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Jazz is a music genre that originated from African American communities of New Orleans in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It emerged in the form of independent traditional and popular musical styles, all linked by the common bonds of African American and European American musical parentage with a performance orientation.  Jazz spans a period of over a hundred years, encompassing a very wide range of music, making it difficult to define. Jazz makes heavy use of improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swing note,  as well as aspects of European harmony, American popular music,  the brass band tradition, and African musical elements such as blue notes and African-American styles such as ragtime. Although the foundation of jazz is deeply rooted within the  black experience of the United States, different cultures have contributed their own experience and styles to the art form as well. Intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as "one of America's original art forms". 

As jazz spread around the world, it drew on different national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to many distinctive styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass-band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. In the 1930s, heavily arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz, a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisational style and Gypsy jazz (a style that emphasized musette waltzes) were the prominent styles. Bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging "musician's music" which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed in the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, linear melodic lines.

The 1950s saw the emergence of free jazz, which explored playing without regular meter, beat and formal structures, and in the mid-1950s, hard bop emerged, which introduced influences from rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues, especially in the saxophone and piano playing. Modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock music's rhythms, electric instruments and the highly amplified stage sound. In the early 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful, garnering significant radio airplay. Other styles and genres abound in the 2000s, such as Latin and Afro-Cuban jazz.

Etymology and definition

The question of the origin of the word jazz has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well documented. It is believed to be related to jasm, a slang term dating back to 1860 meaning "pep, energy." The earliest written record of the word is in a 1912 article in the Los Angeles Times in which a minor league baseball pitcher described a pitch which he called a jazz ball "because it wobbles and you simply can’t do anything with it." 

The use of the word in a musical context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Archived at Observatoire Musical Français, Paris-Sorbonne University. Its first documented use in a musical context in New Orleans was in a November 14, 1916 Times-Picayune article about "jas bands."   In an interview with NPR, musician Eubie Blake offered his recollections of the original slang connotations of the term, saying: "When Broadway picked it up, they called it 'J-A-Z-Z..  It wasn't called that. It was spelled 'J-A-S-S.' That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, you wouldn't say it in front of ladies."   The American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Twentieth Century.  

Jazz has proved to be very difficult to define, since it encompasses such a wide range of music spanning a period of over 100 years, from ragtime to the 2010-era rock-infused fusion. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions, such as European music history or African music. But critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt argues that its terms of reference and its definition should be broader,  defining jazz as a "form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of the Negro with European music"  and arguing that it differs from European music in that jazz has a "special relationship to time defined as 'swing'", involves "a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role" and contains a "sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror the individuality of the performing jazz musician". In the opinion of Robert Christgau, "most of us would say that inventing meaning while letting loose is the essence and promise of jazz." 
 
A broader definition that encompasses all of the radically different eras of jazz has been proposed by Travis Jackson: "it is music that includes qualities such as swing, improvising, group interaction, developing an 'individual voice', and being open to different musical possibilities". Krin Gibbard has provided an overview of the discussion on definitions, arguing that "jazz is a construct" that, while artificial, still is useful to designate "a number of musics with enough in common to be understood as part of a coherent tradition".  In contrast to the efforts of commentators and enthusiasts of certain types of jazz, who have argued for narrower definitions that exclude other types, the musicians themselves are often reluctant to define the music they play. As Duke Ellington, one of jazz's most famous figures, said: "It's all music". 

Elements and issues

Improvisation

Although jazz is considered highly difficult to define, at least in part because it contains so many varied subgenres, improvisation is consistently regarded as being one of its key elements. The centrality of improvisation in jazz is attributed to influential earlier forms of music: the early blues, a form of folk music which arose in part from the work songs and field hollers of the African-American slaves on plantations. These were commonly structured around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, but early blues was also highly improvisational. European classical music performance is evaluated by its fidelity to the musical score, with much less discretion over interpretation, ornamentation and accompaniment: the classical performer's primary goal is to play a composition as it was written. In contrast, jazz is often characterized as the product of group creativity, interaction, and collaboration, which places varying degrees of value on the contributions of composer (if there is one) and performers.  In jazz, the skilled performer will interpret a tune in very individual ways, never playing the same composition the same way twice; depending on the performer's mood and personal experience, interactions with other musicians, or even members of the audience, a jazz musician may alter melodies, harmonies or time signature at will. 

The approach to improvisation has developed enormously over the history of the music. In early New Orleans and Dixieland jazz, performers took turns playing the melody, while others improvised countermelodies. By the swing era, big bands were coming to rely more on arranged music: arrangements were either written or learned by ear and memorized, while individual soloists would improvise within these arrangements. Later, in bebop the focus shifted back toward small groups and minimal arrangements; the melody would be stated briefly at the start and end of a piece, but the core of the performance would be the series of improvisations. Later styles such as modal jazz abandoned the strict notion of a chord progression, allowing the individual musicians to improvise even more freely within the context of a given scale or mode. In many forms of jazz, a soloist is often supported by a rhythm section consisting of one or more chordal instruments (piano, guitar, etc.), double bass playing the basslines and drum kit. These performers provide accompaniment by playing chords and rhythms that outline the song structure and complement the soloist.  In avant-garde and free jazz idioms, the separation of soloist and band is reduced, and there is license, or even a requirement, for the abandoning of chords, scales and rhythmic meters.

Tradition and race

Since at least the emergence of bebop, forms of jazz that are commercially oriented or influenced by popular music have been criticized by purists. According to Bruce Johnson, there has always been a "tension between jazz as a commercial music and an art form".  Traditional jazz enthusiasts have dismissed bebop, free jazz, the 1970s jazz fusion era and much else as periods of debasement of the music and betrayals of the tradition. An alternative viewpoint is that jazz is able to absorb and transform influences from diverse musical styles,  and that, by avoiding the creation of 'norms', other newer, avant-garde forms of jazz will be free to emerge.

To some African Americans, jazz has highlighted their contribution to American society and helped bring attention to black history and culture, but for others, the music and term "jazz" are reminders of "an oppressive and racist society and restrictions on their artistic visions".  Amiri Baraka argues that there is a distinct "white jazz" music genre expressive of whiteness.  White jazz musicians appeared in the early 1920s in the Midwestern United States, as well as other areas. Bix Beiderbecke was one of the most prominent white jazz musicians.  An influential style referred to as the Chicago School (or Chicago Style) was developed by white musicians including Bud Freeman, Jimmy McPartland. Frank Teschemacher, Dave Tough, and Eddie Condon. Others from Chicago such as Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa became leading members of big-band swing during the 1930s. 

Role of women

Women jazz performers and composers have contributed throughout jazz history. While women such as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Ethel Waters, Betty Carter, Adelaide Hall, Abbey Lincoln, and Anita O'Day are famous for their jazz singing, women have achieved much less recognition for their contributions as composers, bandleaders, and instrumental performers.  Other notable jazz women include piano player Lil Hardin Armstrong and jazz songwriters Irene Higginbotham (1918-1988) and Dorothy Fields (1905-1974). Women began playing instruments in jazz in the early 1920s, with the piano being one of the earliest instruments used which allowed female artists a degree of social acceptance. Some well known artists of the time include Sweet Emma Barrett, Mary Lou Williams, Billie Pierce, Jeanette Kimball and Lovie Austin.

When the men were drafted for WWII, many all-women big band jazz bands took over.  The International Sweethearts of Rhythm (founded 1937) was a well-known jazz group of this era, becoming the first all-women integrated band in the U.S., touring Europe in 1945 and becoming the first black women to travel with the USO.  The dress codes of the era required women to wear strapless dresses and high heeled shoes, which was somewhat of a hindrance to the integration of women into the big bands of suit-wearing men. Nevertheless, women were hired into many of the big-league big bands such as Woody Herman and Gerald Wilson.

History

Jazz originated in the late 19th to early 20th century as interpretations of American and European classical music entwined with African and slave folk songs and the influences of West African culture. Its composition and style have changed many times throughout the years with each performer's personal interpretation and improvisation, which is also one of the greatest appeals of the genre.

Origins

Blended African and European music sensibilities

By 1866, the Atlantic slave trade had brought nearly 400,000 Africans to North America.   The slaves came largely from West Africa and the greater Congo River basin, and brought strong musical traditions with them.  The African traditions primarily make use of a single-line melody and call-and-response pattern, and the rhythms have a counter-metric structure and reflect African speech patterns.

Lavish festivals featuring African-based dances to drums were organized on Sundays at Place Congo, or Congo Square, in New Orleans until 1843.  There are historical accounts of other music and dance gatherings elsewhere in the southern United States. Robert Palmer said of percussive slave music:

Usually such music was associated with annual festivals, when the year's crop was harvested and several days were set aside for celebration. As late as 1861, a traveler in North Carolina saw dancers dressed in costumes that included horned headdresses and cow tails and heard music provided by a sheepskin-covered "gumbo box", apparently a frame drum; triangles and jawbones furnished the auxiliary percussion. There are quite a few [accounts] from the southeastern states and Louisiana dating from the period 1820–1850. Some of the earliest [Mississippi] Delta settlers came from the vicinity of New Orleans, where drumming was never actively discouraged for very long and homemade drums were used to accompany public dancing until the outbreak of the Civil War. 

Another influence came from the harmonic style of hymns of the church, which black slaves had learned and incorporated into their own music as spirituals.  The origins of the blues are undocumented, though they can be seen as the secular counterpart of the spirituals. However, as Gerhard Kubik points out, whereas the spirituals are homophonic, rural blues and early jazz "was largely based on concepts of heterophony." 

During the early 19th century an increasing number of black musicians learned to play European instruments, particularly the violin, which they used to parody European dance music in their own cakewalk dances. In turn, European-American minstrel show performers in blackface popularized the music internationally, combining syncopation with European harmonic accompaniment. In the mid-1800s the white New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk adapted slave rhythms and melodies from Cuba and other Caribbean islands into piano salon music. New Orleans was the main nexus between the Afro-Caribbean and African-American cultures.

African rhythmic retention

The "Black Codes" outlawed drumming by slaves, which meant that African drumming traditions were not preserved in North America, unlike in Cuba, Haiti, and elsewhere in the Caribbean. African-based rhythmic patterns were retained in the United States in large part through "body rhythms" such as stomping, clapping, and patting juba. 

In the opinion of jazz historian Ernest Borneman, what preceded New Orleans jazz before 1890 was "Afro-Latin music", similar to what was played in the Caribbean at the time.  A three-stroke pattern known in Cuban music as tresillo is a fundamental rhythmic figure heard in many different slave musics of the Caribbean, as well as the Afro-Caribbean folk dances performed in New Orleans Congo Square and Gottschalk's compositions (for example "Souvenirs From Havana" (1859)). Tresillo is the most basic and most prevalent duple-pulse rhythmic cell in sub-Saharan African music traditions and the music of the African Diaspora.  

Tresillo is heard prominently in New Orleans second line music and in other forms of popular music from that city from the turn of the 20th century to present.  "By and large the simpler African rhythmic patterns survived in jazz ... because they could be adapted more readily to European rhythmic conceptions," the Jazz historian Gunther Schuller observed. "Some survived, others were discarded as the Europeanization progressed." 

In the post-Civil War period (after 1865), African Americans were able to obtain surplus military bass drums, snare drums and fifes, and an original African-American drum and fife music emerged, featuring tresillo and related syncopated rhythmic figures.  This was a drumming tradition that was distinct from its Caribbean counterparts, expressing a uniquely African-American sensibility. "The snare and bass drummers played syncopated cross-rhythms," observed the writer Robert Palmer (writer), speculating that "this tradition must have dated back to the latter half of the nineteenth century, and it could have not have developed in the first place if there hadn't been a reservoir of polyrhythmic sophistication in the culture it nurtured." 

"Spanish tinge"—the Afro-Cuban rhythmic influence

African-American music began incorporating Afro-Cuban rhythmic motifs in the 19th century, when the habanera (Cuban contradanza) gained international popularity.  Musicians from Havana and New Orleans would take the twice-daily ferry between both cities to perform, and the habanera quickly took root in the musically fertile Crescent City. John Storm Roberts states that the musical genre habanera "reached the U.S. twenty years before the first rag was published."  For the more than quarter-century in which the cakewalk, ragtime, and proto-jazz were forming and developing, the habanera was a consistent part of African-American popular music. 

Habaneras were widely available as sheet music, and were the first written music which was rhythmically based on an African motif (1803),  From the perspective of African-American music, the habanera rhythm (also known as congo,  tango-congo,  or tango. ) can be thought of as a combination of tresillo and the backbeat.  The habanera was the first of many Cuban music genres which enjoyed periods of popularity in the United States, and reinforced and inspired the use of tresillo-based rhythms in African-American music.

New Orleans native Louis Moreau Gottschalk's piano piece "Ojos Criollos (Danse Cubaine)" (1860) was influenced by the composer's studies in Cuba: the habanera rhythm is clearly heard in the left hand.  In Gottschalk's symphonic work "A Night in the Tropics" (1859), the tresillo variant cinquillo appears extensively.  The figure was later used by Scott Joplin and other ragtime composers.

Comparing the music of New Orleans with the music of Cuba, Wynton Marsalis observes that tresillo is the New Orleans "clave", a Spanish word meaning 'code' or 'key', as in the key to a puzzle, or mystery.  Although technically the pattern is only half a clave, Marsalis makes the point that the single-celled figure is the guide-pattern of New Orleans music. Jelly Roll Morton called the rhythmic figure the Spanish tinge, and considered it an essential ingredient of jazz. 

1890s–1910s

Ragtime

The abolition of slavery in 1865 led to new opportunities for the education of freed African Americans. Although strict segregation limited employment opportunities for most blacks, many were able to find work in entertainment. Black musicians were able to provide entertainment in dances, minstrel shows, and in vaudeville, during which time many marching bands were formed. Black pianists played in bars, clubs and brothels, as ragtime developed.  

Ragtime appeared as sheet music, popularized by African-American musicians such as the entertainer Ernest Hogan, whose hit songs appeared in 1895. Two years later, Vess Ossman recorded a medley of these songs as a banjo solo known as "Rag Time Medley".   Also in 1897, the white composer William H. Krell published his "Mississippi Rag" as the first written piano instrumental ragtime piece, and Tom Turpin published his "Harlem Rag", the first rag published by an African-American.

The classically trained pianist Scott Joplin produced his "Original Rags" in 1898, and in 1899 had an international hit with "Maple Leaf Rag", a multi-strain ragtime march with four parts that feature recurring themes and a bass line with copious seventh chords. Its structure was the basis for many other rags, and the syncopations in the right hand, especially in the transition between the first and second strain, were novel at the time. 

African-based rhythmic patterns such as tresillo and its variants, the habanera rhythm and cinquillo, are heard in the ragtime compositions of Joplin, Turpin, and others. Joplin's "Solace" (1909) is generally considered to be within the habanera genre:  both of the pianist's hands play in a syncopated fashion, completely abandoning any sense of a march rhythm. Ned Sublette postulates that the tresillo/habanera rhythm "found its way into ragtime and the cakewalk,"  whilst Roberts suggests that "the habanera influence may have been part of what freed black music from ragtime's European bass." 

Blues

African genesis

Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre,  which originated in African-American communities of primarily the "Deep South" of the United States at the end of the 19th century from their spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants and rhymed simple narrative ballads. 

The African use of pentatonic scales contributed to the development of blue notes in blues and jazz.  As Kubik explains:
Many of the rural blues of the Deep South are stylistically an extension and merger of basically two broad accompanied song-style traditions in the west central Sudanic belt:
* A strongly Arabic/Islamic song style, as found for example among the Hausa. It is characterized by melisma, wavy intonation, pitch instabilities within a pentatonic framework, and a declamatory voice.
* An ancient west central Sudanic stratum of pentatonic song composition, often associated with simple work rhythms in a regular meter, but with notable off-beat accents (1999: 94). 

W. C. Handy: early published blues

W. C. Handy became intrigued by the folk blues of the Deep South whilst traveling through the Mississippi Delta. In this folk blues form, the singer would improvise freely within a limited melodic range, sounding like a field holler, and the guitar accompaniment was slapped rather than strummed, like a small drum which responded in syncopated accents, functioning as another "voice".  Handy and his band members were formally trained African-American musicians who had not grown up with the blues, yet he was able to adapt the blues to a larger band instrument format, and arrange them in a popular music form.

Handy wrote about his adopting of the blues:

The primitive southern Negro, as he sang, was sure to bear down on the third and seventh tone of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the cotton field of the Delta or on the Levee up St. Louis way, it was always the same. Till then, however, I had never heard this slur used by a more sophisticated Negro, or by any white man. I tried to convey this effect ... by introducing flat thirds and sevenths (now called blue notes) into my song, although its prevailing key was major ..., and I carried this device into my melody as well. 

The publication of his "Memphis Blues" sheet music in 1912 introduced the 12-bar blues to the world (although Gunther Schuller argues that it is not really a blues, but "more like a cakewalk" ). This composition, as well as his later "St. Louis Blues" and others, included the habanera rhythm,W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues: An Autobiography, edited by Arna Bontemps: foreword by Abbe Niles. Macmillan Company, New York; (1941), pp. 99, 100 (no ISBN in this first printing). and would become jazz standards. Handy's music career began in the pre-jazz era, and contributed to the codification of jazz through the publication of some of the first jazz sheet music.

Within the context of Western harmony

The blues form which is ubiquitous in jazz is characterized by specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues progression is the most common. An important part of the sound are the blue notes which, for expressive purposes, are sung or played flattened, or gradually bent (minor 3rd to major 3rd) in relation to the pitch of the major scale. The blues were the key that opened up an entirely new approach to Western harmony, ultimately leading to a high level of harmonic complexity in jazz.

New Orleans

The music of New Orleans had a profound effect on the creation of early jazz. Many early jazz performers played in venues throughout the city, such as the brothels and bars of the red-light district around Basin Street, known as "Storyville".  In addition to dance bands, there were numerous marching bands who played at lavish funerals (later called jazz funerals), which were arranged by the African-American and European American communities. The instruments used in marching bands and dance bands became the basic instruments of jazz: brass, reeds tuned in the European 12-tone scale, and drums. Small bands which mixed self-taught and well educated African-American musicians, many of whom came from the funeral-procession tradition of New Orleans, played a seminal role in the development and dissemination of early jazz. These bands travelled throughout Black communities in the Deep South and, from around 1914 onwards, Afro-Creole and African-American musicians played in vaudeville shows which took jazz to western and northern US cities.

In New Orleans, a white marching band leader named Papa Jack Laine integrated blacks and whites in his marching band. Laine was known as "the father of white jazz" because of the many top players who passed through his bands (including George Brunies, Sharkey Bonano and the future members of the Original Dixieland Jass Band). Laine was a good talent scout. During the early 1900s jazz was mostly done in the African-American and mulatto communities, due to segregation laws. The red light district of Storyville, New Orleans was crucial in bringing jazz music to a wider audience via tourists who came to the port city.  Many jazz musicians from the African-American communities were hired to perform live music in brothels and bars, including many early jazz pioneers such as Buddy Bolden and Jelly Roll Morton, in addition to those from New Orleans other communities such as Lorenzo Tio and Alcide Nunez. Louis Armstrong also got his start in Storyville  and would later find success in Chicago (along with others from New Orleans) after the United States government shut down Storyville in 1917. 

Syncopation

The cornetist Buddy Bolden led a band who are often mentioned as one of the prime originators of the style later to be called "jazz". He played in New Orleans around 1895–1906, before developing a mental illness; there are no recordings of him playing. Bolden's band is credited with creating the big four, the first syncopated bass drum pattern to deviate from the standard on-the-beat march.  As the example below shows, the second half of the big four pattern is the habanera rhythm.

Afro-Creole pianist Jelly Roll Morton began his career in Storyville. From 1904, he toured with vaudeville shows around southern cities, also playing in Chicago and New York. In 1905 he composed his "Jelly Roll Blues", which on its publication in 1915 became the first jazz arrangement in print, introducing more musicians to the New Orleans style. 

Morton considered the tresillo/habanera (which he called the Spanish tinge) to be an essential ingredient of jazz.  In his own words: Now in one of my earliest tunes, "New Orleans Blues," you can notice the Spanish tinge. In fact, if you can't manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz.

Morton was a crucial innovator in the evolution from the early jazz form known as ragtime to jazz piano, and could perform pieces in either style; in 1938, Morton made a series of recordings for the Library of Congress, in which he demonstrated the difference between the two styles. Morton's solos however were still close to ragtime, and were not merely improvisations over chord changes as in later jazz; but his use of the blues was of equal importance.

Swing

Morton loosened ragtime's rigid rhythmic feeling, decreasing its embellishments and employing a swing feeling.  Swing is the most important and enduring African-based rhythmic technique used in jazz. An oft quoted definition of swing by Louis Armstrong is: "if you don't feel it, you'll never know it."  The New Harvard Dictionary of Music states that swing is: "An intangible rhythmic momentum in jazz ... Swing defies analysis; claims to its presence may inspire arguments." The dictionary does nonetheless provide the useful description of triple subdivisions of the beat contrasted with duple subdivisions:  swing superimposes six subdivisions of the beat over a basic pulse structure or four subdivisions. This aspect of swing is far more prevalent in African-American music than in Afro-Caribbean music. One aspect of swing, which is heard in more rhythmically complex Diaspora musics, places strokes in-between the triple and duple-pulse "grids". 

New Orleans brass bands are a lasting influence, contributing horn players to the world of professional jazz with the distinct sound of the city whilst helping black children escape poverty. The leader of New Orleans' Camelia Brass Band, D'Jalma Ganier, taught Louis Armstrong to play trumpet; Armstrong would then popularize the New Orleans style of trumpet playing, and then expand it. Like Jelly Roll Morton, Armstrong is also credited with the abandonment of ragtime's stiffness in favor of swung notes. Armstrong, perhaps more than any other musician, codified the rhythmic technique of swing in jazz, and broadened the jazz solo vocabulary. 

The Original Dixieland Jass Band made the music's first recordings early in 1917, and their "Livery Stable Blues" became the earliest released jazz record.        That year, numerous other bands made recordings featuring "jazz" in the title or band name, but most were ragtime or novelty records rather than jazz. In February 1918 during World War I, James Reese Europe's "Hellfighters" infantry band took ragtime to Europe,  then on their return recorded Dixieland standards including "Darktown Strutters' Ball".

Other regions

In the northeastern United States, a "hot" style of playing ragtime had developed, notably James Reese Europe's symphonic Clef Club orchestra in New York, which played a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall in 1912.  The Baltimore rag style of Eubie Blake influenced James P. Johnson's development of stride piano playing, in which the right hand plays the melody, while the left hand provides the rhythm and bassline. 

In Ohio and elsewhere in the midwest the major influence was ragtime, until about 1919. Around 1912, when the four-string banjo and saxophone came in, musicians began to improvise the melody line, but the harmony and rhythm remained unchanged. A contemporary account states that blues could only be heard in jazz in the gut-bucket cabarets, which were generally looked down upon by the Black middle-class. 

1920s and 1930s

Jazz Age

  From 1920 to 1933 Prohibition in the United States banned the sale of alcoholic drinks, resulting in illicit speakeasies which became lively venues of the "Jazz Age", hosting popular music including current dance songs, novelty songs and show tunes.  Jazz began to get a reputation as being immoral, and many members of the older generations saw it as threatening the old cultural values and promoting the new decadent values of the Roaring 20s.  Professor Henry van Dyke of Princeton University wrote: "... it is not music at all. It's merely an irritation of the nerves of hearing, a sensual teasing of the strings of physical passion."  The media too began to denigrate jazz. The New York Times used stories and headlines to pick at jazz: Siberian villagers were said by the paper to have used jazz to scare off bears, when in fact they had used pots and pans; another story claimed that the fatal heart attack of a celebrated conductor was caused by jazz. 

In 1919 Kid Ory's Original Creole Jazz Band of musicians from New Orleans began playing in San Francisco and Los Angeles, where in 1922 they became the first black jazz band of New Orleans origin to make recordings.  That year also saw the first recording by Bessie Smith, the most famous of the 1920s blues singers.  Chicago meanwhile was the main center developing the new "Hot Jazz", where King Oliver joined Bill Johnson. Bix Beiderbecke formed The Wolverines in 1924.

Despite its Southern black origins, there was a larger market for jazzy dance music played by white orchestras.  In 1918 Paul Whiteman and his orchestra became a hit in San Francisco, California, signing with Victor Talking Machine Company in 1920 and becoming the top bandleader of the 1920s, giving "hot jazz" a white component, hiring white musicians including Bix Beiderbecke, Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey, Frankie Trumbauer, and Joe Venuti.  In 1924 Whiteman commissioned Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which was premiered by his orchestra.  After the band successfully toured Europe, huge hot jazz orchestras in theater pits caught on with other whites, including Fred Waring, Jean Goldkette, and Nathaniel Shilkret.  Whiteman's success was based on a "rhetoric of domestication" according to which he had elevated and rendered valuable (read "white") a previously inchoate (read "black") kind of music. 

Whiteman's success caused blacks to follow suit, including Earl Hines (who opened in The Grand Terrace Cafe in Chicago in 1928), Duke Ellington (who opened at the Cotton Club in Harlem in 1927), Lionel Hampton, Fletcher Henderson, Claude Hopkins, and Don Redman, with Henderson and Redman developing the "talking to one another" formula for "hot" Swing music. 

In 1924 Louis Armstrong joined the Fletcher Henderson dance band for a year, as featured soloist. The original New Orleans style was polyphonic, with theme variation and simultaneous collective improvisation. Armstrong was a master of his hometown style, but by the time he joined Henderson's band, he was already a trailblazer in a new phase of jazz, with its emphasis on arrangements and soloists. Armstrong's solos went well beyond the theme-improvisation concept, and extemporized on chords, rather than melodies. According to Schuller, by comparison, the solos by Armstrong's bandmates (including a young Coleman Hawkins), sounded "stiff, stodgy," with "jerky rhythms and a grey undistinguished tone quality."  The following example shows a short excerpt of the straight melody of "Mandy, Make Up Your Mind" by George W. Meyer and Arthur Johnston  (top), compared with Armstrong's solo improvisations (below) (recorded 1924).  (The example approximates Armstrong's solo, as it doesn't convey his use of swing.)

Also in the 1920s Skiffle, jazz played with homemade instruments such as washboard, jugs, musical saw, kazoos, etc. began to be recorded in Chicago, Ill., later merging with country music.

Armstrong's solos were a significant factor in making jazz a true 20th-century language. After leaving Henderson's group, Armstrong formed his virtuosic Hot Five band, where he popularized scat singing. 

Jelly Roll Morton recorded with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in an early mixed-race collaboration, then in 1926 formed his Red Hot Peppers.

By 1930 the New Orleans-style ensemble was a relic, and jazz belonged to the world. 

Swing

The 1930s belonged to popular swing big bands, in which some virtuoso soloists became as famous as the band leaders. Key figures in developing the "big" jazz band included bandleaders and arrangers Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Harry James, and Jimmie Lunceford.  Although it was a collective sound, swing also offered individual musicians a chance to "solo" and improvise melodic, thematic solos which could at times be very complex "important" music.

Swing was also dance music.  It was broadcast on the radio "live" nightly across America for many years, especially by Earl Hines and his Grand Terrace Cafe Orchestra broadcasting coast-to-coast from Chicago  (well placed for "live" US time-zones).

Over time, social strictures regarding racial segregation began to relax in America: white bandleaders began to recruit black musicians and black bandleaders white ones.  In the mid-1930, Benny Goodman hired pianist Teddy Wilson, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton and guitarist Charlie Christian to join small groups. In the 1930s, Kansas City Jazz as exemplified by tenor saxophonist Lester Young (inventor of much of hipster jargon) marked the transition from big bands to the bebop influence of the 1940s. An early 1940s style known as "jumping the blues" or jump blues used small combos, uptempo music and blues chord progressions, drawing on boogie-woogie from the 1930s.

Beginnings of European jazz

As only a limited number of American jazz records were released in Europe, European jazz traces many of its roots to American artists such as James Reese Europe, Paul Whiteman and Lonnie Johnson, who visited Europe during and after World War I. It was their live performances which inspired European audiences' interest in jazz, as well as the interest in all things American (and therefore exotic) which accompanied the economic and political woes of Europe during this time.  The beginnings of a distinct European style of jazz began to emerge in this interwar period.

British jazz began with a tour by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1919.  In 1926 Fred Elizalde and His Cambridge Undergraduates began broadcasting on the BBC.

This distinct style entered full swing in France with the Quintette du Hot Club de France, which began in 1934. Much of this French jazz was a combination of African-American jazz and the symphonic styles in which French musicians were well-trained; in this, it is easy to see the inspiration taken from Paul Whiteman, since his style was also a fusion of the two.  Belgian guitar virtuoso Django Reinhardt popularized gypsy jazz, a mix of 1930s American swing, French dance hall "musette" and Eastern European folk with a languid, seductive feel; the main instruments are steel stringed guitar, violin, and double bass, and solos pass from one player to another as the guitar and bass play the role of the rhythm section. Some music researchers hold that it was Philadelphia's Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti who pioneered the guitar-violin partnership typical of the genre,  which was brought to France after they had been heard live or on Okeh Records in the late 1920s. 

1940s and 1950s

"American music"—the influence of Ellington

By the 1940s, Duke Ellington's music had transcended the bounds of swing, bridging jazz and art music in a natural synthesis. Ellington called his music "American Music" rather than jazz, and liked to describe those who impressed him as "beyond category."  These included many of the musicians who were members of his orchestra, some of whom are considered among the best in jazz in their own right, but it was Ellington who melded them into one of the most well-known jazz orchestral units in the history of jazz. He often composed specifically for the style and skills of these individuals, such as "Jeep's Blues" for Johnny Hodges, "Concerto for Cootie" for Cootie Williams (which later became "Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me" with Bob Russell's lyrics), and "The Mooche" for Tricky Sam Nanton and Bubber Miley. He also recorded songs written by his bandsmen, such as Juan Tizol's "Caravan" and "Perdido", which brought the "Spanish Tinge" to big-band jazz. Several members of the orchestra remained with him for several decades. The band reached a creative peak in the early 1940s, when Ellington and a small hand-picked group of his composers and arrangers wrote for an orchestra of distinctive voices who displayed tremendous creativity. 

Bebop

In the early 1940s, bebop-style performers began to shift jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging "musician's music." The most influential bebop musicians included saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianists Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Clifford Brown, and drummer Max Roach. Divorcing itself from dance music, bebop established itself more as an art form, thus lessening its potential popular and commercial appeal.

Composer Gunther Schuller wrote:
 ... In 1943 I heard the great Earl Hines band which had Bird in it and all those other great musicians. They were playing all the flatted fifth chords and all the modern harmonies and substitutions and Dizzy Gillespie runs in the trumpet section work. Two years later I read that that was 'bop' and the beginning of modern jazz ... but the band never made recordings.  

Dizzy Gillespie wrote:
 ... People talk about the Hines band being 'the incubator of bop' and the leading exponents of that music ended up in the Hines band. But people also have the erroneous impression that the music was new. It was not. The music evolved from what went before. It was the same basic music. The difference was in how you got from here to here to here ... naturally each age has got its own shit. 

Rhythm

Since bebop was meant to be listened to, not danced to, it could use faster tempos. Drumming shifted to a more elusive and explosive style, in which the ride cymbal was used to keep time while the snare and bass drum were used for accents. This led to a highly syncopated linear rhythmic complexity. 

Harmony

Bebop musicians employed several harmonic devices which were not previously typical in jazz, engaging in a more abstracted form of chord-based improvisation. Bebop scales are traditional scales with an added chromatic passing note;  bebop also uses "passing" chords, substitute chords, and altered chords. New forms of chromaticism and dissonance were introduced into jazz, and the dissonant tritone (or "flatted fifth") interval became the "most important interval of bebop"  Chord progressions for bebop tunes were often taken directly from popular swing-era songs and reused with a new and more complex melody to form new compositions, a practice which was already well-established in earlier jazz, but came to be central to the bebop style. Bebop made use of several relatively common chord progressions, such as blues (at base, I-IV-V, but infused with II-V motion) and 'rhythm changes' (I-VI-II-V) - the chords to the 1930s pop standard "I Got Rhythm." Late bop also moved towards extended forms that represented a departure from pop and show tunes.

The harmonic development in bebop is often traced back to a transcendent moment experienced by Charlie Parker while performing "Cherokee" at Clark Monroe's Uptown House, New York, in early 1942:
 I'd been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used, ... and I kept thinking there's bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes. I couldn't play it.... I was working over 'Cherokee,' and, as I did, I found that by using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I'd been hearing. It came alive—Parker. 

Gerhard Kubik postulates that the harmonic development in bebop sprang from the blues and other African-related tonal sensibilities, rather than 20th-century Western art music as some have suggested:
 Auditory inclinations were the African legacy in [Parker's] life, reconfirmed by the experience of the blues tonal system, a sound world at odds with the Western diatonic chord categories. Bebop musicians eliminated Western-style functional harmony in their music while retaining the strong central tonality of the blues as a basis for drawing upon various African matrices. 

Samuel Floyd states that blues were both the bedrock and propelling force of bebop, bringing about three main developments:
* A new harmonic conception, using extended chord structures that led to unprecedented harmonic and melodic variety.
* A developed and even more highly syncopated, linear rhythmic complexity and a melodic angularity in which the blue note of the fifth degree was established as an important melodic-harmonic device.
* The reestablishment of the blues as the music's primary organizing and functional principle.

As Kubik explained:
While for an outside observer, the harmonic innovations in bebop would appear to be inspired by experiences in Western "serious" music, from Claude Debussy to Arnold Schoenberg, such a scheme cannot be sustained by the evidence from a cognitive approach. Claude Debussy did have some influence on jazz, for example, on Bix Beiderbecke's piano playing. And it is also true that Duke Ellington adopted and reinterpreted some harmonic devices in European contemporary music. West Coast jazz would run into such debts as would several forms of cool jazz, but bebop has hardly any such debts in the sense of direct borrowings. On the contrary, ideologically, bebop was a strong statement of rejection of any kind of eclecticism, propelled by a desire to activate something deeply buried in self. Bebop then revived tonal-harmonic ideas transmitted through the blues and reconstructed and expanded others in a basically non-Western harmonic approach. The ultimate significance of all this is that the experiments in jazz during the 1940s brought back to African-American music several structural principles and techniques rooted in African traditions 

These divergences from the jazz mainstream of the time initially met with a divided, sometimes hostile, response among fans and fellow musicians, especially established swing players, who bristled at the new harmonic sounds. To hostile critics, bebop seemed to be filled with "racing, nervous phrases".  But despite the initial friction, by the 1950s bebop had become an accepted part of the jazz vocabulary.

Afro-Cuban jazz (cu-bop)

Machito and Mario Bauza

The general consensus among musicians and musicologists is that the first original jazz piece to be overtly based in clave was "Tanga" (1943), composed by Cuban-born Mario Bauza and recorded by Machito and his Afro-Cubans in New York City. "Tanga" began as a spontaneous descarga (Cuban jam session), with jazz solos superimposed on top. 

This was the birth of Afro-Cuban jazz. The use of clave brought the African timeline, or key pattern, into jazz. Music organized around key patterns convey a two-celled (binary) structure, which is a complex level of African cross-rhythm.  Within the context of jazz however, harmony is the primary referent, not rhythm. The harmonic progression can begin on either side of clave, and the harmonic "one" is always understood to be "one". If the progression begins on the "three-side" of clave, it is said to be in 3-2 clave. If the progression begins on the "two-side", its in 2-3 clave. 

Bobby Sanabria mentions several innovations of Machito's Afro-Cubans, citing them as the first band: to wed big band jazz arranging techniques within an original composition, with jazz oriented soloists utilizing an authentic Afro-Cuban based rhythm section in a successful manner; to explore modal harmony (a concept explored much later by Miles Davis and Gil Evans) from a jazz arranging perspective; and to overtly explore the concept of clave counterpoint from an arranging standpoint (the ability to weave seamlessly from one side of the clave to the other without breaking its rhythmic integrity within the structure of a musical arrangement). They were also the first band in the United States to publicly utilize the term Afro-Cuban as the band's moniker, thus identifying itself and acknowledging the West African roots of the musical form they were playing. It forced New York City's Latino and African-American communities to deal with their common West African musical roots in a direct way, whether they wanted to acknowledge it publicly or not. 

Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo

It was Mario Bauzá who introduced bebop innovator Dizzy Gillespie to the Cuban conga drummer and composer Chano Pozo. Gillespie and Pozo's brief collaboration produced some of the most enduring Afro-Cuban jazz standards. "Manteca" (1947) is the first jazz standard to be rhythmically based on clave. According to Gillespie, Pozo composed the layered, contrapuntal guajeos (Afro-Cuban ostinatos) of the A section and the introduction, while Gillespie wrote the bridge. Gillespie recounted: "If I'd let it go like [Chano] wanted it, it would have been strictly Afro-Cuban all the way. There wouldn't have been a bridge. I thought I was writing an eight-bar bridge, but ... I had to keep going and ended up writing a sixteen-bar bridge."  The bridge gave "Manteca" a typical jazz harmonic structure, setting the piece apart from Bauza's modal "Tanga" of a few years earlier.

Gillespie's collaboration with Pozo brought specific African-based rhythms into bebop. While pushing the boundaries of harmonic improvisation, cu-bop, as it was called, also drew more directly from African rhythmic structures. Jazz arrangements with a "Latin" A section and a swung B section, with all choruses swung during solos, became common practice with many "Latin tunes" of the jazz standard repertoire. This approach can be heard on pre-1980 recordings of "Manteca", "A Night in Tunisia", "Tin Tin Deo", and "On Green Dolphin Street".

African cross-rhythm

Cuban percussionist Mongo Santamaria first recorded his composition "Afro Blue" in 1959. 
"Afro Blue" was the first jazz standard built upon a typical African three-against-two (3:2) cross-rhythm, or hemiola.  The song begins with the bass repeatedly playing 6 cross-beats per each measure of 12/8, or 6 cross-beats per 4 main beats—6:4 (two cells of 3:2). The following example shows the original ostinato "Afro Blue" bass line; the slashed noteheads indicate the main beats (not bass notes), where you would normally tap your foot to "keep time."

When John Coltrane covered "Afro Blue" in 1963, he inverted the metric hierarchy, interpreting the tune as a 3/4 jazz waltz with duple cross-beats superimposed (2:3). Originally a B pentatonic blues, Coltrane expanded the harmonic structure of "Afro Blue."

Perhaps the most respected Afro-cuban jazz combo of the late 1950s was vibraphonist Cal Tjader's band. Tjader had Mongo Santamaria, Armando Peraza, and Willie Bobo on his early recording dates.

Dixieland revival

In the late 1940s there was a revival of "Dixieland" music, harking back to the original contrapuntal New Orleans style. This was driven in large part by record company reissues of early jazz classics by the Oliver, Morton, and Armstrong bands of the 1930s. There were two types of musicians involved in the revival: the first group was made up of those who had begun their careers playing in the traditional style and were returning to it (or continuing what they had been playing all along), such as Bob Crosby's Bobcats, Max Kaminsky, Eddie Condon, and Wild Bill Davison.  Most of these players were originally Midwesterners, although there were a small number of New Orleans musicians involved. The second group of revivalists consisted of younger musicians, such as those in the Lu Watters band, Conrad Janis, and Ward Kimball and his Firehouse Five Plus Two Jazz Band. By the late 1940s, Louis Armstrong's Allstars band became a leading ensemble. Through the 1950s and 1960s, Dixieland was one of the most commercially popular jazz styles in the US, Europe, and Japan, although critics paid little attention to it.

Cool jazz and West Coast jazz

In 1944 jazz impresario Norman Granz organized the first Jazz at the Philharmonic concert in Los Angeles, which helped make a star of Nat "King" Cole and Les Paul.  In 1946 he founded Clef Records, discovering Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson in 1949, and merging Clef Records with his new label Verve Records in 1956, which advanced the career of Ella Fitzgerald et al.

By the end of the 1940s, the nervous energy and tension of bebop was replaced with a tendency toward calm and smoothness with the sounds of cool jazz, which favored long, linear melodic lines. It emerged in New York City, and dominated jazz in the first half of the 1950s. The starting point was a collection of 1949 and 1950 singles by a nonet led by Miles Davis, released as the Birth of the Cool (1957).  Later cool jazz recordings by musicians such as Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Gil Evans, Stan Getz, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Gerry Mulligan usually had a "lighter" sound that avoided the aggressive tempos and harmonic abstraction of bebop.

Cool jazz later became strongly identified with the West Coast jazz scene, as typified by singers Chet Baker, Mel Tormé, and Anita O'Day, but it also had a particular resonance in Europe, especially Scandinavia, where figures such as baritone saxophonist Lars Gullin and pianist Bengt Hallberg emerged.  The theoretical underpinnings of cool jazz were laid out by the Chicago pianist Lennie Tristano, and its influence stretches into such later developments as bossa nova, modal jazz, and even free jazz.

Hard bop

Hard bop is an extension of bebop (or "bop") music which incorporates influences from rhythm and blues, gospel music and blues, especially in the saxophone and piano playing. Hard bop was developed in the mid-1950s, coalescing in 1953 and 1954; it developed partly in response to the vogue for cool jazz in the early 1950s, and paralleled the rise of rhythm and blues. Miles Davis' 1954 performance of "Walkin'" at the first Newport Jazz Festival announced the style to the jazz world. The quintet Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, fronted by Blakey and featuring pianist Horace Silver and trumpeter Clifford Brown, were leaders in the hard bop movement along with Davis.

Modal jazz

Modal jazz is a development which began in the later 1950s which takes the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Previously, a solo was meant to fit into a given chord progression, but with modal jazz the soloist creates a melody using one (or a small number of) modes. The emphasis is thus shifted from harmony to melody:  "Historically, this caused a seismic shift among jazz musicians, away from thinking vertically (the chord), and towards a more horizontal approach (the scale),"  explained pianist Mark Levine.

The modal theory stems from a work by George Russell. Miles Davis introduced the concept to the greater jazz world with Kind of Blue (1959), an exploration of the possibilities of modal jazz which would become the best selling jazz album of all time. In contrast to Davis' earlier work with hard bop and its complex chord progression and improvisation, the entire Kind of Blue album was composed as a series of "modal sketches", in which each performer was given a set of scales that defined the parameters of their improvisation and style. "I didn't write out the music for Kind of Blue, but brought in sketches for what everybody was supposed to play because I wanted a lot of spontaneity,"  recalled Davis. The track "So What" has only two chords: D-7 and E-7. 

Other innovators in this style include Jackie McLean,  and two of the musicians who had also played on Kind of Blue: John Coltrane and Bill Evans.

By the 1950s, Afro-Cuban jazz had been using modes for at least a decade, as much of it borrowed from Cuban popular dance forms which are structured around multiple ostinatos with only a few chords. A case in point is Mario Bauza's "Tanga" (1943), the first Afro-Cuban jazz piece. Machito's Afro-Cubans recorded modal tunes in the 1940s, featuring jazz soloists such as Howard McGhee, Brew Moore, Charlie Parker and Flip Phillips. However, there is no evidence that Davis or other mainstream jazz musicians were influenced by the use of modes in Afro-Cuban jazz, or other branches of Latin jazz.

Free jazz

Free jazz, and the related form of avant-garde jazz broke through into an open space of "free tonality" in which meter, beat, and formal symmetry all disappeared, and a range of World music from India, Africa and Arabia were melded into an intense, even religiously ecstatic or orgiastic style of playing.  While loosely inspired by bebop, free jazz tunes gave players much more latitude; the loose harmony and tempo was deemed controversial when this approach was first developed. The bassist Charles Mingus is also frequently associated with the avant-garde in jazz, although his compositions draw from myriad styles and genres.

The first major stirrings came in the 1950s with the early work of Ornette Coleman (whose 1960 album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation coined the term) and Cecil Taylor.  In the 1960s exponents included Albert Ayler, Gato Barbieri, Carla Bley, Don Cherry, Larry Coryell, John Coltrane, Bill Dixon, Jimmy Giuffre, Steve Lacy, Michael Mantler, Sun Ra, Roswell Rudd, Pharoah Sanders, and John Tchicai.  In developing his late style, Coltrane was especially influenced by the dissonance of Ayler's trio with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray, a rhythm section honed with Cecil Taylor as leader.  In November 1961 Coltrane played a gig at the Village Vanguard, which resulted in the classic Chasin' the 'Trane, which Down Beat magazine panned as "Anti-Jazz".  On his 1961 tour of France he was booed, but persevered, signing with the new Impulse! Records in 1960 and turning it into "the house that Trane built", while championing many younger free jazz musicians, notably Archie Shepp, who often played with trumpeter Bill Dixon, who organized the 4-day "October Revolution in Jazz" in Manhattan in 1964, the first free jazz festival.

A series of recordings with the Classic Quartet in the first half of 1965 show Coltrane's playing becoming increasingly abstract, with greater incorporation of devices like multiphonics, utilization of overtones, and playing in the altissimo register, as well as a mutated return to Coltrane's sheets of sound. In the studio, he all but abandoned his soprano to concentrate on the tenor saxophone. In addition, the quartet responded to the leader by playing with increasing freedom.  The group's evolution can be traced through the recordings The John Coltrane Quartet Plays, Living Space and Transition (both June 1965), New Thing at Newport (July 1965), Sun Ship (August 1965) and First Meditations (September 1965).

In June 1965 Coltrane and 10 other musicians recorded Ascension, a 40-minute long piece without breaks that included adventurous solos by young avante-garde musicians as well as Coltrane, and was controversial primarily for the collective improvisation sections that separated the solos.  Dave Liebman later called it "the torch that lit the free jazz thing.".  After recording with the quartet over the next few months, Coltrane invited Pharoah Sanders to join the band in September 1965.  While Coltrane used over-blowing frequently as an emotional exclamation-point, Sanders would opt to overblow his entire solo, resulting in a constant screaming and screeching in the altissimo range of the instrument.

Free jazz in Europe

Free jazz quickly found a foothold in Europe, in part because musicians such as Ayler, Taylor, Steve Lacy and Eric Dolphy spent extended periods there, and European musicians Michael Mantler, John Tchicai et al. traveled to the U.S. to learn it firsthand.   A distinctive European contemporary jazz (often incorporating elements of free jazz but not limited to it) also flourished because of the emergence of European musicians such as Peter Brötzmann, John Surman, Zbigniew Namysłowski, Albert Mangelsdorff, Kenny Wheeler, and Mike Westbrook, who were anxious to develop new approaches reflecting their national and regional musical cultures and contexts.  Since the 1960s various creative centers of jazz have developed in Europe, such as the creative jazz scene in Amsterdam.  Following the work of veteran drummer Han Bennink and pianist Misha Mengelberg, musicians started to explore free music by collectively improvising until a certain form (melody, rhythm, or even famous song) is found by the band.  Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead documented the free jazz scene in Amsterdam and some of its main exponents such as the ICP (Instant Composers Pool) orchestra in his book New Dutch Swing.  Since the 1990s Keith Jarrett has been prominent in defending free jazz from criticism by traditionalists.

1960s and 1970s

Latin jazz

Latin jazz is the term used to describe jazz which employs Latin American rhythms, and is generally understood to have a more specific meaning than simply jazz from Latin America. A more precise term might be Afro-Latin jazz, as the jazz subgenre typically employs rhythms that either have a direct analog in Africa, or exhibit an African rhythmic influence beyond what is ordinarily heard in other jazz. The two main categories of Latin jazz are Afro-Cuban jazz and Brazilian jazz.

In the 1960s and 1970s many jazz musicians had only a basic understanding of Cuban and Brazilian music, and jazz compositions which used Cuban or Brazilian elements were often referred to as "Latin tunes", with no distinction between a Cuban son montuno and a Brazilian bossa nova. Even as late as 2000, in Mark Gridley's Jazz Styles: History and Analysis, a bossa nova bass line is referred to as a "Latin bass figure."  It was not uncommon during the 1960s and 1970s to hear a conga playing a Cuban tumbao while the drumset and bass played a Brazilian bossa nova pattern. Many jazz standards such as "Manteca", "On Green Dolphin Street" and "Song for My Father" have a "Latin" A section and a swung B section. Typically, the band would only play an even-eighth "Latin" feel in the A section of the head, and swing throughout all of the solos. Latin jazz specialists like Cal Tjader tended to be the exception. For example, on a 1959 live Tjader recording of "A Night in Tunisia", pianist Vince Guaraldi soloed through the entire form over an authentic mambo. 

Afro-Cuban jazz

Afro-Cuban jazz often uses Afro-Cuban instruments such as congas, timbales, güiro and claves, combined with piano, double bass, etc. Afro-Cuban jazz began with Machito's Afro-Cubans in the early 1940s, but took off and entered the mainstream in the late 1940s when bebop musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie and Billy Taylor began experimenting with Cuban rhythms. Mongo Santamaria and Cal Tjader further refined the genre in the late 1950s.

Although a great deal of Cuban-based Latin jazz is modal, Latin jazz is not always modal: it can be as harmonically expansive as post-bop jazz. For example, Tito Puente recorded an arrangement of "Giant Steps" done to an Afro-Cuban guaguancó. A Latin jazz piece may momentarily contract harmonically, as in the case of a percussion solo over a one or two-chord piano guajeo.

Guajeos

Guajeo is the name for the typical Afro-Cuban ostinato melodies which are commonly used motifs in Latin jazz compositions. They originated in the genre known as son. Guajeos provide a rhythmic and melodic framework that may be varied within certain parameters, whilst still maintaining a repetitive - and thus "danceable" - structure. Most guajeos are rhythmically based on clave (rhythm).

Guajeos are one of the most important elements of the vocabulary of Afro-Cuban descarga (jazz-inspired instrumental jams), providing a means of tension and resolution and a sense of forward momentum, within a relatively simple harmonic structure. The use of multiple, contrapuntal guajeos in Latin jazz facilitates simultaneous collective improvisation based on theme variation. In a way, this polyphonic texture is reminiscent of the original New Orleans style of jazz.

Afro-Cuban jazz renaissance

For most of its history, Afro-Cuban jazz had been a matter of superimposing jazz phrasing over Cuban rhythms. But by the end of the 1970s a new generation of New York City musicians had emerged who were fluent in both salsa dance music and jazz, leading to a new level of integration of jazz and Cuban rhythms. This era of creativity and vitality is best represented by the Gonzalez brothers Jerry (congas and trumpet) and Andy (bass).  During 1974-1976 they were members of one of Eddie Palmieri's most experimental salsa groups: salsa was the medium, but Palmieri was stretching the form in new ways. He incorporated parallel fourths, with McCoy Tyner-type vamps. The innovations of Palmieri, the Gonzalez brothers and others led to an Afro-Cuban jazz renaissance in New York City.

This occurred in parallel with developments in Cuba  The first Cuban band of this new wave was Irakere. Their "Chékere-son" (1976) introduced a style of "Cubanized" bebop-flavored horn lines that departed from the more angular guajeo-based lines which were typical of Cuban popular music and Latin jazz up until that time. It was based on Charlie Parker's composition "Billie's Bounce", jumbled together in a way that fused clave and bebop horn lines.  In spite of the ambivalence of some band members towards Irakere's Afro-Cuban folkloric / jazz fusion, their experiments forever changed Cuban jazz: their innovations are still heard in the high level of harmonic and rhythmic complexity in Cuban jazz, and in the jazzy and complex contemporary form of popular dance music known as timba.

Afro-Brazilian jazz

Brazilian jazz such as bossa nova is derived from samba, with influences from jazz and other 20th-century classical and popular music styles. Bossa is generally moderately paced, with melodies sung in Portuguese or English, whilst he related term jazz-samba describes an adaptation of street samba into jazz.

The bossa nova style was pioneered by Brazilians João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim, and was made popular by Elizete Cardoso's recording of "Chega de Saudade" on the Canção do Amor Demais LP. Gilberto's initial releases, and the 1959 film Black Orpheus, achieved significant popularity in Latin America; this spread to North America via visiting American jazz musicians. The resulting recordings by Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz cemented bossa nova's popularity and led to a worldwide boom, with 1963's Getz/Gilberto, numerous recordings by famous jazz performers such as Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, and the eventual entrenchment of the bossa nova style as a lasting influence in world music.

Brazilian percussionists such as Airto Moreira and Naná Vasconcelos also influenced jazz internationally by introducing Afro-Brazilian folkloric instruments and rhythms into a wide variety of jazz styles, thus attracting a greater audience to them.   

Post-bop

Post-bop jazz is a form of small-combo jazz derived from earlier bop styles. The genre's origins lie in seminal work by John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Charles Mingus, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. Generally, the term post-bop is taken to mean jazz from the mid-sixties onwards that assimilates influences from hard bop, modal jazz, the avant-garde and free jazz, without necessarily being immediately identifiable as any of the above.

Much post-bop was recorded for Blue Note Records. Key albums include Speak No Evil by Shorter; The Real McCoy by McCoy Tyner; Maiden Voyage by Hancock; Miles Smiles by Davis; and Search for the New Land by Lee Morgan (an artist who is not typically associated with the post-bop genre). Most post-bop artists worked in other genres as well, with a particularly strong overlap with the later hard bop.

Soul jazz

Soul jazz was a development of hard bop which incorporated strong influences from blues, gospel and rhythm and blues to create music for small groups, often the organ trio of Hammond organ, drummer and tenor saxophonist. Unlike hard bop, soul jazz generally emphasized repetitive grooves and melodic hooks, and improvisations were often less complex than in other jazz styles. It often had a steadier "funk" style groove, which was different from the swing rhythms typical of much hard bop.

Horace Silver had a large influence on the soul jazz style, with songs that used funky and often gospel-based piano vamps. Important soul jazz organists included Jimmy McGriff, Jimmy Smith and Johnny Hammond Smith, and influential tenor saxophone players included Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Stanley Turrentine.

African-inspired

Themes

There was a resurgence of interest in jazz and other forms of African-American cultural expression during the Black Arts Movement and Black nationalist period of the 1960s and 1970s. African themes became popular, and many new jazz compositions were given African-related titles: "Black Nile" (Wayne Shorter), "Blue Nile" (Alice Coltrane), "Obirin African" (Art Blakey), "Zambia" (Lee Morgan), "Appointment in Ghana" (Jackie McLean), "Marabi" (Cannonball Adderley), "Yoruba" (Hubert Laws), and many more. Pianist Randy Weston's music incorporated African elements, such as in the large-scale suite "Uhuru Africa" (with the participation of poet Langston Hughes) and "Highlife: Music From the New African Nations." Both Weston and saxophonist Stanley Turrentine covered the Nigerian Bobby Benson's piece "Niger Mambo", which features Afro-Caribbean and jazz elements within a West African Highlife style. Some musicians, including Pharoah Sanders, Hubert Laws and Wayne Shorter, began using African instruments such as kalimbas, bells, beaded gourds and other instruments which were not traditional to jazz.

Rhythm

During this period there was an increased use of the typical African 12/8 cross-rhythmic structure in jazz. Herbie Hancock's "Succotash" on Inventions and Dimensions (1963) is an open-ended modal 12/8 improvised jam, in which Hancock's pattern of attack-points, rather than the pattern of pitches, is the primary focus of his improvisations, accompanied by Paul Chambers on bass, percussionist Osvaldo Martinez playing a traditional Afro-Cuban chekeré part and Willie Bobo playing an Abakuá bell pattern on a snare drum with brushes.

The first jazz standard composed by a non-Latino to use an overt African 12/8 cross-rhythm was Wayne Shorter's "Footprints" (1967).  On the version recorded on Miles Smiles by Miles Davis, the bass switches to a 4/4 tresillo figure at 2:20. "Footprints" is not, however, a Latin jazz tune: African rhythmic structures are accessed directly by Ron Carter (bass) and Tony Williams (drums) via the rhythmic sensibilities of swing. Throughout the piece, the four beats, whether sounded or not, are maintained as the temporal referent. In the example below, the main beats are indicated by slashed noteheads, which do not indicate bass notes.

Pentatonic scales

The use of pentatonic scales was another trend associated with Africa. The use of pentatonic scales in Africa probably goes back thousands of years. 

McCoy Tyner perfected the use of the pentatonic scale in his solos,  and also used parallel fifths and fourths, which are common harmonies in West Africa. 

The minor pentatonic scale is often used in blues improvisation, and like a blues scale, a minor pentatonic scale can be played over all of the chords in a blues. The following pentatonic lick was played over blues changes by Joe Henderson on Horace Silver's "African Queen" (1965). 

Jazz pianist, theorist, and educator Mark Levine refers to the scale generated by beginning on the fifth step of a pentatonic scale as the V pentatonic scale. 

Levine points out that the V pentatonic scale works for all three chords of the standard II-V-I jazz progression.  This is a very common progression, used in pieces such as Miles Davis' "Tune Up." The following example shows the V pentatonic scale over a II-V-I progression. 

Accordingly, John Coltrane's "Giant Steps" (1960), with its 26 chords per 16 bars, can be played using only three pentatonic scales. Coltrane studied Nicolas Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, which contains material that is virtually identical to portions of "Giant Steps".  The harmonic complexity of "Giant Steps" is on the level of the most advanced 20th-century art music. Superimposing the pentatonic scale over "Giant Steps" is not merely a matter of harmonic simplification, but also a sort of "Africanizing" of the piece, which provides an alternate approach for soloing. Mark Levine observes that when mixed in with more conventional "playing the changes", pentatonic scales provide "structure and a feeling of increased space." 

Jazz fusion

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the hybrid form of jazz-rock fusion was developed by combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments and the highly amplified stage sound of rock musicians such as Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa. Jazz fusion often uses mixed meters, odd time signatures, syncopation, complex chords and harmonies.

According to AllMusic:
...until around 1967, the worlds of jazz and rock were nearly completely separate. [However, ...] as rock became more creative and its musicianship improved, and as some in the jazz world became bored with hard bop and did not want to play strictly avant-garde music, the two different idioms began to trade ideas and occasionally combine forces." 

Miles Davis' new directions

In 1969 Davis fully embraced the electric instrument approach to jazz with In a Silent Way, which can be considered his first fusion album. Composed of two side-long suites edited heavily by producer Teo Macero, this quiet, static album would be equally influential to the development of ambient music.

As Davis recalls:
The music I was really listening to in 1968 was James Brown, the great guitar player Jimi Hendrix, and a new group who had just come out with a hit record, "Dance to the Music", Sly and the Family Stone... I wanted to make it more like rock. When we recorded In a Silent Way I just threw out all the chord sheets and told everyone to play off of that." 

Two contributors to In a Silent Way also joined organist Larry Young to create one of the early acclaimed fusion albums: Emergency! by The Tony Williams Lifetime.

Psychedelic-jazz

Bitches Brew

Davis' Bitches Brew (1970) album was his most successful of this era. Although inspired by rock and funk, Davis' fusion creations were original, and brought about a new type of avant-garde, electronic, psychedelic-jazz, as far from pop music as any other Davis work.

Herbie Hancock

Pianist Herbie Hancock (a Davis alumnus) released four albums in the short-lived (1970–1973) psychedelic-jazz subgenre: Mwandishi (1972), Crossings (1973) and Sextant (1973). The rhythmic background was a mix of rock, funk, and African-type textures.

Musicians who had previously worked with Davis formed the four most influential fusion groups: Weather Report and Mahavishnu Orchestra emerged in 1971, and were soon followed by Return to Forever and The Headhunters.

Weather Report

Weather Report's self-titled electronic and psychedelic Weather Report debut album caused a sensation in the jazz world on its arrival in 1971, thanks to the pedigree of the group's members (including percussionist Airto Moreira), and their unorthodox approach to music. The album featured a softer sound than would be the case in later years (predominantly using acoustic bass with Shorter exclusively playing soprano saxophone, and with no synthesizers involved), but is still considered a classic of early fusion. It built on the avant-garde experiments which Joe Zawinul and Shorter had pioneered with Miles Davis on Bitches Brew, including an avoidance of head-and-chorus composition in favour of continuous rhythm and movement – but took the music further. To emphasise the group's rejection of standard methodology, the album opened with the inscrutable avant-garde atmospheric piece "Milky Way", which featured by Shorter's extremely muted saxophone inducing vibrations in Zawinul's piano strings while the latter pedalled the instrument. Down Beat described the album as "music beyond category", and awarded it Album of the Year in the magazine's polls that year.

Weather Report's subsequent releases were creative funk-jazz works. 

Jazz-rock

Although some jazz purists protested against the blend of jazz and rock, many jazz innovators crossed over from the contemporary hard bop scene into fusion. As well as the electric instruments of rock (such as electric guitar, electric bass, electric piano and synthesizer keyboards), fusion also used the powerful amplification, "fuzz" pedals, wah-wah pedals and other effects that were used by 1970s-era rock bands. Notable performers of jazz fusion included Miles Davis, Eddie Harris, keyboardists Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, vibraphonist Gary Burton, drummer Tony Williams (drummer), violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, guitarists Larry Coryell, Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin and Frank Zappa, saxophonist Wayne Shorter and bassists Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke. Jazz fusion was also popular in Japan, where the band Casiopea released over thirty fusion albums.

According to jazz writer Stuart Nicholson, "just as free jazz appeared on the verge of creating a whole new musical language in the 1960s ... jazz-rock briefly suggested the promise of doing the same" with albums such as Williams' Emergency! (1970) and Davis' Agharta (1975), which Nicholson said "suggested the potential of evolving into something that might eventually define itself as a wholly independent genre quite apart from the sound and conventions of anything that had gone before." This development was stifled by commercialism, Nicholson said, as the genre "mutated into a peculiar species of jazz-inflected pop music that eventually took up residence on FM radio" at the end of the 1970s. 

Jazz-funk

By the mid-1970s the sound known as jazz-funk had developed, characterized by a strong back beat (groove), electrified sounds  and, often, the presence of electronic analog synthesizers. Jazz-funk also draws influences from traditional African music, Afro-Cuban rhythms and Jamaican reggae, notably Kingston bandleader Sonny Bradshaw. Another feature is the shift of emphasis from improvisation to composition: arrangements, melody and overall writing became important. The integration of funk, soul and R&B music into jazz resulted in the creation of a genre whose spectrum is wide and ranges from strong jazz improvisation to soul, funk or disco with jazz arrangements, jazz riffs and jazz solos, and sometimes soul vocals.

Early examples are Herbie Hancock's Headhunters band and Miles Davis' On the Corner album, which in 1972 began Davis' foray into jazz-funk and was, he claimed, an attempt at reconnecting with the young black audience which had largely forsaken jazz for rock and funk. While there is a discernible rock and funk influence in the timbres of the instruments employed, other tonal and rhythmic textures, such as the Indian tambora and tablas and Cuban congas and bongos, create a multi-layered soundscape. The album was a culmination of sorts of the musique concrète approach that Davis and producer Teo Macero had begun to explore in the late 1960s.

Other trends

Jazz continued to expand and change, influenced by other types of music such as world music, avant garde classical music and rock and pop. Jazz musicians began to improvise on unusual instruments, such as the jazz harp (Alice Coltrane), the electrically amplified and wah-wah pedaled jazz violin (Jean-Luc Ponty) and the bagpipes (Rufus Harley).  In 1966 jazz trumpeter Don Ellis and Indian sitar player Harihar Rao founded the Hindustani Jazz Sextet.  In 1971 guitarist John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra began playing a mix of rock and jazz infused with East Indian influences.  In the 1970s the ECM record label began in Germany with artists including Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, the Pat Metheny Group, Jan Garbarek, Ralph Towner, Kenny Wheeler, John Taylor, John Surman, and Eberhard Weber, establishing a new chamber music aesthetic which featured mainly acoustic instruments, occasionally incorporating elements of world music and folk.

1980s

In 1987, the United States House of Representatives and Senate passed a bill proposed by Democratic Representative John Conyers, Jr. to define jazz as a unique form of American music, stating:
... that jazz is hereby designated as a rare and valuable national American treasure to which we should devote our attention, support and resources to make certain it is preserved, understood and promulgated.
It passed in the House of Representatives on September 23, 1987 and in the Senate on November 4, 1987.HR-57 Center [http://www.hr57.org/hconres57.html HR-57 Center for the Preservation of Jazz and Blues, with the six-point mandate.]

Resurgence of traditionalism

The 1980s saw something of a reaction against the Fusion and Free Jazz that had dominated the 1970s. Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis emerged early in the decade, and strove to create music within what he believed was the tradition, rejecting both fusion and free jazz and creating extensions of the small and large forms initially pioneered by artists such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, as well as the hard bop of the 1950s. It's debatable whether Marsalis' critical and commercial success was a cause or a symptom of the reaction against Fusion and Free Jazz and the resurgence of interest in the kind of jazz pioneered in the 1960s (particularly Modal Jazz and Post-Bop); nonetheless there were many other manifestations of a resurgence of traditionalism, even if Fusion and Free Jazz were by no means abandoned and continued to develop and evolve.

For example, several musicians who had been prominent in the fusion genre during the 1970s began to record acoustic jazz once more, including Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock. Other musicians who had experimented with electronic instruments in the previous decade had abandoned them by the 1980s, for example Bill Evans, Joe Henderson and Stan Getz. Even the 1980s music of Miles Davis, although certainly still fusion, adopted a far more accessible and recognisably jazz-oriented approach than his abstract work of the mid-1970s, such as a return to a theme-and-solos approach.

The emergence of young jazz talent beginning to perform in older, established musicians' groups further impacted the resurgence of traditionalism in the jazz community. In the 1970s, the groups of Betty Carter and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers retained their conservative jazz approaches in the midst of fusion and jazz- rock, and in addition to difficulty booking their acts, struggled to find younger generations of personnel to authentically play traditional styles such as hard bop and bebop. In the late 1970s, however, a resurgence of younger jazz players  in Blakey's band began to occur. This movement included musicians such as Valery Ponomarev and Bobby Watson, Dennis Irwin and James Williams.
In the 1980s, in addition to Wynton and Branford Marsalis, the emergence of pianists in the Jazz Messengers such as Donald Brown, Mulgrew Miller, and later, Benny Green, bassists such as Charles Fambrough, Lonnie Plaxico (and later, Peter Washington and Essiet Essiet) horn players such as Bill Pierce, Donald Harrison and later Javon Jackson and Terence Blanchard emerged as talented jazz musicians, all of whom made significant contributions in later 1990s and 2000s jazz music. 

[http://www.jazzdiscography.com/Artists/Blakey/chron.htmJ Drummerworld: Art Blakey].

The young Jazz Messengers' contemporaries, including Roy Hargrove, Marcus Roberts, Wallace Roney and Mark Whitfield were also influenced by Wynton Marsalis's emphasis toward jazz tradition. These younger rising stars rejected avant-garde approaches and instead championed the acoustic jazz sound of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and early recordings of the first Miles Davis quintet. This group of "Young Lions" sought to reaffirm jazz as a high art tradition comparable to the discipline of European classical music.
 

In addition, Betty Carter's rotation of young musicians in her group foreshadowed many of New York's preeminent traditional jazz players later in their careers. Among these musicians were Jazz Messenger alumni Benny Green, Branford Marsalis and Ralph Peterson, Jr., as well as Kenny Washington, Lewis Nash, Curtis Lundy, Cyrus Chestnut, Mark Shim, Craig Handy, Greg Hutchinson and Marc Cary, Taurus Mateen and Geri Allen. 

Blue Note Records's O.T.B. ensemble featured a rotation of young jazz musicians such as Kenny Garrett, Steve Wilson, Kenny Davis, Renee Rosnes, Ralph Peterson, Jr., Billy Drummond and Robert Hurst.
 

A similar reaction took place against free jazz. According to Ted Gioia:

the very leaders of the avant garde started to signal a retreat from the core principles of Free Jazz. Anthony Braxton began recording standards over familiar chord changes. Cecil Taylor played duets in concert with Mary Lou Williams, and let her set out structured harmonies and familiar jazz vocabulary under his blistering keyboard attack. And the next generation of progressive players would be even more accommodating, moving inside and outside the changes without thinking twice. Musicians such as David Murray or Don Pullen may have felt the call of free-form jazz, but they never forgot all the other ways one could play African-American music for fun and profit. 

Pianist Keith Jarrett — whose bands of the 1970s had played only original compositions with prominent free jazz elements — established his so-called 'Standards Trio' in 1983, which, although also occasionally exploring collective improvisation, has primarily performed and recorded jazz standards. Chick Corea similarly began exploring jazz standards in the 1980s, having neglected them for the 1970s.

Smooth jazz

In the early 1980s a commercial form of jazz fusion called "pop fusion" or "smooth jazz" became successful, garnering significant radio airplay in "quiet storm" time slots at radio stations in urban markets across the U.S. This helped to establish or bolster the careers of vocalists including Al Jarreau, Anita Baker, Chaka Khan and Sade, as well as saxophonists including Grover Washington, Jr., Kenny G, Kirk Whalum, Boney James and David Sanborn. In general, smooth jazz is downtempo (the most widely played tracks are of 90–105 beats per minute), and has a lead melody-playing instrument (saxophone, especially soprano and tenor, and legato electric guitar are popular).

In his Newsweek article "The Problem With Jazz Criticism",  Stanley Crouch considers Miles Davis' playing of fusion to be a turning point that led to smooth jazz. Critic Aaron J. West has countered the often negative perceptions of smooth jazz, stating:
I challenge the prevalent marginalization and malignment of smooth jazz in the standard jazz narrative. Furthermore, I question the assumption that smooth jazz is an unfortunate and unwelcomed evolutionary outcome of the jazz-fusion era. Instead, I argue that smooth jazz is a long-lived musical style that merits multi-disciplinary analyses of its origins, critical dialogues, performance practice, and reception. 

Acid jazz, nu jazz and jazz rap

Acid jazz developed in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s, influenced by jazz-funk and electronic dance music. Acid jazz often contains various types of electronic composition (sometimes including Sampling (music) or a live DJ cutting and scratching), but it is just as likely to be played live by musicians, who often showcase jazz interpretation as part of their performance. Jazz-funk musicians such as Roy Ayers and Donald Byrd are often credited as the forerunners of acid jazz. 

Nu jazz is influenced by jazz harmony and melodies, and there are usually no improvisational aspects. It can be very experimental in nature and can vary widely in sound and concept. It ranges from the combination of live instrumentation with the beats of jazz house (as exemplified by St Germain, Jazzanova and Fila Brazillia) to more band-based improvised jazz with electronic elements (for example The Cinematic Orchestra, Kobol and the Norwegian "future jazz" style pioneered by Bugge Wesseltoft, Jaga Jazzist and Nils Petter Molvær).

Jazz rap developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and incorporates jazz influences into hip hop. In 1988, Gang Starr released the debut single "Words I Manifest", which sampled Dizzy Gillespie's 1962 "Night in Tunisia", and Stetsasonic released "Talkin' All That Jazz", which sampled Lonnie Liston Smith. Gang Starr's debut LP No More Mr. Nice Guy (1989) and their 1990 track "Jazz Thing" sampled Charlie Parker and Ramsey Lewis. The groups which made up the Native Tongues Posse tended toward jazzy releases: these include the Jungle Brothers' debut Straight Out the Jungle (1988), and A Tribe Called Quest's People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (1990) and The Low End Theory (1991). Rap duo Pete Rock & CL Smooth incorporated jazz influences on their 1992 debut Mecca and the Soul Brother. Rapper Guru's Jazzmatazz series began in 1993, using jazz musicians during the studio recordings.

Though jazz rap had achieved little mainstream success, Miles Davis' final album Doo-Bop (released posthumously in 1992) was based around hip hop beats and collaborations with producer Easy Mo Bee. Davis' ex-bandmate Herbie Hancock also absorbed hip-hop influences in the mid-1990s, releasing the album Dis Is Da Drum in 1994.

Punk jazz and jazzcore

The relaxation of orthodoxy which was concurrent with post-punk in London and New York City led to a new appreciation of jazz. In London, the Pop Group began to mix free jazz and dub reggae into their brand of punk rock.  In New York, No Wave took direct inspiration from both free jazz and punk. Examples of this style include Lydia Lunch's Queen of Siam,Bangs, Lester. "Free Jazz / Punk Rock". Musician Magazine, 1979. [http://www.notbored.org/bangs.html] Access date: July 20, 2008. Gray, the work of James Chance and the Contortions (who mixed Soul with free jazz and punk) and the Lounge Lizards (the first group to call themselves "punk jazz").

John Zorn took note of the emphasis on speed and dissonance that was becoming prevalent in punk rock, and incorporated this into free jazz with the release of the Spy vs. Spy album in 1986, a collection of Ornette Coleman tunes done in the contemporary thrashcore style.  In the same year, Sonny Sharrock, Peter Brötzmann, Bill Laswell and Ronald Shannon Jackson recorded the first album under the name Last Exit (free jazz band), a similarly aggressive blend of thrash and free jazz.  These developments are the origins of jazzcore, the fusion of free jazz with hardcore punk.

M-Base

The M-Base movement started in the 1980s, when a loose collective of young African-American musicians in New York which included Steve Coleman, Greg Osby and Gary Thomas developed a complex but grooving  sound.

In the 1990s most M-Base participants turned to more conventional music, but Coleman, the most active participant, continued developing his music in accordance with the M-Base concept.  Coleman's audience decreased, but his music and concepts influenced many musicians,  both in terms of music technique  and of the music's meaning.  Hence, M-Base changed from a movement of a loose collective of young musicians to a kind of informal Coleman "school",  with a much advanced but already originally implied concept.  Steve Coleman's music and M-Base concept gained recognition as "next logical step" after Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. 

1990s–2010s

Since the 1990s jazz has been characterized by a pluralism in which no one style dominates, but rather a wide range of active styles and genres are popular. Individual performers often play in a variety of styles, sometimes in the same performance. Pianist Brad Mehldau and power trio The Bad Plus have explored contemporary rock music within the context of the traditional jazz acoustic piano trio, recording instrumental jazz versions of songs by rock musicians. The Bad Plus have also incorporated elements of free jazz into their music. A firm avant-garde or free jazz stance has been maintained by some players, such as saxophonists Greg Osby and Charles Gayle, while others, such as James Carter, have incorporated free jazz elements into a more traditional framework.

On the other side, even a singer like Harry Connick, Jr. (who has ten number-1 US jazz albums)  is sometimes called a jazz musician, although there are only a few elements from jazz history in his mainly pop oriented music. Other recent vocalists have achieved popularity with a mix of traditional jazz and pop/rock forms, such as Diana Krall, Norah Jones, Cassandra Wilson, Kurt Elling and Jamie Cullum.

A number of players who usually perform in largely straight-ahead settings have emerged since the 1990s, including pianists Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer, guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, vibraphonist Stefon Harris, trumpeters Roy Hargrove and Terence Blanchard, saxophonists Chris Potter and Joshua Redman, clarinetist Ken Peplowski and bassist Christian McBride.

Although jazz-rock fusion reached the height of its popularity in the 1970s, the use of electronic instruments and rock-derived musical elements in jazz continued in the 1990s and 2000s. Musicians using this approach include Pat Metheny, John Abercrombie, John Scofield and the Swedish group e.s.t.

In 2001 Ken Burns's documentary Jazz was premiered on PBS, featuring Wynton Marsalis and other experts reviewing the entire history of jazz to that time. The saxophone  (also referred to as the sax) is a family of woodwind instruments. Saxophones are usually made of brass and played with a single-reed mouthpiece similar to that of the clarinet. The saxophone family was invented by the Belgian instrument maker Adolphe Sax in 1840.  Adolphe Sax wanted to create a group or series of instruments that would be the most powerful and vocal of the woodwinds, and the most adaptive of the brass instruments, that would fill the vacant middle ground between the two sections. He patented the saxophone on June 28, 1846, in two groups of seven instruments each. Each series consisted of instruments of various sizes in alternating transposition. The series pitched in B and E, designed for military bands, have proved extremely popular and most saxophones encountered today are from this series. Instruments from the so-called "orchestral" series, pitched in C and F, never gained a foothold, and the B and E instruments have now replaced the C and F instruments when the saxophone is used in an orchestra.

The saxophone is  used in classical music (such as concert bands, chamber music, and solo repertoires), military bands, marching bands, and jazz (such as big bands and jazz combos). Saxophone players are called saxophonists.

History

The saxophone was developed in 1846 by Adolphe Sax, a Belgian instrument maker, flautist, and clarinetist. Born in Dinant and originally based in Brussels, he moved to Paris in 1842 to establish his musical instrument business.   Prior to his work on the saxophone, he had made several improvements to the bass clarinet by improving its keywork and acoustics and extending its lower range. Sax was also a maker of the then-popular ophicleide, a large conical brass instrument in the bass register with keys similar to a woodwind instrument. His experience with these two instruments allowed him to develop the skills and technologies needed to make the first saxophones.  As an outgrowth of his work improving the bass clarinet,  Sax began developing an instrument with the projection of a brass instrument and the agility of a woodwind. He wanted it to overblow at the octave, unlike the clarinet, which rises in pitch by a twelfth when overblown. An instrument that overblows at the octave, has identical fingering for both registers.

Sax created an instrument with a single-reed mouthpiece like a clarinet, conical brass body like an ophicleide, and some acoustic properties of both the horn and the clarinet.

Having constructed saxophones in several sizes in the early 1840s,  Sax applied for, and received, a 15-year patent for the instrument on June 28, 1846. The patent encompassed 14 versions of the fundamental design, split into two categories of seven instruments each, and ranging from sopranino to contrabass. Although the instruments transposed at either F or C have been considered "orchestral", there is no evidence that Sax intended this. As only three percent of Sax's surviving production were pitched in F and C, and as contemporary composers used the E alto and B bass saxophone freely in orchestral music, it is almost certain that Sax experimented to find the most suitable keys for these instruments, settling upon instruments alternating between E and B rather than those pitched in F or C, for reasons of tone and economy (the saxophones were the most expensive wind instruments of their day). The C soprano saxophone was the only instrument to sound at concert pitch. All the instruments were given an initial written range from the B below the treble staff to the F, one space above the three ledger lines above staff, giving each saxophone a range of two and a half octaves.

Sax's patent expired in 1866;  thereafter, numerous saxophonists and instrument manufacturers implemented their own improvements to the design and keywork. The first substantial modification was by a French manufacturer who extended the bell slightly and added an extra key to extend the range downwards by one semitone to B. It is suspected that Sax himself may have attempted this modification. This extension is now commonplace in almost all modern designs, along with other minor changes such as added keys for alternate fingerings. Using alternate fingerings allows a player to play faster and more easily. A player may also use alternate fingerings to bend the pitch. Some of the alternate fingerings are good for trilling, scales, and big interval jumps. 

Sax's original keywork, which was based on the Triebert system 3 oboe for the left hand and the Boehm clarinet for the right, was simplistic and made playing some legato passages and wide intervals extremely difficult to finger, so numerous developers added extra keys and alternate fingerings to make chromatic playing less difficult. While early saxophones had two separate octave vents to assist in the playing of the upper registers just as modern instruments do, players of Sax's original design had to operate these via two separate octave keys operated by the left thumb. A substantial advancement in saxophone keywork was the development of a method by which the left thumb operates both tone holes with a single octave key, which is now universal on modern saxophones.  Further developments were made by Selmer in the 1930s and '40s, including offsetting tone holes and a revamping of the octave key mechanism, beginning with balanced action instruments and continuing through their celebrated Mark VI line. One of the most radical, however temporary, revisions of saxophone keywork was made in the 1950s by M. Houvenaghel of Paris, who completely redeveloped the mechanics of the system to allow a number of notes (C, B, A, G, F and E) to be flattened by a semitone simply by pressing the right middle finger. This enables a chromatic scale to be played over two octaves simply by playing the diatonic scale combined with alternately raising and lowering this one digit.  However, this keywork never gained much popularity, and is no longer in use.

Description

The saxophone consists of an approximately conical tube, usually of thin brass, flared at the tip to form a bell. At intervals along the tube are between 20 and 23 tone holes of varying size and two very small vent holes to assist the playing of the upper register. These holes are covered by keys (also known as pad cups), containing soft leather pads, which are closed to produce an airtight seal. At rest some of the holes stand open and others are closed. The keys are activated by keytouches pressed by the fingers, either directly on the pad cup or connected to it with levers, either directly or with joints called "linkages."  The right thumb sits under a thumb rest to stabilize and balance the saxophone, while the weight of most saxophones is supported by a neckstrap attached to a strap ring on the rear of the body of the instrument. The fingering for the saxophone is a combination of that of the oboe with the Boehm system, and is very similar to the flute or the upper register of the clarinet. Instruments that play to low A have a left thumb key for that note.

The simplest design of saxophone is a straight conical tube, and the sopranino and soprano saxophones are usually of this straight design. However, as the lower-pitched instruments would be unacceptably long if straight, for ergonomic reasons, the larger instruments usually incorporate a U-bend ("bow") at, or slightly above, the third-lowest tone hole. As this would cause the bell of the instrument to point almost directly upward, the end of the instrument is either beveled or tilted slightly forward. This U-shape has become a distinctive feature of the saxophone family, to the extent that soprano and even sopranino saxes are sometimes made in the curved style, even though not strictly necessary. By contrast, tenors and even baritones have occasionally been made in the straight style.   Most commonly, however, the alto and tenor saxophones incorporate a detachable, curved "neck" above the highest tone hole, directing the mouthpiece to the player's mouth while the instrument is held in a playing stance. The baritone, bass, and contrabass saxophones accommodate the length of the bore with extra bows and right angle bends between the main body and the mouthpiece.

Materials

Most saxophones, both past and present, are made from brass. Despite this, they are categorized as woodwind instruments rather than brass, as the sound waves are produced by an oscillating wood reed, not the player's lips against a mouthpiece as in a brass instrument, and because different pitches are produced by breath wind passing opening and closing keys. The screw pins that connect the rods to the posts, as well as the needle and leaf springs that cause the keys to return to their rest position after being released, are generally made of blued or stainless steel. Since 1920, most saxophones have "key touches" (smooth replaceable pieces placed where the fingers touch the instrument) made from either plastic or mother of pearl.  Recently, some saxophones are offered with abalone or stone keytouches.

Other materials have been tried with varying degrees of success, such as the 1950s Grafton plastic alto saxophone and its recent successor, the polycarbonate saxophone, [http://www.vibratosax.com/ VibratoSax]. There is also the wooden Sawat saxophone created in Thailand on a small scale. Recent years have seen use higher copper alloys substituted for the "yellow brass" or "cartridge brass" that are most common, for visual and tonal effect.  Yanagisawa's 902 and 992 series saxophones are made with phosphor bronze, which is claimed to offer slightly different, more "vintage" tonal qualities from the brass 901 and 991 models of identical design.   Other saxophones made of high copper alloys are sold under the brands Chateau, Kessler, Saxgourmet, and Bauhaus Walstein.  Yanagisawa and other manufacturers, starting with the King Super 20 around 1950, have made saxophone necks, bells, or entire instruments from sterling silver.  Keilwerth and P. Mauriat have made saxes with a nickel silver body.   Opinions vary on the significance of body materials to sound.  With the exception of the identical brass and phosphor bronze Yanagisawa models, opportunities to isolate body materials from other variables in design and construction are lacking.

Prior to final assembly, the manufacturers usually apply a thin coating of clear or colored acrylic lacquer, or silver plate, over the bare brass. The lacquer or plating serves to protect the brass from oxidation, and maintains its shiny appearance. Several different types and colors of surface finish have been used over the years. It is also possible to plate the instrument with nickel or gold, and a number of gold-plated saxophones have been produced. Plating saxophones with gold is an expensive process because gold does not adhere directly to brass. As a result, the brass is first plated with silver, then gold.

Some players, sellers, and repair technicians argue that the type of lacquer or plating, or absence thereof,  may enhance an instrument's tone quality. The possible effects of different finishes on tone are difficult to isolate from the other variables that affect an instrument's tone colors. In any case, what constitutes a pleasing tone is a matter of personal preference.

Mouthpiece and reed

The saxophone uses a single-reed mouthpiece similar to that of the clarinet. Most saxophonists use reeds made from Arundo donax cane, but since the 20th century some have also been made of fiberglass and other composite materials. Saxophone reeds are proportioned slightly differently from clarinet reeds, being wider for the same length, although some soprano saxophonists use clarinet reeds on the soprano saxophone. Each size of saxophone (alto, tenor, etc.) uses a different size of reed. Reeds are commercially available in a vast array of brands, styles, and strengths. Players experiment with reeds of different strength (hardnesses) and material to find which strength and cut suits their mouthpiece, embouchure, physiology, and playing style.

The saxophone mouthpiece is larger than that of the clarinet, has a wider inner chamber, and lacks the cork-covered tenon of a clarinet mouthpiece because the saxophone neck inserts into the mouthpiece whereas the clarinet mouthpiece piece is inserted into the barrel. Saxophone and clarinet embouchures differ from each other in firmness, position of the lower lip, and range of entry angles.  The "long tones" exercise is used to develop embouchure, along with airstream and breath control. 

Mouthpieces come in a wide variety of materials, including vulcanized rubber (sometimes called hard rubber or ebonite), plastic, and metals such as bronze or surgical steel. Less common materials that have been used include wood, glass, crystal, porcelain, and even bone. According to Larry Teal, the mouthpiece material has little, if any, effect on the sound, and the physical dimensions give a mouthpiece its tone colour.  There are examples of "dark" sounding metal pieces and "bright" sounding hard rubber pieces – Marcel Mule, for example, used a metal mouthpiece to perform classical music.   Some contend that instability at the mouthpiece/neck connection moves harmonic frequencies off series with the fundamental frequency and each other, resulting in a "spread" sound, and that the weight of a metal mouthpiece counteracts that instability, increasing tonal "focus."  Mouthpiece design has a profound impact on tone.

Early mouthpieces were designed to produce a warm and round sound for classical playing. Among classical mouthpieces, those with a concave ("excavated") chamber are more true to Adolphe Sax's original design; these provide a softer or less piercing tone favored by some saxophonists, including students of Sigurd Raschèr, for classical playing. Saxophonists who follow the French school of classical saxophone playing, influenced by Marcel Mule, generally use mouthpieces with smaller chambers than Rascher style mouthpieces. The use of the saxophone in dance orchestras and jazz ensembles put a premium on dynamic range, projection, and tonal richness, leading to rapid innovation in chamber shape and tip design, and metal construction.  At the opposite extreme from the classical mouthpieces are those with a small chamber and a low clearance above the reed between the tip and the chamber, called high baffle. These produce a bright sound with maximum projection, suitable for having a sound stand out among amplified instruments and typical of modern pop and smooth jazz. Most saxophonists who play different styles have a mouthpiece suited for each style.

Saxophone family

The primary (military band) saxophone family alternates instruments in B and E. The other (orchestral) family patented by Sax, alternating instruments in C and F, has always been marginal, although some manufacturers tried to popularise the soprano in C (C soprano saxophone), the alto in F (mezzo-soprano saxophone), and the tenor in C (C melody saxophone) early in the twentieth century. The C melody enjoyed some success in the late 1920s and early 1930s as a parlor instrument. One company has recently revived production of the C soprano and C melody.  Instruments in F are rare.

Uses

In military bands and classical music

The saxophone first gained popularity in one of the uses it was designed for: military bands. Although the instrument was mostly ignored in Germany at first, French and Belgian military bands took full advantage of the instrument that Sax had designed. Most French and Belgian military bands incorporate at least a quartet of saxophones, comprising an E baritone, B tenor, E alto and B soprano. These four instruments have proved the most popular of all of Sax's creations, with the E contrabass and B bass usually considered impractically large and the E sopranino insufficiently powerful. British military bands tend to include at minimum two saxophonists, on the alto and tenor. Today, the saxophone is used in military bands all around the world.

The saxophone was subsequently introduced into the concert bands, which generally call for an E alto saxophone, a B tenor saxophone, and an E baritone saxophone. A typical high-level concert band includes two altos, one tenor, and one baritone. A B soprano saxophone is also occasionally used, in which case it is normally played by the first alto saxophonist. A bass saxophone in B is called for in some concert band music (especially music by Percy Grainger).

Saxophones are used in chamber music, such as saxophone quartets, reed quintets, and other chamber combinations of instruments.

The classical saxophone quartet consists of a soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, and baritone saxophone. There is a repertoire of classical compositions and arrangements for the SATB instrumentation dating back to the nineteenth century, particularly by French composers who knew Sax. Classical saxophone quartets include Quatuor Habanera, the h2 quartet, the Raschèr Saxophone Quartet, the Aurelia Saxophone Quartet, the New Century Saxophone Quartet. The quartets led by Marcel Mule and Daniel Deffayet, saxophone professors at the Conservatoire de Paris, were started in 1928 and 1953, respectively, and were highly regarded. The Mule quartet is often considered the prototype for future quartets, due the level of virtuosity demonstrated by its members and its central role in the development of the quartet repertoire. However, organised quartets did exist before Mule's ensemble, the prime example being the quartet headed by Eduard Lefebre (1834–1911), former soloist with the Sousa band, in the United States c. 1904–1911. Other ensembles most likely existed at this time as part of the saxophone sections of the many touring professional bands that existed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The saxophone is a member of the reed quintet. A reed quintet consists of an oboe, a clarinet, a saxophone, a bass clarinet, and a bassoon.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the saxophone found increased popularity in symphony orchestras. In one or another size, the instrument has also been found as a useful accompaniment to genres such as opera and choral music. Many musical theatre scores include parts for a saxophone, sometimes doubling another woodwind or brass instrument. In this way, the saxophone serves as a middle point between other woodwinds and the brass section, helping to blend them.

Selected works of the repertoire

* Fantasie sur un thème original (1860)—Jules Demersseman
* Rapsodie pour orchestre et saxophone [Rhapsody for orchestra and saxophone] (1901)—Claude Debussy
* Choral varié, Op.55 (1903)—Vincent d'Indy
* Légende, Op.66 (1918)—Florent Schmitt
* Saxophone Concerto (1934)—Lars-Erik Larsson
* Concerto in E major for alto saxophone and orchestra (1934)—Alexander Glazunov
* Concertino da camera (1935)—Jacques Ibert
* Aria pour saxophone alto (1936)—Eugène Bozza
* Sonata for alto saxophone and piano(1937)—Bernhard Heiden
* Scaramouche for alto saxophone and piano (1937)—Darius Milhaud
* Ballade for Alto Saxophone (1938)—Henri Tomasi
* Sonata for alto saxophone and piano, Op. 19 (1939)—Paul Creston
* Sonata for alto saxophone and piano (1943)—Paul Hindemith
* Concerto for alto saxophone and orchestra, Op. 26 (1944)—Paul Creston
* Concerto for alto saxophone and orchestra (1948)—Ingolf Dahl
* Fantasia for soprano saxophone, three horns, and strings (1948)—Heitor Villa-Lobos
* Concerto for alto saxophone and orchestra (1949)—Henri Tomasi
* Tableaux de Provence (1955)—Paule Maurice
* Prélude, cadence et finale (1956)—Alfred Desenclos
* Saxophone Concerto (1958)—Erland von Koch
* Concerto for alto saxophone and orchestra (1959)—Pierre Max Dubois
* Élégie et rondeau pour saxophone alto et orchestre (1961)—Karel Husa
* Sonata for alto saxophone (1970)—Edison Denisov
* Sonata for alto saxophone and piano, Op. 29 (1970)—Robert Muczynski
* Concerto for Saxophone Quartet (1995)—Philip Glass  
* Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra (2013)—John Adams

Selected saxophone quartets

* Premier Quatuor [Quartet No. 1], Op. 53 (1857)—Jean-Baptiste Singelée
* Quartette [Quartet] (1879)—Caryl Florio
* Saxophone Quartet in B, Op.109 (1932)—Alexander Glazunov
* Introduction et variations sur une ronde populaire (1934)—Gabriel Pierné
* Andante et Scherzo for saxophone quartet (1938)—Eugène Bozza
* Quatuor pour Saxophones [Quartet for Saxophones], Op. 102 (1939)—Florent Schmitt
* Quatuor pour Saxophones (1956)—Pierre Max Dubois
* Quatuor [Quartet] (1962)—Alfred Desenclos
* Suite for Saxophone Quartet (1979)—Paul Creston
* XAS (1987)—Iannis Xenakis

Selected orchestral pieces that include saxophones

* Boléro – Maurice Ravel
* Pictures at an Exhibition – Modest Mussorgsky/Maurice Ravel
* L'Arlésienne – Georges Bizet
* Romeo and Juliet – Sergei Prokofiev
* Lieutenant Kijé – Sergei Prokofiev
* Alexander Nevsky – Sergei Prokofiev
* Symphonic Dances – Sergei Rachmaninoff
* La création du monde – Darius Milhaud
* Symphony No. 6 – Ralph Vaughan Williams
* Symphony No. 9 – Ralph Vaughan Williams
* Job: A Masque for Dancing – Ralph Vaughan Williams
* Suite for Variety Orchestra – Dmitri Shostakovich
* Suite No. 1 – Dmitri Shostakovich
* Suite No. 2 – Dmitri Shostakovich
* The Golden Age – Dmitri Shostakovich
* Symphonia Domestica – Richard Strauss
* Neues vom Tage – Paul Hindemith
* Háry János – Zoltán Kodály
* Rhapsody in Blue – George Gershwin
* An American in Paris – George Gershwin
* Sinfonia da Requiem – Benjamin Britten
* Billy Budd – Benjamin Britten
* The Prince of the Pagodas – Benjamin Britten
* Violin Concerto – Alban Berg
* Lulu – Alban Berg
* Der Wein – Alban Berg
* Symphony No. 4 – Charles Ives
* Belshazzar's Feast – William Walton
* The Wooden Prince – Béla Bartók
* City Noir – John Adams
* West Side Story – Leonard Bernstein
* On the Waterfront – Leonard Bernstein
* Sylvia – Léo Delibes
* Werther – Jules Massenet
* Hérodiade – Jules Massenet
* Symphony No. 1 – Aaron Copland
* Piano Concerto – Aaron Copland
* Turandot – Giacomo Puccini

In jazz and popular music

Saxophones are also commonly used in jazz music, where it is one of the signature sounds. Beginning in the early 20th century,  saxophones became popular in dance orchestras, which were not jazz ensembles but influenced the format of the big swing era bands that were soon to follow. The arrival of the saxophone as a jazz instrument is attributed to tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins' stint with the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra starting in 1923.  The saxophone was soon embraced by Chicago-style musicians who added it, along with chordal instruments such as pianos, banjos, and guitars, to the trumpet-clarinet-trombone-bass-drums ensemble format inherited from New Orleans jazz.  The Duke Ellington Orchestra of the late 1920s featured saxophone-based ensemble sounds and solos by saxophonists Otto Hardwick, Johnny Hodges, and Harry Carney.  The swing bands of the 1930s utilized arrangements of saxophone and brass sections playing off each other in call-response patterns.  The influence of tenor saxophonist Lester Young with the Count Basie Orchestra in the late 1930s and the tremendous popularity of Coleman Hawkins' 1939 recording of "Body and Soul" marked the saxophone as an influence on jazz equal to that of the trumpet, which had been the defining instrument of jazz since its beginnings in New Orleans.  But the greatest influence of the saxophone on jazz was to occur a few years later, as alto saxophonist Charlie Parker became an icon of the bebop revolution that influenced generations of jazz musicians.  The small-group format of bebop and post-bebop jazz ensembles, typically with one to three lead instruments, usually including a saxophone, a chordal instrument, bass, and drums, gained ascendancy in the 1940s as musicians emphasized extended exploration utilizing the new harmonic and melodic freedoms that Charlie Parker and a few others, such as Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell pioneered.

In addition to the brilliance and virtuosity of Parker, the alto sax was also popularized in the 1950s by top saxophonists such as Sonny Stitt, Cannonball Adderley, Sonny Criss and Paul Desmond (of the Dave Brubeck Quartet). The tenor sax, a popular form of saxophone as a solo instrument in jazz, was popularized by jazz greats such as Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Dexter Gordon, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz and Zoot Sims. The baritone sax, featured more in big bands (notably by Harry Carney in the Duke Ellington Orchestra) and larger ensembles than as a solo instrument, was popularized in jazz as a solo instrument within small groups by musicians such as Serge Chaloff, Gerry Mulligan, Pepper Adams and Leo Parker.  The soprano saxophone was popularized by Sidney Bechet in early jazz, but then largely fell out of favor on the jazz scene until John Coltrane began to feature the instrument. Popular smooth jazz and contemporary pop musician Kenny G also uses the soprano sax as his principal instrument.

Saxophonists such as John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Sam Rivers and Pharoah Sanders again defined the forefront of creative exploration with the avant-garde movement of the 1960s.  Modal, harmolodic, and free jazz further removed boundaries and the new space was explored with every device that saxophonists could conceive of.  Sheets of sound, tonal exploration, upper harmonics, and multiphonics were hallmarks of the creative possibilities that saxophones offered in the new realm.  One lasting influence of the avant-garde movement is the exploration of non-Western ethnic sounds on the saxophone, for example, the African-influenced sounds used by Pharoah Sanders.  The devices of the avant-garde movement have continued to be influential in music that challenges the boundaries between avant-garde and other categories of jazz, such as that of alto-saxophonists Steve Coleman and Greg Osby.

A jazz saxophone quartet is usually made up of one B soprano, one E alto, one B tenor and one E baritone (SATB). On occasion, the soprano is replaced with a second alto sax (AATB); a few professional saxophone quartets have featured non-standard instrumentation, such as James Fei's Alto Quartet  (four altos) and Hamiet Bluiett's Bluiett Baritone Nation (four baritones). Recently, the World Saxophone Quartet has become known as the preeminent jazz saxophone quartet.

The saxophone, as a solo instrument or as part of a horn section, can also be heard in blues, soul music, rhythm and blues, reggae, ska, funk, rock and roll, and other forms of popular music. Some players of these genres include King Curtis, Maceo Parker, Bobby Keys, Clarence Clemons, the Memphis Horns, and the Phenix Horns.

Unusual saxophone variants

A number of saxes and saxophone-related instruments have appeared since Sax's original work, most with no significant success. These include the saxello, essentially a straight B soprano, but with a slightly curved neck and tipped bell; the straight alto; and the straight B tenor.  Since a straight-bore tenor is approximately five feet long, the cumbersome size of such a design makes it almost impossible to either play or transport. "King" Saxellos, made by the H. N. White Company in the 1920s, now command prices up to US $4,000. A number of companies, including Keilwerth, Rampone & Cazzani (altello model), L.A. Sax and Sax Dakota USA, are marketing straight-bore, tipped-bell soprano saxophones as saxellos (or "saxello sopranos").

The contralto saxophone, similar in size to the orchestral soprano, was developed in the late 20th century by Californian instrument maker Jim Schmidt.  This instrument has a larger bore and a new fingering system, and does not resemble the C melody instrument except for its key and register. Another new arrival to the sax scene is the soprillo sax, a piccolo-sized straight instrument with the upper speaker hole built into the mouthpiece. The instrument, which extends Sax's original family, as it is pitched a full octave higher than the B soprano sax, is manufactured by Benedikt Eppelsheim, of Munich, Germany. There is a rare prototype slide tenor saxophone. One company that produced a slide soprano saxophone was Reiffel & Husted, Chicago, ca. 1922 (catalog NMM 5385).   

Two of these variants were championed by jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who called his straight Buescher alto a "stritch" and his modified saxello a "manzello"; the latter featured a larger-than-usual bell and modified key work. Among some saxophonists, Kirk's terms have taken on a life of their own in that it is believed that these were "special" or "new" saxophones that might still be available. Though rare, the Buescher straight alto was a production item instrument while the manzello was indeed a saxello with a custom-made bell.

Another unusual variant of the saxophone is the Conn-O-Sax, a straight-conical bore instrument in F (one step above the E alto) with a slightly curved neck and spherical bell. This instrument, which combines a saxophone bore and keys with a bell shaped similar to that of a heckelphone, was intended to imitate the timbre of the English horn and was produced only in 1929 and 1930. The instrument has a key range from low A to high G. Fewer than 100 Conn-O-Saxes are in existence, and they are highly sought by collectors.

The tubax, developed in 1999 by the German instrument maker Benedikt Eppelsheim,  plays the same range, and with the same fingering, as the E contrabass saxophone; its bore, however, is narrower than that of a contrabass saxophone, making for a more compact instrument with a "reedier" tone (akin to the double-reed contrabass sarrusophone). It can be played with the smaller (and more commonly available) baritone saxophone mouthpiece and reeds. Eppelsheim has also produced subcontrabass tubaxes in C and B, the latter being the lowest saxophone ever made. Among the most recent developments is the aulochrome, a double soprano saxophone invented by Belgian instrument maker François Louis in 2001.

The fingering scheme of the saxophone, which has had only minor changes since the instrument's original invention, has presented inherent acoustic problems related to closed keys below the first open tonehole that affect response of, and slightly muffle, some notes.  There is also a lack of tactile consistency moving between key centers.  Extra effort is required from the player to adjust modes of muscle memory when moving between key centers.  Two efforts to remedy the acoustic problems and awkward aspects of the original fingering system are noteworthy.

The Leblanc Rationale and System  saxophones have key mechanics designed to remedy the acoustic problems associated with closed keys below the first open tonehole.  They also enable players to make half-step shifts of scales by depressing one key while keeping the rest of the fingering consistent with that of the fingering a half step away (which can also trip up players used to certain alternate fingerings on a regular saxophone).  Some Leblanc System features were built into the Vito Model 35 saxophones of the 1950s and 1960s.  The acceptance of what was arguably a superior system was impaired by the adjustment required of players switching between System and non-System horns, and the added costs associated with the compounded complexity of certain key mechanisms.

The chromatic or linear fingering, saxophone is a project of instrument designer and builder Jim Schmidt, developing a horn maximizing tactile and logical consistency between every interval regardless of the key, and avoiding the acoustic problems associated closed keys below the first open tone hole.   Several working prototypes have been built and presented at trade shows.   Production of this original and expensive saxophone is on an individual order basis.

Related instruments

Although not true saxophones, inexpensive keyless folk versions of the saxophone made of bamboo (recalling a chalumeau) were developed in the 20th century by instrument makers in Hawaii, Jamaica, Thailand, Indonesia, Ethiopia, and Argentina. The Hawaiian instrument, called a xaphoon, was invented during the 1970s and is also marketed as a "bamboo sax," although its cylindrical bore more closely resembles that of a clarinet, and its lack of any keywork makes it more akin to a recorder. Jamaica's best known exponent of a similar type of homemade bamboo "saxophone" was the mento musician and instrument maker 'Sugar Belly' (William Walker).  In the Minahasa region of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, there exist entire bands made up of bamboo "saxophones"  and "brass" instruments of various sizes. These instruments are imitations of European instruments, made using local materials. Very similar instruments are produced in Thailand.   In Argentina, Ángel Sampedro del Río and Mariana García have produced bamboo saxophones of various sizes since 1985, the larger of which have bamboo keys to allow for the playing of lower notes. 

Composition

Music for most saxophones is usually notated using treble clef. The standard written range extends from a B below the staff to an F or F three ledger lines above the staff. Most, if not all, intermediate and professional saxophones made today are built with F keys, with F included on even student instruments.

There are many models of soprano saxophone that have a key for high G, and most modern models of baritone saxophone have an extended bore and key to produce low A; it is also possible to play a low A on any saxophone by blocking the end of the bell, usually with the foot or inside of the left thigh. Low A keys however were not limited to just the baritone saxophone. For a short time Selmer Paris produced mark VI alto saxophones with the low A key. Notes above F are considered part of the altissimo register of any sax, and can be produced using advanced embouchure techniques and fingering combinations. Sax himself had mastered these techniques; he demonstrated the instrument as having a range of just beyond three octaves up to a (written) high B4. Modern saxophone players have extended this range to over 4 octaves on tenor and alto.

Because all saxophones use the same key arrangement and fingering to produce a given notated pitch, it is not difficult for a competent player to switch among the various sizes when the music has been suitably transposed, and many do so. Since the baritone and alto are pitched in E, players can read concert pitch music notated in the bass clef by reading it as if it were treble clef and adding three sharps to the key signature. This process, referred to as clef substitution, makes it possible for the Eb instruments to play from parts written for baritone horn, bassoon, euphonium, string bass, trombone, or tuba. This can be useful if a band or orchestra lacks one of those instruments.

Gallery

File:CurvedSopranoAltoTenorSaxophoneComparison.jpg|From left to right, an E alto saxophone, a curved B soprano saxophone, and a B tenor saxophone
File:ConnCMelodySax.JPG|A straight-necked Conn C melody saxophone (Conn New Wonder Series 1)  with a serial number that dates manufacture to 1922
File:KeilwerthAltoSax.JPG|Vintage silver-plated 'Pennsylvania Special' alto saxophone, manufactured by Kohlert & Sons for Selmer  in Czechoslovakia, circa 1930
File:Conn6M1.JPG|Conn 6M "Lady Face"  brass alto saxophone (dated 1935) in its original case
File:GraftonSax2.JPG|1950s Grafton alto made of plastic
File:Sax1.JPG|Yamaha YAS-25 alto saxophone. Circa 1990s
File:YanagisawaA9932J.JPG|Yanagisawa A9932J alto saxophone: has a solid silver bell and neck with solid phosphor bronze body. The bell, neck and key-cups are extensively engraved. Manufactured in 2008
File:BauhausWalsteinTenorSax1.JPG|Bauhaus Walstein tenor saxophone manufactured in 2008 from phosphor bronze
File:PMSA-300.jpg|The lower portion of a P. Mauriat alto saxophone, showing the mother of pearl key touches and engraved brass pad cups
File:Barisax.jpg|A Yamaha baritone saxophone
File:Mouthpiece tenor saxophone.jpg|Two mouthpieces for tenor saxophone: the one on the left is ebonite; the one on the right is metal.
File:Ochres N5.jpg|Ochres Music "No.5" hand-made professional alto saxophone with 24 carat gold seal on bell.

Notes Bird is a 1988 American biographical film, produced and directed by Clint Eastwood of a screenplay written by Joel Oliansky.  The film is a tribute to the life and music of jazz saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker. It is constructed as a montage of scenes from Parker's life, from his childhood in Kansas City, through his early death at the age of 34.

The film moves back and forth through Parker's history, blending moments to find some truth to his life.  Much of the movie revolves around his only grounding relationships with wife Chan Parker, Bebop pioneer trumpet player and band leader Dizzy Gillespie, and his influence (both musically and into the world of heroin addiction) on trumpet player Red Rodney.

Cast

*Forest Whitaker as Charlie "Bird" Parker
*Diane Venora as Chan Parker
*Michael Zelniker as Red Rodney
*Samuel E. Wright as Dizzy Gillespie
*Keith David as Buster Franklin
*Diane Salinger as Baroness Nica
*Michael McGuire as Brewster
*James Handy as Esteves
*Anna Thomson as Audrey
* Damon Whitaker as Young Bird
*Morgan Nagler as Kim
*Arlen Dean Snyder as Dr Heath
*Sam Robards as Moscowitz
*Penelope Windust as Bellevue Nurse
* Glenn Wright as Alcoholic Patient (as Glenn T. Wright)
*George Orrison as Patient with Checkers
*Bill Cobbs as Dr Caulfield

Plot

Charlie 'Bird' Parker (Forest Whitaker) is cheered by the audience to a small jazz club in New York. He goes home feeling exultant, but his wife Chan Parker -née Richardson- (Diane Venora) is in no mood to have sex or be kind to him. During the following row, Chan wonders whether she did good in letting him in. The shouting wakes the baby up, and Charlie says he'll tend to him; however Chan prefers that he keeps away from the baby. Charlie feels heart-broken at that, so he takes another dose of some drugs. His body can't take them anymore, so he falls to the floor all bloodied.

Charlie goes to hospital, but feels the need to take drugs, which leads to a fight with an alcoholic patient (George Orrison). The director of the clinic worries about the finances of the treatment, and Chan blames his painful bleeding ulcers for Charlie's fall into drugs yet again. Charlie has these flashbacks about him seeing a dead body and a relative asking young Charlie (Damon Whitaker) to take some revenge, and of a broken drum flying by. The director wants to give Charlie the shock treatment, but Chan feels that such a thing will end with Charlie's creativity and brilliant performances for good, which will leave unable to provide for himself and his family.

Chan reminiscences about Charlie's debut in New York -Charlie from "just around"-. The talkative doorman (Chris Bosley) is witness to that, the same as a young Chan. Charlie replaces Don. Another player throws his instrument to the river after hearing Charlie. Charlie appears on the first page of the newspaper. Charlie admits that he owes everything to Dizzy Gillespie (Samuel E. Wright) on his way to the probation panel judges. Morello (Richard Jeni) is trying to get Charlie some work. Agent Moscowitz (Sam Robards) keeps on pestering Charlie trying to get from him the names of his drug dealers.

Charlie reminiscences about him going on a tour to California, and waking Dizzy and his wife Lorraine in the middle of the night so that he writes some music he's just improvised. Charlie makes a pass at Chan. Frog (Tony Todd) is also interested in Charlie Parker's girl. Charlie used to say to Chan that she calms him down, but she wants to make men crazy.

After a performance, Esteves (James Handy) visits him but Charlie doesn't want to talk to him. Charlie goes out with Chan, but his drug habits get on the way. She is also constantly complaining about his many other girls. She gets pregnant from whoever knows who. Charlie leaves, leaving her with the problem.

One night, on a Hollywood tour, he meets Red Rodney (Michael Zelniker), who also plays the trumpet. Charlie tells him never to touch drugs and gives him the opportunity to play with him. That night, Charlie has sex with Audrey (Anna Levine). She takes him to the home of Stravinsky, whom Charlie admires. Charlie rings the bell. He goes to the door with his wife, but Charlie does not dare to say anything. Charlie longs to have such a good home at a nice neighbourhood close to Thomas Mann, Huxley and other famous writers. Audrey goes to the same dentist than Stravinsky, and that's why she knew where he lived.

Charlie's music is off the air due to morality concerns. Charlie has problems to find drugs, so he resorts to drinking. Chan tries to convince club owners (Steve Zettler & Al Pugliese) that he's ready to work, but its' difficult. Charlie goes to Chan's as his eldest daughter and her grandmother are waiting for him. Charlie is pressured into give the names of fellow drug addicts by Moscowitz. As Charlie is broke, he embarks on a Parisian tour, which is really successful that he has the opportunity to stay there forever with a better life, with people respecting him and his music.

Back in New York, he needs to convince his musicians John Wilson (Hubert Kelly) and Billy McNabb to wait for him. Red Rodney offers him a gid playing at a wedding to earn some money on the while. They are relatives of Red Rodney, who is a Jewish guy. He improvises, as usual. The bride's father (Lou Catell) is happy about it and pays him what was agreed. Charlie wants to open Birdland to play there. Rodney phones Chan home because Charlie has gone back to his old ways. Rodney is a star on his own right. Charlie offers Rodney some gigs deep south with a mixed band. Rodney is worried they'll get lynched, but Charlie thinks hes' got that covered. Charlie says that Rodney is an albino black singer so instead of going to a nicer white hotel, he will share the blacks' accommodation - which is not very good. Red has to sing the blues, at first with little confidence, but then he goes with it. Red is sick with kidney stones. When he has to go to see a local doctor (Richard McKenzie). The nurse (Gretchen Oehler) tends to him and gets his history of previous kindney stones. Later, Red Rodney buys some stronger painkiller from the corrupt local doctor, simply offering some extra cash. The nurse stays silent throughout.

Rodney and Charlie have a conversation in which each one doubts that the other one will see forty. Rodney gets a year on jail. Charlie keeps on playing, getting awards, recording songs and improvising. Chan has got three children by now. They have all moved onto a better apartment. One of her daughters, Pree, is deeply sick. Charlie feels so unwelcome that he leaves to a bar. He asks Rodney where he can find some more drugs. Soon afterwards, he's walking half-dizzy in the pouring rain. Moscowitz sends him to jail.

Charlie's lawyer (Peter Crook) cannot make much when he's before the judge (Mathew Faison). Charlie'd rather go to jail and have his cabaret card signed afterwards than to stay on probation for such a long time. Charlie is with a chick at a club while Chan has to take Pree to hospital. A nun (Patricia Herd) asks Chan whether Pree has been baptized. When there daughter dies Charlie sends a telegram expressing his condolences to Chan. He looks distraught but he stays with Audrey throughout the ordeal and gets drugged up again leading to Charlie making a suicide attempt to his life with iodine.

Chan moves with her children to a smaller shabby house which her mother can't rent, in the hopes of mending it and making a stable home for her family. Charlie visits them and then leaves to a gig in Chicago. He has to drive as nobody would pay for his plane tickets - he's got infamous for his lack of reliability, his missed gigs, etc... Back at New York, all the jazz bars have been turned into strip joints.

Bernie can't find Charlie any more work, as he has the tendency to show up too late. Bernie tells Charlie to call Chan, who is really worried about him. Charlie tells her about a Boston gig, and pretens that everything's all right. Chan tries to be supportive, but she can't believe him anymore.

Charlie goes to Baroness Nica's. She calls a doctor (Don Starr), who tells her that Charlie is beyond repair. Charlie drinks -as usual-, he watches TV and laughs. It looks like he's having a heart attack. He remembers about people he knew, people who called him Yardbird, Pree's coffin, the body he was supposed to be avenging... Charlie "Bird" Parker died that night, in 1955 of a heart attack. Nica tries to reach Chan on the phone desperately to give her the news. A reporter (Jim Lane) thinks that Charlie was 65 years old, and gets startled when Nica corrects him: Charlie was only 34.

Production

In the 1970s, Parker's friend and colleague Teddy Edwards shared his reminiscences of the saxophonist to Oliansky, who had wanted to make a biopic about Charlie Parker starring actor Richard Pryor.  The property was originally owned by Columbia Pictures, which traded the rights to Warner Bros. at Eastwood's instigation, in exchange for the rights to what would become Columbia's 1990 Kevin Costner vehicle, Revenge.   There was a delay of a few years while the trade was completed, and by then Pryor had lost interest.  The film was eventually shot in 52 days for $14.4 million, not counting Eastwood's fee,  although in interviews Eastwood sometimes said the film only cost $9 million to make. Locations used for filming include the Sacramento Valley, Los Angeles, and Pasadena in California as well as New York.

Reception

Bird received positive reviews from critics, scoring a 78% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Forest Whitaker's performance as Parker earned him critical acclaim and several awards, including the Best Actor award at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival  and a Golden Globe nomination.  In addition, the film also won the prestigious Grand Prix of the Belgian Film Critics Association and the Academy Award for Best Sound (Les Fresholtz, Dick Alexander, Vern Poore, Willie Burton). 

Music

Initially, when Columbia owned the project, the studio executives wanted to hire musicians to re-record all of Parker's music, largely because most of the original recordings were in mono, and considered of insufficient sound quality to accompany a feature film.  Eastwood had some recordings of Parker made by Parker's wife, Chan, from which he had a sound engineer electronically isolate Parker's solos.  Contemporary musicians such as Ray Brown, Walter Davis, Jr., Ron Carter, Barry Harris, and Red Rodney were then hired to record backing tracks on modern sound equipment.  Dizzy Gillespie was on tour at the time of recording, so trumpet player Jon Faddis was hired to record his parts. Charles "Charlie" Parker, Jr. (August 29, 1920 – March 12, 1955), also known as Yardbird and Bird, was an American jazz saxophonist and composer. 

Parker was a highly influential jazz soloist and a leading figure in the development of bebop,  a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, virtuosic technique and advanced harmonies. Parker was a blazingly fast virtuoso, and he introduced revolutionary harmonic ideas including rapid passing chords, new variants of altered chords, and chord substitutions. His tone ranged from clean and penetrating to sweet and somber.
Parker acquired the nickname "Yardbird" early in his career.  This, and the shortened form "Bird", continued to be used for the rest of his life, inspiring the titles of a number of Parker compositions, such as "Yardbird Suite", "Ornithology", "Bird Gets the Worm", and "Bird of Paradise". Parker was an icon for the hipster subculture and later the Beat Generation, personifying the jazz musician as an uncompromising artist and intellectual rather than just an entertainer. 

Childhood

Charles Parker, Jr. was born in Kansas City, Kansas, and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, the only child of Adelaide "Addie" (Bailey) and Charles Parker.  He attended Lincoln High School  in September 1934, but withdrew in December 1935, just before joining the local musicians' union. 

Parker began playing the saxophone at age 11, and at age 14 he joined his school's band using a rented school instrument. His father, Charles, was often absent but provided some musical influence; he was a pianist, dancer and singer on the T.O.B.A. circuit. He later became a Pullman waiter or chef on the railways. Parker's mother Addie worked nights at the local Western Union office. His biggest influence at that time was a young trombone player who taught him the basics of improvisation. 
Career

Early career

In the late 1930s Parker began to practice diligently. During this period he mastered improvisation and developed some of the ideas that led to bebop. In an interview with Paul Desmond, he said that he spent three to four years practicing up to 15 hours a day. 

Bands led by Count Basie and Bennie Moten certainly influenced Parker. He played with local bands in jazz clubs around Kansas City, Missouri, where he perfected his technique, with the assistance of Buster Smith, whose dynamic transitions to double and triple time influenced Parker's developing style.

In 1937, Parker played at a jam session at the Reno Club in Kansas City. His attempt to improvise failed when he lost the tune. This prompted Jo Jones, the drummer for Count Basie's Orchestra, to contemptuously throw a cymbal at his feet as a signal to leave the stage. However, rather than discouraging Parker, the incident caused him to vow to practice harder, and turned out to be a seminal moment in the young musician's career when he returned as a new man a year later. 

In 1938 Parker joined pianist Jay McShann's territory band.  The band toured nightclubs and other venues of the southwest, as well as Chicago and New York City.   Parker made his professional recording debut with McShann's band.

As a teenager, Parker developed a morphine addiction while hospitalized after an automobile accident, and subsequently became addicted to heroin. He continued using heroin throughout his life, and it ultimately contributed to his death. 

New York City

In 1939 Parker moved to New York City, to pursue a career in music. He held several other jobs as well. He worked for nine dollars a week as a dishwasher at Jimmie's Chicken Shack, where pianist Art Tatum performed. 

In 1942 Parker left McShann's band and played for one year with Earl Hines, whose band included Dizzy Gillespie, who later played with Parker as a duo. Unfortunately, this period is virtually undocumented, due to the strike of 1942–1943 by the American Federation of Musicians, during which time few professional recordings were made. Parker joined a group of young musicians, and played in after-hours clubs in Harlem, such as Clark Monroe's Uptown House and Minton's Playhouse. These young iconoclasts included Gillespie, pianist Thelonious Monk, guitarist Charlie Christian, and drummer Kenny Clarke. The beboppers' attitude was summed up in a famous quotation attributed to Monk by Mary Lou Williams: "We wanted a music that they couldn't play"  – "they" referring to white bandleaders who had usurped and profited from swing music.  The group played in venues on 52nd Street, including Three Deuces and the Onyx. While in New York City, Parker studied with his music teacher, Maury Deutsch. 

Bebop

According to an interview Parker gave in the 1950s, one night in 1939 he was playing "Cherokee" in a jam session with guitarist William "Biddy" Fleet when he hit upon a method for developing his solos that enabled one of his main musical innovations. He realized that the 12 semitones of the chromatic scale can lead melodically to any key, breaking some of the confines of simpler jazz soloing.

Early in its development, this new type of jazz was rejected by many of the established, traditional jazz musicians who disdained their younger counterparts. The beboppers responded by calling these traditionalists "moldy figs". However, some musicians, such as Coleman Hawkins and Tatum, were more positive about its development, and participated in jam sessions and recording dates in the new approach with its adherents.

Because of the two-year Musicians' Union ban of all commercial recordings from 1942 to 1944, much of bebop's early development was not captured for posterity. As a result, it gained limited radio exposure. Bebop musicians had a difficult time gaining widespread recognition. It was not until 1945, when the recording ban was lifted, that Parker's collaborations with Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Bud Powell and others had a substantial effect on the jazz world. (One of their first small-group performances together was rediscovered and issued in 2005: a concert in New York's Town Hall on June 22, 1945.) Bebop soon gained wider appeal among musicians and fans alike.

On November 26, 1945, Parker led a record date for the Savoy label, marketed as the "greatest Jazz session ever." Recording as Charlie Parker's Reboppers, Parker enlisted such sidemen as Gillespie and Miles Davis on trumpet, Curly Russell on bass and Roach on drums. The tracks recorded during this session include "Ko-Ko", "Billie's Bounce" and "Now's the Time".

Shortly afterward, the Parker/Gillespie band traveled to an unsuccessful engagement at Billy Berg's club in Los Angeles. Most of the group returned to New York, but Parker remained in California, cashing in his return ticket to buy heroin. He experienced great hardship in California, eventually being committed to Camarillo State Mental Hospital for a six-month period.

Charlie Parker with Strings

A longstanding desire of Parker's was to perform with a string section. He was a keen student of classical music, and contemporaries reported he was most interested in the music and formal innovations of Igor Stravinsky and longed to engage in a project akin to what later became known as Third Stream, a new kind of music, incorporating both jazz and classical elements as opposed to merely incorporating a string section into performance of jazz standards. On November 30, 1949, Norman Granz arranged for Parker to record an album of ballads with a mixed group of jazz and chamber orchestra musicians.  Six master takes from this session comprised the album Charlie Parker with Strings: "Just Friends", "Everything Happens to Me", "April in Paris", "Summertime", "I Didn't Know What Time It Was", and "If I Should Lose You".

Jazz at Massey Hall

In 1953, Parker performed at Massey Hall in Toronto, Canada, joined by Gillespie, Mingus, Powell and Roach. Unfortunately, the concert happened at the same time as a televised heavyweight boxing match between Rocky Marciano and Jersey Joe Walcott, so the musical event was poorly attended. Mingus recorded the concert, resulting in the album Jazz at Massey Hall. At this concert, Parker played a plastic Grafton saxophone.  At this point in his career he was experimenting with new sounds and materials. Parker himself explained the purpose of the plastic saxophone in a May 9, 1953 broadcast from Birdland and did so again in a subsequent May 1953 broadcast. Parker is known to have played several saxophones, including the Conn 6M, the Martin Handicraft and Selmer Model 22. He is also known to have performed with a King "Super 20" saxophone. Parker's King Super 20 saxophone was made specially for him in 1947. 

Personal life

Addiction

Parker's addiction to heroin caused him to miss performances and be considered unemployable. He frequently resorted to busking, receiving loans from fellow musicians and admirers, and pawning his saxophones for drug money. Heroin use was rampant in the jazz scene, and users could acquire it with little difficulty.

Although he produced many brilliant recordings during this period, Parker's behavior became increasingly erratic. Heroin was difficult to obtain once he moved to California, where the drug was less abundant, so he used alcohol as a substitute. A recording for the Dial label from July 29, 1946, provides evidence of his condition. Before this session, Parker drank a quart of whiskey. According to the liner notes of Charlie Parker on Dial Volume 1, Parker missed most of the first two bars of his first chorus on the track, "Max Making Wax". When he finally did come in, he swayed wildly and once spun all the way around, away from his microphone. On the next tune, "Lover Man", producer Ross Russell physically supported Parker. On "Bebop" (the final track Parker recorded that evening) he begins a solo with a solid first eight bars; on his second eight bars, however, he begins to struggle, and a desperate Howard McGhee, the trumpeter on this session, shouts, "Blow!" at him. Charles Mingus considered this version of "Lover Man" to be among Parker's greatest recordings, despite its flaws.  Nevertheless, Parker hated the recording and never forgave Ross Russell for releasing it. He re-recorded the tune in 1951 for Verve.

When Parker received his discharge from the hospital, he was clean and healthy. Before leaving California, he recorded "Relaxin' at Camarillo" in reference to his hospital stay. He returned to New York, resumed his addiction to heroin and recorded dozens of sides for the Savoy and Dial labels, which remain some of the high points of his recorded output. Many of these were with his so-called "classic quintet" including Davis and Roach. 

Death

Parker died on March 12, 1955, in the suite of his friend and patroness Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter at the Stanhope Hotel in New York City, while watching The Dorsey Brothers' Stage Show on television. The official causes of death were lobar pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer, but Parker also had an advanced case of cirrhosis and had suffered a heart attack. The coroner who performed his autopsy mistakenly estimated Parker's 34-year-old body to be between 50 and 60 years of age. 

Since 1950, Parker had been living with Chan Berg, the mother of his son Baird (who lived until 2014)  and his daughter Pree (who died as an infant of cystic fibrosis). He considered Chan his wife although he never married her, nor did he divorce his previous wife, Doris, whom he had married in 1948. His marital status complicated the settling of Parker's estate and would ultimately serve to frustrate his wish to be quietly interred in New York City.

Parker wished never to return to Kansas City, even in death. He had told Chan that he wanted to be buried in New York, the city he considered his home. Dizzy Gillespie paid for the funeral arrangements  and organized a lying-in-state, a Harlem procession officiated by Congressman and Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., as well as a memorial concert. Parker's body was flown back to Missouri, in accordance with his mother's wishes. Parker's widow criticized the dead man's family for giving him a Christian funeral even though they knew he was a confirmed atheist.  Parker was buried at Lincoln Cemetery in Missouri, in a hamlet known as Blue Summit, located close to I-435 and East Truman Road.

Parker's estate is managed by CMG Worldwide.

Music

Parker's style of composition involved interpolation of original melodies over existing jazz forms and standards, a practice known as contrafact and still common in jazz today. Examples include "Ornithology" (which borrows the chord progression of jazz standard "How High the Moon"), and "Yardbird Suite", the vocal version of which is called "What Price Love", with lyrics by Parker. The practice was not uncommon prior to bebop, but it became a signature of the movement as artists began to move away from arranging popular standards and toward composing their own material.

While tunes such as "Now's The Time", "Billie's Bounce", "Au Privave", "Barbados", "Relaxin' at Camarillo", "Bloomdido", and "Cool Blues" were based on conventional 12-bar blues changes, Parker also created a unique version of the 12-bar blues for tunes such as "Blues for Alice", "Laird Baird", and "Si Si." These unique chords are known popularly as "Bird Changes". Like his solos, some of his compositions are characterized by long, complex melodic lines and a minimum of repetition although he did employ the use of repetition in some tunes, most notably "Now's The Time".

Parker contributed greatly to the modern jazz solo, one in which triplets and pick-up notes were used in unorthodox ways to lead into chord tones, affording the soloist with more freedom to use passing tones, which soloists previously avoided. Parker was admired for his unique style of phrasing and innovative use of rhythm. Via his recordings and the popularity of the posthumously published Charlie Parker Omnibook, Parker's identifiable style dominated jazz for many years to come.

Other well-known Parker compositions include "Ah-Leu-Cha", "Anthropology", co-written with Gillespie, "Bird Gets the Worm", "Cheryl", "Confirmation", "Constellation", "Donna Lee", "Moose the Mooche", and "Scrapple from the Apple".

Miles Davis once said, "You can tell the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong. Charlie Parker." 

Discography

Awards and recognitions

Grammy Award

Grammy Hall of Fame

Recordings of Charlie Parker were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, which is a special Grammy award established in 1973 to honor recordings that are at least twenty-five years old, and that have "qualitative or historical significance."

Inductions

Government honors

In 1995, the U.S. Postal Service issued a 32-cent commemorative postage stamp in Parker's honor. 

In 2002, the Library of Congress honored his recording "Ko-Ko" (1945) by adding it to the National Recording Registry.

Musical tributes

*Jack Kerouac's spoken poem "Charlie Parker" to backing piano by Steve Allen on Poetry for the Beat Generation (1959)
* Lennie Tristano's overdubbed solo piano piece "Requiem" was recorded in tribute to Parker shortly after his death.
* Street musician Moondog wrote his famous "Bird's Lament" in his memory; published on the 1969 album Moondog.
* Since 1972, the Californian ensemble Supersax harmonized many of Parker's improvisations for a five-piece saxophone section.
* In 1973, guitarist Joe Pass released his album I Remember Charlie Parker in Parker's honor. 
* Weather Report's jazz fusion track and highly acclaimed big band standard "Birdland", from the Heavy Weather album (1977), was a dedication by bandleader Joe Zawinul to both Charlie Parker and the New York 52nd Street club itself.
* The biographical song "Parker's Band" was recorded by Steely Dan on its 1974 album Pretzel Logic.
* The avant-garde trombonist George Lewis recorded Homage to Charles Parker (1979).
* The opera Charlie Parker's Yardbird by , libretto by Bridgette A. Wimberly, was premiered by Opera Philadelphia on June 5, 2015, with Lawrence Brownlee in the title role. 

Charlie Parker Residence

From 1950 to 1954, Parker and his common-law wife, Chan Berg, lived in the ground floor of the townhouse at 151 Avenue B, across from Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan's East Village. The Gothic Revival building, which was built about 1849,, p. 69 was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994,  and was designated a New York City landmark in 1999. Avenue B between East 7th and East 10th Streets was given the honorary designation Charlie Parker Place in 1992.

Other tributes

* The 1957 story "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin features a jazz/blues playing virtuoso who names Bird as the "greatest" jazz musician, whose style he hopes to emulate.
* In 1949, the New York night club Birdland was named in his honor. Three years later, George Shearing wrote "Lullaby of Birdland", named for both Parker and the nightclub.
* A memorial to Parker was dedicated in 1999 in Kansas City at 17th Terrace and The Paseo, near the American Jazz Museum located at 18th and Vine, featuring a 10 ft tall bronze head sculpted by Robert Graham.
* The Charlie Parker Jazz Festival is a free two-day music festival that takes place every summer on the last weekend of August in Manhattan, New York City, at Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem and Tompkins Square Park in the Lower East Side, sponsored by the non-profit organization City Parks Foundation. The festival marked its 17th anniversary in 2009.
* In one of his most famous short story collections, Las armas secretas (The Secret Weapons), Julio Cortázar dedicated "El perseguidor" ("The Pursuer") to the memory of Charlie Parker. This piece examines the last days of Johnny, a drug-addict saxophonist, through the eyes of Bruno, his biographer. Some qualify this story as one of Cortázar's masterpieces in the genre.
* A biographical film called Bird, starring Forest Whitaker as Parker and directed by Clint Eastwood, was released in 1988. 
* In 1984, legendary modern dance choreographer Alvin Ailey created the piece For Bird – With Love in honor of Parker. The piece chronicles his life, from his early career to his failing health.
* In 2005, the Selmer Paris saxophone manufacturer commissioned a special "Tribute to Bird"  alto saxophone, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the death of Charlie Parker (1955–2005).
* Parker's performances of "I Remember You" and "Parker's Mood" (recorded for the Savoy label in 1948, with the Charlie Parker All Stars, comprising Parker on alto sax, Miles Davis on trumpet, John Lewis on piano, Curley Russell on bass, and Max Roach on drums) were selected by Harold Bloom for inclusion on his shortlist of the "twentieth-century American Sublime", the greatest works of American art produced in the 20th century. A vocalese version of "Parker's Mood" was a popular success for King Pleasure.
* Jean-Michel Basquiat created many pieces to honour Charlie Parker, including Charles the First, CPRKR and Discography I.
* Charlie Watts, drummer for the Rolling Stones, wrote a children's book entitled Ode to a High Flying Bird as a tribute to Parker. Watts has cited Parker as a major influence in his life as a youth learning to play jazz.
* The 2014 film Whiplash repeatedly makes reference to the 1937 incident at the Reno Cafe, changing the aim point of the cymbals to his head and pointing to it as proof that true genius is not born but made by relentless practice and pitiless peers.
* Jazz historian Phil Schaap hosts Bird Flight, a radio show on WKCR New York that is dedicated solely to Parker's music.

Notes
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