Jazz & Blues
The twin pillars of African-American music — blues rooted in field hollers and spirituals, jazz in improvisation and harmonic complexity. Together they shaped the 20th century.
Sub-topics
Born in the Deep South around the 1890s-1900s from spirituals, work songs, and field hollers. The 12-bar blues form, blue notes, and call-and-response became the DNA of popular music.
The earliest recorded blues style, originating in the Mississippi Delta in the 1900s-1920s. Acoustic guitar and slide guitar, raw vocals. Robert Johnson, Charley Patton, Son House.
Electrified Delta blues transplanted to Chicago during the Great Migration (1940s-1950s). Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, and Little Walter added electric guitar, amplified harmonica, and full bands.
Emerged in the late 1940s as a commercial term for African-American popular music. Combined blues, jazz, and gospel into an upbeat, dance-oriented style that directly birthed rock and roll.
Originated in New Orleans in the 1910s from blues, ragtime, and brass band traditions. Defined by improvisation, swing, and complex harmony. America's classical music.
The dominant popular music of the 1930s-1940s. Big band jazz with danceable rhythms — Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman. The first truly mass-market American music.
A virtuosic, harmonically complex jazz style developed in the mid-1940s by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk. Fast tempos, intricate melodies, and improvisation over chord changes.
A relaxed, lyrical response to bebop's intensity, emerging in the late 1940s-1950s. Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool (1957), Dave Brubeck, Chet Baker. West Coast jazz.
A grittier, blues- and gospel-inflected extension of bebop, flourishing in the 1950s-1960s. Art Blakey, Horace Silver, Cannonball Adderley. The East Coast response to cool jazz.
Avant-garde jazz that abandoned fixed chord progressions, tempos, and structures in the 1960s. Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor. Radical freedom as aesthetic principle.
Jazz fused with rock, funk, and electronic instruments in the late 1960s-1970s. Miles Davis's Bitches Brew (1970), Weather Report, Herbie Hancock, Return to Forever.
A commercially oriented, radio-friendly jazz style emphasizing melody over improvisation. Emerged in the 1980s from fusion. Grover Washington Jr., Kenny G, George Benson.
African-American sacred music rooted in spirituals, hymns, and the Black church. Thomas A. Dorsey formalized it in the 1930s. Its vocal intensity and emotional power shaped soul, R&B, and rock.
Born in the late 1950s-1960s by fusing gospel fervor with R&B rhythm. Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding. Motown and Stax defined two distinct approaches.
James Brown and Parliament-Funkadelic made the groove the song itself in the late 1960s-1970s. Syncopated bass, rhythmic guitar, heavy drums. The One. Directly seeded hip-hop and electronic dance music.