Page 275 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

in a plaintive, wailing style of singing
called the blues, and in a highly
syncopated kind of piano playing called
ragtime, popularized by Scott Joplin
(1868–1917). The first jazz bands, made
up of Creoles and African-Americans,
were centered in New Orleans where
New Orleans jazz (sometimes called
“Dixieland jazz”) arose. Disseminated
by the newly invented radio during
the 1920 (technology breaking down
cultural barriers), the seemingly
risqué sounds of African-American
jazz bands were embraced by middle-
class whites as music suitable for social
dancing. So popular did jazz become that the decade of the roaring 1920s came to be dubbed, as we have seen, “the Jazz Age.” In these years, George Gershwin created his Rhapsody in Blue (1924) in a style called symphonic jazz, a fusion of jazz and classical idioms meant for listening. But during the Great Depression (1929–1941) and World War II (1929–1945), “swing bands” and “big bands” with leaders such as Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington (Figure 16.4) continued to make music for dancing. With the second half of the twentieth century, however, came a succession of more esoteric, less danceable jazz styles—bebop, cool jazz, and free jazz; in these the beat is not always clearly defined and
the changing harmonies are difficult to follow. The advent rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s—with its pounding beat and backbeat— ended jazz’s preeminent status as America’s favorite dance music.
To be sure, jazz is not one style but many, ranging from
ragtime to free jazz. The essence of jazz, however, can be heard
in the cool jazz style of Miles Davis (Figure 16.5). “Cool” arose
as a reaction to the “hot,” high-pitched, hard-driving music of
earlier bebop jazz. By contrast, cool jazz emphasizes lyricism,
lower instrumental registers, moderate tempos, and lower
dynamic levels. Trumpeter Miles Davis (1926–1991) popular-
ized the term cool when he issued his iconic album Birth of the
Cool (1949–1950). Davis was a seminal force in his day—every
“jazzer” wanted to play like Miles Davis—and still today his
style is often imitated by trumpeters such as Wynton Marsalis
(b. 1961), Chris Botti (b. 1962), and Bria Skonberg (b. 1983).
For his album Birth of the Cool, Davis assembled nine play-
ers. To the core of the usual jazz combo (trumpet, saxophone,
piano, drums, and bass), Davis added orchestral instruments,
including tuba and French horn, so as to lend greater body
to the sound. Although the tempo of the track “Jeru” (see
Listening Cue) is moderately fast, solo instrumentalists Gerry Mulligan (saxo- phone) and Miles Davis (trumpet) play with a smooth, mellow sound: hence the name “cool.”
Figure 16.4
Duke Ellington (seated at the piano) and his big band in 1943. Unlike other band leaders of this time, Ellington was as much a composer as he was a performer. But Ellington infused jazz with elements of classical music, rather than the other way around.
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Figure 16.5
Miles Davis at a recording session for his influential album Birth of the Cool
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Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS Bettmann/CORBIS
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