JAZZ

A musical genre and art form indigenous to the United States. The word ‘jazz’ may have come into usage as early as 1915. The word ‘jass’, later ‘jazz’, turned up first in Chicago in the middle 1910s with an unprintable meaning, but later was associated in New Orleans with the notion of ‘speeding up’. The writer Ralph Ellison referred to jazz as an artistic counterpart to the American political system. New Orleans was the birthplace of jazz music and culture, and later, the music moved onwards to Chicago and New York. In New York, in neighbourhoods such as Harlem and Greenwich Village, writers and artists embraced jazz, including those associated with the HARLEM RENAISSANCE. Jazz pianist and composer Duke Ellington became a pivotal figure in the movement, performing in residency at the popular Harlem nightclub the Cotton Club in the 1920s, and influenced leading African American writers of the period such as Langston Hughes.

The FRANKFURT SCHOOL theorist Theodor W. Adorno provided a CRITIQUE of jazz in the setting of Weimar Germany, and continued to do so throughout his career as a musicologist and philosopher of new music in EXILE in America, rendering it as a product of the CULTURE INDUSTRY. Jazz thrived in Weimar Germany and the quintessential METROPOLIS of high MODERNITY, Berlin. It was also performed extensively in cities such as Paris. The first international jazz festival was held in Paris in 1949, and featured trumpeter Miles Davis, who went on to pioneer Cool Jazz on the West Coast of the United States in cities such as Los Angeles following his return to America, setting a trend in jazz for the next decade. Bassist Charles Mingus emerged from such a musical setting in Los Angeles, and would further pioneer jazz modernism in the bohemia of New York's Greenwich Village among BEAT GENERATION poets, writers and artists.

JAZZ embraced the AVANT-GARDE in the second half of the twentieth century, in the works of musicians such as saxophonist and composer John Coltrane. The 1920s in the United States were known as the ‘Jazz Age’, when it embodied MASS CULTURE. Orchestral and big-band jazz became the mainstay in the 1930s.