Ethno 50B Essay #1 - 1347 Words

Small Changes Make Big Differences A living jazz legend once exclaimed â€Å"jazz has borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other genres of music.† Herbie Hancock makes it clear that jazz has been an evolving form of art. And just as simple as the notion that music can change the world, music changes in itself. Jazz once evolved into something we call swing. Back in the roaring twenties people got up and danced to this kind of music. However, these simple and playful melodies that everyone were accustomed to transformed into intricate music with a different basis. When jazz was over everyone’s head and people stopped dancing, we call this period bop. Inevitably, new ideas emerged and jazz musicians decided to take a†¦show more content†¦Monk was a self-taught pianist that played with flat fingers, yet had incredible control and improvisation skills. Gillespie was a genius musician trumpet player that had a great deal of fun with his se nse of humor and comedic skits, nicknamed Dizzy. â€Å"Dizzy developed bunny routines as fast as he developed original music. With them he attracted and held audiences that might not have understood everything he was playing† (Crow 1990: 331). As Crow shows, Dizzy had a silly side but knew when to buckle down and be serious. The combination of Bird, Dizzy and Monk, meant endless hours soloing at Minton’s and Monroe’s. They explored their individual sides of soloing and created unison soloing between trumpet and saxophone when improvising. The only problem was, even when Dizzy was serious, his style of music was not adored by everyone. The very fast tempos and blur through notes made it hard to dance to like in the swing period, which made it hard to be popular. It was this lack of an audience that started the transition over to the cool era. The reason it’s probably called cool jazz is because it brought the energy down a level compared to bop. â€Å"In a macro sense, it describes a jazz musician whose performance style is restrained subdued, or understated when compared with â€Å"hot† taken in bebop† (Meadows 2003: 262). Some people consider cool jazz a reaction to bop, yet