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Jazz take 51/8/2024 ![]() ![]() The amalgamation of international styles influenced the group to experiment with unfamiliar sounds, unconventional pacing and uncommon time signatures for an upcoming album. Even so, the band marveled at local musicians while overseas - particularly Turkish street performers playing traditional folk songs in varying rhythms. The tour’s mission was to showcase American ideals and its racially inclusive sentiments - a falsity the band would come to experience while traveling domestically in the early ’60s. Only a year prior Brubeck, alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, bassist Eugene Wright and drummer Joe Morello had completed a world tour funded by the United States Department of State, performing 80 concerts in over 14 countries, including Turkey, Poland, Iraq, Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. Prior to recording Time Out in the summer of 1959, Brubeck and his bandmates had no intention of creating a commercially viable record. Brubeck refused to use race as a safety net, however he never stopped working with both white and black musicians for the duration of his career, despite industry pushback. His appearance - that of a middle-class, well-groomed white male - provided him with a wider appeal to the predominantly white mainstream than leading African American jazz artists like Miles Davis or Duke Ellington. Uncomfortable with his fame, Brubeck felt he was only receiving the adoration due to his skin color. After a handful of moderately successful releases throughout the first half of the decade, mostly targeted toward college students, Brubeck found himself on the front of Time in 1954, making him only the second jazz artist behind Louis Armstrong to grace the cover. 14, 1959, Time Out wasn’t 39-year-old Brubeck’s first album nor was he an unknown at the time of its release. Jazz is one of the United States's greatest exports to the world.Josh Groban Explains Reason for Leaving 'Sweeney Todd' & Reflects on 20 Years of 'Closer' At the same time, jazz spread from the United States to many parts of the world, and today jazz musicians-and jazz festivals-can be found in dozens of nations. Jazz developed a series of different styles including traditional jazz, swing (listen, for example, to Benny Carter, who got his start in swing music, in Benny's Music Class) bebop, cool jazz, and jazz?rock, among others. The evolution of jazz was led by a series of brilliant musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington (listen to Ellington in Duke's Music Class), Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis. (In later years, people would sit and listen to it.) After the first recordings of jazz were made in 1917, the music spread widely and developed rapidly. African-American musical traditions mixed with others and gradually jazz emerged from a blend of ragtime, marches, blues, and other kinds of music. The city's population was more diverse than anywhere else in the South, and people of African, French, Caribbean, Italian, German, Mexican, and American Indian, as well as English, descent interacted with one another. New Orleans, near the mouth of the Mississippi River, played a key role in this development. Jazz developed in the United States in the very early part of the 20th century. Those are just some of the reasons that jazz is a great art form, and why some people consider it "America's classical music." THE GROWTH OF JAZZ And about making something shared-a tune that everyone knows-into somethingpersonal. Jazz is about making something familiar-a familiar song-into something fresh. The musicians' playing styles make each version different, and so do the improvised solos. ![]() ![]() ![]() Jazz musicians place a high value on finding their own sound and style, and that means, for example, that trumpeter Miles Davis sounds very different than trumpeter Louis Armstrong (whose sound you can hear in Louis's Music Class.) Jazz musicians like to play their songs in their own distinct styles, and so you might listen to a dozen different jazz recordings of the same song, but each will sound different. In jazz, you may hear the sounds of freedom-for the music has been a powerful voice for people suffering unfair treatment because of the color of the skin, or because they lived in a country run by a cruel dictator. (You can hear Ella Fitzgerald and Roy Eldridge do "call and response" in Ella's Singing Class.) Jazz can express many different emotions, from pain to sheer joy. You can often hear "call-and-response" patterns in jazz, in which one instrument, voice, or part of the band answers another. There is tremendous variety in jazz, but most jazz is very rhythmic, has a forward momentum called "swing," and uses "bent" or "blue" notes. In most jazz performances, players play solos which they make up on the spot, which requires considerable skill. Jazz is a kind of music in which improvisation is typically an important part. ![]()
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