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bebop

Bebop

United States · 1940s

Intense Dark Happy Sad Romantic

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Description

Bebop is a modern jazz style characterized by fast tempos, intricate melodies, and harmonically advanced improvisation. It moved jazz from dance-oriented big-band music to art-focused small-ensemble performance, prioritizing virtuosity and spontaneous creativity.

Typical bebop groups are quintets or quartets featuring trumpet, alto or tenor saxophone, piano, double bass, and drums. The music emphasizes asymmetrical phrasing, extended chords and substitutions, and contrafacts—new melodies written over the chord changes of popular songs.

Rhythm sections center time on the ride cymbal, with the bass walking and the drummer "dropping bombs" on snare and bass drum. Melodies are angular and chromatic, and soloists outline rapidly shifting harmonies with bebop scales, enclosure tones, and altered dominants.

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Swing is a jazz style centered on a buoyant, danceable groove created by a walking bass, four-to-the-bar rhythm guitar, a backbeat emphasis on 2 and 4, and a lilted “swung” eighth-note feel. Typically performed by big bands (saxes, trumpets, trombones, and a rhythm section) as well as small combos, it balances written arrangements with improvised solos. Hallmarks include call-and-response between horn sections, riff-based melodies, shout choruses that build intensity near the end of an arrangement, and rich sectional voicings grounded in blues language and ii–V–I harmonic motion. Tempos range from medium to brisk, serving social dances like the Lindy Hop and Jitterbug. Swing’s expressive phrasing, dance-floor focus, and sophisticated arranging made it the dominant popular music of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Blues is an African American musical tradition defined by expressive "blue notes," call-and-response phrasing, and a characteristic use of dominant-seventh harmony in cyclical song forms (most famously the 12‑bar blues). It is as much a feeling as a form, conveying sorrow, resilience, humor, and hard-won joy. Musically, blues commonly employs the I–IV–V progression, swung or shuffled rhythms, and the AAB lyric stanza. Melodies lean on the minor/major third ambiguity and the flattened fifth and seventh degrees. Core instruments include voice, guitar (acoustic or electric), harmonica, piano, bass, and drums, with slide guitar, bends, and vocal melismas as signature techniques. Over time the blues has diversified into regional and stylistic currents—Delta and Piedmont country blues, urban Chicago and Texas blues, West Coast jump and boogie-woogie—while profoundly shaping jazz, rhythm & blues, rock and roll, soul, funk, and much of modern popular music.

Stride (often called Harlem stride piano) is an early jazz piano style distinguished by a powerful, syncopated left hand that "strides" between low bass notes or octaves on beats 1 and 3 and mid‑range chords on beats 2 and 4, while the right hand plays a highly embellished melody, runs, and improvised variations. Emerging in New York City—especially Harlem—after ragtime, stride expanded the rhythmic looseness, harmonic richness, and improvisational freedom that would feed directly into swing and later jazz piano traditions. It is both virtuosic and danceable, equally suited to fast showpieces and tender ballads, and was central to piano "cutting contests" of the era.

Big band is a large-ensemble style of jazz and popular dance music built around brass, reed, and rhythm sections playing arranged parts. Typical instrumentation includes five saxophones (often doubling clarinet/flute), four trombones, four trumpets, and a rhythm section of piano, guitar, upright bass, and drum set. The music emphasizes swing rhythms, call-and-response between sections, riff-based writing, and dramatic shout choruses, while leaving space for improvised solos. Born in American ballrooms and theaters, big band became the sound of the Swing Era, providing both music for dancing and a platform for sophisticated arranging and orchestration that shaped much of 20th‑century jazz and popular music.

Ragtime is an African American–rooted piano style that flourished from the 1890s to the 1910s, characterized by lively syncopation in the right hand against a steady, march-like “oom‑pah” accompaniment in the left hand. Typically written in 2/4 or 4/4 time and notated with straight (unswung) eighth notes, classic rags unfold in multiple 16‑bar strains, often in the form AABBACCDD. The music draws on cakewalk rhythms, marching-band forms, and popular song, and it became a sensation through sheet music, piano rolls, and parlor performance. Scott Joplin, known as the “King of Ragtime,” helped codify the genre’s refined, compositional approach, calling for moderate tempos and a clear, singing melody. Beyond solo piano, ragtime was arranged for small ensembles and orchestras, found a home in vaudeville and dance halls, and laid essential groundwork for early jazz, stride piano, and much of 20th‑century American popular music.

Dixieland is one of the earliest forms of jazz, crystallizing in New Orleans in the 1910s and spreading to Chicago and New York in the 1920s. It is characterized by collective improvisation, where the front line—trumpet or cornet carrying the melody, clarinet weaving countermelodies, and trombone providing "tailgate" harmonies and slides—creates a lively polyphonic texture over a buoyant two-beat feel. Its rhythm section often features banjo or piano, tuba or string bass, and drums playing parade-derived press rolls and stop-time figures. Harmonically it draws on functional tonality (I–IV–V with frequent secondary dominants), and structurally it favors 12-bar blues, 16-bar strains from ragtime, and 32-bar AABA song forms. Repertoire includes marches, blues, spirituals, popular songs, and Creole dances, rendered with a brassy, celebratory sound that evokes the New Orleans brass band tradition.

Jazz is an improvisation-centered music tradition that emerged from African American communities in the early 20th century. It blends blues feeling, ragtime syncopation, European harmonic practice, and brass band instrumentation into a flexible, conversational art. Defining features include swing rhythm (a triplet-based pulse), call-and-response phrasing, blue notes, and extended harmonies built on 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths. Jazz is as much a way of making music—spontaneous interaction, variation, and personal sound—as it is a set of forms and tunes. Across its history, jazz has continually hybridized, from New Orleans ensembles and big-band swing to bebop, cool and hard bop, modal and free jazz, fusion, and contemporary cross-genre experiments. Its influence permeates global popular and art music.

Jazz blues is a hybrid idiom that merges the expressive, melodic language and 12‑bar song forms of the blues with the harmony, improvisational vocabulary, and rhythmic feel of jazz. Typically, it retains a blues structure (often the 12‑bar form) while enriching it with jazz devices such as ii–V progressions, secondary dominants, turnarounds, tritone substitutions, and extended chords (9ths, 11ths, 13ths). The feel commonly swings, with walking bass lines, comping on piano or guitar, blue notes, call‑and‑response phrasing, and solos that mix blues scales with mixolydian and bebop lines. The result ranges from earthy shuffles to urbane, harmonically sophisticated vehicles for improvisation, sitting comfortably between New Orleans roots, Kansas City riff traditions, and modern bop language.

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