Jazz

Jazz is a kind of music that began in the United States in the early 1900s. It was created by Black musicians in New Orleans, Louisiana, and it grew out of older African American music styles like blues and ragtime. Jazz spread quickly across the country, then around the world. Today it is played on every continent.

The most important thing about jazz is improvisation. To improvise means to make something up on the spot. In most kinds of music, players read notes from a page and play them the same way every time. In jazz, the players know the basic tune, but they invent new notes as they go. A jazz song is never played exactly the same way twice. Even the same band, playing the same song, will sound different on Tuesday than it did on Monday.

Jazz also has a special rhythm called swing. Instead of playing notes evenly spaced in time, jazz musicians stretch some notes a little longer and squeeze others a little shorter. This gives the music a bouncy, rolling feeling that makes people want to tap their feet or dance.

A jazz band can be small or large. A small group, called a combo, might have just four or five players. A large group, called a big band, can have 15 or more. Common jazz instruments include the trumpet, saxophone, trombone, clarinet, piano, bass, and drums. The human voice can be a jazz instrument too. Singers sometimes use nonsense sounds like "doo-bee-doo-wah" to copy the sound of a horn. This is called scat singing.

Jazz has many styles. Dixieland was the early New Orleans sound. Swing music filled big ballrooms in the 1930s and 1940s, and millions of people danced to it. Bebop came in the 1940s. It was faster and harder, and it was made for listening, not dancing. Later styles include cool jazz, free jazz, and fusion, which mixes jazz with rock.

Some of the most famous jazz musicians of all time were Louis Armstrong, who played trumpet and sang; Duke Ellington, who led a big band and wrote thousands of songs; Ella Fitzgerald, one of the greatest singers in any kind of music; and Miles Davis, a trumpet player who kept changing his sound for 50 years.

Jazz shaped almost every kind of popular music that came after it. Rock, soul, R&B, and hip-hop all borrowed from jazz, and many of them still do.