How did jazz go from extremely popular radio music made by lower class negroes to one of the most experimental and obnoxiously academic genres in existence?
How did jazz go from extremely popular radio music made by lower class negroes to one of the most experimental and...
Aiden Hernandez
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Brandon Sanchez
Because Jazz is good.
Benjamin Murphy
It stopped being (super) popular and fully embraced its obscuruty. Since a fewer number of people care for it now, there's room for the genre to experiment and appeal to a smaller audience
Jace Richardson
Heroin
Adrian Watson
It offers a challenge for artists who want to go to extremes of virtuosity and creativity and to collaborate with other extremely creative/virtuosic musicians.
Jacob Wood
Jazz had an undercurrent of increasing complexity for a long while. You can see this going back to cutting contests of the 20s. Musicianship has always been highly valued among jazz musicians.
en.wikipedia.org
This attitude just kind of persisted. Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson took it into writing more complex arrangements and harmonically rich compositions and they subsequently inspired and were overtaken by bebop musicians and so on. It was a gradual thing with a couple of major players/records spurring the music on to more complex ends but you can't really pinpoint a single thing in the same way you can't do it for rock/pop music.
Sure Sgt. Pepper was a big event there, but it didn't exist in a vacuum and it was hardly the zenith of the trend there either.
Nicholas Roberts
Like most music with actual room to grow. It always comes from the people before it gets worked on by increasingly qualified musician.
Although nowadays it's a bit deader than it used to be in the middle of all the noise,
Dominic Foster
Basically this, it was Ellington, and then in the late 50s there was a shift to everything becoming obnoxiously focused around modes in some circles.
Anthony Myers
Time. Shakespeare was the DVD movie of his time.
Caleb Fisher
Because academia ruins every artform it gets it's hands on.
Michael Baker
Did low class people really get down to dixieland polyphony back then? Sounds too patrician to be true
Joseph Watson
>How did jazz go from extremely popular radio music made by lower class negroes to one of the most experimental and obnoxiously academic genres in existence?
1. The most popular jazz bands weren't lower class blacks, they were white.
2. The decline of jazz's popularity is due to many reasons: WW2, the recording strike of 1942-1944, the emergence of the less commercial bebop, etc. The shift to bebop changed jazz from dancing music to music that was to be listened to. Bebop evolved into different forms like hard-bop, cool jazz came as a reaction to bebop, then people like Ornette Coleman came and pushed the boundaries even further, the rest is history.
Brayden Thompson
modal jazz was a reaction to bebop but just came here to say what said much more eloquently
Alexander Smith
Can rock music hurry up and go this route please
Jeremiah Wright
OP is confused, jazz was popular with all kinds but blues was really the sound of downtrodden. jazz always flirted with aristocracy, its birth could be partly blamed on jim crow laws forcing classically trained creole musicians to play in segregated black venues and having to adapt their knowledge to playing with poor blues players
Colton Rivera
rock needs to merge with jazz at this point, too bad most rock musicians are distracted by kurt cobain fetishing or ooga booga metal chugging
David Carter
>How did jazz go from extremely popular radio music made by lower class negroes
Jazz was an invention by a bunch of White guys, though.
Jason Powell
This is one of the least true things you could say about jazz. Kind of impressive how wrong you've managed to be with so few words.
Camden Baker
because the music became too challenging for normies, and eventually all the jazz masters have either died off or retired and have been replaced by white college kids who just want to cover Giant Step and Take Five until the end of time
Jeremiah Johnson
That already happened
Kayden Turner
Same thing happened to classical music. The more (insert specific ethnic group which shall remain unmentioned) gets involved with it, the further the artform travels up its own ass
Brody Jones
>dude all creativity is begot by drugs lmao!!!!
Matthew Ross
recent eg.'s?
Jaxson Rogers
I know this is a Yas Forumstard meme but that isn't what my post said or implied. Black people started this music and black people were the group pushing it into more academic territory. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, etc. were the driving forces behind jazz's evolution towards art music. People of every other major faith and ethnicity eventually became part of that story but they're not the progenitors and rarely the key players.
Kevin Edwards
>this is white
damn...
just say jews you fucking cowardly faggot jfc
Tyler Rivera
Happened in the 70s
Caleb Brown
The negroes started trying to outplay each other, while mainstream music drifted towards country and rock'n roll.
Julian Hill
damn thats a long time ago tho, what happened between then?
Aaron Watson
Punk, post-punk, alternative rock
Logan Parker
Fusion has continued existing as it's own thing with people taking it in different directions with very different philosophies in mind.
Early on, music being made by Miles and Tony Williams was often pretty harsh and uncompromising but eventually people started making more radio friendly stuff aswell.
Smooth jazz ala Kenny G was very popular for a while and came out of the jazz-rock of the 70s.
People started mixing other genres with jazz too (Bela Fleck and the Flecktones make fusion with Bluegrass and rock elements for example).
Charles Moore
Man have you heard dixieland polyphony? This stuff isn't like the B minor mass or something. It's catchy dance music.
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Eli Gutierrez
Drugs. Same reason all music evolved.