Jazz
Jazz is a musical tradition rooted in African American communities, shaped by improvisation, swing, blues, and distinctive rhythmic practices.
Improvisation: The creation of music in real time rather than solely from a fixed, fully written score. Jazz musicians reshape melodies and harmonies in performance, making spontaneous invention central to the tradition.
New Orleans jazz: An early jazz style associated with New Orleans ensembles and collective improvisation. New Orleans was a formative center for jazz, and the style preserves features of its early ensemble practice.
Big band: A large jazz ensemble, typically organized into saxophone, trombone, and trumpet sections with a rhythm section. Big bands made jazz central to popular dance music and developed distinctive arranged ensemble textures.
Louis Armstrong: An American jazz trumpeter and singer whose recordings transformed solo improvisation and popular singing. Armstrong helped establish the virtuosic soloist as a defining voice in jazz.
Classical music: A broad tradition of art music associated with written scores, formal composition, and historically developed performance practices. Jazz and classical music have distinct histories, yet composers and performers have repeatedly crossed between them.
Swing (music): A rhythmic feel built from flexible timing and an unequal subdivision of beats. Swing gives many jazz performances their distinctive forward motion, though not all jazz swings.
Ragtime: An African American-derived popular music, prominent around 1890–1917, known for syncopated piano compositions. Ragtime’s syncopation and piano culture formed part of the musical setting from which early jazz emerged.
Bebop: A modern jazz style associated with fast tempos, complex harmonies, and virtuosic improvisation. Bebop shifted jazz toward small-group listening music and expanded the harmonic demands on soloists.
Duke Ellington: An American composer, pianist, and bandleader whose work expanded jazz orchestration and composition. Ellington treated the orchestra as a flexible palette for distinctive compositions and individual musicians.
Rock music: A family of popular music styles built around amplified instruments and rhythmic song forms. Jazz and rock met in fusion, while retaining different conventions for improvisation, ensemble roles, and form.