The Hoofers Club was an African-American entertainment establishment and dancers' club hangout in Harlem , New York , that ran from the early 1920s until the early 1940s. It was founded and managed by Lonnie Hicks (1882–1953), an Atlanta -born ragtime pianist.
99-485: The Hoofers Club was a legendary site of some of the best of jazz and tap performers, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s. It was located on Harlem's "Swing Street," the stretch of 133rd Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues known for its music and dance venues. The Hoofers Club was actually a small room in the back of a comedy club. When you walked down the stairs of the Hoofers Club ... you would go into
198-518: 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 ' ". Jazz involves "a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role" and contains a "sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror
297-405: A bar of 4 time as an example in standard western musical notation), 5:2, 5:3, 5:4, etc. In auditory processing, rhythms are perceived as pitches once they have been sufficiently sped up. Furthermore, intervals of rhythms are perceived as intervals of pitch once sufficiently sped up. As such, there is a parallel between cross-rhythms and musical intervals : in an audible frequency range,
396-526: A coherent tradition". Duke Ellington , one of jazz's most famous figures, said, "It's all music." Although jazz is considered difficult to define, in part because it contains many subgenres, improvisation is one of its defining elements. The centrality of improvisation is attributed to the influence of earlier forms of music such as blues , a form of folk music which arose in part from the work songs and field hollers of African-American slaves on plantations. These work songs were commonly structured around
495-545: A compulsion — as well as a compositional device and an engine of expression. ” Another straightforward example of a cross-rhythm is 3 evenly spaced notes against 2 (3:2), also known as a hemiola . Two simple and common ways to express this pattern in standard western musical notation would be 3 quarter notes over 2 dotted quarter notes within one bar of 8 time, quarter note triplets over 2 quarter notes within one bar of 4 time. Other cross-rhythms are 4:3 (with 4 dotted eighth notes over 3 quarter notes within
594-473: A drum made by stretching skin over a flour-barrel. Lavish festivals with 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
693-469: A life-purpose while dealing with life's challenges. Many non-Saharan languages do not have a word for rhythm , or even music . From the African viewpoint, the rhythms represent the very fabric of life itself; they are an embodiment of the people, symbolizing interdependence in human relationships—Peñalosa (2009: 21). At the center of a core of rhythmic traditions within which the composer conveys his ideas
792-410: 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
891-529: A little room. The room was no bigger than 30x20 feet. It had a piano in the corner and a good floor. All the dancers around town came in. You could hear dancing the minute you got in the building. There was always dancin' going on, known dancers and unknown dancers. Among the tap dancers who appeared at the club were Bill Robinson , Jack Wiggins , Maceo Anderson , "Buddy" Bradley , John Bubbles , Honi Coles , Eddie Rector , Leonard Reed , Dewey Washington , Raymond Winfield , Roland Holder , Hal Leroy (one of
990-460: 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. The last four measures of Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899) are shown below. African-based rhythmic patterns such as tresillo and its variants,
1089-660: 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
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#17327874559941188-439: A repetitive call-and-response pattern, but early blues was also improvisational. Classical music performance is evaluated more by its fidelity to the musical score , with less attention given to interpretation, ornamentation, and accompaniment. The classical performer's goal is to play the composition as it was written. In contrast, jazz is often characterized by the product of interaction and collaboration, placing less value on
1287-412: A single meter. The duple beats are primary and the triple beats are secondary. The example below shows the African 3:2 cross-rhythm within its proper metric structure. The music of African xylophones , such as the balafon and gyil , is often based on cross-rhythm. In the following example, a Ghanaian gyil sounds a 3:2-based ostinato melody. The left hand (lower notes) sounds the two main beats, while
1386-492: A single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, 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 near
1485-416: A soloist is supported by a rhythm section of one or more chordal instruments (piano, guitar), double bass, and drums. The rhythm section plays chords and rhythms that outline the composition structure and complement the soloist. In avant-garde and free jazz , the separation of soloist and band is reduced, and there is license, or even a requirement, for the abandoning of chords, scales, and meters. Since
1584-580: A variety of ways to generate polyrhythmic melodies. Some instruments organize the pitches in a uniquely divided alternate array, not in the straight linear bass to treble structure that is so common to many western instruments such as the piano , harp , or marimba . Lamellophones including mbira , mbila, mbira huru, mbira njari, mbira nyunga, marimba, karimba, kalimba , likembe, and okeme. This family of instruments are found in several forms indigenous to different regions of Africa and most often have equal tonal ranges for right and left hands. The kalimba
1683-500: Is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans , Louisiana , in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues , ragtime , European harmony , African rhythmic rituals, spirituals , hymns , marches , vaudeville song, and dance music . Since the 1920s Jazz Age , it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music . Jazz
1782-529: Is a "white jazz" genre that expresses whiteness . White jazz musicians appeared in the Midwest and in other areas throughout the U.S. Papa Jack Laine , who ran the Reliance band in New Orleans in the 1910s, was called "the father of white jazz". The Original Dixieland Jazz Band , whose members were white, were the first jazz group to record, and Bix Beiderbecke was one of the most prominent jazz soloists of
1881-411: Is a double sided box zither which also employs this divided tonal structure. Trough zithers also have the ability to play polyrhythms. The Gravikord is a new American instrument closely related to both the African kora and the kalimba was created in the latter 20th century to also exploit this adaptive principle in a modern electro-acoustic instrument. On these instruments, one hand of the musician
1980-693: 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 (shown below) 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
2079-525: Is a modern version of these instruments originated by the pioneer ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey in the early 20th century which has over the years gained worldwide popularity. Chordophones , such as the West African kora , and doussn'gouni, part of the harp-lute family of instruments, also have this African separated double tonal array structure. Another instrument, the Marovany from Madagascar
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#17327874559942178-459: Is a staple of modern jazz . Although not as common, use of systemic cross-rhythm is also found in jazz. In 1959, Mongo Santamaria recorded " Afro Blue ", the first jazz standard built upon a typical African 6:4 cross-rhythm (two cycles of 3:2). The song begins with the bass repeatedly playing 6 cross-beats per each measure of 8 (6:4). The following example shows the original ostinato "Afro Blue" bass line. The cross noteheads indicate
2277-469: Is characterized by swing and blue notes , complex chords , call and response vocals , polyrhythms and improvisation . As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles , biguine , ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation . However, jazz did not begin as
2376-493: 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," jazz historian Gunther Schuller observed. "Some survived, others were discarded as the Europeanization progressed." In
2475-422: Is not primarily in the bass nor the other primarily in the treble, but both hands can play freely across the entire tonal range of the instrument. Also, the fingers of each hand can play separate independent rhythmic patterns, and these can easily cross over each other from treble to bass and back, either smoothly or with varying amounts of syncopation . This can all be done within the same tight tonal range, without
2574-400: Is that jazz can absorb and transform diverse musical styles. By avoiding the creation of norms, jazz allows avant-garde styles to emerge. For some African Americans, jazz has drawn attention to African-American contributions to culture and history. For others, jazz is a reminder of "an oppressive and racist society and restrictions on their artistic visions". Amiri Baraka argues that there
2673-403: Is the foundation of most typical polyrhythmic textures found in West African musics." 3:2 is the generative or theoretic form of non-Saharan rhythmic principles. Victor Kofi Agawu succinctly states, "[The] resultant [3:2] rhythm holds the key to understanding... there is no independence here, because 2 and 3 belong to a single Gestalt." The two beat schemes interact within the hierarchy of
2772-460: Is the simultaneous use of two or more rhythms that are not readily perceived as deriving from one another, or as simple manifestations of the same meter. The rhythmic layers may be the basis of an entire piece of music ( cross-rhythm ), or a momentary section. Polyrhythms can be distinguished from irrational rhythms , which can occur within the context of a single part ; polyrhythms require at least two rhythms to be played concurrently, one of which
2871-464: Is the technique of cross-rhythm. The technique of cross-rhythm is a simultaneous use of contrasting rhythmic patterns within the same scheme of accents or meter ... By the very nature of the desired resultant rhythm, the main beat scheme cannot be separated from the secondary beat scheme. It is the interplay of the two elements that produces the cross-rhythmic texture—Ladzekpo (1995). Eugene Novotney observes: "The 3:2 relationship (and [its] permutations)
2970-403: Is typically an irrational rhythm. Concurrently in this context means within the same rhythmic cycle. The underlying pulse, whether explicit or implicit can be considered one of the concurrent rhythms. For example, the son clave is poly-rhythmic because its 3 section suggests a different meter from the pulse of the entire pattern. In some European art music , polyrhythm periodically contradicts
3069-474: Is used as a tool to construct highly complex polyrhythms and to divide each beat of a pulse into various subdivisions, with the emphasised beat shifting from beat cycle to beat cycle. Common polyrhythms found in jazz are 3:2, which manifests as the quarter-note triplet; 2:3, usually in the form of dotted-quarter notes against quarter notes; 4:3, played as dotted-eighth notes against quarter notes (this one demands some technical proficiency to perform accurately, and
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3168-476: 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
3267-625: 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 use a single-line melody and call-and-response pattern, and the rhythms have a counter-metric structure and reflect African speech patterns. An 1885 account says that they were making strange music (Creole) on an equally strange variety of 'instruments'—washboards, washtubs, jugs, boxes beaten with sticks or bones and
3366-590: The Grateful Dead . Olatunji reached his greatest popularity during the height of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Afro-Cuban music makes extensive use of polyrhythms. Cuban Rumba uses 3-based and 2-based rhythms at the same time. For example, the lead drummer (playing the quinto ) might play in 8 , while the rest of the ensemble keeps playing 2 . Afro-Cuban conguero , or conga player, Mongo Santamaría
3465-471: The swing era of the 1920s–40s, big bands relied more on arrangements which were written or learned by ear and memorized. Soloists improvised within these arrangements. In the bebop era of the 1940s, big bands gave way to small groups and minimal arrangements in which the melody was stated briefly at the beginning and most of the piece was improvised. Modal jazz abandoned chord progressions to allow musicians to improvise even more. In many forms of jazz,
3564-948: The 1920s. The Chicago Style was developed by white musicians such as Eddie Condon , Bud Freeman , Jimmy McPartland , and Dave Tough . Others from Chicago such as Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa became leading members of swing during the 1930s. Many bands included both Black and white musicians. These musicians helped change attitudes toward race in the U.S. Female jazz performers and composers have contributed to jazz throughout its history. Although Betty Carter , Ella Fitzgerald , Adelaide Hall , Billie Holiday , Peggy Lee , Abbey Lincoln , Anita O'Day , Dinah Washington , and Ethel Waters were recognized for their vocal talent, less familiar were bandleaders, composers, and instrumentalists such as pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong , trumpeter Valaida Snow , and songwriters Irene Higginbotham and Dorothy Fields . Women began playing instruments in jazz in
3663-451: The 1950s, many women jazz instrumentalists were prominent, some sustaining long careers. Some of the most distinctive improvisers, composers, and bandleaders in jazz have been women. Trombonist Melba Liston is acknowledged as the first female horn player to work in major bands and to make a real impact on jazz, not only as a musician but also as a respected composer and arranger, particularly through her collaborations with Randy Weston from
3762-423: The 2:3 ratio produces the musical interval of a perfect fifth , the 3:4 ratio produces a perfect fourth , and the 4:5 ratio produces a major third . All these interval ratios are found in the harmonic series . These are called harmonic polyrhythms. In traditional European ("Western") rhythms, the most fundamental parts typically emphasize the primary beats. By contrast, in rhythms of sub-Saharan African origin,
3861-629: The American music scene in 1959 with his album Drums of Passion , which was a collection of traditional Nigerian music for percussion and chanting. The album stayed on the charts for two years and had a profound impact on jazz and American popular music. Trained in the Yoruba sakara style of drumming, Olatunji would have a major impact on Western popular music. He went on to teach, collaborate and record with numerous jazz and rock artists, including Airto Moreira , Carlos Santana and Mickey Hart of
3960-509: The Black middle-class. 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
4059-707: The Buried and Me and Dream Theater also incorporate polyrhythms in their music, and polyrhythms have also been increasingly heard in technical metal bands such as Ion Dissonance , The Dillinger Escape Plan , Necrophagist , Candiria , The Contortionist and Textures . Much minimalist and totalist music makes extensive use of polyrhythms. Henry Cowell and Conlon Nancarrow created music with yet more complex polytempo and using irrational numbers like π : e . Peter Magadini 's album Polyrhythm , with musicians Peter Magadini , George Duke , David Young, and Don Menza , features different polyrhythmic themes on each of
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4158-464: 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 dancing . 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
4257-665: The Starlight Roof at the famed Waldorf-Astoria Hotel . He entertained audiences with a light elegant musical style which remained popular with audiences for nearly three decades from the 1930s until the late 1950s. Jazz originated in the late-19th to early-20th century. It developed out of many forms of music, including blues , ragtime , European harmony , African rhythmic rituals, spirituals , hymns , marches , vaudeville song, and dance music . It also incorporated interpretations of American and European classical music, entwined with African and slave folk songs and
4356-442: The album The 2nd Law by the band Muse uses 4 and 4 time signatures for the guitar and drums respectively. The Aaliyah song "Quit Hatin" uses 8 against 4 in the chorus. The Japanese idol group 3776 makes use of polyrhythm in a number of their songs, most notably on their 2014 mini-album " Love Letter ", which features five songs that all include several rhythmic references to
4455-558: The balance of the phrase sideways, so to speak, together with the place of each note within it." Polyrhythm is a particularly common feature of the music of Brahms . Writing about the Violin Sonata in G major, Op. 78 , Jan Swafford (1997, p. 456) says "In the first movement Brahms plays elaborate games with the phrasing, switching the stresses of the 4 meter back and forth between 3+3 and 2+2+2 , or superimposing both in violin and piano. These ideas gather at
4554-552: 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
4653-464: The climax at measure 235, with the layering of phrases making an effect that perhaps during the 19th century only Brahms could have conceived." In "The Snow Is Dancing" from his Children's Corner suite, Debussy introduces a melody "on a static, repeated B-flat, cast in triplet-division cross rhythms which offset this stratum independently of the sixteenth notes comprising the two dancing-snowflake lines below it." "In this section great attention to
4752-473: The contribution of the composer, if there is one, and more on the performer. The jazz performer interprets a tune in individual ways, never playing the same composition twice. Depending on the performer's mood, experience, and interaction with band members or audience members, the performer may change melodies, harmonies, and time signatures. In early Dixieland , a.k.a. New Orleans jazz, performers took turns playing melodies and improvising countermelodies . In
4851-555: 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: W. C. Handy became interested in folk blues of the Deep South while traveling through the Mississippi Delta. In this folk blues form, the singer would improvise freely within
4950-509: The early 1920s, drawing particular recognition on piano. When male jazz musicians were drafted during World War II, many all-female bands replaced them. The International Sweethearts of Rhythm , which was founded in 1937, was a popular band that became the first all-female integrated band in the U.S. and the first to travel with the USO , touring Europe in 1945. Women were members of the big bands of Woody Herman and Gerald Wilson . Beginning in
5049-480: 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
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#17327874559945148-593: The emergence of bebop, forms of jazz that are commercially oriented or influenced by popular music have been criticized. According to Bruce Johnson, there has always been a "tension between jazz as a commercial music and an art form". Regarding the Dixieland jazz revival of the 1940s, Black musicians rejected it as being shallow nostalgia entertainment for white audiences. On the other hand, traditional jazz enthusiasts have dismissed bebop, free jazz, and jazz fusion as forms of debasement and betrayal. An alternative view
5247-525: The end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, linear melodic lines. The mid-1950s saw the emergence of hard bop , which introduced influences from rhythm and blues , gospel , and blues to small groups and particularly to saxophone and piano. Modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode , or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation, as did free jazz , which explored playing without regular meter, beat and formal structures. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in
5346-556: 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 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. Classically trained pianist Scott Joplin produced his " Original Rags " in 1898 and, in 1899, had an international hit with " Maple Leaf Rag ",
5445-614: The exactitude of rhythms is demanded by the polyrhythmic superposition of pedals, ostinato , and melody." Concerning the use of a two-over-three (2:3) hemiola in Beethoven's String Quartet No. 6 , Ernest Walker states, "The vigorously effective Scherzo is in 4 time, but with a curiously persistent cross-rhythm that does its best to persuade us that it is really in 8 ." The illusion of simultaneous 4 and 8 , suggests polymeter : triple meter combined with compound duple meter . However,
5544-408: The first movement of Mozart 's Piano Sonata No. 12 . Three evenly-spaced sets of three attack-points span two measures. Cross-rhythm refers to systemic polyrhythm. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music defines it as “The Regular shift of some beats in a metric pattern to points ahead of or behind their normal positions.” The finale of Brahms Symphony No. 2 features a powerful passage where
5643-415: 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
5742-478: The formalized buck-dancing competitions of Tammany Hall, where judges sat beside, before, and beneath the stage to evaluate the [dancers'] clarity, speed, and presentation. The Hoofers Club comprised a more informal panel of peers, whose judgments could be cruel and mocking and were driven by an insistence on innovation. "Survive or die" was the credo. In an eccentric fusion of imitation and innovation, young dancers were forced to find their style and rhythmic voice. It
5841-532: The habanera rhythm and cinquillo , are heard in the ragtime compositions of Joplin and Turpin. Joplin's " Solace " (1909) is generally considered to be in 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". In
5940-469: The independence of a pianist's two hands. A spectacular example may be found in his Étude, Op, 10 No. 10 . Alan Walker comments that while this piece is straightforward for listeners, "From the player’s point of view, however, nothing is straightforward. Chopin has placed him inside a veritable hornets’ nest of cross-rhythms and syncopations. The melody first emerges from a background of triplets, then of duplets. Accents are changed without warning, shifting
6039-512: The individuality of the performing jazz musician". A broader definition that encompasses 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 argued that "jazz is a construct" which designates "a number of musics with enough in common to be understood as part of
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#17327874559946138-424: 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. By the 18th century, slaves in the New Orleans area gathered socially at a special market, in an area which later became known as Congo Square , famous for its African dances. By 1866,
6237-460: The instruments of jazz: brass, drums, and reeds tuned in the European 12-tone scale. Small bands contained a combination of self-taught and formally educated musicians, many from the funeral procession tradition. These bands traveled in black communities in the deep south. Beginning in 1914, Louisiana Creole and African-American musicians played in vaudeville shows which carried jazz to cities in
6336-578: The late 1950s into the 1990s. Jewish Americans played a significant role in jazz. As jazz spread, it developed to encompass many different cultures, and the work of Jewish composers in Tin Pan Alley helped shape the many different sounds that jazz came to incorporate. Jewish Americans were able to thrive in Jazz because of the probationary whiteness that they were allotted at the time. George Bornstein wrote that African Americans were sympathetic to
6435-455: The late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock music 's rhythms, electric instruments, and 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 21st century, such as Latin and Afro-Cuban jazz . The origin of the word jazz has resulted in considerable research, and its history
6534-415: The left and right hand fingers ever physically encountering each other. These simple rhythms will interact musically to produce complex cross rhythms including repeating on beat/ off beat pattern shifts that would be very difficult to create by any other means. This characteristically African structure allows often simple playing techniques to combine with each other to produce polyrhythmic music. Polyrhythm
6633-570: The main beats . The famous jazz drummer Elvin Jones took the opposite approach, superimposing two cross-beats over every measure of a 4 jazz waltz (2:3). This swung 4 is perhaps the most common example of overt cross-rhythm in jazz. In 1963 John Coltrane recorded "Afro Blue" with Elvin Jones on drums. Coltrane reversed the metric hierarchy of Santamaria's composition, performing it instead in 4 swing (2:3). Nigerian percussion master Babatunde Olatunji arrived on
6732-955: The many top players he employed, such as George Brunies , Sharkey Bonano , and future members of the Original Dixieland Jass Band . During the early 1900s, jazz was mostly performed in African-American and mulatto communities due to segregation laws. Storyville brought jazz to a wider audience through tourists who visited the port city of New Orleans. Many jazz musicians from African-American communities were hired to perform in bars and brothels. These included Buddy Bolden and Jelly Roll Morton in addition to those from other communities, such as Lorenzo Tio and Alcide Nunez . Louis Armstrong started his career in Storyville and found success in Chicago. Storyville
6831-420: The meter is in a permanent state of contradiction. Cross-rhythm was first explained as the basis of non-Saharan rhythm in lectures by C.K. Ladzekpo and the writings of David Locke. From the philosophical perspective of the African musician, cross-beats can symbolize the challenging moments or emotional stress we all encounter. Playing cross-beats while fully grounded in the main beats, prepares one for maintaining
6930-424: The most fundamental parts typically emphasize the secondary beats. This often causes the uninitiated ear to misinterpret the secondary beats as the primary beats, and to hear the true primary beats as cross-beats. In other words, the musical "background" and "foreground" may mistakenly be heard and felt in reverse—Peñalosa (2009: 21) In non-Saharan African music traditions , cross-rhythm is the generating principle;
7029-697: 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. 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
7128-583: The music of New Orleans with the music of Cuba, Wynton Marsalis observes that tresillo is the New Orleans "clavé", a Spanish word meaning "code" or "key", as in the key to a puzzle, or mystery. Although 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. The abolition of slavery in 1865 led to new opportunities for
7227-467: The northeastern United States, a "hot" style of playing ragtime had developed, notably James Reese Europe 's symphonic Clef Club orchestra in New York City, 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
7326-618: The northern and western parts of the U.S. Jazz became international in 1914, when the Creole Band with cornettist Freddie Keppard performed the first ever jazz concert outside the United States, at the Pantages Playhouse Theatre in Winnipeg , Canada. In New Orleans, a white bandleader named Papa Jack Laine integrated blacks and whites in his marching band. He was known as "the father of white jazz" because of
7425-399: The only White dancers ever invited in), Harold Mablin , "Sandman" Sims , "Slappy" Wallace , Warren Berry , "Baby" Laurence Jackson , Buster Brown , and other black tap dancing greats. At the Hoofers Club, rookie and veteran, mostly [B]lack male tap dancers assembled to share with, steal from, and challenge each other; there, new standards were set for competition. These were nothing like
7524-500: 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
7623-494: The plight of the Jewish American and vice versa. As disenfranchised minorities themselves, Jewish composers of popular music saw themselves as natural allies with African Americans. The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson is one example of how Jewish Americans were able to bring jazz, music that African Americans developed, into popular culture. Benny Goodman was a vital Jewish American to the progression of Jazz. Goodman
7722-459: 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
7821-676: The pre-jazz era and contributed to the codification of jazz through the publication of some of the first jazz sheet music. The music of New Orleans , Louisiana had a profound effect on the creation of early jazz. In New Orleans, slaves could practice elements of their culture such as voodoo and playing drums. Many early jazz musicians played in the bars and brothels of the red-light district around Basin Street called Storyville . In addition to dance bands, there were marching bands which played at lavish funerals (later called jazz funerals ). The instruments used by marching bands and dance bands became
7920-458: The prevailing meter. For example, in Mozart 's opera Don Giovanni , two orchestras are heard playing together in different metres ( 4 and 4 ): They are later joined by a third band, playing in 8 time. Polyrhythm is heard near the opening of Beethoven 's Symphony No. 3 . (See also syncopation .) Chopin often explored the rhythmic possibilities inherent in
8019-432: The prevailing metre of four beats to the bar becomes disrupted. Here is the passage as notated in the score: Here is the same passage re-barred to clarify how the ear may actually experience the changing metres: “Polyrhythms run through Brahms’s music like an obsessive-compulsive streak...For Brahms, subdividing a measure of time into different units and layering different patterns on top of one another seemed to be almost
8118-410: The rhythm and bassline. In Ohio and elsewhere in the mid-west 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
8217-466: The right hand (upper notes) sounds the three cross-beats. The cross-beats are written as quarter-notes for visual emphasis. The following notated example is from the kushaura part of the traditional mbira piece "Nhema Mussasa". The mbira is a lamellophone . The left hand plays the ostinato bass line while the right hand plays the upper melody. The composite melody is an embellishment of the 3:2 cross-rhythm. Sub-Saharan instruments are constructed in
8316-526: The six songs. King Crimson used polyrhythms extensively in their 1981 album Discipline . Above all Bill Bruford used polyrhythmic drumming throughout his career. The band Queen used polyrhythm in their 1974 song " The March of the Black Queen " with 8 and 8 time signatures. Talking Heads ' Remain in Light used dense polyrhythms throughout the album, most notably on
8415-497: The song "The Great Curve". Megadeth frequently tends to use polyrhythm in its drumming, notably from songs such as "Sleepwalker" or the ending of "My Last Words", which are both played in 2:3. Carbon Based Lifeforms have a song named " Polyrytmi ", Finnish for "polyrhythm", on their album Interloper . This song indeed does use polyrhythms in its melody. Aphex Twin makes extensive use of polyrhythms in his electronic compositions. Japanese girl group Perfume made use of
8514-459: The technique in their single, appropriately titled " Polyrhythm ", included on their second album Game . The bridge of the song incorporates 8 , 8 in the vocals, common time ( 4 ) and 2 in the drums. The Britney Spears single " Till the World Ends " (released March 2011) uses a 4:3 cross-rhythm in its hook. The outro of the song "Animals" from
8613-500: 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
8712-505: The two beat schemes interact within a metric hierarchy (a single meter). The triple beats are primary and the duple beats are secondary; the duple beats are cross-beats within a triple beat scheme. The four-note ostinato pattern of Mykola Leontovych 's " Carol of the Bells " (the first measure below) is the composite of the two-against-three hemiola (the second measure). Another example of polyrhythm can be found in measures 64 and 65 of
8811-575: 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
8910-498: The writer Robert Palmer, 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." 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
9009-500: 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
9108-469: Was another percussionist whose polyrhythmic virtuosity helped transform both jazz and popular music. Santamaria fused Afro-Latin rhythms with R&B and jazz as a bandleader in the 1950s, and was featured in the 1994 album Buena Vista Social Club , which was the inspiration for the like-titled documentary released five years later. Another form of polyrhythmic music is south Indian classical Carnatic music . A kind of rhythmic solfege called konnakol
9207-497: Was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune . 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 National Public Radio , musician Eubie Blake offered his recollections of the slang connotations of the term, saying: "When Broadway picked it up, they called it 'J-A-Z-Z'. It wasn't called that. It
9306-433: 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, and would become jazz standards . Handy's music career began in
9405-921: Was not at all common in jazz before Tony Williams used it when playing with Miles Davis ); and finally 4 time against 4 , which along with 2:3 was used famously by Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner playing with John Coltrane . Frank Zappa , especially towards the end of his career, experimented with complex polyrhythms, such as 11:17, and even nested polyrhythms (see " The Black Page " for an example). The highly avant garde album produced by Frank Zappa, Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band found extensive use of polyrhythm and cross-rhythm. The metal bands Mudvayne , Nothingface , Threat Signal , Lamb of God , also use polyrhythms in their music. Contemporary progressive metal bands such as Meshuggah , Gojira , Periphery , Textures , TesseracT , Tool , Animals as Leaders , Between
9504-693: Was said that on the wall of the Hoofers Club was written: "Thou shalt not copy each other's steps — Exactly." A fictionalized version of the Hoofers Club was depicted in Francis Ford Coppola 's 1984 film The Cotton Club . The " Tree of Hope ," a piece of which is still touched by performers for good luck on the stage of the Apollo Theater , originally stood outside the Hoofers Club and the nearby Lafayette Theatre . 40°48′47″N 73°56′35″W / 40.813°N 73.943°W / 40.813; -73.943 Jazz Jazz
9603-446: Was shut down by the U.S. government in 1917. Cornetist Buddy Bolden played in New Orleans from 1895 to 1906. No recordings by him exist. His 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. Polyrhythm Polyrhythm ( / ˈ p ɒ l i r ɪ ð əm / )
9702-651: 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 20th Century . Jazz is difficult to define because it encompasses a wide range of music spanning a period of over 100 years, from ragtime to 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
9801-536: Was the leader of a racially integrated band named King of Swing. His jazz concert in the Carnegie Hall in 1938 was the first ever to be played there. The concert was described by Bruce Eder as "the single most important jazz or popular music concert in history". Shep Fields also helped to popularize "Sweet" Jazz music through his appearances and Big band remote broadcasts from such landmark venues as Chicago's Palmer House , Broadway's Paramount Theater and
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