The word "jazz" began as a West Coast slang term and was first used to refer to music in Chicago in about 1915. In early accounts, jazz is sometimes spelled "jass," and is said to be a variation of the word "jism," because it was originally performed by horn players to entertain johns in the whorehouses of Storyville, the notorious red-light district of New Orleans.
Prohibition in the United States (from 1920 to 1933) banned the sale of alcoholic drinks, resulting in illicit speakeasies becoming lively venues of the "Jazz Age", an era when popular music included current dance songs, novelty songs, and show tunes. Jazz started to get a reputation as being immoral and many members of the older generations saw it as threatening the old values in culture and promoting the new decadent values of the Roaring 20s.
Even the media began to degrade jazz. For instance, villagers used pots and pans in Siberia to scare off bears, and the newspaper stated that it was Jazz that scared the bears away. Another story claims that Jazz caused the death of a celebrated conductor.There was also a larger market for jazzy dance music played by white orchestras.
When electric guitar first showed up in the jazz world, most fans treated it as a novelty effect. But after the impact of Chicago blues, rock-and-roll and other related styles, the plugged-in guitar has become the defining sound of contemporary music.
Swing
The 1930s belonged to popular swing big bands, in which some virtuoso soloists became as famous as the band leaders. Key figures in developing the "big" jazz band included bandleaders and arrangers Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Glenn Miller, and Artie Shaw.
Trumpeter, bandleader and singer Louis Armstrong was a much-imitated innovator of early jazz. Swing was also dance music. It was broadcast on the radio 'live' nightly across America for many years especially by Hines and his Grand Terrace Cafe Orchestra broadcasting coast-to-coast from Chicago, well placed for 'live' time-zones.
- Louis Armstrong >
Beginnings of European jazz
Outside of the United States the beginnings of a distinct European style of jazz emerged in France with the Quintette du Hot Club de France which began in 1934. Belgian guitar virtuoso Django Reinhardt popularized gypsy jazz, a mix of 1930s American swing, French dance hall "musette" and Eastern European folk with a languid, seductive feel. The main instruments are steel stringed guitar, violin, and double bass. Solos pass from one player to another as the guitar and bass play the role of the rhythm section.
*reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz; http://www.allaboutjazz.com/; http://www.jazz.com/
My favourite
My favourite would be the Soul jazz. Soul jazz was a development of hard bop which incorporated strong influences from blues, gospel and rhythm and blues in music for small groups, often the organ trio, which partnered a Hammond organ player with a drummer and a tenor saxophonist. Soul jazz generally emphasized repetitive grooves and melodic hooks, and improvisations were often less complex than in other jazz styles. One nice composition, that I really like, is Cannonball Adderley's Mercy, Mercy, Mercy (1966).
Try listening to it : http://www.google.com.sg/url?q=http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DpRrFWp4DUho&ei=B_7kS82LDMyxrAeIqKSQAw&sa=X&oi=video_result&resnum=1&ct=thumbnail&cad=11897038358641332762&ved=0CBYQuAIwAA&usg=AFQjCNHiq8r_9nu9OutKEmIczn1RwnEnRA
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