Bebop Jazz Music

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Jazz is music like no other. It’s considered the “musical language of communication” and it’s also the first American Native style of music to affect many cultures around the world. Jazz is a type of African-American music that originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the South of the United States. This type of music is a combination of European harmony and different types of African musical elements such as blue notes, improvising, polyrhythms, and syncopation. As it started spreading around the world, Jazz made an amazing impression on national, regional and local cultures forming many distinctive styles of jazz. Some of the most famous styles/genres of jazz includes Afro-Cuban jazz, Ska jazz, Indo jazz, soul jazz, Latin jazz, jazz fusion, punk jazz and bebop. The style of Bebop jazz is characterized by its fast tempos, instrumental brilliance and improvisation that’s based on a combination of harmonic organization and melody. The bebop style of jazz began at the beginning of World War two and right after the end of the swing jazz era. The music of the swing era was popular from the 1930’s to around the beginning of World War two when most of the Jazz musicians went off to fight in the war. Before the 1930s, however, small groups, usually consisting of a trumpet, trombone, clarinet, tuba or bass, banjo or piano, and drums, performed jazz. Each instrument had a specific role in the ensemble, aside from the melody. This sectionalized approach carried over into the big bands of swing music, which instead featured a section of three to four trumpet players; four trombone performers and five to six saxophonists. The number of Clarinet players were doubled and instead of a bassist they had a tuba player. It still consisted of one piano play, one guitarist and one drummer. World War Two brought an end to the glory days of swing. Big bands

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