Cash McCall – The Blues

How are the hi-hat cymbals significant in jazz music?

On swing tunes, they are used on 2 and 4 to keep the basic time of the chart going.

I listen to mostly classical composers but I recently started to listen to Jazz as well. Can anyone point out someplace where I could learn more about Jazz? You know, about the history and ideas of Jazz. Maybe some good Jazz music to listen to as well. From different Genres of Jazz!

some of my favorites:

red clay – freddie hubbard
a night at birdland – art blakey
the shape of jazz to come – ornette coleman
koln concert – keith jarrett
take five – dave brubeck quartet
karma – pharoah sanders
alone at last – gary burton
soul box – grover washington, jr.
spectrum – billy cobham
my favorite things – john coltrane
slow traffic on the right – bennie maupin
other side of abbey road – george benson
filles de kilimanjaro – miles davis
live-evil – miles davis
elegant gypsy – al di meola
jaco pastorius – self-titled
maiden voyage – herbie hancock
friday night in san francisco – di meola, de lucia and mclaughlin
head hunters – herbie hancock

Give a listen to these jazz musicians from Granite Bay High School.

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I am just getting started enjoying jazz music. As instruments go, I love piano, bass and trumpet in that order. Can anyone suggest some artists that I would enjoy combining those instruments, or utilizing a few of them?

Claude Bolling is a great jazz painist and composer. He teamed up with classical flutist Jean Pierre Rampal to produce two great albums called Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano. You should immediatley recognize some of the tracks. They received radio play when released and have been used as music beds for commercials and news packages. They both feature only the piano, flute, drums, and sting bass. Two virtuoso’s blending and battling through two great albums. Check out Bollings other works as well.

Another great album with more emphasis on trumpet with piano and bass is by the Yellow Jackets. I have a couple of their recordings but would only recommend Mirage a Trois. It is very upbeat and crisp with lots of syncopation and rhythm.

Jazz is such a wide music category and tastes carry vary tremendously. Don’t forget some of the older artists like Duke Ellington and George Gershwin (perhaps more classical than truley jazz – An American in Paris – the music used for United Airlines commercials). There is some great music with the early mastes too.

Enjoy the music – the other answers have some great artists too!

I’m writing a story for my school newspaper and need to know the difference between Jazz music and other music that would be played at a school band concert. Thanks!!!!!!!!

I think you can put it into 3 succinct points:

1) Improvisation: MOST music has written notation and it’s intended to sound the same with each performance while jazz soloists do the opposite, creating a different solo with each performance typically.

2) History: The four types of music with the longest roots in the U.S. and therefore arguably the most "American" music are country, blues, gospel and jazz.

3) Unusual (difficult) meters: The "meter" is the way the beat goes into each measure. Most popular music is usually 3/4 or 4/4 but it’s not uncommon to have 5/4 or 12/8 (which are considered difficult to play from a technical standpoint) in a jazz composition.

I really like vocal Jazz music. However, I do not know anyone my age that like jazz music as well. I’m not really into the rap kind of stuff but mainstream is okay and I like it too.

Are there any other jazz fans out there that are teenagers? I feel strange liking a genre people my age find "boring".

I love it too. there’s nothing wrong with it at all…there is no age limit in music

What types of jazz music was popular in the 1920s, also known as the Jazz Age or Roaring Twenties?

There were many, from Dixieland to Blues to "White" symphonic jazz. It’s impossible to characterize the decade’s music in a few paragraphs when volumes have been written.

Here are some important figures you should look at:

Paul Whiteman – Labeled the "King of Jazz" he helped popularize jazz among white audiences. In 1924 he commissioned George Gershwin to write a symphonic jazz piece that became "Rhapsody in Blue." Out of his band came the greatest white musicians: Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer, Eddie Lang, Joe Venuti, and Jack Teagarden. He also hired some kid by the name of Bing Crosby.

Louis Armstrong – Perhaps the most important musician of the 20th century, he took his New Orleans Dixieland horn to Chicago and made significant contributions to the "hot jazz" of the era. Crosby and Armstrong became great friends in the twenties. He taught Bing to scat and how to put humor into music and Crosby was an influence for Armstrong’s way of handling a ballad. This duo, therefore, probably did more to shape American music than any other.

Duke Ellington – Duke’s band was the prototype that would fuse jazz and popular music and lead to the rise of the white "swing" orchestras of the 1930’s.

(Note on above posters: Ragtime was a much earlier era of American music. It’s biggest star and composer, Scott Joplin, was dead by 1917)