Great Jazz Musicians

Jazz, type of music developed by black Americans about 1900 and possessing an identifiable history and describable stylistic evolution. Jazz has borrowed from black folk music, and popular music has borrowed from jazz, but these three kinds of music remain distinct and should not be confused with one another.

Since its beginnings jazz has branched out into so many styles that no single description fits all of them with total accuracy. A few generalizations, however, can be made, bearing in mind that for all of them, exceptions can be cited.

Performers of jazz improvise within the conventions of their chosen style. Typically, the improvisation is accompanied by the repeated chord progression of a popular song or an original composition. Instrumentalists emulate black vocal styles, including the use of glissandi and slides, nuances of pitch (including blue notes, the microtonally flattened tones in the blue scales), and tonal effects such as growls and wails.

In striving to develop a personal sound or tone color-an idiosyncratic sense of rhythm and form and an individual style of execution-performers create rhythms characterized by constant syncopation (accents in unexpected places) and also by swing-a sensation of pull and momentum that arises as the melody is heard alternately together with, then slightly at variance with, the expected pulse or division of a pulse. Written scores, if present, are used merely as guides, providing structure within which improvisation occurs. The typical instrumentation begins with a rhythm section consisting of piano, string bass, drums, and optional guitar, to which may be added any number of wind instruments. In big bands the winds are grouped into three sections- saxophones, trombones, and trumpets.

Although exceptions occur in some styles, most jazz is based on the principle that an infinite number of melodies can fit the chord progressions of any song. The musician improvises new melodies that fit the chord progression, which is repeated again and again as each soloist is featured, for as many choruses as desired.

Although pieces with many different formal patterns are used for jazz improvisation, two formal patterns in particular are frequently found in songs used for jazz. One is the AABA form of popular-song choruses, which typically consist of 32 measures in 4/4 meter, divided into four 8-measure sections: section A; repeat of section A; section B ( the "bridge" or "release," often beginning in a new key); repeat of section A. The second form, with roots deep in black American folk music, is the 12-bar form. Unlike the 32-bar AABA form, blues sons have a fairly standardized chord progression (see Blues).

MISS BESSIE SMITH

The classic blues sound of Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and other early blues singers was an attempt by the record industry to present the rural country blues of the American South in a broadly accessible, popular format. In most cases, these artists were the first blues performers heard by white audiences. These early singers, almost all women, performed a highly produced, jazz-inspired form of blues that was popular in traveling minstrel shows and vaudeville. Smith was know for her smooth, sultry voice wrought with pain and emotion and was considered one of the greatest blues singers of her time. This example is from the song "St. Louis Blues," created by American composer and trumpet player W.C. Handy in 1914.

Jazz is rooted in the mingled musical traditions of American blacks. These include traits surviving from West African music; black folk music forms developed in the New World; European popular and light classical music of the 18th and 19th centuries; and later popular music forms influenced by black music or produced by black composers. Among the African survivals are vocal styles that include great freedom of vocal color; a tradition of improvisation; call-and-response patterns; and rhythmic complexity-both syncopation of individual melodic lines and conflicting rhythmic played by different members of an ensemble. Black folk music forms include field hollers, rowing chants, lullabies, and later, spirituals and blues (see African American Music).

European music contributed specific styles and forms-hymns, marches, waltzes, quadrilles, and other dance music, light theatrical music, Italian operatic music-and also theoretical elements, in particular, harmony, both as a vocabulary of chords and as a concept related to musical form. (Much of the European influence was absorbed through specific trainingin European music, even when the musician so trained could find work only in low-life entertainments districts and on Mississippi riverboats.)

CEROLE JAZZ BAND
Black-influenced elements of popular music that contributed to jazz include the banjo music of the minstrel shows (derived from the banjo music of slaves); the syncopated rhythmic patterns of black-influenced Latin American music (heard in southern U.S. cities); the barrelhouse piano styles of tavern musicians in the Midwest; and marches and hymns as they played by black brass bands in the late 19th century. Near the end of the 19th century another influential genre emerged. This was ragtime, a composed music that combined many elements, including syncopated rhythms (from banjo music and other black sources) and the harmonic contrasts and formal patterns of European marches. After 1910 the bandleader W.C. Handy took another influential form, the blues, beyond its previously strictly oral tradition by publishing his original blues songs. (Favored by jazz musicians, his songs found perhaps their greatest interpreter later, in the 1920's, in the blues singer Bessie Smith, who recorded many of them.) The merging of these multiple influences into jazz is difficult to reconstruct, because it occurred before the phonograph could provide valuable documentation.

Most early jazz was played in small marching bands or by solo pianists. Besides ragtime and marches, the repertoire included hymns, spirituals, and blues. The bands played this music, modified frequently by syncopations and acceleration, at picnics, weddings, parades, and funerals. Characteristically, the bands played dirges on the way to funerals and lively marches on the way back. Although blues and ragtime had arisen independently of jazz, and continued to exist alongside it, these genres influenced the style and forms of jazz and provided important vehicles for jazz improvisation.

MR. KING OLIVER


King Oliver: Jazz Cornetist. Around the turn of the 20th century the earliest fully documented jazz style emerged, centered in New Orleans, Louisiana. In this style the cornet or trumpet carried the melody, the clarinet played florid countermelodies, and the trombone played rhythmic slides and sounded the root notes of chords or simple harmony. Below this basic trio the tuba or string bass line and drums the rhythmic accompaniment. Exuberance and volume were more important than finesse, and improvisation was focused on the ensemble sound.

A musican named Buddy Bolden appeared to have led some of the first jazz bands, but their music and its sound have been lost to posterity. Although some jazz influences can be heard on a few early phonograph records, not until 1917 did a jazz band record. This band, a group of white New Orleans musicans called The Original DixieLand Jazz Band, created a sensation overseas and in the United States (The term Dixieland jazz eventually came to mean the New Orleans styles as played by white musicans.) Two groups, one white and one black, followed: in 1922 the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and in 1923 the Creole Jazz Band, the latter led by the cornetist King Oliver, and influential stylist. The series of recordings made by Oliver's group are the most significant recordings in the New Orlean's style. Other leading New Orleans musicians included the trumpeters Bunk Johnson and Freddie Keppard, the soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, the drummer Warren "Baby" Dodds, and the pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton. The most influential musician nurtured in New Orleans, however, was Kings Oliver's second trumpeter, Louis Armstrong.

JELLY ROLL MORTON


Creole jazz pianist and compser Jelly Roll Morton developed his New Orleans style of piano in the early 20th century, playing in southern honky-tonks, barrelhouses, and gambling joints. Diverging from the more composed form of ragtime that was then popular, Morton incorporated elements of New Orleans brass-band music and early Dixieland jazz, as well as the spontaneity of improvised jazz. Morton is heard in a 1927 recording of his composition "Hyena Stomp."





LOUIS ARMSTRONG
Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong was born in the slums of New Orleans, August 4, 1901. Armstrong's mother, Mary was very young and his father William abandoned he and his mother soon after birth. His first five years of life was spent with his grandmother. When he was twelve, he got into some trouble and was sent to the"Colored Waif's" home. He received his first horn while he was in the home. When he left the Waif's home, he would play in 'honky tonks' and jook joints. While playing these small venures he was noticed by Joe "King" Oliver. Oliver helped him with his career. He traveled up and down the Mississippi by playing on river-boats. Armstrong became known as " The Jazz Ambassador". He played the stages of Broadway and the sets of Hollywood. He appeared in the courts of kings and queens. Louis Armstrong will always be remember in the world of jazz. From very humble beginnings, Armstrong never forgot about where he had come from.

The first true virtuoso soloist of jazz, Armstrong was a dazzling improviser, technically, emotionally, and intellectually. He changed the format of jazz by bringing the soloist to the forefront, and in his recording groups, the "Hot Five" and the "Hot Seven", demonstrated that jazz improvisation could go far beyond simply ornamenting the melody-he created mew melodies based on the chords of the initial tune. He also set standards for all later jazz singers, not only by the way he altered the words and melodies of songs but also by improvising without words, like an instrument (scat singing).

EARL FATHA HINES


As a jazz pianist, Earl "Fatha" Hines remains in a class all his own. Hines went to Chicago, Illinois, in the early 1920's with singer Lois Deppe. His solo piano style brought him almost immediate recognition. Hines was initially influenced by Jelly Roll Morton, and his playing solidified while he worked with cornet and trumpet player Louis Armstrong. In the late 1920's, Hines introduced his own big band to local audiences. A plethora of up-and-coming jazz greats contributed to Hine's band over the next two decaeds, including Darnell Howard, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughan.

For jazz the 1920's was a decade of great experimentation and discovery. Many New Orleans musicians, including Armstrong, migrated to Chicago, influencing local musicians and stimulating the evolution of the Chicago style-derived from the New Orleans style but emphasizing soloist, often adding saxophone to the instrumentation, and usually producing tenser rhythms and more complicated textures. Instrumentalists working in Chicago or influenced by Chicago style included the trombonist Jack Teagarden, the banjoist Eddie Condon, the drummer Gene Krupa, and the clarinetist Benny Goodman. Also active in Chicago was Bix Beiderbecke, whose lyrical approach to the cornet provided an alternative to Armstrong's trumpet style. Many Chicago musicians eventually settled in New York City, another major center for jazz in the 1920s.


JAMES PRICE JOHNSON


Another vehicle for jazz developments in the 1920s was piano music. The Harlem district of New York City became the center of a highly technical, hard-driving solo style known as stride piano. The master of this approach in the early 1920s was James P. Johnson, whose protege Fats Waller, a talented vocalist and entertainer as well, became by far the most popular perfomer in this idiom.

A second piano style to develop in the 1920s was boogie-woogie. A form of blues played on the piano, it consists of a short, sharply accented bass pattern played over and over by the left hand while the right hand plays freely, using a variety of rhythms. Boogie-woogie became especially popular in the 1930s and '40s. Leading boogie-woogie pianists include Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, and Pine Top Smith.

The most innovative pianist of the pianist of the 1920s, comparable to Armstrong and present on some of the latter's best recording, was Earl "Fatha" Hines, a Chicago-nurtured virtuoso considered to possess a wild, unpredictable imagination. His style, combined with the smoother approach of Waller, influenced most pianists of the next generation-notably Teddy Wilson, who was featured with Goodman's band in the 1930s, and Art Tatum, who performed mostly as a soloist, and who was regarded with awe for his complex virtuosity.


FLETCHER HENDERSON


Big-band leader and pianist Fletcher Henderson made his way to New York from Gerorgia in 1924 to perform at the Roseland Ballroom. His band was known for employing some of the top jazz soloists-Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter-in early jazz history. But Henderson was best known for his novel arrangements of songs, especially for establishing the call-and-response feature heard between brass and reed sections. His ideas were immediately picked up by top band leaders the day.

Also during the 1920s, large groups of jazz musicians began to play together, after the model of society dance bands, forming the so-called big bands that became so popular in the 1930s and early '40s that the period was known as the swing era. One major development in the emergence of the swing era was rhythmic change that smoothed the two-beat rhythms of the New Orleans style into a more flowing four beats to the bar. Musicians also developed the use of short melodic patterns, called riffs, in call-and-response patterns. To facillitate this procedure, orchestras were divided into instrumental sections, each with its own riffs, and opportunities were provided for musicians to play extended solos.

The development of the big band as a jazz medium was largely the achievement of Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson. Henderson and his arranger, Don Redman, helped introduce written scores into jazz music, but they also attempted to capture the quality of improvisation that characterized the music of smaller ensembles. In the latter aim they were aided by gifted soloist such as the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins.


MR. DUKE ELLINGTON
American composer, bandleader, and pianist Duke Ellington endures as perhaps the most important pioneer in big-band jazz. Ellington and his orchestra shared a special interdependent relationship: Using the band as his musical workshop, Ellington derived his orchestra's tone coloring from the unique sound qualities of the group's individual players. This particular style was later dubbed the "Ellington Effect" by jazz arranger Billy Strayhorn, who also wrote one of the band's signature tunes "Take the 'A' Train" (1941). Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was the most prolific composer of the twentieth century in terms of both number of compositions and variety of forms. His development was one of the most spectacular in the history of music, underscored by more than fifty years of sustained achievement as an artist and an entertainer. He is considered by many to be America's greatest composer, bandleader, and recording artist. The extent of Ellington's innovations helped to redefine the various forms in which he worked. He synthesized many of the elements of American music — the minstrel song, ragtime, Tin Pan Alley tunes, the blues, and American appropriations of the European music tradition — into a consistent style with which, though technically complex, has a directness and a simplicity of expression largely absent from the purported art music of the twentieth century. Ellington's first great achievements came in the three-minute song form, and he later wrote music for all kinds of settings: the ballroom, the comedy stage, the nightclub, the movie house, the theater, the concert hall, and the cathedral. His blues writing resulted in new conceptions of form, harmony, and melody, and he became the master of the romantic ballad and created numerous works that featured the great soloists in his jazz orchestra.

Ellington, during the 1920s, led a band at the Cotton Club in New York City. Continuing to direct his orchestra until his death in 1924, he composed colorful experimental concert pieces ranging in length from the three-minute "Koko" (1940) to the hour-long Black, Brown, and Beige (1943), as well as songs such as "Solitude" and "Sophisticated Lady." More complex than Henderson's music, Ellington's music made his orchestra a cohesive ensemble, with solos written for the unique qualities of specific instruments and players. Other bands in the tradition of Ellington and Henderson were led by Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, and Cab Calloway.


MR. COUNT BASIE
During the 1930s and 1940s, when big bands were at the height of their popularity, American jazz pianist and bandleader Count Basie introduced a sound rooted in the musical styles of blues and New Orleans jazz. Basie’s band, then named the Count Basie Orchestra, was famous for achieving what many consider to be the epitome of the swing feel. This selection from a 1977 recording demonstrates Basie’s sparse, restrained style of piano accompaniment. Count Basie was a leading figure of the swing era in jazz and, alongside Duke Ellington, an outstanding representative of big band style. After studying piano with his mother, as a young man he went to New York, where he met James P. Johnson, Fats Waller (with whom he studied informally), another pianist of the Harlem stride school. Before he was 20 years old, he toured extensively on the Keith and TOBA vaudeville circuits as a solo pianist, accompanist, and music director for blues singers, dancers, and comedians. This provided an early training that was to prove significant in his later career. Stranded in Kansas City in 1927 while accompanying a touring group, he remained there, playing in silent-film theaters. In July 1928, he joined Walter Page's Blue Devils which, in addition to Page, included Jimmy Rushing; both later figured prominently in Basie's own band. Basie left the Blue Devils early in 1929 to play with two lesser-known bands in the area. Later that year, he joined Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra, as did the other key members of the Blue Devils shortly after.

A different style of big-band jazz was developed in Kansas City during the mid-1930s and was epitomized by the band of Count Basie. Originally assembled in Kansas City, Basie's band reflected the southwestern emphasis on improvisation, keeping the written (or simply memerized) passages relatively short and simple. The wind instruments in his band exchanged ensemble riffs in a free, strongly rhythmical interplay, with pauses to accommodate extended instrumental solos. Basie's tenor saxophonist Lester Young, in particular, played with a rhythmic freedom rarely apparent in the improvisations of soloists from other bands. Young's delicate tone and long, flowing melodies, laced with an occasional avant-garde honk or gurgle, opened up a whole new approach, as Armstrong's playing had done in the 1920s.

MISS BILLIE HOLIDAY



Billie Holiday, known as Lady Day, had a profound effect on the jazz-blues scene during the 1940s and 1950s. She toured throughout the United States and Europe, singing with such well-known musicians as Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Lester Young. Holiday was recognized for her moving vocal interpretations, which brought elements of blues and jazz to popular songs.



Other trend setters of the late 1930s were the trumpeter Roy Eldridge, the electric-guitarist Charlie Christian, the drummer Kenny Clarke, ane the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. Jazz singing in the 1930s became increasingly flexible and stylized. Ivie Anderson, Mildred Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, and, above all Billie Holiday were the leading singers.

The pioneering efforts of Armstrong, Ellington, Henderson, and others made jazz a dominant influence on American music during the 1920s and '30s. Such popular musicians as the bandleader Paul Whiteman used some of the more obvious rhythmic and melodic devices of jazz, although with less improvisational freedom and skill than were displayed in the music of the major jazz players. Attempting to fuse jazz with light classical music, Whiteman's orchestra also premiered jazzy symphonic pieces by American composers such as George Gershwin. Closer to the authentic jazz tradition of improvisation and solo virtuosity was the music played by the bands of Benny Goodman (who used many Henderson arrangements), Gene Krupa, and Harry James.

Since the days of ragtime, jazz composers had admired classical music. A number of swing-era musicians "jazzed the classics" in recordings such as "Bach Goes to Town" (Benny Goodman) and "Ebony Rhapsody" (Ellington and others). Composers of concert music, in turn, paid tribute to jazz in works such as Contrasts (1938, commissioned by Goodman) by the Hungarian Bela Bartok, and Ebony Concerto (1945, commissioned by the orchestra led by Woody Herman, 1913-87) by the Russian-born Igor Stravinsky. Other composers, such as Aaron Copland, an American, and Darius Milhaud, a Frenchman, acknowledged the spirit of jazz in their works.


MR CHARLIE PARKER


Alto sazophonist Charlie Parker, known as "Bird" by admirers, was among the greatest creative artists in the history of jazz music. Along with trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie, Parker was largely responsible for developing the style known as bebop, in which fast, harmonically complex melodic lines are improvised over rapidly shifting chord progressions. Playing with Gillespie in New York City, Parker exhibited a bright, distinctive tone and brilliant improvised musical ideas, both of which are evident in this live recording (with Gillespie) of "Perdido".

The preeminently influential jazz musician of the 1940s was Charlie Parker, who became the leader of a new style known as bebop, rebop, or bop. Like lester Young, Charlie Christian, and other outstanding soloists, Parker had played with big bands. During World War ll, however, the wartime economy and changes in audience tastes had driven many big bands out of business. Their decline, combined with the radically new bebop style amounted to a revolution in the jazz world.

Bebop was still based on the principle of improvisation over a chord progression, but the tempos were faster, the phrases longer and more complex, and the emotional range expanded to include more unpleasant feelings than before. Jazz musicians became aware of themselves as artists and made little effort to sell their wares by adding vocals, dancing, and comedy, as had their predecessors.

MR. SONNY ROLLINS

Tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins’s highly personal approach has made him one of the most important jazz saxophonists of his generation. Rollins was a prominent figure in the 1950s Chicago jazz scene. He had developed his unique style of jazz by 1955, when he moved to New York City to work with famed drummer Max Roach. Rollins’s style embodied the complex harmonies of bebop and the light sophistication of cool jazz.

At the center of the ferment stood Parker, who could do anything on the saxophone, in any tempo and in any key. He created beautiful melodies that were related in advanced ways to the underlying chords, and his music possessed endless rhythmic variety. Parker's frequent collaborators were the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, known for his formidable speed and range and daring harmonic sense, and the pianist Earl "Bud" Powell and drummer Max Roach, both leaders in their own right. Also highly regarded were the pianist-composer Thelonious Monk and the trumpeter Fats Navarro. The jazz singer Sarah Vaughan was associated early in her career with bop musicians, particularly Gillespie and Parker.

MR. THELONIOUS MONK



Although jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk contributed greatly to the new harmonic idiom of bebop in the 1940s, he remained largely misunderstood as a jazz musician and did not gain recognition until over a decade later. Even for bebop musicians and fans, Monk’s compositions and playing style were unusual and rhythmically sparse. In this audio selection, Monk is heard in a 1954 recording of his composition "Little Rootie Tootie."

The late 1940s brought forth an explosion of experimentation in jazz. Modernized big bands led by Gillespie and Stan Kenton flourished alongside small groups with innovative musicians such as the pianist Lennie Tristano. Most of these groups drew ideas from 20th-century pieces by such masters as Bartok and Stravinsky.

The most influential of the midcentury experiments with classically influenced jazz were the 1949-50 recordings made by an unusual nonet led by Charlie Parker's protege, a young trumpeter named Miles Davis. The written arrangements, by Davis and others, were soft in tone but highly complex. Many groups adopted this "cool" style, especially on the West Coast, and so it became known as West Coast jazz. Refined by players such as the tenor saxophonists Zoot Sims and Stan Getz and the baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, cool jazz flourished throughout the 1950s. Also in the 1950s the pianist Dave Brubeck (a student of Milhaud), with the alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, achieved popularity with his blend of classical music and jazz.

Most musicians, however, particularly on the East Coast, continued to expand on the hotter, more driving bebop tradition. Major exponents of the hard-bop or East Coast style included the trumpeter Clifford Brown, the drummer Art Blakey, and the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, whose unique approach made him one of the major talents of his generation. Another derivative of the Parker style was soul jazz, played by the pianist Horace Silver, the alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, and his brother, the cornetist Nat Adderley.

MR. JOHN COLTRANE

Jazz saxophonist, bandleader, and composer John Coltrane emerged in the late 1950s as a leading innovator in jazz music, recording both with his own groups and as a soloist with trumpet player Miles Davis. Performing on tenor saxophone, and later on soprano saxophone, Coltrane infused his improvisations with new harmonic relationships and imaginative timbres (tone colors) and gained recognition for his technical genius. Widely imitated and admired, he helped to revolutionize the role of the saxophone in jazz. Coltrane improvises in this 1958 recording of his composition "Trane’s Slo Blues."

Several new approaches characterized jazz in the third quarter of the century. The years around 1960 ranked with the late 1920s and the late 1940s as one of the most fertile periods in the history of jazz.

MR. MILES DAVIS


A by-product of the new era of jazz ushered in by the bebop revolution in the 1940s was the expression "cool." The term was used to describe both a sophisticated point of view and a particular school of jazz. Many jazz enthusiasts believe that the birth of cool jazz came with a group of jazz musicians led by trumpeter Miles Davis. Davis produced an elegantly textured, almost dreamy sound. His style was coolly modern, always searching for a new sound and a new way to paint a familiar phrase. Davis’s experiments opened the door for a sound that was highly schooled, but that demanded to be played with real feeling without losing the relaxed, behind-the-beat swing of traditional jazz.

In 1955 Miles Davis organized a quintet that featured the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, whose approach produced a striking contrast to Davis's rich-toned, unhurried, expressive melodic lines. Coltrane poured out streams of notes with velocity and passion, exploring every melodic idea, no matter how exotic; yet he played slow ballads with poise and serenity. In his solos he revealed an exceptional sense of form and pacing. In 1959 he appeared on a landmark Miles Davis album, Kind of Blue. Along with the pianist Bill Evans, Davis devised for this album a set of pieces that remain in one key, chord, and mode for a long as 16 measures at a time-leading to the term modal jazz-allowing much freedom for the improviser.

Coltrane striking out on his own, first pushed the complexity of bop to its limits in "Giant Steps" (1959), then settled on the other extreme, modal jazz. The latter style dominated his repertoire after 1960, when he recorded "My Favorite Things" using an open-ended arrangement in which each soloist stayed in one mode for as long as he wished. Coltrane's quartet included the pianist McCoy Tyner and the drummer Elvin Jones, two musicians who, because of their dramatic musical qualities, were widely imitated.

MODERN JAZZ QUARTET


One of the leading exponents of cool jazz, the Modern Jazz Quartet jazz ensemble featured some of the finest performers of the 1950s. In its early days the group’s instruments included vibraphone, piano, drums, and double bass. Their repertoire was broad-based and eclectic for the time. The group exhibited a cool, relaxed sound that blended a high level of skill and musical training with an intimate approach to jazz improvisation. This example features the vibraphone, a percussion instrument with metal bars that became a popular jazz ensemble instrument in the wake of the popularity of the Modern Jazz Quartet.

Another product of the experimentation of the late 1950s and '60s was the attempt by the composer Gunther Schuller, together with the pianist John Lewis and his Modern Jazz Quartet, to fuse jazz and classical music into a "third stream" by bringing together musicians from both worlds in a repertoire that drew heavily on the techniques of both kinds of music.

Also active during these years was the composer, bassist, and bandleader Charlie Mingus, who imbued his chord-progression-based improvisation with a wild, raw excitement. Most controversial was the work of the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, whose improvisations, at times almost atonal, did away with chord progressions altogether, while retaining the steady rhythmic swing so characteristic of jazz. Although Coleman's wailing sound and rough technique shocked many critics, others recognized the wit, sincerity, and rare sense of form that characterized his solos. He inspired a whole school of avant-garde jazz that flourished in the 1960s and '70s and included the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the clarinetist Jimmy Giuffre, the pianist Cecil Taylor, and even Coltrane, who ventured into avant-garde improvisation before his death in 1967.


MR. DAVE BRUBECK
Brubeck, Dave (1920- ), American composer and pianist, known for his jazz compositions incorporating unusual meters (see Musical Rhythm) and classical techniques such as fugal form (see Fugue) and counterpoint. Born David W. Brubeck in Concord, California, he studied music theory and composition with French composer Darius Milhaud and Austrian-born serial music pioneer Arnold Schoenberg. Brubeck achieved wide popularity with his quartet formed in 1951, which included gifted alto saxophonist Paul Desmond. In the innovative album Time Out (1957), the group abandoned the 4/4 meter of earlier jazz compositions to experiment with a different time signature for each piece on the album. Featured on Time Out are Brubeck's "Blue Rondo a la Turk," written in 9/8 time, and Desmond's, "Take Five," written in 5/4 time-a piece that, despite its unconventional meter, imparts a natural and relaxed jazz feel. Brubeck has also written music for two ballets and various motion pictures and television programs, and he has composed a mass, four cantatas, works for solo piano, and pieces for jazz group and orchestra. In 1994 Brubeck won a National Medal of Arts.



MR. ORNETTE COLEMAN
Coleman, Ornette (1930- ), American saxophonist, who pioneered in the creation of atonal free-form jazz. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Coleman began playing saxophone at the age of 14 and performed as a teenager near his home. He held a number of odd jobs and played with various groups, including rhythm-and-blues and carnival bands, before moving to Los Angeles in 1950. While working in Los Angeles as an elevator operator, Coleman studied music harmony and theory textbooks on his own. During this period, while playing in obscure clubs in the city, he developed his unconventional concepts and style. His work emphasized the concept of free jazz, which essentially left the musician free to explore improvisation without melodic, harmonic, or metric limitations. Coleman's innovations attracted worldwide attention with the release of a series of recordings including The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959) and Change of the Century (1959). His album Free Jazz (1960) was a sustained, collective improvisation and made an ndelible mark on the world of avant-garde jazz. He came to be considered a musical liberator to his proponents, and a master of anarchy to his detractors. During the 1960s Coleman taught himself to play the trumpet and the violin, and he toured throughout the United States and Europe, inspiring an emerging European avant-garde jazz movement. He also composed a number of extended works for larger ensembles, including Skies of America (1972). Coleman's larger, symphonic works reflected his theory of harmelodics, which involved musicians simultaneously playing the same melody at different pitch levels and in different keys. He conceived the approach as a method of escaping the harmonic conventions of Western music. In 1975 Coleman founded the band Prime Time, which included electric instruments. Prime Time recorded and performed throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, reflecting the influences of pop, rock, funk, and fusion music.

Meanwhile, the mainstream of jazz, although incorporating many of Coltrane's melodic ideas and even some modal jazz pieces, continued to build improvisations largely on the chord progressions of popular songs. Brazilian songs, especially those in the bassa nova style, were added to the repertoire in the early 1960s. Their Latin rhythums and fresh chord progressions appealed to jazz musicians of several generations, notably Stan Getz and the flutist Herbie Mann. Even after the bossa nova style declined, the sambas that gave rise to it remained staples of the jazz repertoire, and many groups augmented their regular drum set with Caribbean percussion.

The trio formed by the pianist Bill Evans treated popular songs with depth, the musicians constantly interacting instead of simply taking turns for solos. This interactive approach was carried even further by the rhythm section of Davis's quintet of 1963 and later, which included the drummer Tony Williams, the bassist Ron Carter, the pianist Herbie Hancock, and later the highly original tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter.

Jazz underwent an economic crisis in the late 1960s. Younger audiences favored soul music and rock, while older aficionados turned away from the abstractness and emotional rawness of much modern jazz. Jazz musicians realized that to regain an audience they must draw ideas from popular music. Some of these ideas came from rock, but most were drawn from the dance rhythms and chord progressions of soul musicians such as James Brown.


MR. JAMES BROWN
Revue, a rigorously disciplined and choreographed stage show, was filling concert halls and auditoriums and commanding top fees. Brown dominated the rhythm-and-blues market with "Prisoner of Love" (1963), "I Got You" (1965), "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" (1965), and "It's a Man's World" (1966). "Cold Sweat" was a top single in 1967, followed by "Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud" (1968). In the 1970s his recordings did well on both rhythm-and-blues and popular charts. Brown used his popularity to address the importance of education, self-improvement, and the need for minority-owned businesses (he owned his own recording studios, three radio stations, and a real-estate company). He appeared in the film The Blues Brothers (1980). Brown toured and recorded in the 1980s, publicly encouraging a rivalry between Prince and Michael Jackson, whom he viewed as his successors. He wrote his autobiography, James Brown, The Godfather of Soul (1986), and was one of the first ten inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (1986). In 1988 Brown was sentenced to six years in prison for assault and for eluding police during a car chase. He was paroled in 1991 and resumed his music career, recording Love Over-Due the same year. In 1992 he received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Some groups also added elements of music fromother cultures. The initial examples of this new fusion jazz met with varying success, but in 1969 Davis recorded "Bitches Brew", a highly successful album that combined soul rhythms and electronically amplified instruments with uncompromising, highly dissonant jazz. Not surprisingly, alumni of Davis's groups created some of the most musically successful fusion recordings of the 1970s: Herbie Hancock; Wayne Shorter and the Austrian-born pianist Joe Zawinul, co-leaders of the ensemble Weather Report; the English electric guitarist John McLaughlin; and the brilliant pianist Chick Corea and his group Return to Forever. Rock musicians, in turn, began featuring jazz phrasings and solos over a rock-based rhythm. These groups included Chase; Chicago; and Blood, Sweat and Tears.

During this same period another Davis alumnus, the iconoclastic pianist Keith Jarrett, succeeded commercialy while eschewing electronic instruments and popular styles. His performances of popular standards and original songs with a quartet, as well as this improvisations alone at the keyboard, marked him as a major contemporary pianist of jazz.


MR. WYNTON MARSALIS


The popularity of Wynton Marsalis, along with his brother Branford and frequent co-performer Marcus Roberts, sparked a resurgence of interest in jazz during the 1980s. Their music demonstrated a strong respect for jazz tradition while retaining the creative spark that characterizes jazz improvisation. Wynton Marsalis’s direction of the Jazz at Lincoln Center program has brought a greater awareness of the history of jazz to the general public.

In the mid-1980s jazz artists were once again performing, in a variety of styles, to sizable audiences, and there was renewed interest in serious (as opposed to pop-oriented) jazz. Associated with this interest was the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who was also acclaimed for his performances of classical music. Although jazz remained essentially the provenance of American musicians, it's international audience flourished to the extent that non-American musicians formed an increasingly significant subgroup within jazz in the 1970s and '80s, as their predecessors, including the Belgian guitarist Django Reinhardt, had done in the 1930s and later.

For additional information on individual musicians, see biographies of those whose names are not followed by dates. "Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia"