New Orleans Jazz

United States · 1910s

Happy Dancing Sentimental Chill

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Description

New Orleans jazz is an early jazz style that emerged in New Orleans as small ensembles blended African-American musical practices with European instrumentation.

It is characterized by collective improvisation, where multiple frontline instruments (typically cornet/trumpet, clarinet, and trombone) improvise simultaneously around the melody.

Rhythm is driven by a steady, marching-band-derived pulse and syncopation, often supported by tuba (or string bass), banjo (or guitar), drums, and sometimes piano.

The repertoire commonly draws on blues, ragtime, marches, quadrilles, hymns, and popular songs, with frequent use of call-and-response phrasing and a strong sense of swing that predates later big-band styles.

In many catalogs this tradition overlaps with what is later called Dixieland, though historically it includes both African-American New Orleans styles and subsequent revival interpretations.

Sources: Spotify, Wikipedia, Discogs, Rate Your Music, MusicBrainz, and other online sources

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Influenced by

Classic Blues

Classic blues (often called "classic female blues") is the early, urban, theater-bred form of the blues that flourished primarily in the 1920s. It is characterized by powerful lead vocalists—frequently women—fronting small jazz ensembles or a piano accompanist, with arrangements that translated the blues idiom to vaudeville stages and recording studios. Musically it typically uses the 12‑bar blues form, AAB lyric stanzas, swung or shuffle rhythms in 4/4, and prominent use of blue notes (flattened 3rd, 5th, and 7th). The style sits at the crossroads of Southern blues traditions, ragtime and early jazz, and the songcraft and professionalism of vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley. Classic blues differs from country/delta blues by its more formal arrangements, band instrumentation, and theatrical delivery. It launched the commercial “race records” era with Mamie Smith’s 1920 hit "Crazy Blues," and set the template for later jazz and R&B vocal performance.

Ragtime

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.

March

A march is a musical genre and form designed to accompany orderly movement, most commonly military processions, parades, and ceremonial events. It is typically in duple meter (2/4 or 4/4) or compound duple (6/8), with a steady tempo that supports synchronized stepping. Classical and concert marches evolved a characteristic multi-strain structure: an introduction, two strains, a key-changing trio, a break strain ("dogfight"), and a final strain, often with a strong cadential "stinger." Instrumentation centers on winds and percussion—brass, woodwinds, snare and bass drums, and cymbals—producing a bright, projecting sonority suitable for outdoor performance. While the style is pan-European in origin, the late-19th- and early-20th-century "golden age" of the American march, led by John Philip Sousa, codified the concert march’s form, orchestration, and performance practice, influencing wind band music worldwide.

Rock And Roll

Rock and roll is a high-energy, dance-oriented popular music style that emerged in the United States in the early-to-mid 1950s. It fuses the 12‑bar blues and boogie‑woogie with the backbeat and instrumentation of rhythm & blues, the twang and storytelling of country, and the fervor of gospel. Its hallmark sound centers on a strong backbeat (accented on beats 2 and 4), driving rhythm sections, electric guitar riffs, prominent piano or saxophone leads, and catchy, chorus-forward songwriting. Typical harmonies revolve around I–IV–V progressions, often in 12-bar form, with swung or shuffle feels and punchy turnarounds. Culturally, rock and roll catalyzed a youth movement linked to dancing, teen identity, and social change. It bridged racial audiences by popularizing Black American musical traditions for mainstream listeners, and it laid the foundation for subsequent rock styles and much of modern pop.

Maracatu

Maracatu is an Afro-Brazilian processional music and performance tradition from Pernambuco, centered on powerful, polyrhythmic percussion and call-and-response song. It exists in two main forms: Maracatu Nação (also called maracatu de baque virado), associated with the historic coronation ceremonies of the "Rei e Rainha do Congo" (King and Queen of Congo) in Recife and Olinda; and Maracatu Rural (maracatu de baque solto), linked to the sugarcane zone (Zona da Mata) and famous for its costumed caboclos de lança. Both forms combine African-derived drumming, Portuguese processional pageantry, and local popular poetry to create an epic, ceremonial groove that animates Carnival and community celebrations. The core sound is driven by alfaias (large rope-tuned bass drums), caixas/tarois (snares), gonguê (iron bell), agbês/xequerês (gourd shakers), and ganzás/mineiros (metal shakers). Vocals are led by a puxador (lead singer) with a chorus, delivering toadas (songs) that praise the nation, invoke spiritual lineages, and comment on community life.

Bayawan

Bayawan is a localized Visayan folk song-and-dance practice linked to Bayawan City in Negros Oriental, Philippines. It blends courtship duet singing, light banter, and graceful partner dancing, echoing the spirit of Visayan balitaw and the serenade ethos of harana and kundiman. Performances typically feature call-and-response verses in Cebuano/Visayan, accompanied by guitars or a small rondalla (bandurria, laud/octavina, guitar, and bass). Rhythms often sit in 3/4 (waltz-like) or 2/4/4/4 with a habanera lilt, and melodies are tuneful and strophic, inviting audience participation. Today, the style commonly appears in civic and festival contexts (e.g., street-dance suites and cultural showcases), preserving its community-centered, dance-forward identity.

Acoustic Blues

Acoustic blues is a family of blues styles performed on non-amplified instruments, most commonly solo voice with acoustic guitar and, at times, harmonica. It emphasizes raw, intimate timbres; elastic vocal phrasing; and guitar techniques such as fingerpicking, alternating-bass patterns, and bottleneck slide. Rooted in African American folk traditions of the U.S. South, acoustic blues typically favors small-scale, conversational performance practice—call-and-response between voice and guitar, expressive "blue notes," and lyrics in the AAB stanza form. Substyles include Delta blues (driving, slide-heavy), Piedmont blues (ragtime-influenced fingerpicking), and Texas blues (looser, narrative-driven playing).

Field Hollers

Field hollers are solo, unaccompanied vocal cries historically performed by African Americans in the rural U.S. South, especially in plantations, levee camps, railroad gangs, and prison farms. They were used to communicate across distances, express emotion, keep time, or relieve the isolation of field labor. Musically, hollers feature elastic, free rhythm; soaring melismas; blue notes; wide glissandi; sudden dynamic shifts; and improvised text. Singers often project at high volume, using falsetto, moans, whoops, and bends to carry over long distances. While mostly solo, hollers sometimes prompted distant call-and-response with other workers. Lyrically, field hollers range from short location calls or work-time signals to longer complaint songs and personal laments, touching on separation, longing, hardship, and news. The style is a foundational ancestor of the blues and a close cousin to ring shouts and spirituals, preserving core elements of West African vocality within oppressive working conditions.

Jongo

Jongo is an Afro-Brazilian circle dance and song tradition from the coffee-growing heartlands of southeastern Brazil, especially the Paraíba Valley spanning Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais. It is typically performed around a bonfire with two drums—the larger caxambu and the smaller candongueiro—driving interlocking rhythms while participants sing call-and-response verses known as pontos. Rooted in Central and West-Central African (Bantu) cultural memory brought by enslaved peoples, jongo blends ritual, poetry, dance, and social commentary. Dancers invite one another into the circle using the umbigada (a belly-to-belly gesture), and singers improvise metaphor-rich, often enigmatic lyrics that encode devotion, resistance, and wit. In some regions the practice is also called caxambu, reflecting local naming of the larger drum and the tradition itself. Beyond performance, jongo serves as an intergenerational archive for Afro-Brazilian communities, embodying ancestry, spirituality, and communal cohesion while maintaining a lively, dance-forward character.

Has influenced

Bebop

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.

Jazz Pop

Jazz pop blends the melodic immediacy and song structures of pop with the harmonic richness, phrasing, and instrumentation of jazz. Typical arrangements feature piano or guitar-led rhythm sections, upright or electric bass, light drum kits (often with brushes), and tasteful horns or strings. Harmonically it favors extended chords (maj7, 9ths, 13ths), ii–V–I cadences, and sophisticated substitutions, while rhythms range from gentle swing and bossa nova to straight pop backbeats. Vocals usually emphasize warm timbres, nuanced crooning, and elastic, behind-the-beat phrasing. The result is urbane, approachable music that keeps pop’s hooks and forms while carrying jazz’s color and elegance, making it a perennial crossover sound for radio, lounges, and contemporary singer‑songwriters.

Modal Jazz

Modal jazz is a style of jazz in which improvisation and composition are organized around musical modes rather than rapid chord changes. Instead of navigating dense harmonic progressions (as in bebop and hard bop), modal jazz often sustains a single scale or a small set of modes for long stretches, creating a spacious, open canvas for melodic development. Hallmarks include slow harmonic rhythm, pedal points or drones, vamp-based forms, and quartal/quintal voicings on piano and guitar. Improvisers focus on color, contour, and motivic variation inside a mode (e.g., Dorian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Lydian), rather than outlining constant chord substitutions. The sound is typically lyrical, floating, and contemplative, but it can also be turbulent and intense when rhythm section dynamics and modal tension are pushed. Canonical examples include Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959) and John Coltrane’s modal vehicles such as Impressions and My Favorite Things.

Jazz

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.

Big Band

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.

Soul

Soul is a genre of popular music that blends the spiritual fervor and vocal techniques of African‑American gospel with the grooves and song forms of rhythm & blues and the harmonic palette of jazz and blues. It is defined by impassioned, melismatic lead vocals; call‑and‑response with backing singers; handclaps and a strong backbeat; syncopated bass lines; and memorable horn or string riffs. Typical instrumentation includes drum kit, electric bass, electric guitar, piano or Hammond organ, horns (trumpet, saxophone, trombone), and sometimes orchestral strings. Lyrically, soul ranges from love and heartbreak to pride, social commentary, and spiritual yearning. Regionally distinct scenes—such as Detroit’s Motown, Memphis/Stax, Muscle Shoals, Chicago, New Orleans, and Philadelphia—shaped different flavors of soul, while the style’s emotional directness and rhythmic drive made it a cornerstone of later funk, disco, contemporary R&B, and hip hop.

Doo-Wop

Doo-wop is a vocal harmony–driven style of rhythm and blues that blossomed in mid-century urban America. Built around lead-tenor melodies, lush background harmonies, and playful nonsense syllables (the source of its name), the genre blends church-bred gospel techniques with street-corner spontaneity. Musically, doo-wop favors simple, singable chord cycles—especially the “’50s progression” (I–vi–IV–V)—a steady 4/4 or lilting 12/8 feel, and call-and-response between lead and backing parts. Arrangements range from a cappella to small combos with guitar, piano, bass, light drums, and occasional saxophone. Lyrically, the songs are often teen-centered: romance, longing, heartbreak, and devotion. The sound emerged in the late 1940s within African-American communities and soon resonated across ethnic lines, inspiring groups in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. Its polished harmonies, sweet ballads, and hooky refrains helped shape early rock and roll and later pop harmony traditions.

Rock And Roll

Rocksteady

Rocksteady is a Jamaican popular music style that emerged in the mid‑1960s as a slowed‑down, more soulful successor to ska and the direct precursor to reggae. It retains ska’s off‑beat guitar/piano "skank" but lowers the tempo, brings the bass to the foreground, and favors expressive vocal harmonies. Typically recorded by small studio bands with guitar, electric bass, drums, piano/organ, and occasional horns, rocksteady emphasizes melodic, inventive basslines, tight rhythm guitar, rimshot/side‑stick drums, and sparse horn figures. Lyrically it ranges from tender love songs and yearning ballads to rude‑boy narratives and social commentary. Its concise arrangements and groove‑driven feel make it both danceable and emotionally resonant.

Jit

Jit (also called jiti) is a fast, guitar-driven dance music from Zimbabwe characterized by bright, interlocking lead and rhythm guitar lines, propulsive bass, and a driving 4/4 drum pulse. The groove often translates traditional mbira (thumb piano) patterns onto electric guitars, yielding a shimmering, tightly woven texture meant for exuberant social dancing. Songs are typically sung in Shona (and sometimes Ndebele), with call-and-response refrains, community handclaps, and hosho (shaker) accents. Harmonies favor major keys and cyclical I–IV–V progressions, while melodies are concise and hook-forward. The overall feel is joyous, kinetic, and communal, with tempos commonly in the 130–160 BPM range.

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