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Jazz has roots in a variety of American music traditions, including spirituals, blues, ragtime, religious hymns, hillbilly music, marching band music, and other popular musics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. After originating in and around New Orleans near the beginning of the 20th century, jazz styles spread in the 1920s, influencing other musical styles. The origins of the word jazz are uncertain. The word is rooted in American slang, and various derivations have been suggested. Jazz was not applied to jazz music until about 1915, in Chicago. Earl Hines, born in 1903 and later to become a celebrated "jazz" musician, used to claim that he was "playing piano before the word "Jazz" was even invented". For the origin and history of the word jazz, see Jazz (word).

The instruments used in marching bands and dance band music at the turn of century became the basic instruments of jazz: brass, reeds, and drums, using the Western 12-tone scale. Small bands of musicians, many of whom came from the jazz funeral procession tradition of New Orleans, played a seminal role in the articulation and dissemination of early jazz, traveling in the West, South, and to northern cities.

The rapid growth of public schooling in the postbellum produced more formally trained musicians. For example, Lorenzo Tio, Scott Joplin, and many other important musicians of the era were schooled in classical European musical forms. Joplin, the son of a former slave and a free-born woman of color, was largely self-taught until age 11, when he received lessons in the fundamentals of music theory. Musicians with formal music skills helped to preserve and disseminate the essentially improvisational musical styles of jazz.

By the Swing era, big bands played using arranged music: arrangements were either written or rehearsed (many early jazz musicians could not read written music.) Individual soloists, however, would perform improvised solos within these compositions. In bebop the focus shifted from the arrangement to improvisation over the form; musicians paid less attention to the composed melody, or "head," which was played at the beginning and the end of the tune's performance with improvised sections in between.

Later styles of jazz such as modal jazz abandoned the strict notion of a chord progression, allowing the individual musicians to improvise more freely within the context of a given scale or mode (e.g., "So What" on the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue). The avant-garde and free jazz idioms permit, even call for, abandoning chords, scales, and rhythmic meters.

The interaction between various ethnic music traditions had already been a part of mainstream popular music in the United States for generations, going back to the 19th century minstrel show tunes and the melodies of Stephen Foster. Public dance halls, clubs, and tea rooms opened in the cities. Black dances inspired by African dance moves, like the shimmy, turkey trot, buzzard lope, chicken scratch, monkey glide, and the bunny hug eventually were adopted by a white public. The cake walk, developed by slaves as a send-up of formal dress balls, became popular. White audiences saw these dances in vaudeville shows. The popular dance music of the time were blues-ragtime styles. Tin Pan Alley composers like Irving Berlin incorporated ragtime influences into their compositions. Bandleader Buddy Bolden's performances in New Orleans parades and dances are an early example of jazz-style improvisation.

Cakewalks, Coon Songs and the music of "Jig Bands" eventually evolved into Ragtime, c.1895 (timeline). One of the early Ragtime compositions was published by Ben Harney. The music was vibrant, enthusiastic and often extemporaneous. Early Ragtime music was in the format of marches, waltzes and other traditional song forms but the consistent characteristic was syncopation. Syncopated notes and rhythms became so popular with the public that sheet music publishers included the word "syncopated" in advertising. In 1899, a classically trained young pianist from Missouri named Scott Joplin published the first of many Ragtime compositions that would come to shape the music of a nation.

A number of regional styles contributed to the development of jazz. In the New Orleans, Louisiana area an early style of jazz called "Dixieland" developed. New Orleans had long been a regional music center. In addition to the slave population, New Orleans also had North America's largest community of free people of color. The New Orleans style used more intricate rhythmic improvisation than ragtime, and incorporated "blues" style elements including "bent" and "blue" notes, and using the European instruments in novel ways. The band which was credited with starting the jazz revolution was the Original Dixieland Jass Band, who arguably made the first recordings of jazz in April of 1917]; in mid 1917, the band respelled "Jass" as "Jazz."

Key figures in the development of the new style were trumpeter Buddy Bolden and his band, who arranged blues tunes for brass instruments and improvised; Freddie Keppard, who was influenced by Bolden; Joe Oliver, whose style was bluesier than Bolden's; Kid Ory, a trombonist who refined the style; and Papa Jack Laine, who led a multi-ethnic band. In 1891 in Charleston, South Carolina, Reverend Daniel J. Jenkins, an African-American minister, established the Jenkins Orphanage, which included a variety of orphanage bands. The orphanage bands were trained to perform popular and religious music, and members such as William "Cat" Anderson, Gus Aiken, and Jabbo Smith went on to play with jazz bandleaders like Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton and Count Basie.

In the northeastern United States, a "hot" style of playing ragtime developed, characterized by rollicking rhythms, without the bluesy influence of the southern styles. The music had collective improvised solos, around a melodic structure, that ideally built to a climax, supported by a rhythm section of drums, bass, banjo or guitar. The solo piano version of the northeast style was typified by Eubie Blake. "Stride" piano playing, in which the right hand plays the melody, while the left hand provides the rhythm and bassline, was developed by James P. Johnson. Johnson influenced later pianists like Fats Waller and Willie Smith. Recordings spread the "Hot" new sound across the country. James Reese Europe was a prominent orchestra leader. Tim Brymn performed with a northeastern "hot" style.

In Chicago in the early 1910s, saxophones vigorously "ragged" a melody over a dance band rhythm section, blending New Orleans styles and creating a new "Chicago Jazz" sound. Chicago was the breeding ground for many young, inventive players. Characterized by harmonic, innovative arrangements and a high technical ability of the players, Chicago Style Jazz significantly furthered the improvised music of its day. Contributions from dynamic players like Benny Goodman, Bud Freeman and Eddie Condon along with the creative grooves of Gene Krupa, helped to pioneer Jazz music from its infancy and inspire those who followed. Along the Mississippi from Memphis, Tennessee to St. Louis, Missouri, the "Father of the Blues," W.C. Handy popularized a less improvisation-based approach, in which improvisation was limited to short "fills" between phrases.

With Prohibition, the constitutional amendment that forbade the sale of alcoholic beverages, speakeasies emerged as nightlife settings, and many early jazz artists played in them. The invention of the phonograph record and the rise of popularity in radio helped the proliferation of jazz as well. Radio stations helped to popularize Jazz, which became associated with sophistication and decadence that helped to earn the era the nickname of the "Jazz Age." In the early 1920s, popular music was still a mixture of things: current dance songs, novelty songs, and show tunes.

Paul Whiteman, the self-proclaimed "King of Jazz," was a popular bandleader of the 1920s who hired Bix Beiderbecke and other white jazz musicians and combined jazz with elaborate orchestrations. Whiteman commissioned Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which was debuted by Whiteman's Orchestra. Ted Lewis was another popular bandleader. Some of the other bandleaders included: Harry Reser, Leo Reisman, Abe Lyman, Nat Shilkret, George Olsen, Ben Bernie, Bob Haring, Ben Selvin, Earl Burtnett, Gus Arnheim, Rudy Vallee, Jean Goldkette, Isham Jones, Roger Wolfe Kahn, Sam Lanin, Vincent Lopez, Ben Pollack and Fred Waring.

The 1930s belonged to Swing - and to the radio and dancing. During what many regard as jazz's classic era the popular bands became larger in size - Big Bands - and the solo became more important in jazz, with the soloists sometimes as famous as their leaders. Key figures in developing the "big" jazz band were bandleaders and arrangers Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Jimmie Lunceford, Jay McShann, Walter Page, Don Redman and Chick Webb. Other Big Bands, such as Artie Shaw's, Tommy Dorsey's and Benny Goodman's "Orchestra", were highly jazz oriented while others, such as, later, Glenn Miller's, left less space for improvisation. Swing was also dance music - hence its immediate connection to the people - and it was broadcast 'live' coast-to-coast nightly across America for many years, most famously by The Earl Hines Band from Al Capone's Grand Terrace Cafe in Chicago, well-positioned for the 'live coast-to-coast' time-zone broadcasting problem. Although it was a collective sound, swing also offered individual musicians a chance to 'solo' and improvise melodic, thematic solos which could at times be very complex and 'important' music.

Over time, social strictures regarding racial segregation began to relax, and white bandleaders began to recruit black musicians. In the mid-1930s, Benny Goodman hired pianist Teddy Wilson, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, and guitarist Charlie Christian to join small groups. During this period, swing and big band music were popular. The influence of Louis Armstrong can be seen in bandleaders like Cab Calloway, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and vocalists like Bing Crosby, who were influenced by Armstrong's style of improvising. The style further spread to vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday; later, Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan, among others, would jump on the scat bandwagon.

An early 1940s style known as "jumping the blues" or jump music used small combos, up-tempo music, and blues chord progressions. Jump blues drew on boogie-woogie from the 1930s, with the rhythm section playing "eight to the bar," (eight beats per measure instead of four). Big Joe Turner became a boogie-woogie star in the 1940s, and then in the 1950s was an early rock and roll musician. (Also see saxophonist Louis Jordan). The mid 1990s saw a revival of Swing music fueled by the retro trends in dance.

Outside of the United States the beginnings of a distinctly European jazz started emerging. At first this came mostly in France with the Quintette du Hot Club de France being among the first non-US bands of significance to jazz history. The playing of Django Reinhardt in particular would be important to the rise of gypsy jazz, which is one of the earliest genres to start outside the US.

Originated by Belgian guitarist Django Reinhardt, Gypsy Jazz is an unlikely mix of 1930s American swing, French dance hall "musette" and the folk strains of Eastern Europe. Also known as Jazz Manouche, it has a languid, seductive feel characterized by quirky cadences and driving rhythms. The main instruments are steel stringed guitar (particularly those of the Selmer Maccaferri line), violin, and upright bass. Solos pass from one player to another as the other guitars assume the rhythm. While primarily a nostalgic style set in European bars and small venues, Gypsy Jazz is appreciated world wide, and continues to thrive and grow in the music of artists such as Biréli Lagrène.

In the mid-1940s bebop performers such as saxophonist Charlie Parker, pianist Bud Powell and trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie helped to shift jazz from danceable popular music towards a more challenging "musician's music." Differing greatly from swing, early bebop divorced itself from dance music, establishing itself more as an art form but lessening its potential popular and commercial value. Other bebop musicians included pianist Thelonious Monk, drummer Kenny Clarke, trumpeters Clifford Brown and Fats Navarro, saxophonists Wardell Gray and Sonny Stitt, bassist Ray Brown, drummer Max Roach, guitarist Charlie Christian and vocalist Betty Carter.

These divergences from the jazz mainstream of the time initially met with a divided, sometimes hostile response among fans and fellow musicians. (Louis Armstrong, for instance, condemned bebop as "Chinese music.") But it was not long before bebop's influence was felt throughout jazz: older big-band leaders like Woody Herman (extensively) and Benny Goodman (briefly) experimented with the style. By the 1950s bebop had become an accepted part of the jazz vocabulary, and it has come to form the bedrock of modern jazz practice.

Free jazz and avant-garde jazz, are two partially overlapping subgenres that, while rooted in bebop, typically use less compositional material and allow performers more latitude. Free jazz uses implied or loose harmony and tempo, which was deemed controversial when this approach was first developed.

Early performances of these styles go back as early as the late 40s and early 50s: Lennie Tristano's Intuition and Digression (1949) and Descent into the Maelstrom (1953) are often credited as anticipations of the later free jazz movement, though they seem not to have had a direct influence on it. The bassist Charles Mingus is also frequently associated with the avant-garde in jazz, although his compositions draw off a myriad of styles and genres. The first major stirrings of what free jazz came in the 1950s, with the early work of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. In the 1960s, performers included John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Makanda Ken McIntyre, Pharoah Sanders, Sam Rivers, Don Pullen, Dewey Redman and others. Peter Brötzmann, Ken Vandermark, William Parker, Derek Bailey and Evan Parker are leading contemporary free jazz musicians, and musicians such as Coleman, Taylor and Sanders continue to play in this style. Keith Jarrett has been prominent in defending free jazz from criticism by traditionalists in recent years.

The hard bop style coalesced in 1953 and 1954, paralleling the rise of rhythm and blues. The performance by Miles Davis of his composition "Walkin'," the title track of his album of the same year, at the very first Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, announced the style to the jazz world. The quintet by Art Blakey featured pianist Horace Silver and trumpeter Clifford Brown, all of whom would be leaders in the hard bop movement along with Davis.

Other musicians who contributed prominently to the hard bop style include Cannonball Adderley, Donald Byrd, Sonny Clark, John Coltrane, Lou Donaldson, Kenny Drew, Benny Golson, Dexter Gordon, Joe Henderson, Andrew Hill, Freddie Hubbard, Jackie McLean, Charles Mingus, Blue Mitchell, Hank Mobley, Thelonious Monk, Lee Morgan, and Sonny Rollins.

The 1970's saw the rise of Jazz Rock and Jazz Fusion subgenres with artists such as John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and Miles Davis prominent. Many rock musicians such as guitarist Jeff Beck, experimented in this field with groups dominated by guitar and electronic keyboards. e.g. Weather Report.

Traditional Jazz continues with the likes of Wynton Marsalis and the debate continues whether so called Acid Jazz, Smooth Jazz (Kenny G) and Contemporary Jazz (Norah Jones) should be called "Jazz" at all.

www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_Music