Blues and Jazz

The New York blues was a type of blues music, characterized by significant jazz influences and a more modernized, urban feel than the country blues. It arose in New York City in the early part of the 20th century, and quickly spread to other urban areas and, often, more affluent listeners than country blues, which is distinctively rural in nature. Prominent musicians from this field include Lionel Hampton and Joe Turner .

In New York City, jazz was fused with stride (an advanced form of ragtime) and became highly evolved. Fletcher Henderson's jazz orchestra, first appearing in 1923, included Coleman Hawkins and later, Louis Armstrong , became wildly popular and helped invent swing music. Though Henderson was among the first major New York jazz musicians, he was not as able to adapt to the rapidly changing style as some of his contemporaries, like Duke Ellington . When Ellington moved to New York City, he inaugurated a legion of jazz musicians that did the same and moved the center of jazz's development from Chicago to New York.

The style that developed from New York's big jazz bands became known as swing music; it was a very danceable and catchy style, played originally by large black orchestras. Later, white bands led by people like Jimmy Dorsey and Benny Goodman began to dominate. These large orchestras produced a number of instrumentalists that had a profound effect on the later evolution of jazz, including Coleman Hawkin's tenor saxophone innovations, electric guitarist Charlie Christian and improvisational Lester Young . Star vocalists also emerged, mainly women like the bluesy Billie Holiday and the scat singer Ella Fitzgerald .

New York's jazz scene was the home of bebop, which evolved over many years and reached its full identity in the mid-1940s. Charlie Christian, Dizzy Gillespie , Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk were among the major innovators of the style. Bebop "polarized listers, critics and musicians alike" because it differed from swing in many important ways, including a lack of typical riffs and danceable beats, the use of melodic progression and the chords as the basis for all soloing and improvising.

In the 1950s, jazz began to diversify into a number of new genres, spread out into many cities. The West Coast became a home for cool jazz, though the style's major innovator was New York-based Miles Davis . New York was also a major center for hard bop, and was home to Sonny Rollins and Art Blakely . Late in the 1950s, the Los Angeles-based Ornette Coleman moved to New York, bringing with him the nascent style of free jazz. He was later joined by a number of others, most famously including John Coltrane ; Coltrane and his other contemporaries, like Albert Ayler and Sun Ra .

The last few decades have seen a further diffusion of jazz from New York and other major long-time capitals, to cities and regions across the United States and the world. Many New York jazz performers during this period played fusions of jazz with rock and other styles; among the earliest of these modern musicians was Carla Bley , cofounder of the Jazz Composers Orchestra Association, an independent distribution company for avant-garde and jazz artists. The city has also been home to the well-known modern performer Wynton Marsalis and the large M-Base Collective, as well as people like John Zorn who use jazz as a prominent part of their experimental music in many different styles. Article courtesy of Wikipedia