Jazz
Like most major musical genres, it's all but impossible to sum up jazz in a
single paragraph. By the late 19th century, what had started as the
call-and-response songs of the African slave population had turned into
blues. The style progressed further in the early part of the 20th century,
giving us Ragtime and Dixieland, before making its way up the Mississippi
from New Orleans to Chicago. There, Big Band and Swing took hold in the '30s
and '40s, taking jazz's complexity and maturity to new heights and extending
its popularity beyond its original predominantly African-American audiences.
Soon bebop emerged, championed by one of jazz's most renowned geniuses,
saxophonist Charlie Parker, signalling the genre's coming of age as more
than just a regional folk music. In the late '40s and '50s, Miles Davis and
others took jazz further with modal and "cool" jazz, inspiring players like
John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman to move in the new experimental direction of "free jazz." In the late '60s, Miles continued to be an innovator, introducing fusion, while others like Herbie Hancock brought us funk. Though its roots are planted firmly in American soil, jazz has become a thoroughly global phenomenon, recognized as the grandfather of much of the popular music enjoyed throughout the world. Modern composers and players continue to draw on work done during jazz's last century, while using their own voices to continually develop and reinvent the style.
