Saturday, July 18, 2015

Dixieland music

Dixieland music or New Orleans jazz, sometimes referred to as hot jazz or early jazz, is a style of jazz music which developed in New Orleans at the start of the 20th century, and was spread to Chicago and New York City by New Orleans bands in the 1910s. Well-known jazz standard songs from the Dixieland era, such as "Basin Street Blues" and "When the Saints Go Marching In", are known even to non-jazz fans. With its beginnings in riverboat jazz, Dixieland progressed to Chicago-style jazz or hot jazz as developed by Louis Armstrong and others. The latter was also a transition and combination of 2-beat to 4-beat, introducing swing in its earliest form. "Chicago style" musicians used the string bass instead of the tuba and the guitar instead of the banjo to play a faster-paced, swinging style that emphasized solos. Hot jazz or Chicago-style jazz was also the current original music that began the Lindy Hop dance craze as it developed in Harlem.

Dixieland 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 unison melody of bebop in the 1940s. The swing era of the 1930s led to the end of many Dixieland jazz musicians' careers. There was a revival of Dixieland in the late 1940s and 1950s.

The "West Coast revival" began in the late 1930s in San Francisco which used banjo and tuba. 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.

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