JAZZ HISTORY

By 1808 the Atlantic slave trade had brought almost half a million Africans to the United States. The slaves largely came from West Africa and brought strong tribal musical traditions with them. Lavish festivals featuring African dances to drums were organized on Sundays at Congo Square, in New Orleans until 1843, as were similar gatherings in New England and New York. African music was largely functional, for work or ritual, and included work songs and field hollers. In the African tradition, they had a single-line melody and a call-and-response pattern, but without the European concept of harmony. Rhythms reflected African speech patterns, and the African use of pentatonic scales led to blue notes in blues and jazz music.

In 1922 Fitzgerald coined the phrase, "the Jazz Age" to describe the flamboyant—"anything goes"—era that emerged in America after World War I. 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 music started to get a reputation as being immoral and many members of the older generations saw it as threatening the old values in culture and promoting the new decadent values of the Roaring 20s. Kid Ory's Original Creole Jazz Band of musicians from New Orleans in 1922 became the first black jazz band to make recordings. However, the main centre developing the new "Hot Jazz" was Chicago, where King Oliver joined Bill Johnson. That year also saw the first recording by Bessie Smith, the most famous of the 1920s blues singers.
The 1930s belonged to popular swing big bands, in which some virtuoso jazz musicians became as famous as the band leaders. Key figures in developing the "big" jazz band included bandleaders and arrangers Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Glenn Miller.

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.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the hybrid form of jazz-rock fusion was developed. Although jazz purists protested the blend of jazz and rock, some of jazz's significant innovators crossed over from the contemporary hardbop scene into fusion. Jazz fusion music often uses mixed meters, odd time signatures, syncopation, and complex chords and harmonies, and fusion includes a number of electric instruments, such as the electric guitar, electric bass, electric piano, and synthesizer keyboards. Notable performers of jazz fusion included Miles Davis, keyboardists Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, drummer Tony Williams, guitarists Larry Coryell and John McLaughlin, Frank Zappa, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, bassist-composer Jaco Pastorius and other jazz musicians.
In the early 1980s, a lighter commercial form of jazz fusion called pop fusion or "smooth jazz " became successful and garnered significant radio airplay. Smooth jazz saxophonists include Grover Washington, Jr., Kenny G and Najee. Smooth jazz received frequent airplay helping to establish or bolster the careers of vocalists including Al Jarreau, Anita Baker, Chaka Khan, Sade and some other vocal jazz music artists.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, several subgenres fused jazz with popular music, such as Acid jazz, nu jazz, and jazz rap. Acid jazz and nu jazz combined elements of jazz and modern forms of electronic dance music. While nu jazz is influenced by jazz harmony and melodies, there are usually no improvisational aspects.