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Nov 4, 2024 · Jazz, musical form, often improvisational, developed by African Americans and influenced by both European harmonic structure and African rhythms. It is often characterized by syncopated rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, and the use of original timbres. Learn more about its history and prominent musicians.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. Below is the article summary. For the full article, see jazz. Louis Armstrong Louis Armstrong, 1953. jazz, Musical form, often improvisational, developed by African Americans and influenced by both European harmonic structure and African rhythms.
Although any attempt to formulate an all-encompassing definition of jazz may be hopeless, jazz music is often identified with the use of syncopated rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, varying degrees of improvisation, deliberate deviations of pitch, and original timbres.
Oct 19, 2024 · Music, art concerned with combining vocal or instrumental sounds for beauty of form or emotional expression, usually according to cultural standards of rhythm, melody, and, in most Western music, harmony. Learn about the history of music and about theories of musical meaning since the 19th century.
Jazz grew from a mix of African and European music. Ragtime, a form of piano music, and blues music also influenced jazz. New Orleans, Louisiana, is often called the home of jazz. Many important early jazz musicians, such as pianist Jelly Roll Morton, were from New Orleans.
Nov 10, 2024 · blues, secular folk music created by African Americans in the early 20th century, originally in the South. The simple but expressive forms of the blues became by the 1960s one of the most important influences on the development of popular music—namely, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock, and country music—throughout the United States. Form
Oct 10, 2024 · Ragtime, propulsively syncopated musical style, one forerunner of jazz and the predominant style of American popular music from about 1899 to 1917. Ragtime evolved in the playing of honky-tonk pianists in the last decades of the 19th century. Its best-known composer was Scott Joplin.
swing, in music, both the rhythmic impetus of jazz music and a specific jazz idiom prominent between about 1935 and the mid-1940s—years sometimes called the swing era. Swing music has a compelling momentum that results from musicians’ attacks and accenting in relation to fixed beats.
Jazz music, which had developed into an exciting style defined by improvisation and swinging rhythms, became the dominant sound of the new generation. (Its prominence earned the era another nickname, the Jazz Age, popularized by the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald.)
Cool jazz, a style of jazz that emerged in the United States during the late 1940s. The term derives from what journalists perceived as an understated or subdued feeling in the music of Miles Davis, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Gerry Mulligan, Lennie Tristano, and others.