www.jazzfestivalbz.com

Jazz is the only true American art form. It started in New Orleans in the 1920′s with horn bands but has changed greatly over the years. It is now one of the most expansive and creative genres in music today. From Dixieland, to Big Band to Fusion the game has changed greatly over the years. It continues to evolve greatly even to this day.

The fundamental theme of jazz is improvisation. It is essential to jazz and every musician in the band knows how to do it. Jazz started in New Orleans with various Dixieland horn bands that would play arrangements of popular songs of the day. Trumpeter/Vocalist Louis Armstrong took this music to a whole new level with his virtuous trumpet playing and great jazz singing. He was one of the most popular musicians in the world until he died in 1970.

This music later developed into Big Band swing music in the 1940s. These big bands consisted of saxophones, trumpets, trombones and a rhythm section. The technology to amplify a band hadn’t really been perfected yet. So these big bands were necessary to get a big sound to fill up a large theater. These bands got expensive though.

The solution to that was small jazz combos consisting of a rhythm section and a few horn players. The advantage of this is that you could do tougher arrangements and have more complex harmonic arrangements. This is how bebop was born. Bebop was very popular in jazz in the 1940s and 1950s. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis were some of popular musicians that helped move this music along.

Miles Davis later took this music and combined it with the popular music of the day like rock and funk. He started this with his album “Bitches Brew”. This style of music was called fusion. Musicians today are still advancing and changing fusion to mix with the pop music of the day as jazz continues to evolve. Improvisation is still the underlying theme of the music though. That is what makes it jazz.