Dixieland jazz
Dixieland jazz, also referred to as traditional jazz, hot jazz, or simply Dixieland, is a style of jazz based on the music that developed in New Orleans at the start of the 20th century. The 1917 recordings by the Original Dixieland Jass Band (which shortly thereafter changed the spelling of its name to "Original Dixieland Jazz Band"), fostered awareness of this new style of music.
"Dixieland" redirects here. For the nickname of the Southern United States, see Dixie. For other uses, see Dixieland (disambiguation).Etymology[edit]
The word "Dixie" is the nickname of the Southern United States, wherein New Orleans – the birthplace of Dixieland Jazz – is located.
Styles influenced by traditional jazz[edit]
Musical styles showing influences from traditional jazz include later styles of jazz, rhythm and blues, and early rock and roll. Traditional New Orleans second-line drumming and piano playing are prominent in the music of Fats Domino. The New Orleans drummer Idris Muhammad adapted second-line drumming to modern jazz styles and gained crossover influence on the R&B style of James Brown. Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy combined New Orleans style polyphonic improvisation with bebop. Bassist Charles Mingus paid homage to traditional jazz styles with compositions such as Eat Dat Chicken and My Jellyroll Soul. The contemporary New Orleans Brass Band styles, such as the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, The Primate Fiasco, the Hot Tamale Brass Band and the Rebirth Brass Band have combined traditional New Orleans brass band jazz with such influences as contemporary jazz, funk, hip hop, and rap. The M-Base (Multi-Basic Array of Synchronous Extemporization) improvisational concept used by ensembles including Cassandra Wilson, Geri Allen, Greg Osby, Steve Coleman, Graham Haynes, Kevin Eubanks and others is an extension of the polyphonic improvisation of New Orleans jazz.
Revival[edit]
The Dixieland revival renewed the audience for musicians who had continued to play in traditional jazz styles and revived the careers of New Orleans musicians who had become lost in the shuffle of musical styles that had occurred over the preceding years. Younger black musicians shunned the revival, largely because of a distaste for tailoring their music to what they saw as nostalgia entertainment for white audiences with whom they did not share such nostalgia.[7][8] The Jim Crow associations of the name "Dixieland" also did little to attract younger black musicians to the revival.[9]
The Dixieland revival music during the 1940s and 1950s gained a broad audience that established traditional jazz as an enduring part of the American cultural landscape, and spawned revival movements in Europe. Well-known jazz standard tunes such as "Basin Street Blues" and "When the Saints Go Marching In" are known even to non-jazz fans thanks to the enduring popularity of traditional jazz. Country Joe McDonald's Vietnam-era protest song "Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag" is based on tonal centers and incorporates the "B" refrain from the New Orleans standard "Muskrat Ramble". Traditional jazz is a major tourist attraction for New Orleans to the present day. It has been an influence on the styles of more modern players such as Charles Mingus and Steve Coleman.
New Orleans music combined earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime, and blues with collective, polyphonic improvisation. The "standard" band consists of a "front line" of trumpet (or cornet), trombone, and clarinet, with a "rhythm section" of at least two of the following instruments: guitar or banjo, string bass or tuba, piano, and drums. The Dixieland sound is created when one instrument (usually the trumpet) plays the melody or a variation on it, and the other instruments improvise around that melody. This creates a more polyphonic sound than the heavily arranged big band sound of the 1930s or the straight melodies (with or without harmonizing) of bebop in the 1940s.
The "West Coast revival", which used banjo and tuba, began in the late 1930s in San Francisco. The Dutch "old-style jazz" was played with trumpets, trombones and saxophones accompanied by a single clarinet, sousaphone and a section of Marching percussion usually including a washboard.
Periodicals[edit]
There are several active periodicals devoted to traditional jazz: the Jazz Rambler, a quarterly newsletter distributed by San Diego's America's Finest City Dixieland Jazz Society, The Syncopated Times, which covers traditional jazz, ragtime, and swing; "Just Jazz" and "The Jazz Rag" in the UK, and, to an extent, Jazz Journal, an online-only publication based in Europe covering a variety of jazz styles.[11]