4 Styles Of Jazz Music

Popular music styles

Popular music is a general term covering the many different styles and genres of music around since the late 18th Century that are considered to be part of mod everyday culture.

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Jazz

Jazz emerged equally a new mode of music in the early twentieth century in the African American communities of New Orleans. Jazz has its origins in dejection and ragtime.

Jazz features lots of improvisation, which requires musicians to:

creatively explore and experiment with sound
limited themselves
listening carefully to themselves and the people they make music with
answer to the improvisation of people they are playing with

All of this is done spontaneously, with musicians having to react in real time to what is going on around them.

Syncopation is a common characteristic in the rhythm. This is where emphasis is put on rhythms that are off the trounce.

Sheet music with green arrows showing examples of syncopation

There are many different styles of jazz, eg:

trad, New Orleans or Dixieland jazz - fashion originating from music played in New Orleans in the early 20th Century
bebop - mode from the 1940s featuring fast tempo , circuitous harmonies and lots of improvisation
cool jazz - a more laid back style from the late 1940s
Latin jazz - jazz featuring rhythms from Latin American music
jazz fusion - style from the late 1960s that mixes jazz with blues, funk, rock and other styles

The original New Orleans trad jazz style would have typical instrumentation of:

trumpet or cornet
trombone
clarinet
banjo
double bass or tuba
drum kit

The texture in New Orleans, or Dixieland, jazz was very polyphonic and contained lots of improvisation. This means that there were lots of parts weaving in and out of each other.

Trombone glissando - sliding between notes - was a characteristic in this style of jazz and was known as 'tailgate trombone'.

When the Saints Go Marching In performed past Louis Armstrong

Blues notes

Some notes used in jazz music may be flattened past a semitone. These are normally the third, fifth or seventh notes of the scale.

Musicians playing jazz sometimes use pentatonic scales and blues scales to play improvisations.

The blues in C. Low C, E flat, F, G flat, G natural, B flat, C.

Jazz music can exist played past lots of dissimilar types of instruments and by unlike sizes of band. A twenty-piece big band is fabricated up of trumpets, trombones, saxophones, rhythm section and sometimes a vocaliser. A jazz trio often contains a piano or other instrument to play the melody, with double bass and drums providing the rhythm.

Listen to the Soweto Kinch trio - comprising of saxophone, drum kit and double bass - perform the jazz standard 'A Night in Tunisia'.

This rail features improvisation and, although remaining in simple time throughout, alternates from a directly feel to a swing feel. Mind out for when it changes from ane to the other.