Fingerbreaker: Classics Of Ragtime And Early Jazz Piano

Jazz piano is the art of performing jazz on the piano, combining syncopated rhythms, blues-inflected melodies, and advanced harmony with improvisation. It grew from ragtime and early New Orleans styles into stride, swing, bebop, post-bop, and beyond, developing a vast vocabulary of voicings, comping approaches, left-hand textures, and soloing concepts. The genre spans intimate solo performances to interactive trio settings and orchestral jazz contexts, while remaining rooted in groove, storytelling, and spontaneous creation.

African-American classical refers to concert music in the Western art-music tradition written or led by African-American composers and performers. It encompasses orchestral, chamber, choral, operatic, and solo repertoire that speaks in the language of classical form and notation while drawing on the rhythms, scales, timbres, and stories of the African diaspora in the United States. Typical markers include the incorporation of spirituals, blues inflections, call-and-response textures, cakewalk and ragtime rhythms, and programmatic subjects tied to Black history and experience. Stylistically it ranges from late-Romantic symphonic writing through mid‑century modernism and post‑minimalism to today’s genre-fluid concert music.