Pop Jazz

Great Jazz Pianists and Their Contributions to Music

Some of the greatest piano players in history became known for their proficiency in jazz. Technicality and a heavy reliance upon the ability of the musician to improvise makes jazz piano one of the hardest styles to learn. That does NOT mean, however, that it can’t be learned, but to get to the highest rungs a pianist must have lots of talent, a great ear, and the ability to improvise.

The birth of Jazz Music in the early 1900s was a significant period in musical history. Many of those who are considered among the greatest jazz pianists of all times were pioneers of the genre during this period. Jazz evolved from musical styles that African slaves brought to America. Therefore, its inception can largely be attributed to the early African-American community. African-American pianists, such as Scott Joplin and Ernest Hogan, are considered to be among the fathers of ragtime music. Although the ragtime era only lasted a few years, it was a precursor to, and contemporary of, the jazz era.

Many of the earliest and greatest jazz pianists were African American. For this reason, jazz music had something of a hurdle to overcome. While many embraced jazz as a new and exciting genre, others didn’t. The emancipation of African slaves was still a fresh memory, and many people still carried strong attitudes of racism.

Jazz’s public image changed slowly over the first two or three decades of the 20th century. Great African-American jazz pianists of the early to mid 1900s were instrumental in helping transform the perception of jazz. African-American artists like Erroll Garner, Theoloius Monk, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Oscar Peterson brought a level of class to the genre that was undeniable. In fact, the Count Basie orchestra was pivotal to the jazz culture of New York for half a century. Noteworthy musicians in and of themselves, they also provided back-up for critically acclaimed singers like Billie Holliday and Big Joe Turner.

Count Basie’s association with Ella Fitzgerald is both historically and musically significant. The 1963 album the two made together is remembered by critics as possibly the greatest recording of her career. Count Basie also made recordings with Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Tony Bennett. These match-ups lent even more credibility to jazz as a distinct genre.

The evolution of jazz saw many changes over the ensuing decades. More branches and sub-genres developed. In fact, jazz music fell out of favor with the public for several years in the 1980s. There was controversy within the musical community over the fusing of so many different types of music with jazz. Some purists viewed it as “watering down” the art form. Other musicians and fans see jazz music as a culmination of many types of music and view blending it with rock as simply another variation generally known as “fusion”.

Contemporary Jazz Artists have brought jazz back around into public favor in the 21st century. Today’s great jazz pianists, like Diana Krall, Harry Connick Jr. and Norah Jones bear living proof of this by number of albums sold. While some write off their work as “pop” jazz, many believe they are instrumental in keeping jazz alive in the new millennium.

About the Author

Duane Shinn is the author of the popular online newsletter on piano chords, available free at “Exciting Piano Chords & Chord Progressions!”

TOP 14 Mollee y Nathan – Pop jazz

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Amy Winehouse – 3×2 inch Fridge Magnet – large magnetic button – Magnet $4.99 Rectangular wrap-around refrigerator magnet and a glossy mylar cover.Large 2×3 inch rectangle fridge magnet or ‘buttons’ as they are sometimes known in the USA.Crop shown is automated for display purposes only. All magnets are hand finished and the best most appropriate crop will always be selected to best show the full image. Therefore, actual product may vary slightly from crop shown – this can …

Amy Winehouse – 3×2 inch Fridge Magnet – large magnetic button – Magnet $4.99 Rectangular wrap-around refrigerator magnet and a glossy mylar cover.Large 2×3 inch rectangle fridge magnet or ‘buttons’ as they are sometimes known in the USA.Crop shown is automated for display purposes only. All magnets are hand finished and the best most appropriate crop will always be selected to best show the full image. Therefore, actual product may vary slightly from crop shown – this can …

In Concert [VHS] $19.95 …

Music [VHS] $2.99 WINNER OF… -The International Film and Video Competition- Gold Award -WorldFest Houston- Bronze Award -The C.I.N.D.Y. Awards- Gold Award -United Press International- 1995 Years Best in Jazz: Video Oscar Peterson narrates this feature-length film, tracing the evolution of his ever-changing sound and style: from his early days as Montreal’s boogie-woogie sensation, through his meteoric rise to i…

Miles Davis Story [VHS] $14.98 Trumpeter-bandleader Miles Davis (1926-91) was a catalyst for the major innovations in post-bop, cool jazz, hard-bop, and jazz-fusion, and his wispy and emotional trumpet tones were some of the most evocative sounds ever heard. He was also one of the most identifiable and misunderstood pop icons of the 20th century. This engrossing British documentary shows the complex layers of this magnific…

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Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story $3.49 The soulful story of Stax Records is told in this appreciative documentary chronicling the history of the renowned record label. From its humble 1953 origins in Memphis, Stax grew to represent the finest in soul music and African-American artists, and this program includes rare performance footage and insights from Isaac Hayes, Mavis Staples, Booker T. Jones, Bono, Jesse Jackson, and others. 113 m…

Jazz Pop $14.99 (Jazz Play-Along Volume 102). By Various. Jazz Play Along. Softcover with CD. 72 pages. Published by Hal Leonard

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Keyboard Runs for the Pop & Jazz Stylist $19.95 By Noreen Grey Lienhard. For Piano. Piano Collection; Piano Supplemental. Jazz. Book & CD. Published by Ekay/Shacor

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Hal Leonard Jazz Pop – Jazz Piano Solos Series Volume 8 $13.46 Jazz piano arrangements of 22 classic pop songs, including: Blackbird Don’t Know Why Fields of Gold Isn’t She Lovely It’s Too Late New York State of Mind On Broadway Oye Como Va Roxanne What a Fool Believes You Are So Beautiful and more.

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Accompanying the Jazz/Pop Vocalist $16.99 (A Practical Guide for Pianists). Keyboard Instruction. Softcover with CD. 56 pages. Published by Hal Leonard

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Music Master Compact Disc Catalogue $0.62 Used – Containing over 30,000 entries, this is an updated guide to the music CDs currently available. All CD formats are listed, including pop, soul, jazz, rock and musicals.

Music Master Compact Disc Catalogue $0.99 Used – Containing over 30,000 entries, this is an updated guide to the music CDs currently available. All CD formats are listed, including pop, soul, jazz, rock and musicals.

”I wanna take you higher”: The stylistic development and cultural dissemination of post-psychedelic funk music. $49.99 A traditional history of rock music divides up the genre into chronologically discrete eras, the fifties, the sixties and the seventies. Due to its convoluted influence streams, black popular music, especially funk must be looked at differently. Following on from the narrowly defined funk of James Brown, the second-wave of funk groups such as Sly and the Family Stone and Funkadelic allied themselves to the late-sixties psychedelic rock movement. Essentially funk was black music and rock was white, and the pivotal figure that connected these two movements was Jimi Hendrix.;Contemporaneous soul albums were referencing jazz, which had by the early seventies, become wholly appropriated by white musicians. Funk became a tool for the re-appropriation of African and African American musical idioms. In doing so it set itself up as a parallel and an alternative to mainstream rock, a sort of black rock analogous to punk rock music’s relationship to mainstream rock a generation later. Indeed the parallels between funk and punk run deep. Funkadelic, during their brief spell in Detroit were part of the same underground scene as some of the founding figures of punk namely, Iggy Pop and the MC5. Funk gave voice to the expression of urban alienation felt by many African-Americans in the seventies, but it also, at first through the use of funk in blaxploitation films, became a symbol of vice, funk being the soundtrack to both seventies cop-dramas and seventies pornography.;Ultimately, funk was subsumed by the disco movement, a genre that it had helped create. Yet funk was to reappear again in the eighties as the instrumental basis for hip-hop. The cross-section of this time period most closely addressed in this dissertation is the early seventies, and in particular 1971, looking at two seminal funk albums from this year, There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Sly and the Family Stone and Maggot Brain by Funkadelic. Both these albums demonstrate how the influence of the white musical

”Just another one of God’s gifts”: Prince, African-American masculinity, and the sonic legacy of the eighties. $49.99 The popular recording artist Prince is known for his ability to fuse musical styles considered mutually exclusive on the basis of race—funk and new-wave, R&B and hard rock. Prince has also made a name for himself by moving between different identities—sexual savant, devout man of god, androgynous sprite—a strategy that fit the 1980s, an era of shifting identity politics. This dissertation expands on previous scholarly work, which has claimed Prince as a quintessentially “post-modern” figure, by showing how his music manifests a history of the struggle for African-American self-representation. As an artist well versed in American pop history and deeply engaged with the black church, Prince was bringing the liberatory strategies of African-American culture to bear even as he de-constructed gender and sexuality. This dissertation takes a fresh approach to the question of music and identity: by analyzing Prince’s music with an ear for particular genre references, I present a snapshot of racial politics, music, and American society during a time period that few scholars have yet addressed. Musical genre is the discursive arena in which popular musicians navigate identity and history, and in each of my chapters I have focused on how Prince manipulates genre references, taking instrumental idioms as the signifiers of genre and identity. My introduction considers Prince’s use of the guitar, a “white” rock instrument; chapter one deals with keyboard synthesizers, and how Prince blended R&B horn idioms with new-wave music; chapter two discusses the relationship between funk drumming and black identity, exploring Prince’s symphonic transformations of the funk and his ambivalence to hip-hop. Chapter three connects Prince’s vocal styles to gospel music and the cosmology of the black church; and chapter four details how Prince re-integrated horns into his music, engaging with jazz and R&B as a way to reclaim black musical history. In its blend of musicology,

”Just another one of God’s gifts”: Prince, African-American masculinity, and the sonic legacy of the eighties. $49.99 The popular recording artist Prince is known for his ability to fuse musical styles considered mutually exclusive on the basis of race—funk and new-wave, R&B and hard rock. Prince has also made a name for himself by moving between different identities—sexual savant, devout man of god, androgynous sprite—a strategy that fit the 1980s, an era of shifting identity politics. This dissertation expands on previous scholarly work, which has claimed Prince as a quintessentially “post-modern” figure, by showing how his music manifests a history of the struggle for African-American self-representation. As an artist well versed in American pop history and deeply engaged with the black church, Prince was bringing the liberatory strategies of African-American culture to bear even as he de-constructed gender and sexuality. This dissertation takes a fresh approach to the question of music and identity: by analyzing Prince’s music with an ear for particular genre references, I present a snapshot of racial politics, music, and American society during a time period that few scholars have yet addressed. Musical genre is the discursive arena in which popular musicians navigate identity and history, and in each of my chapters I have focused on how Prince manipulates genre references, taking instrumental idioms as the signifiers of genre and identity. My introduction considers Prince’s use of the guitar, a “white” rock instrument; chapter one deals with keyboard synthesizers, and how Prince blended R&B horn idioms with new-wave music; chapter two discusses the relationship between funk drumming and black identity, exploring Prince’s symphonic transformations of the funk and his ambivalence to hip-hop. Chapter three connects Prince’s vocal styles to gospel music and the cosmology of the black church; and chapter four details how Prince re-integrated horns into his music, engaging with jazz and R&B as a way to reclaim black musical history. In its blend of musicology,

”Lily Park” for symphony orchestra. $49.99 Composers have long been interested in authentic materials from their own national heritage. Many composers favored folk-based melodies and rhythms. Bela Bartok, for example, collected volumes of Hungarian folk and gypsy melodies throughout his life. Igor Stravinsky’s three ballets (Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring) are also famous for their employment of folk melodies and primitive rhythms. American composers such as Charles Ives and Aaron Copland represented ‘Americana’ through the use of American pop music, jazz, and folk songs in their compositions. Much of the music of composers who emigrated to foreign countries represents strong implications of nationalism. These composers’ efforts to remember their origins, as well as nostalgia for their native culture, were expressed in their music. These qualities appear most interestingly in Asian composers such as Toru Takemitsu and Isang Yun. Despite the drastic difference between Asian and Western music, the two contrasting idioms are handled similarly by these two composers. They not only use non-Western musical materials such as folk melodies and rhythms, but also employ Asian titles, concepts, and traditional instruments to represent Asian inspiration in their music.;The composition Lily Park consists of three movements, entitled Wind Bell, Goblin Lights, and Rock of Ages . The three movements are based on my personal impressions of the cemetery Lily Park, located near Deagu, Korea, where all my grandparents are buried. In this composition, Western musical idioms are integrated with the composer’s Asian musical heritage. The concept of Lily Park , which is purely non-Western in origination, is realized by utilizing compositional techniques and concepts that have been developed by Western composers, such as tone color, tonality, pitch-class set theory, and serialism, with an ensemble that consists of Western instruments. These ideas are combined with Asian materials such as exotic scales, extended

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(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction Conductor Score & Parts Jazz Ensemble – Alfred Publishing – 00-33329 $42.79 Alfred Music Publishing is the world s largest educational music publisher. Alfred produces educational #44; reference #44; pop #44; and performance materials for teachers #44; students #44; professionals #44; and hobbyists spanning every musical instrument #44; style #44; and difficulty level. . Format: Conductor Score and Parts. Level: 1 (Easy). Genre: Jazz; Rock. Length: 12 quot;. Width: 9 quot;. Contributor: Words and music by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards [Rolling Stones] / Arranged by Mike Story. Series: First Year Charts for Jazz Ensemble. Category: Jazz Ensemble. Instrument: Jazz Ensemble. Publisher: Alfred Publishing.

(Why Don’t You Take) The Other Side? $13.99 Given that he’s got an extensive background as a pianist in Germany’s rich jazz scene — having made a home in Munich after moving from his native Milan — Robert Di Gioia’s work as the virtually one-man-band behind (Why Don’t You Take) The Other Side? comes as something of a surprise. No doubt he’s had to gradually ease out of some of the most defining traits of his original craft throughout his tenure as Marsmobil; though it began as an amalgam of lounge jazz and electronica in 1999, it fully culminates here with a far-removed, fascinatingly wide-ranging set sporting an abundance of tributaries. This is a tour de force of immaculately mind-bending pastoral pop, with an arsenal of instruments at play and only one finger on the trigger. Early album highlight and single “Crazy Colored Lights” utilizes a neat little tactic of segmenting the words of the title in a fleeting vocal harmony, and cycling them repeatedly as an isolated sonic tidbit floating over the rest — the perfect sonic equivalent of a kaleidoscopic image that does much to set the stage for what follows. One of the album’s two guests also shows up on this track in the form of a spoken word interlude by an entity known as the Illusionists, a strangely riveting out-of-left-field segment on a song that has already done much to ingratiate itself. You could swear that Mark Everett of Eels makes an appearance on the equally strong “Moon of Dust,” but as it turns out the song is intended merely as an “homage to Eels,” and is actually that much more impressive for it. At 16 tracks it would be tempting to assume there’d be some filler here, but this masterwork simply unfolds with nary a dull or derivative moment. Pianos and keyboard-driven sounds are the most consistently featured sonic implement, but in many cases they are used to lay the groundwork or simply twinkle at the higher end of the spectrum while other instruments take the spotlight. Such is the case with the deftly executed “Lolly,” which…