,
Tommy Potter,
Miles Davis,
Dizzy Gillespie, and
Max Roach performing at Three Deuces in
New York City. Photograph by
William P. Gottlieb (August 1947),
Library of Congress. The outbreak of
World War II marked a turning point for jazz. The swing-era jazz of the previous decade had challenged other popular music as being representative of the nation's culture, with big bands reaching the height of the style's success by the early 1940s; swing acts and big bands traveled with U.S. military overseas to Europe, where it also became popular. Many of the big bands who were deprived of experienced musicians because of the war effort began to enlist young players who were below the age for conscription, as was the case with saxophonist
Stan Getz's entry in a band as a teenager. According to
Clive James, bebop was "the post-war musical development which tried to ensure that jazz would no longer be the spontaneous sound of joy ... Students of race relations in America are generally agreed that the exponents of post-war jazz were determined, with good reason, to present themselves as challenging artists rather than tame entertainers." The end of the war marked "a revival of the spirit of experimentation and musical pluralism under which it had been conceived", along with "the beginning of a decline in the popularity of jazz music in America", according to American academic Michael H. Burchett. With the rise of bebop and the end of the swing era after the war, jazz lost its cachet as
pop music. Vocalists of the famous big bands moved on to being marketed and performing as solo pop singers; these included
Frank Sinatra,
Peggy Lee,
Dick Haymes, and
Doris Day. 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." 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 music with a linear rhythmic complexity. 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 tunes and reused with a new and more complex melody or reharmonized with more complex chord progressions 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 often 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 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."
Gerhard Kubik postulates that harmonic development in bebop sprang from blues and
African-related tonal sensibilities rather than 20th-century Western classical music. "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." But despite the 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 (shown below). If the progression begins on the "two-side", it is in
2–3 clave. : \new RhythmicStaff { \clef percussion \time 4/4 \repeat volta 2 { c8. c16 r8[ c] r[ c] c4 } }
Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo Mario Bauzá introduced bebop innovator Dizzy Gillespie to 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 also drew from African rhythm. 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".
"Un Poco Loco" Another jazz composition critical to the development of Afro-Cuban jazz was Bud Powell's "
Un Poco Loco," recorded with
Curley Russell on bass and Max Roach on drums. Noted for its "frenetic energy" and "clanging cowbell and polyrhythmic accompaniment," the composition combined Afro-Cuban rhythm with polytonality and preceded further use of modality and avant-garde harmony in Latin jazz.
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 piece begins with the bass repeatedly playing 6 cross-beats per each measure of , 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 cross noteheads indicate the main
beats (not bass notes). : \new Staff > When
John Coltrane covered "Afro Blue" in 1963, he inverted the metric hierarchy, interpreting the tune as a 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, harking back to the contrapuntal New Orleans style. This was driven in large part by record company reissues of 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. Some elements of the genre were simplified from their bebop roots. Further leaders of hard bop's development included the
Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet, Art Blakey's
Jazz Messengers, the Horace Silver Quintet, and trumpeters
Lee Morgan and
Freddie Hubbard. The late 1950s to early 1960s saw hard boppers form their own bands as a new generation of blues- and bebop-influenced musicians entered the jazz world, from pianists
Wynton Kelly and
Tommy Flanagan to saxophonists
Joe Henderson and
Hank Mobley. Coltrane,
Johnny Griffin, Mobley, and Morgan all participated on the album ''
A Blowin' Session'' (1957), considered by Al Campbell to have been one of the high points of the hard bop era. Hard bop was prevalent within jazz for about a decade spanning from 1955 to 1965, or "straight-ahead" jazz. It went into decline in the late 1960s through the 1970s due to the emergence of other styles such as jazz fusion, but again became influential following the Young Lions Movement and the emergence of
neo-bop. "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.
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 DownBeat'' 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 avant-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 is a key figure in European free jazz. Free jazz was played in Europe in part because musicians such as Ayler, Taylor,
Steve Lacy, and
Eric Dolphy spent extended periods of time there, and European musicians such as
Michael Mantler and
John Tchicai traveled to the U.S. to experience American music firsthand. European contemporary jazz was shaped by
Peter Brötzmann,
John Surman,
Krzysztof Komeda,
Zbigniew Namysłowski,
Tomasz Stańko,
Lars Gullin,
Joe Harriott,
Albert Mangelsdorff,
Kenny Wheeler,
Graham Collier,
Michael Garrick and
Mike Westbrook. They were eager to develop approaches to music that reflected their heritage. Since the 1960s, creative centers of jazz in Europe have developed, such as the creative jazz scene in Amsterdam. Following the work of drummer
Han Bennink and pianist
Misha Mengelberg, musicians started to explore by improvising collectively until a form (melody, rhythm, a famous song) is found 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 defended free jazz from criticism. British writer
Stuart Nicholson has argued European contemporary jazz has an identity different from American jazz and follows a different trajectory.
Latin jazz Latin jazz is jazz that 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 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 playing the Afro-Brazilian
Berimbau 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 the related jazz-samba is 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. While bossa nova has been labeled as jazz by music critics, namely those from outside of Brazil, it has been rejected by many prominent bossa nova musicians such as Jobim, who once said "Bossa nova is not Brazilian jazz."
African-inspired Rhythm The first
jazz standard composed by a non-Latino to use an overt African cross-rhythm was
Wayne Shorter's "
Footprints" (1967). On the version recorded on
Miles Smiles by
Miles Davis, the bass switches to a
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. The following example shows the and forms of the bass line. The slashed noteheads indicate the main
beats (not bass notes), where one ordinarily taps their foot to "keep time". : { \relative c, > \new Staff > >> }
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's "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".
Sacred and liturgical jazz . As noted above, jazz has incorporated from its inception aspects of African-American sacred music including spirituals and hymns. Secular jazz musicians often performed renditions of spirituals and hymns as part of their repertoire or isolated compositions such as "Come Sunday", part of "Black and Beige Suite" by
Duke Ellington. Later many other jazz artists borrowed from black
gospel music. However, it was only after World War II that a few jazz musicians began to compose and perform extended works intended for religious settings or as religious expression. Since the 1950s, sacred and liturgical music has been performed and recorded by many prominent jazz composers and musicians. The "Abyssinian Mass" by
Wynton Marsalis (Blueengine Records, 2016) is a recent example. Relatively little has been written about sacred and liturgical jazz. In a 2013 doctoral dissertation, Angelo Versace examined the development of sacred jazz in the 1950s using disciplines of musicology and history. He noted that the traditions of black gospel music and jazz were combined in the 1950s to produce a new genre, "sacred jazz". Versace maintained that the religious intent separates sacred from secular jazz. Most prominent in initiating the sacred jazz movement were pianist and composer
Mary Lou Williams, known for her jazz masses in the 1950s and
Duke Ellington. Prior to his death in 1974 in response to contacts from Grace Cathedral in San Francisco,
Duke Ellington wrote three Sacred Concerts: 1965 – A Concert of Sacred Music; 1968 – Second Sacred Concert; 1973 – Third Sacred Concert. . The most prominent form of sacred and liturgical jazz is the jazz mass. Although most often performed in a concert setting rather than church worship setting, this form has many examples. An eminent example of composers of the jazz mass was
Mary Lou Williams. Williams converted to Catholicism in 1957, and proceeded to compose three masses in the jazz idiom. One was composed in 1968 to honor the
recently assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. and the third was commissioned by a pontifical commission. It was performed once in 1975 in St Patrick's Cathedral in New York City. However the
Catholic Church has not embraced jazz as appropriate for worship. In 1966 Joe Masters recorded "Jazz Mass" for Columbia Records. A jazz ensemble was joined by soloists and choir using the English text of the Roman Catholic Mass. Other examples include "Jazz Mass in Concert" by
Lalo Schiffrin (Aleph Records, 1998, UPC 0651702632725) and "Jazz Mass" by
Vince Guaraldi (Fantasy Records, 1965). In England, classical composer
Will Todd recorded his "Jazz Missa Brevis" with a jazz ensemble, soloists and the St Martin's Voices on a 2018 Signum Records release, "Passion Music/Jazz Missa Brevis" also released as "Mass in Blue", and jazz organist James Taylor composed "The Rochester Mass" (Cherry Red Records, 2015). In 2013, Versace put forth bassist
Ike Sturm and New York composer Deanna Witkowski as contemporary exemplars of sacred and liturgical jazz.
Miles Davis's 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! (1969) by
The Tony Williams Lifetime.
Psychedelic-jazz 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 favor of continuous rhythm and movement – but took the music further. To emphasize 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 pedaled the instrument.
DownBeat 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, violinist
Jean-Luc Ponty, guitarists
Larry Coryell,
Al Di Meola,
John McLaughlin,
Ryo Kawasaki, 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 more than 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's
Emergency! (1970) and Davis's
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.
Electronic music is considered a pioneer of future jazz, a genre that fuses jazz and electronic music. 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. Since the beginning of the 1990s, electronic music had significant technical improvements that popularized and created new possibilities for the genre. Jazz elements such as improvisation, rhythmic complexities and harmonic textures were introduced to the genre and consequently had a big impact in new listeners and in some ways kept the versatility of jazz relatable to a newer generation that did not necessarily relate to what the traditionalists call real jazz (bebop, cool and modal jazz). Artists such as
Squarepusher,
Aphex Twin,
Flying Lotus and sub genres like
IDM,
drum 'n' bass,
jungle and
techno ended up incorporating a lot of these elements. Squarepusher being cited as one big influence for jazz performers drummer
Mark Guiliana and pianist
Brad Mehldau, showing the correlations between jazz and electronic music are a two-way street.
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's
On the Corner album, which, in 1972, began Davis's 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.
Straight-ahead jazz 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 is debatable whether Marsalis's 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 recognizably jazz-oriented approach than his abstract work of the mid-1970s, such as a return to a theme-and-solos approach. 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. 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 "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 on September 23, 1987, and in the Senate on November 4, 1987. In 2001,
Ken Burns's documentary
Jazz premiered on
PBS, featuring Wynton Marsalis and other experts reviewing the entire history of American jazz to that time. It received some criticism, however, for its failure to reflect the many distinctive non-American traditions and styles in jazz that had developed, and its limited representation of US developments in the last quarter of the 20th century.
Neo-bop . 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 the 1990s and 2000s. 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 classical music. with Reggie Workman and Oliver Lake. 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.
O.T.B. ensemble included a rotation of young jazz musicians such as
Kenny Garrett,
Steve Wilson,
Kenny Davis,
Renee Rosnes,
Ralph Peterson Jr.,
Billy Drummond, and
Robert Hurst. Starting in the 1990s, a number of players from largely straight-ahead or post-bop backgrounds emerged as a result of the rise of neo-traditionalist jazz, 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.
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). , 2008 In his
Newsweek article "The Problem With Jazz Criticism",
Stanley Crouch considers Miles Davis's 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 or 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. Richard S. Ginell of AllMusic considers
Roy Ayers "one of the prophets 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. Although jazz rap had achieved little mainstream success, Miles Davis's final album
Doo-Bop (released posthumously in 1992) was based on hip-hop beats and collaborations with producer
Easy Mo Bee. Davis's ex-bandmate
Herbie Hancock also absorbed hip-hop influences in the mid-1990s, releasing the album
Dis Is da Drum in 1994. The mid-2010s saw an increased influence of R&B, hip-hop, and pop music on jazz. In 2015,
Kendrick Lamar released his third studio album,
To Pimp a Butterfly. The album heavily featured prominent contemporary jazz artists such as
Thundercat and redefined jazz rap with a larger focus on improvisation and live soloing rather than simply sampling. In that same year, saxophonist
Kamasi Washington released his nearly three-hour long debut,
The Epic. Its hip-hop inspired beats and R&B vocal interludes was not only acclaimed by critics for being innovative in keeping jazz relevant, but also sparked a small resurgence in jazz on the internet.
Punk jazz and jazzcore performing in 2006 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, Gray, the work of
James Chance and the Contortions (who mixed
Soul with free jazz and
punk) In the same year,
Sonny Sharrock,
Peter Brötzmann,
Bill Laswell, and
Ronald Shannon Jackson recorded the first album under the name
Last Exit, 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 in
Paris, July 2004 The
M-Base movement started in the 1980s, when a loose collective of young African-American musicians in New York that 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, according to pianist Vijay Iver and critic Ben Ratlifff of
The New York Times. 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.
Jazz pluralism . Since the 1990s, jazz has been characterized by a pluralism in which no one style dominates, but rather a wide range of styles and genres are popular. Individual performers often play in a variety of styles, sometimes in the same performance. Pianist
Brad Mehldau and
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. Japanese jazz pianist and composer known for her virtuosic playing and innovative fusion of jazz, classical, and progressive rock elements in her music.
Harry Connick Jr. began his career playing stride piano and the Dixieland jazz of his home, New Orleans, beginning with his first recording when he was 10 years old. Some of his earliest lessons were at the home of pianist
Ellis Marsalis. Connick had success on the pop charts after recording the soundtrack to the movie
When Harry Met Sally, which sold over two million copies. and studio archives such as
Just Coolin' by
Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.
Social media An internet-aided trend of 2010s jazz was that of extreme
reharmonization, inspired by both virtuosic players known for their speed and rhythm such as
Art Tatum, as well as players known for their ambitious voicings and chords such as Bill Evans. Supergroup
Snarky Puppy adopted this trend, allowing players like
Cory Henry to shape the grooves and harmonies of modern jazz soloing.
YouTube phenomenon
Jacob Collier also gained recognition for his ability to play an incredibly large number of instruments and his ability to use
microtones, advanced polyrhythms, and blend a spectrum of genres in his largely homemade production process. Other jazz musicians gained popularity through social media during the 2010s and 2020s. These included
Joan Chamorro, a bassist and bandleader based in
Barcelona whose big band and jazz combo videos have received tens of millions of views on YouTube, and
Emmet Cohen, who broadcast a series of performances live from New York starting in March 2020. ==See also==