JazzNightOut.org

Whether it is in a motion picture soundtrack, the back round to a conversation or setting the mood on a romantic evening with your significant other music plays an integral part in the lives of every American. Many people’s lives, especially younger people’s, revolves around the world of music in some way. As with most things in the world in the twentieth century, music as we knew it and know it now has changed significantly. From the hymns and prayers of church and the early days jazz and blues music has evolved to many different things. We now have enough genres or styles of music to need binomial nomenclature but just enjoying the music we have today is not enough. It is important to know how music as we know it came to be.

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Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974)

• American composer
• pianist
• jazz orchestra leader

Duke Ellington became one of the most influential artists in the history of recorded music, and is largely recognized as one of the greatest figures in the history of jazz, though his music stretched into various other genres, including blues, gospel, movie soundtracks, popular, and classical. His career spanned five decades and comprised of leading his orchestra, an inexhaustible songbook, scoring for movies and world tours. Due to his inventive use of the orchestra, or big band, and in part to his refined public manner and extraordinary charisma, he is generally considered to have elevated the perception of jazz to an artistic level on par with that of classical music. His reputation increased after his death, and he received a special award citation from the Pulitzer Prize Board in 1999.

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Wayne Shorter (born August 25, 1933)

• American jazz saxophonist
• composer

He is often referred as one of the most important American jazz musicians of his generation. His efforts have arguably made him a household name amongst jazz fans around the world, and won him honors and recognition, including multiple Grammy Awards.

Wayne Shorter has recorded over 20 albums as a leader, and appeared on dozens more with others including Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the late 1950s, Miles Davis’s second great quintet in the 1960s and the jazz fusion band Weather Report, which Shorter co-led in the 1970s. Many of his compositions have become standards.

More about Wayne Shorter you can find HERE and HERE.

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John William Coltrane (September 23, 1926 – July 17, 1967)

• jazz saxophonist
• composer

Starting in bebop and hard bop, Coltrane later pioneered free jazz. He influenced generations of other musicians, and remains one of the most significant tenor saxophonists in jazz history. He was astonishingly prolific: he made about fifty recordings as a leader in his twelve-year-long recording career, and appeared as a sideman on many other albums, notably with trumpeter Miles Davis. As his career progressed, Coltrane’s music took on an increasingly spiritual dimension. His second wife was pianist Alice Coltrane, and their son Ravi Coltrane is also a saxophonist.

He received a posthumous Special Citation from the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2007 for his “masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz.”

More about John Coltrane HERE.

John Coltrane official site.

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Jazz is a primarily American musical art form which originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions. The style’s West African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation, and the swung note.

What say vocabulary:

1. Music
   1. A style of music, native to America, characterized by a strong but flexible rhythmic understructure with solo and ensemble improvisations on basic tunes and chord patterns and, more recently, a highly sophisticated harmonic idiom.
   2. Big band dance music.
2. Slang
   1. Animation; enthusiasm.
   2. Nonsense.
   3. Miscellaneous, unspecified things: brought the food and all the jazz to go with it.

   And what say famous jazz players about jazz?

   If you need to ask what jazz, you will not ever know. - Louis Armstrong

   What is jazz? Jazz is the folk music of the age of machines. - Paul Whiteman

   Jazz must have “that thing”. You must be born with it. You can not even buy it. If I could buy, they were on sale at the next Newport festival. - Miles Davis

   Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains. - Paul Whiteman

Jazz can be hard to define because it spans from Ragtime waltzes to 2000s-era fusion. While many attempts have been made to define jazz from points of view outside jazz, such as using European music history or African music, jazz critic Joachim Berendt argues that all such attempts are unsatisfactory. One way to get around the definitional problems is to define the term “jazz” more broadly. Berendt defines jazz as a “form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of blacks with European music”; he argues that jazz differs from European music in that jazz has a “special relationship to time, defined as ’swing’”, “a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role”; and “sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror the individuality of the performing jazz musician”^.