Jazz

c.1910 – present day

Main Composers/Artists: Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Miles Davis

The main ingredients of jazz are:

Swung Rhythms – where 2 normally equal notes, e.g. quavers, are changed to a triplet feel, with the 1st note twice as long as the 2nd. This can produce a lazy, mellow feel in slow music, and a springy bounce in faster passages.

Syncopation – where many of the melody notes and accents occur between the main beats rather than on them.

Extended harmony – the harmonic skeleton is usually a repeated and fairly straightforward pattern but the individual chords can be complex, with 9ths, 11ths and 13ths grafted on to the fundamental major, minor and dominant 7th chords. The almost infinite possibilities of how to distribute a 5 or 6-note chord are partly what gives jazz its harmonic succulence.

Improvisation – the art of jazz is based on the performers improvising over the underlying harmonic framework. Even when written down, it should sound spontaneous. One manifestation of this can be long melody notes alternating with rapid flurries (riffs).

Blue notes – jazz and blues are closely related, and blues has its own scale. The blues scale on C, for example, is C, Eb, F, Gb, G, Bb.

The main colours of this scale are the Eb, Gb and Bb (all a semitone lower than in a major scale) which can sound sad in slower music, and robust and defiant at faster speeds. Many jazz performers use blues riffs in their improvisations.

Ornamentation – grace notes (sometimes crushed acciaccatura style, sometimes slowly sliding) are common.

Suggested listening

Christopher Norton ‘Tiger Blues’ from ‘Microjazz’ – An excellent introduction to blues style: the right-hand part plays only notes from the C blues scale virtually throughout.

Gershwin 3 Preludes for Piano – Syncopation; spicy blue-note melody and harmony; slow grace notes (No.2).

‘My Funny Valentine’ sung by Ella Fitzgerald   – This wonderful arrangement takes you beyond the scope of the exam extract you will encounter, but it is a great way to immerse yourself in the soundworld of jazz. Lush chromatic harmonies; frequent piano riffs including grace notes; blues inflections.  

Gershwin ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ – A more extended masterpiece in jazz idiom, great fun to listen to all the way through.