The forerunners of jazz

Jazz has special characteristics

• To this day, jazz music is characterized by peculiarities that distinguish it from other musical styles. There is the omnipresent improvisation, the rhythm form swing that belongs to jazz (not to be confused with the style swing), that Inclusion of the traditions of the individual styles of jazz and a special type of tone formation, paired with a special one Sound ideal.
• The instrumentation in jazz is as diverse as the musical influences. There are almost always double bass, piano, drum and wind instruments in the bands. Depending on the jazz direction, conga, banjo, tuba, guitar, horn, sousaphone, organ and various electronic instruments such as electric guitar or electric violin are also used.
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• Jazz, with its individual forerunners and styles, has traveled a long way in function. At first it was a regional music that was strongly based on the traditions of the population (New Orleans). The later swing was popular music compatible with the masses, from there it went straight to the art direction. Styles like bebop, free jazz and fusion are often only a delight for a small audience.
• Well-known greats in jazz from the past are: Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Josephine Baker and Nat King Cole. In the last few years Europe Pop-jazz in particular became known to a wide audience - through the works of Norah Jones.

Forerunner of the musical genre

• Which noises and which rhythms are regarded as music or simply as noise is very strongly influenced by culture. It is therefore generally difficult to determine the hours or even places where music was born. It's the same with jazz.


Dixieland and Jazz - parallels and differences simply explained

Dixieland is a variety of jazz. It developed at the beginning of the 20th Century ...

• What is now known as jazz had several birthplaces, all of which are in the United States. This is where musicians met each other who threw their various musical backgrounds together in bands. Late 19th In the early 1900s, there were bands in the south of the United States who mainly played street music.
• In these so-called marching bands there were influences from different countries depending on the line-up. The Creoles had French and Spanish rootwho have favourited African Americans had African roots. The fact that these people were able to play music together in New Orleans was due to the fact that racial segregation was relatively little pronounced at that time. So different ways of making music and styles could mix. The music played by the marching bands is called archaic jazz.
• Shortly afterwards, at the beginning of the 20th Century, ragtime was added, a notated piano style, which is characterized by the fact that the the right hand plays the chords and the left hand the rhythm section, i.e. the beat guitar and bass replaced. At the same time, the so-called New Orleans Jazz came up, which included elements of both ragtime and archaic jazz.
• New Orleans Jazz is often referred to as the music of the black population of New Orleans. At the same time, white musicians also played jazz in the same place, which is usually called Dixieland. In addition to New Orleans, there were other cities in the US where jazz and its precursors were played, so there is no single inventor of this style of music.
• Over the next few decades, more and more sub-forms of jazz developed, sometimes New developments, in some cases the resumption of old forms - for example swing, bebop, cool jazz, free Jazz and fusion.
• The origin of the word jazz is not clear; there are various theories on this. The designation became publicly known between 1913 and 1915 and prevailed no later than 1917 with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band from New Orleans.