic drinks, resulting in illicit speakeasies becoming lively venues of the "Jazz Age", an era when popular music included current dance songs, novelty songs, and show tunes.

Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in black communities in the Southern United States .

[ 17 ] Its first documented use in a musical context in New Orleans appears in a November 14, 1916 Times-Picayune article about "jas bands."

In September 1917 Handy's Orchestra of Memphis recorded a cover version of "Livery Stable Blues."

Small bands mixing self-taught and well educated African American musicians, many of whom came from the funeral-procession tradition of New Orleans , played a seminal role in the development and dissemination of early jazz, traveling throughout Black communities in the Deep South and, from around 1914 on, Afro-Creole and African American musicians playing in vaudeville shows took jazz to western and northern US cities.

[ 49 ] [ 50 ]

Ragtime appeared as sheet music, popularized by African American musicians such as the entertainer Ernest Hogan , whose hit songs appeared in 1895; two years later Vess Ossman recorded a medley of these songs as a banjo solo "Rag Time Medley".

His " Jelly Roll Blues ", which he composed around 1905, was published in 1915 as the first jazz arrangement in print, introducing more musicians to the New Orleans style.

He won acclaim as a member of the samba jazz pioneers Sambalanço Trio and for his landmark recording Quarteto Novo with Hermeto Pascoal in 1967.

[ 156 ]

Although jazz purists protested the blend of jazz and rock, some of jazz's significant innovators crossed over from the contemporary hard bop scene into fusion.

Early blues was commonly structured around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, a common element in the African American oral tradition.

Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins argues that as the creation and dissemination of jazz is becoming increasingly institutionalized and dominated by major entertainment firms, jazz is facing a "...perilous future of respectability and disinterested acceptance."

[ 1 ] From its early development until the present day jazz has also incorporated music from American popular music .

Although it was a collective sound, swing also offered individual musicians a chance to 'solo' and improvise melodic, thematic solos which could at times be very complex and 'important' music.

Over time, social strictures regarding racial segregation began to relax in America: white bandleaders began to recruit black musicians and black bandleaders white ones.

A form of folk music which rose in part from work songs and field hollers of rural Blacks, early blues was also highly improvisational.

[ 109 ]

Since bebop was meant to be listened to, not danced to, it could use faster tempos.

Other influential large ensembles included Fletcher Henderson 's band, Duke Ellington 's band (which opened an influential residency at the Cotton Club in 1927) in New York, and Earl Hines 's Band in Chicago (who opened in The Grand Terrace Cafe there in 1928).

Examples of this style include Lydia Lunch 's Queen of Siam , [ 171 ] the work of James Chance and the Contortions , who mixed Soul with free jazz and punk , [ 171 ] Gray, and the Lounge Lizards , [ 171 ] who were the first group to call themselves " punk jazz ".

Handy wrote about his adopting of the blues:

"The primitive southern Negro, as he sang, was sure to bear down on the third and seventh tone of the scale, slurring between major and minor.

As late as 1861, a traveler in North Carolina saw dancers dressed in costumes that included horned headdresses and cow tails and heard music provided by a sheepskin-covered "gumbo box," apparently a frame drum; triangles and jawbones furnished the auxiliary percussion.

Jazz arrangements with a "Latin" A section and a swung B section, with all choruses swung during solos, became common practice with many "Latin tunes" of the jazz standard repertoire.

[ 10 ] The avant-garde and free jazz idioms permit, even call for, abandoning chords, scales, and rhythmic meters.

The piece may be considered the 'archetypal rag' due to its influence on the genre; its structure was the basis for many other famous rags, including "Sensation" by Joseph Lamb .

[ 114 ] Samuel Floyd states that blues were both the bedrock and propelling force of bebop, bringing about three main developments:

While for an outside observer, the harmonic innovations in bebop would appear to be inspired by experiences in Western "serious" music, from Claude Debussy to Arnold Schoenberg , such a scheme cannot be sustained by the evidence from a cognitive approach.

While in European classical music elements of interpretation, ornamentation and accompaniment are sometimes left to the performer's discretion, the performer's primary goal is to play a composition as it was written.

Drumming shifted to a more elusive and explosive style, in which the ride cymbal was used to keep time while the snare and bass drum were used for accents.

[ 165 ] In spite of the ambivalence by some members towards Irakere's Afro-Cuban folkloric/jazz fusion, their experiments forever changed jazz.

Coltrane studied Nicolas Slonimsky 's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns .

Jelly Roll Morton called the rhythmic figure the Spanish tinge , and considered it an essential ingredient of jazz.

[ 105 ]

By the 1940s, Duke Ellington's music transcended the bounds of swing, bridging jazz and art music in a natural synthesis.

Though jazz rap had achieved little mainstream success, jazz legend Miles Davis ' final album (released posthumously in 1992), Doo-Bop , was based around hip hop beats and collaborations with producer Easy Mo Bee .

Jazz, on the other hand, is often characterized as the product of egalitarian creativity, interaction and collaboration, placing equal value on the contributions of composer (if there is one) and performer, 'adroitly weigh[ing] the respective claims of the composer and the improviser'.

Music organized around key patterns convey a two-celled (binary) structure, which is a complex level of African cross-rhythm .

Generally, the term post-bop is taken to mean jazz from the mid-sixties onward that assimilates influence from hard bop , modal jazz , the avant-garde , and free jazz , without necessarily being immediately identifiable as any of the above.

At the jazz end of the spectrum, jazz-funk characteristics include a departure from ternary rhythm (near-triplet), i.e. the "swing", to the more danceable and unfamiliar binary rhythm, known as the " groove ".

Black musicians were able to provide "low-class" entertainment in dances, minstrel shows , and in vaudeville , by which many marching bands formed.

Early blues was commonly structured around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, a common element in the African American oral tradition.

It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions.

Depending upon the performer's mood and personal experience, interactions with other musicians, or even members of the audience, a jazz musician/performer may alter melodies, harmonies or time signature at will.

The original New Orleans style was polyphonic, with theme variation, and simultaneous collective improvisation.

Jazz has been seen as a way to showcase contributions of African American to American society, to highlight black history and affirm black culture.

[ 5 ] Gilbert notes that as the notion of a canon of jazz is developing, the “achievements of the past” may become "...privileged over the idiosyncratic creativity...” and innovation of current artists.

In 1987, the US House of Representatives and Senate passed a bill proposed by Democratic Representative John Conyers, Jr. to define jazz as a unique form of American music stating, among other things, "...that jazz is hereby designated as a rare and valuable national American treasure to which we should devote our attention, support and resources to make certain it is preserved, understood and promulgated."

[ 10 ] The avant-garde and free jazz idioms permit, even call for, abandoning chords, scales, and rhythmic meters.

A second characteristic of jazz-funk music is the use of electric instruments, and the first use of analogue electronic instruments notably by Herbie Hancock , whose jazz-funk period saw him surrounded on stage or in the studio by several Moog synthesizers .

As late as 1861, a traveler in North Carolina saw dancers dressed in costumes that included horned headdresses and cow tails and heard music provided by a sheepskin-covered "gumbo box," apparently a frame drum; triangles and jawbones furnished the auxiliary percussion.

Musicians began improvising jazz tunes on unusual instruments, such as the jazz harp ( Alice Coltrane ), electrically amplified and wah-wah pedaled jazz violin ( Jean-Luc Ponty ), and even bagpipes ( Rufus Harley ).

New forms of chromaticism and dissonance were introduced into jazz; the dissonant tritone (or "flatted fifth") interval became the "most important interval of bebop" [ 112 ] Chord progressions for bebop tunes were often taken directly from popular swing-era songs and reused with a new and more complex melody, forming new compositions.

[ 49 ] [ 50 ]

Ragtime appeared as sheet music, popularized by African American musicians such as the entertainer Ernest Hogan , whose hit songs appeared in 1895; two years later Vess Ossman recorded a medley of these songs as a banjo solo "Rag Time Medley".

Bebop made use of several relatively common chord progressions, such as blues (at base, I-IV-V, but infused with II-V motion) and 'rhythm changes' (I-VI-II-V, the chords to the 1930s pop standard " I Got Rhythm ."

According to Schuller, by comparison, the solos by Armstrong's bandmates (including a young Coleman Hawkins ), sounded "stiff, stodgy," with "jerky rhythms and a grey undistinguished tone quality."

[ 23 ] The origins of the blues are undocumented, though they can be seen as the secular counterpart of the spirituals.

[ 5 ] Krin Gabbard states that “jazz is a construct” or category that, while artificial, still is useful to designate “a number of musics with enough in common to be understood as part of a coherent tradition”.

In turn, European-American minstrel show performers in blackface popularized such music internationally, combining syncopation with European harmonic accompaniment.

Although inspired by rock and funk, Davis's fusion creations were original, and brought about a type of new avant-garde, electronic, psychedelic-jazz, as far from pop music as any other Davis work.

To emphasise the group’s rejection of standard methodology, the album opened with the inscrutable avant-garde atmospheric piece “Milky Way” (created by Shorter’s extremely muted saxophone inducing vibrations in Zawinul’s piano strings while the latter pedalled the instrument).

In the 1990s most participants of the M-Base movement turned to more conventional music but Steve Coleman , the most active participant, continued developing his music in accordance with the M-Base concept.

These features are fundamental to the nature of jazz.

Outside of the United States the beginnings of a distinct European style of jazz emerged in France with the Quintette du Hot Club de France which began in 1934.

By the swing era, big bands were coming to rely more on arranged music: arrangements were either written or learned by ear and memorized—many early jazz performers could not read music.

The blues were the key that opened up an entirely new approach to Western harmony, ultimately leading to a high level of harmonic complexity in jazz.

In a way, this polyphonic texture is reminiscent of the original New Orleans style of jazz.

[ 102 ]

The 1930s belonged to popular swing big bands , in which some virtuoso soloists became as famous as the band leaders.

Kansas City Jazz in the 1930s as exemplified by tenor saxophonist Lester Young marked the transition from big bands to the bebop influence of the 1940s.

Besides energetic rhythmic textures, Airto added percussion color, using bells, shakers, and whistles to create evocative textures of timbre.

Later styles of jazz such as modal jazz abandoned the strict notion of a chord progression , allowing the individual musicians to improvise even more freely within the context of a given scale or mode.

Horace Silver had a large influence on the soul jazz style, with songs that used funky and often gospel -based piano vamps .

Berendt defines jazz as a "form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of blacks with European music"; he argues that jazz differs from European music in that jazz has a "special relationship to time, defined as ' swing '", "a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role"; and "sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror the individuality of the performing jazz musician".

The quintet Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers , fronted by Blakey and featuring pianist Horace Silver and trumpeter Clifford Brown , were leaders in the hard bop movement along with Davis.

[ 25 ] In the mid-1800s the white New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk adapted slave rhythms and melodies from Cuba and other Caribbean islands, into piano salon music.

[ 71 ] Swing is the most important, and enduring African-based rhythmic technique used in jazz.

This type of African-based rhythmic interplay between the two pulse (subdivision) structures, was explored in the 1940s by Machito 's Afro-Cubans , but "Footprints" is not a Latin jazz tune; Cuban music is not serving as the conduit to African rhythmic structures.

When John Coltrane covered "Afro Blue" in 1963, he inverted the metric hierarchy, interpreting the tune as a 3/4 jazz waltz with duple cross-beats superimposed (2:3).

[ 172 ] The same year, Sonny Sharrock , Peter Brötzmann , Bill Laswell, and Ronald Shannon Jackson recorded the first album under the name Last Exit, a similarly aggressive blend of thrash and free jazz.

Gene Johnson – alto, Brew Moore – tenor; the first band to explore modal harmony (a concept explored much later by Miles Davis and Gil Evans ) from a jazz arranging perspective.

This led to a highly syncopated, linear rhythmic complexity.

[ 19 ] The rhythms had a counter-metric structure, and reflected African speech patterns.

Their debut record of that year Emergency! is also cited as one of the early acclaimed fusion albums.

Some music researchers hold that it was Philadelphia's Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti who pioneered the guitar-violin partnership typical of the genre, [ 104 ] which was brought to France after they had been heard live or on Okeh Records in the late 1920s.

[ 119 ]

Bobby Sanabria cites several innovations of Machito's Afro-Cubans—they were the first band to successfully wed big band jazz arranging techniques within an original composition, with jazz oriented soloists utilizing an authentic Afro-Cuban based rhythm section in a successful manner. e.g.

[ 32 ] See: The Ringshout and the Birth of African-American Religion

Two decades after drumming was banned in Congo Square, in the post-Civil War period (after 1865), African Americans were able to obtain surplus military bass drums, snare drums and fifes.

Bebop scales are traditional scales, with an added chromatic passing note.

Gang Starr also collaborated with Branford Marsalis and Terence Blanchard .Groups making up the collective known as the Native Tongues Posse tended towards jazzy releases; these include the Jungle Brothers ' debut Straight Out the Jungle (Warlock, 1988) and A Tribe Called Quest 's People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm ( Jive , 1990) and The Low End Theory (Jive, 1991).

In the studio, he all but abandoned his soprano to concentrate on the tenor saxophone.

Berendt defines jazz as a "form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of blacks with European music"; he argues that jazz differs from European music in that jazz has a "special relationship to time, defined as ' swing '", "a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role"; and "sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror the individuality of the performing jazz musician".

[ 6 ]

While jazz may be difficult to define, improvisation is clearly one of its key elements.

Tresillo is the most basic and by far, the most prevalent duple-pulse rhythmic cell in sub-Saharan African music traditions , and the music of the African Diaspora .

One aspect of swing, which is heard in more rhythmically complex Diaspora musics, places strokes in-between the triple and duple-pulse “grids.”

[ 76 ]

The Original Dixieland Jass Band made the music's first recordings early in 1917, and their " Livery Stable Blues " became the earliest released jazz record .

Although strict segregation limited employment opportunities for most blacks, many were able to find work in entertainment.

By the swing era, big bands were coming to rely more on arranged music: arrangements were either written or learned by ear and memorized—many early jazz performers could not read music.

The integration of Funk , Soul and R&B music and styles into jazz resulted in the creation of a genre whose spectrum is indeed quite wide and ranges from strong jazz improvisation to soul, funk or disco with jazz arrangements, jazz riffs and jazz solos, and sometimes soul vocals.