Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue exemplifies my favorite merits of cool jazz. The bestselling jazz album is bursting with innovative music that is largely independent from the routine melody and rhythm that often accompanied jazz music before the records conception; its recordings perpetuate a sound that is both tranquil and engaging. The artists responsible for creating this widely recognized album are Miles Davis on trumpet, Jon Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Julian Adderley on alto saxophone, Paul Chambers on bass, Jimmy Cobb on drums, Bill Evans on piano and Wynton Kelly substituting in at piano for the piece Freddy Freeloader. In my opinion, what gave Kind of Blue its unique sounds are the eccentric conditions in which Davis required his musicians to record. Instead of providing each musician with a series of harmonies or chord progressions, Davis simply gave each musician parameters in which to perform their improvisation. There were five recordings on the original album; So What, Freddie Freeloader, Blue in Green, All Blues and Flamenco Sketches. My personal favorite is the second recording on the album, Freddie Freeloader. I enjoy its particular chord and phrase structure which is composed in the twelve-bar blues format. I also found it fascinating that Davis incorporated the beginning phrases of the first recording, So What, into Freddie Freeloader. Speaking less formally, I greatly appreciated the (only) piano solo performed by Wynton Kelly early in the recording; it was one of the only times in my young life that music has, somewhat unexplainably, ‘taken me away’ from my current worries—something that has inspired me to further investigate his work. Kelly’s improvisation sounded light, playful and optimistic, in a way contrasting the slightly provocative tone of the rest of the piece. My second favorite record on the album is Flamenco Sketches. I found the way that Davis performed during the piece…
Crime Data Comparison will look at a specific crime in two selected metropolitan areas and identify the occurrences reported and address which area had more reported incidents, what the rate was for each area, whether the rates changes in each area over time and what factors might explain the differences in the rates.…
a. Improvisation is creating music in the moment by responding to the other players around you. Jazz music uses improvisation almost all the time, most jazz pieces use improvisation.…
Miles Davis was an American Jazz musician back in the 1960s. He was not only a terrific trumpeter, but was also a bandleader and composer. Miles Davis is just one of the people who had a major impact and influence on the Jazz-Rock fusion era and artists in the late 1940s. Unknowingly, Miles Davis would grow and become one of the leading figures in the Jazz world, and would help Jazz-Rock to be brought to the mainstream music…
One particularly upfront connection between Moodie’s Moodie and Atwood’s Moodie is that of language. Although the subject of language comes up in considerably different ways language is still an important theme in both pieces of work. Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush is meant to be a means for conveying her animosity towards the land agents. These land agents convinced her, and many English people like alike, to emigrate and give up life in England in favour of a life of supposed riches in Canada. Once moved, the English folk would come to notice that life in Canada was not all it was claimed to have been. There were certainly no riches. On the contrary, life was completely different and required dedication to sustain life. Moodie,…
In the year 1959, Jazz innovator Miles Davis created a sound that would inspire generations of artists in Jazz, R&B, Rap, and Rock. Early that year, Davis had laid down the album Kind of Blue, a record that would be the foundation of modal jazz. As Davis’ best selling album, the record was a major hit with critics and listeners everywhere. Showcasing each songs complexity through soloing, Davis was able to entice educated listeners with the simplicity of the modes.…
Polymodality is a term that has been rarely mentioned in the jazz literature, in the same way it has been infrequently practiced as a compositional tool by jazz arrangers and composers. Very few books mention either polymodality, polytonality or its related terminology, and when done, is sometimes to describe a different concept from the one discussed in this research. A clear example of this, is the use of the term polymodality by George Russell in his book Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. Russell uses the term to describe how chords and scales can generate vertical and horizontal modality, in his principle that reorganizes western theory with the Lydian mode at the center of it (instead of the major scale).…
Jazz is a music genre that has complex characteristics and history of development and thus many musicians and scholars face troubles in defining what jazz is. In general, jazz is believed to have born in New Orleans. Jazz developed for the pleasure of the social dancers. According to the “Understanding Jazz: What Is Jazz?” of John F. Kennedy center for the Performing Arts, Jazz was created mainly by Afro-Americans, and had elements of European and Afro-American culture. Also, it emphasizes few elements of Jazz, which are swing-feel, syncopation, and improvisation. These different culture and elements of jazz may be explained by how jazz developed from popular music styles of 1800’s. There can be many different music styles that could have effected development of jazz, but ragtime and blues were the two essential music style in development of jazz. Ragtime and Blues are similar in that they both were forerunner of Jazz in closely overlapping time period, but those two music styles were different in many ways: the origin of the music, whether instrumental or vocal, and which musical technic each music genre focused on. Thus both ragtime and blues were critical in jazz development, but they influenced jazz in different ways.…
The “Globalization of Jazz” is occurred when musicians from all around the world that were assimilating bebop and post-bop styles into the music of their culture in interesting and creative ways and creating new hybrid styles. Jazz had absorbed musical influences from other cultures and the reciprocal absorption of jazz into other parts of the world was…
Called also bop, bebop is a style of jazz with its characteristics being fast tempo, instrumental virtuosity and improvisation founded on the mixture of harmonic structure and melody. Its origins began in the early and mid-1940’s, where it became synonymous with modern jazz, as the two of them came to a certain maturity point in the 1960’s. Its roots were from New York City.…
Jazz is one of the musical genres that represent America. It had a combination of influences from Africa and Europe. When Africans were brought to the United States as slaves, they brought their music and culture with them. Samuel A. Floyd Jr. stated “…particular musical tendencies were brought with Africans to the New World…and spread throughout African-derived populations in the United States, eventually becoming an integral part of the music we know as jazz.” African slaves used musical expression for social purpose in the 1800s; they sang songs when they are working or they played drums. The immigration of Europeans started in the seventeenth century. They brought the instrumentations, the tonality, the chords, and the form into the United…
One thing known for certain is that Jazz music contains an abundance of American culture. This is part of the reason why the word, “fusion” holds such a strong association with jazz. Jazz began at about the beginning of the 1900s, and took off with a full head of steam until the end of the 1950s. At this time, there was a shift in popularity from jazz to rock music and jazz, true to its cultural background, was determined to stay alive. With that brought about some changes, and the way many artists dealt with this reality was through fusion. Now jazz has been fused with nearly every genre of music. When popular artists such as Jimi Hendrix or the Beatles came to fruition, fusion bridged the gap very smoothly with the new emerging genres. An…
I went to recital hour and heard The College Concert Jazz Band. They were a big band that consisted of various instruments such as: alto and tenor saxophones, trumpets, trombones, drums, bass, guitar and piano. They played Swing, Swing, Swing, Sunny Side of the Street, Bebop Charlie, which is a song that is a transition between swing and bebop, Blues for Sita, which was played by the big band and was intended to sound like a small band, It Had to be You, which featured a guest vocalist named Stav Sokolov, and Howdiz Songo?, which was a salsa style piece and it featured Charlie Chavez, who was awesome. I am going to write about Swing, Swing, Swing by Marty Conley and Blues for Sita by Mike Barone.…
I am doing my end of the semester paper on Jazz music. Jazz was created in the twentieth century and was said that it was, “created to bring people together.” Jazz was also known in many cities around the time of the jazz age, but the city that was known as the birthplace of jazz was New Orleans. There are many important names that people still know today from the jazz ages. One important name during the jazz age was Louis Armstrong is known for many Jazz songs like “What a Wonderful World”, “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “Go down Moses.” Another name was Billie Holiday and she was known for “God Bless the Child” and “Billie’s Blues.” The other name was Duke Ellington, who have many recordings like “Take the A Train”, “Black and Tan Fantasy”,…
“Playing outside” is when a free jazz musician makes choices about breaking some rules but not others. Generally speaking, the free jazz style is characterized by a spirit, which is willingly operating beyond the rules whether it is one or several. This was important to the free jazz movement because this enabled more creativity from the artists and they were able to make their music what they…