Jazz
Origins
The Jazz tradition was started in New Orleans in the 1920s. It was heavily influenced by ragtime music, which itself evolved from the combination of western classical music and syncopated rhythms from traditional African music.
Musical Fingerprints
Instrumentation: The ensemble would have originally be split between solo/melody/front-line instruments, such as the saxophone, trumpet and/or the clarinet, and accompanying instruments, such as piano, drum kit/rhythm section, double bass and guitar. Jazz has continued to evolve over the years, so modern jazz now often features drum machines, synths, electric guitars/basses etc.
Rhythm: Early jazz would have been played straight, but swung rhythms became more popular as musicians started to experiment. In the 1960's, musicians started to create jazz-rock fusion which lead to the addition of a backbeat in the rhythm sections of jazz recordings.
Texture: Contrapuntal textures were common. Was a musical feature from the ragtime influence.
Arrangement: In early forms of Jazz, the band would play fully orchestrated fixed arrangements. However, during the 1940's, improvised sections became more popular, with each melody instrument getting the chance to improvise for a short period.
Tempo: The tempo ranges massively, from the super fast Bebop style of Jazz to the slower, ‘cool’ Jazz that become popular in the mid-1950's after the release of Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” album. In sub-genres such as free jazz, sometimes there was no consistent tempo at all.
Harmony: Depending of the sub genre of Jazz, the harmony could get quite extreme. Use of modal harmony, extended chords, key changes were common in most sub-genres of jazz.
Technological Fingerprints
The Original Dixieland Jass Band are credited for making the first jazz recording in 1917 for the record label Victor.
The challenge for Victor was to make the recording sound like the music they heard when the band played. Their novel solution was to place the musicians at various distances from the pick up horn, the drummer being furthest away and the pianist closest.
A common theme within recording jazz bands is recording all the tracks/instruments simultaneously, each close enough to hear each other so that headphones weren’t needed. It is suggested that this helped the music keep it spontaneity and energy.
Jimmy Smith helped to popularize the electric Hammond Organ within Jazz.
Would have originally been recorded with little to no effects.
Artists
Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong.