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African-American Music, music of the African natives sold into slavery in the Americas, and of their descendants. Early African-American music in the United States accommodated African musical practices with the vocabulary and structures of Euro-American music. Comprising work songs, calls, field and street cries, hollers, rhyme songs, and spirituals, this music provided the slaves with a means of effectively pacing their work, with a form of sung prayer and praise, with a means of surreptitious intragroup communication, and with psychic relief from the degradation of bondage. Many of the work songs used the African call-and-response form; a lead singer gave the line of melody and the others joined in the refrain. This pattern, as well as a number of actual African tunes, was also carried over into the African-American spiritual. Both the spiritual and the later blues, a form of secular solo folk song, incorporated the African freedom to improvise variations in the melodic line. Also derived from African heritage was polyrhythmic drumming, simultaneously combining several different rhythmic patterns of different metres. The interplay of contrasting rhythms was eventually carried over into a later African-American musical style, jazz. Although sacred music—the spiritual—was the most ubiquitous African-American music in the early 19th century, secular music also existed. Like the spirituals, the work songs, calls, and cries were performed a cappella; some of the other secular songs were accompanied by instruments. The earliest slave instruments included drums and an African transplant, the banjo; later, the flute, violin, and guitar were also used. Guitar, violin, and banjo frequently constituted the string bands that provided music for the African- and Euro-American social dances of the 19th century—jigs, reels, the buck-and-wing, cotillions, and quadrilles. Makeshift instruments such as gutbuckets (bass fiddles made from washtubs), and jugs were also employed in string bands. Jazz and Its Predecessors Following the American Civil War, rhyme songs and ballads became plentiful, and the blues began to take on its modern forms. The music of the black minstrel shows, the string bands, the brass bands, and the honky-tonk pianos began to assert itself, and such genres as the cakewalk and ragtime gradually emerged. Having originated in the southern and midwestern United States, ragtime reached its classic form in the 1890s in the St Louis, Missouri, school of ragtime pianists led by Scott Joplin. In the first decade of the 20th century, the musical practices of black Americans came together to form a new American music called jazz. It first flourished in New Orleans, Louisiana, then spread to cities across the country. Among the most important jazz innovators in the first half of the 20th century were Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie. Mid-20th Century in the 1940s, rhythm and blues emerged as a combined product of rural blues and black-oriented, big-band swing music, performed by small ensembles with a lead vocalist or instrumentalist and rhythm and backing sections. The pioneers and popularizers of rhythm and blues were the following: T-Bone Walker, Little Walter, Louis Jordan, Fats Domino, James Brown, Ray Charles, and Ruth Brown. Since the 1950s rhythm and blues has been the generic source of black music, as well as of American rock music and popular music. Soul music was a further development of rhythm and blues. Essentially, it combines the rhythm-and-blues sound of the 1950s with techniques, effects, and performance practices borrowed from black gospel music. It has two main substyles: the polished, sophisticated Detroit style associated with the Motown label, featuring such artists as Stevie Wonder, The Supremes, and The Temptations; and the earthier, more gospel-oriented Memphis, Tennessee, style, exemplified by Otis Redding and by Booker T. and the MGs. The black gospel movement had its beginnings in the early performance practices of the black Holiness churches and in the published songs of the Philadelphia minister Charles A. Tindley. Using the resources of work songs, hollers, cries, spirituals, blues, and jazz, black gospel music was fully developed by the hymnodist-composer Thomas A. Dorsey and the singer Roberta Martin, gradually becoming an important part of black worship among some denominations. Famous performers of gospel music include Mahalia Jackson, the Clouds of Joy, James Cleveland, and Andrae Crouch and the Disciples. In the 1970s a new musical form called “rap”, or “rapping”, arose on the streets of New York. The Sugar Hill Gang's “Rapper's Delight” (1979) was the first rap hit record. Using bits of funk and hard-rock records, plus a miscellany of sounds, as background, rap performers chanted often-complicated rhyming couplets, generally about ghetto life. In the 1980s the music spread across the United States as young audiences responded to the rap performers' angry words about social injustice, racism, and drug abuse. Late in the decade and into the early 1990s, controversy surrounded some artists accused of rapping racially and sexually inflammatory lyrics. Latin American Influence The relationship of Latin American music to black music in the United States is most evident in the offbeat accents that are common in both. Between 1900 and 1940, Latin American dances—the tango (Argentina), the merengue (Dominican Republic), and the rumba (Cuba)—were all introduced into the United States. In the 1940s a fusion of Latin and jazz elements began; it was stimulated by the African-Cuban mambo and the Brazilian bossa nova. The late 1960s brought a mingling of Latin and soul music—notably by Mongo Santamaria and Willie Bobo—and the recognition of the Cuban-Puerto Rican salsa as an important genre. Reversing the direction of influence, African-American music of the United States also affected musical fusions in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa, giving rise to the Jamaican reggae and its predecessors, ska, rocksteady, and the African highlife. Concert and Recital Music Blacks in the Americas have also long contributed as composers and performers to North and South American concert and recital music in the European tradition. "African-American Music," Microsoft® Encarta® 97 Encyclopedia. © 1993-1996 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Spiritual, genre of religious folk song found in American black and white musical traditions. White spirituals, or revival spirituals, developed in the mass evangelical camp meetings that swept the country in the religious revival movement of the early 1800s. The roots of these songs include folk hymns, religious ballads, secular folk songs, and evangelical hymns by the English hymnodist Isaac Watts and others. Another precedent was the colonial church practice of “lining out”, in which a leader chanted a psalm verse and the congregation then sang it. Spirituals were commonly improvised from a stock of familiar melodic fragments and from “floating” verses (often sung by a leader) and refrains and tag lines such as “glory, hallelujah”, (sung by the audience). As far as is known, the high tenors took the melody, the women and basses singing above or below them, producing a stirring sonority. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, by the American poet Julia Ward Howe, is written to the melody and format of an old revival spiritual. The few early references to spiritual-like songs sung by black slaves date from about 1825-1850. Black and white spirituals share many tunes and texts; blacks and whites mingled at the camp meetings, and musical influences probably travelled both ways. Both traditions use pentatonic tunes and extensive melodic ornamentation, and lining out resembles the pervasive call-and-response (solo-chorus alternation) pattern of African music. Black spirituals also show significant melodic and rhythmic relationships with West African songs. They are also linked with the ring-shout, an ecstatic dance of African origin. Black spirituals were sung with an African vocal quality and to African polyrhythmic accompaniment of finger-snapping, clapping, and stamping. Until after the American Civil War they were apparently sung without harmony. Examples include “Deep River” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll”. Black spirituals were often used as work songs and sometimes contained coded information as a form of secret communication. In the late 1800s both black and white spirituals were largely displaced by gospel songs. Blues, a genre of African-American folk and popular song in 44time. Blues lyrics are typically cast in a three-line stanza consisting of an initial line, its repetition, and a new third line ( A A B). Blues music is generally 12 bars long, falling into three phrases of four bars each (one phrase for each line of text).The most typical chord pattern for these phrases is based on the first (I), fourth (IV)and fifth (V) notes of the scale: phrase 1—I I I I; phrase 2—IV IV I I; phrase 3—V V (or IV) I I. Each phrase of sung text is normally followed by instrumental improvisation, creating a call-and-response pattern. Blues music uses a scale in which the third, fifth, and seventh notes are freely “bent”, or microtonally flattened in comparison with the standard major scale. Blues lyrics tend to deal with the hardships of life and the vicissitudes of love. Blues singing, rooted in various forms of black American slave song, was widespread in the southern United States by the late 19th century. “Archaic” or “country” blues differed widely in their lyric and musical form; singers typically accompanied themselves on guitar or harmonica. Later singers in this style include Blind Lemon Jefferson and Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter). In 1912, with the publication of “Memphis Blues” by W. C. Handy, blues entered the arena of popular song. Classic “city” blues evolved in the 1920s and 1930s in the singing of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and others. Lyric and musical forms became largely standardized, and singers often worked with jazz band or piano. Adapted to solo piano, blues gave rise to boogie-woogie piano playing. Blues and jazz overlapped, sometimes almost indistinguishably, and blues was considered a nurturing form for early jazz, but blues also developed independently. In the 1940s singers such as T-Bone Walker and Louis Jordan performed with big bands or with ensembles based on electric guitar, acoustic string bass, drums, and saxophones; the electric organ also came into use about this time. After 1950 B. B. King, Ray Charles, and others used improved electric guitars (allowing manipulation of sustained tones) and louder, electric basses; brass instruments often replaced saxophones. Record companies applied the terms rhythm and blues and, later, soul to blues and nonblues music in these “urban” blues styles. Jazz, type of music developed by black Americans about 1900 and possessing an identifiable history and describable stylistic evolution. Jazz has borrowed from black folk music, and popular music has borrowed from jazz, but these three kinds of music remain distinct and should not be confused with one another. Characteristics Since its beginnings jazz has branched out into so many styles that no single description fits all of them with total accuracy. A few generalizations, however, can be made, bearing in mind that for all of them, exceptions can be cited. Performers of jazz improvise within the conventions of their chosen style. Typically, the improvisation is accompanied by the repeated chord progression of a popular song or an original composition. Instrumentalists emulate black vocal styles, including the use of glissandi and slides, nuances of pitch (including blue notes, the microtonally flattened tones in the blues scale), and tonal effects such as growls and wails. In striving to develop a personal sound or tone colour—an idiosyncratic sense of rhythm and form and an individual style of execution—performers create rhythms characterized by constant syncopation (accents in unexpected places) and also by swing—a sensation of pull and momentum that arises as the melody is heard alternately together with, then slightly at variance with, the expected pulse or division of a pulse. Written scores, if present, are used merely as guides, providing structure within which improvisation occurs. The typical instrumentation begins with a rhythm section consisting of piano, string bass, drums, and optional guitar, to which may be added any number of wind instruments. In big bands the winds are grouped into three sections—saxophones, trombones, and trumpets. Although exceptions occur in some styles, most jazz is based on the principle that an infinite number of melodies can fit the chord progressions of any song. The musician improvises new melodies that fit the chord progression, which is repeated again and again as each soloist is featured, for as many choruses as desired. Although pieces with many different formal patterns are used for jazz improvisation, two formal patterns in particular are frequently found in songs used for jazz. One is the AABA form of popular-song choruses, which typically consist of 32 bars in o metre, divided into four 8-bars sections: section A; repeat of section A; section B (the “bridge” or “release”, often beginning in a new key); repeat of section A. The second form, with roots deep in black American folk music, is the 12-bar blues form. Unlike the 32-bar AABA form, blues songs have a fairly standardized chord progression. Origins Jazz is rooted in the mingled musical traditions of American blacks. These include traits surviving from West African music; black folk music forms developed in the New World; European popular and light classical music of the 18th and 19th centuries; and later popular music forms influenced by black music or produced by black composers. Among the African survivals are vocal styles that include great freedom of vocal colour; a tradition of improvisation; call-and-response patterns; and rhythmic complexity—both syncopation of individual melodic lines and conflicting rhythms played by different members of an ensemble. Other Afro-American music forms include field hollers, rowing chants, lullabies, and later, spirituals and blues. European music contributed specific styles and forms—hymns, marches, waltzes, quadrilles, and other dance music, light theatrical music, Italian operatic music—and also theoretical elements, in particular, harmony, both as a vocabulary of chords and as a concept related to musical form. (Much of the European influence was absorbed through specific training in European music, even when the musicians so trained could find work only in low-life entertainment districts and on Mississippi riverboats.) Black-influenced elements of popular music that contributed to jazz include the banjo music of the minstrel shows (derived from the banjo music of slaves); the syncopated rhythmic patterns of black-influenced Latin American music (heard in southern United States cities); the barrelhouse piano styles of tavern musicians in the Midwest; and marches and hymns as they were played by black brass bands in the late 19th century. Near the end of the 19th century another influential genre emerged. This was ragtime, a composed music that combined many elements, including syncopated rhythms (from banjo music and other black sources) and the harmonic contrasts and formal patterns of European marches. After 1910 the bandleader W. C. Handy took another influential form, the blues, beyond its previously strictly oral tradition by publishing his original blues songs. (Favoured by jazz musicians, his songs found perhaps their greatest interpreter later, in the 1920s, in the blues singer Bessie Smith, who recorded many of them.) The merging of these multiple influences into jazz is difficult to reconstruct, because it occurred before the phonograph could provide valuable documentation. History Most early jazz was played in small marching bands or by solo pianists. Besides ragtime and marches, the repertoire included hymns, spirituals, and blues. The bands played this music, modified frequently by syncopations and acceleration, at picnics, weddings, parades, and funerals. Characteristically, the bands played dirges on the way to funerals and lively marches on the way back. Although blues and ragtime had arisen independently of jazz, and continued to exist alongside it, these genres influenced the style and forms of jazz and provided important vehicles for jazz improvisation. New Orleans Jazz Around the turn of the 20th century the earliest fully documented jazz style emerged, centred in New Orleans, Louisiana. In this style the cornet or trumpet carried the melody, the clarinet played florid countermelodies, and the trombone played rhythmic slides and sounded the root notes of chords or simple harmony. Below this basic trio the tuba or string bass provided a bass line and drums the rhythmic accompaniment. Exuberance and volume were more important than finesse, and improvisation was focused on the ensemble sound. A musician named Buddy Bolden appears to have led some of the first jazz bands, but their music and its sound have been lost to posterity. Although some jazz influences can be heard on a few early phonograph records, not until 1917 did a jazz band record. This band, a group of white New Orleans musicians called The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, created a sensation overseas and in the United States (The term Dixieland jazz eventually came to mean the New Orleans style as played by white musicians.) Two groups, one white and one black, followed: in 1922 the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and in 1923 the Creole Jazz Band, the latter led by the cornettist King Oliver, an influential stylist. The series of recordings made by Oliver's group are the most significant recordings in the New Orleans style. Other leading New Orleans musicians included the trumpeters Bunk Johnson and Freddie Keppard, the soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, the drummer Warren “Baby” Dodds, and the pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton. The most influential musician nurtured in New Orleans, however, was King Oliver's second trumpeter, Louis Armstrong. Armstrong's Impact The first true virtuoso soloist of jazz, Armstrong was a dazzling improviser, technically, emotionally, and intellectually. He changed the format of jazz by bringing the soloist to the forefront, and in his recording groups, the Hot Five and the Hot Seven, demonstrated that jazz improvisation could go far beyond simply ornamenting the melody—he created new melodies based on the chords of the initial tune. He also set standards for all later jazz singers, not only by the way he altered the words and melodies of songs but also by improvising without words, like an instrument (scat singing). Chicago and New York For jazz the 1920s was a decade of great experimentation and discovery. Many New Orleans musicians, including Armstrong, migrated to Chicago, influencing local musicians and stimulating the evolution of the Chicago style—derived from the New Orleans style but emphasizing soloists, often adding saxophone to the instrumentation, and usually producing tenser rhythms and more complicated textures. Instrumentalists working in Chicago or influenced by the Chicago style included the trombonist Jack Teagarden, the banjoist Eddie Condon, the drummer Gene Krupa, and the clarinettist Benny Goodman. Also active in Chicago was Bix Beiderbecke, whose lyrical approach to the cornet provided an alternative to Armstrong's trumpet style. Many Chicago musicians eventually settled in New York, another major centre for jazz in the 1920s. Jazz Piano Another vehicle for jazz developments in the 1920s was piano music. The Harlem district of New York became the centre of a highly technical, hard-driving solo style known as stride piano. The master of this approach in the early 1920s was James P. Johnson, whose protégé Fats Waller, a talented vocalist and entertainer as well, became by far the most popular performer in this idiom. A second piano style to develop in the 1920s was boogie-woogie. A form of blues played on the piano, it consists of a short, sharply accented bass pattern played over and over by the left hand while the right hand plays freely, using a variety of rhythms. Boogie-woogie became especially popular in the 1930s and 40s. Leading boogie-woogie pianists include Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, and Pine Top Smith. The most innovative pianist of the 1920s, comparable to Armstrong and present on some of the latter's best recordings, was Earl “Fatha” Hines, a Chicago-nurtured virtuoso considered to possess a wild, unpredictable imagination. His style, combined with the smoother approach of Waller, influenced most pianists of the next generation—notably Teddy Wilson, who was featured with Goodman's band in the 1930s, and Art Tatum, who performed mostly as a soloist, and who was regarded with awe for his complex virtuosity. The Big-Band Era Also during the 1920s, large groups of jazz musicians began to play together, after the model of society dance bands, forming the so-called big bands that became so popular in the 1930s and early 40s that the period was known as the swing era. One major development in the emergence of the swing era was a rhythmic change that smoothed the two-beat rhythms of the New Orleans style into a more flowing four beats to the bar. Musicians also developed the use of short melodic patterns, called riffs, in call-and-response patterns. To facilitate this procedure, orchestras were divided into instrumental sections, each with its own riffs, and opportunities were provided for musicians to play extended solos. The development of the big band as a jazz medium was largely the achievement of Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson. Henderson and his arranger, Don Redman, helped introduce written scores into jazz music, but they also attempted to capture the quality of improvisation that characterized the music of smaller ensembles. In the latter aim they were aided by gifted soloists such as the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins. Ellington, during the 1920s, led a band at the Cotton Club in New York. Continuing to direct his orchestra until his death in 1974, he composed colourful experimental concert pieces ranging in length from the three-minute “Koko” (1940) to the hour-long Black, Brown, and Beige (1943), as well as songs such as “Solitude” and “Sophisticated Lady”. More complex than Henderson's music, Ellington's music made his orchestra a cohesive ensemble, with solos written for the unique qualities of specific instruments and players. Other bands in the tradition of Ellington and Henderson were led by Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, and Cab Calloway. A different style of big-band jazz was developed in Kansas City during the mid-1930s and was epitomized by the band of Count Basie. Originally assembled in Kansas City, Basie's band reflected the south-western emphasis on improvisation, keeping the written (or simply memorized) passages relatively short and simple. The wind instruments in his band exchanged ensemble riffs in a free, strongly rhythmical interplay, with pauses to accommodate extended instrumental solos. Basie's tenor saxophonist Lester Young, in particular, played with a rhythmic freedom rarely apparent in the improvisations of soloists from other bands. Young's delicate tone and long, flowing melodies, laced with an occasional avant-garde honk or gurgle, opened up a whole new approach, as Armstrong's playing had done in the 1920s. Other trend setters of the late 1930s were the trumpeter Roy Eldridge, the electric-guitarist Charlie Christian, the drummer Kenny Clarke, and the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton. Jazz singing in the 1930s became increasingly flexible and stylized. Ivie Anderson, Mildred Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, and, above all, Billie Holiday were the leading singers. Interplay with Popular and Classical Music The pioneering efforts of Armstrong, Ellington, Henderson, and others made jazz a dominant influence on American music during the 1920s and 30s. Such popular musicians as the bandleader Paul Whiteman used some of the more obvious rhythmic and melodic devices of jazz, although with less improvisational freedom and skill than were displayed in the music of the major jazz players. Attempting to fuse jazz with light classical music, Whiteman's orchestra also premiered jazzy symphonic pieces by American composers such as George Gershwin. Closer to the authentic jazz tradition of improvisation and solo virtuosity was the music played by the bands of Benny Goodman (who used many Henderson arrangements), Gene Krupa, and Harry James. Since the days of ragtime, jazz composers had admired classical music. A number of swing-era musicians “jazzed the classics” in recordings such as “Bach Goes to Town” (Benny Goodman) and “Ebony Rhapsody” (Ellington and others). Composers of concert music, in turn, paid tribute to jazz in works such as Contrasts (1938, commissioned by Goodman) by the Hungarian Béla Bartók, and Ebony Concerto (1945, commissioned by the orchestra led by Woody Herman, 1913-1987) by the Russian-born Igor Stravinsky. Other composers, such as Aaron Copland, an American, and Darius Milhaud, a Frenchman, acknowledged the spirit of jazz in their works. The 1940s and the Postwar Decades The pre-eminently influential jazz musician of the 1940s was Charlie Parker, who became the leader of a new style known as bebop, rebop, or bop. Like Lester Young, Charlie Christian, and other outstanding soloists, Parker had played with big bands. During World War II, however, the wartime economy and changes in audience tastes had driven many big bands out of business. Their decline, combined with the radically new bebop style, amounted to a revolution in the jazz world. Bebop was still based on the principle of improvisation over a chord progression, but the tempos were faster, the phrases longer and more complex, and the emotional range expanded to include more unpleasant feelings than before. Jazz musicians became aware of themselves as artists and made little effort to sell their wares by adding vocals, dancing, and comedy, as had their predecessors. At the centre of the ferment stood Parker, who could do anything on the saxophone, in any tempo and in any key. He created beautiful melodies that were related in advanced ways to the underlying chords, and his music possessed endless rhythmic variety. Parker's frequent collaborators were the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, known for his formidable speed and range and daring harmonic sense, and the pianist Earl “Bud” Powell and drummer Max Roach, both leaders in their own right. Also highly regarded were the pianist-composer Thelonious Monk and the trumpeter Fats Navarro. The jazz singer Sarah Vaughan was associated early in her career with bop musicians, particularly Gillespie and Parker. The late 1940s brought forth an explosion of experimentation in jazz. Modernized big bands led by Gillespie and Stan Kenton flourished alongside small groups with innovative musicians such as the pianist Lennie Tristano. Most of these groups drew ideas from 20th-century pieces by such masters as Bartók and Stravinsky. The most influential of the mid-century experiments with classically influenced jazz were the 1949-1950 recordings made by an unusual nonet led by Charlie Parker's protégé, a young trumpeter named Miles Davis. The written arrangements, by Davis and others, were soft in tone but highly complex. Many groups adopted this “cool” style, especially on the West Coast, and so it became known as West Coast jazz. Refined by players such as the tenor saxophonists Zoot Sims and Stan Getz and the baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, cool jazz flourished throughout the 1950s. Also in the 1950s the pianist Dave Brubeck (a student of Milhaud), with the alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, achieved popularity with his blend of classical music and jazz. Most musicians, however, particularly on the East Coast, continued to expand on the hotter, more driving bebop tradition. Major exponents of the hard-bop or East Coast style included the trumpeter Clifford Brown, the drummer Art Blakey, and the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, whose unique approach made him one of the major talents of his generation. Another derivative of the Parker style was soul jazz, played by the pianist Horace Silver, the alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, and his brother, the cornettist Nat Adderley The Late 1950s, 60s, and 70s several new approaches characterized jazz in the third quarter of the century. The years around 1960 ranked with the late 1920s and the late 1940s as one of the most fertile periods in the history of jazz. Modal Jazz In 1955 Miles Davis organized a quintet that featured the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, whose approach produced a striking contrast to Davis's rich-toned, unhurried, expressive melodic lines. Coltrane poured out streams of notes with velocity and passion, exploring every melodic idea, no matter how exotic; yet he played slow ballads with poise and serenity. In his solos he revealed an exceptional sense of form and pacing. In 1959 he appeared on a landmark Miles Davis album, Kind of Blue. Along with the pianist Bill Evans, Davis devised for this album a set of pieces that remain in one key, chord, and mode for as long as 16 bars at a time—leading to the term modal jazz—allowing much freedom for the improviser. Coltrane, striking out on his own, first pushed the complexity of bop to its limits in “Giant Steps” (1959), then settled on the other extreme, modal jazz. The latter style dominated his repertoire after 1960, when he recorded “My Favourite Things” using an open-ended arrangement in which each soloist stayed in one mode for as long as he wished. Coltrane's quartet included the pianist McCoy Tyner and the drummer Elvin Jones, two musicians who, because of their dramatic musical qualities, were widely imitated. Third-Stream and Avant-Garde Movements Another product of the experimentation of the late 1950s and 60s was the attempt by the composer Gunther Schuller, together with the pianist John Lewis, and his Modern Jazz Quartet, to fuse jazz and classical music into a “third stream” by bringing together musicians from both worlds in a repertoire that drew heavily on the techniques of both kinds of music. Also active during these years was the composer, bassist, and bandleader Charlie Mingus, who imbued his chord-progression-based improvisations with a wild, raw excitement. Most controversial was the work of the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, whose improvisations, at times almost atonal, did away with chord progressions altogether, while retaining the steady rhythmic swing so characteristic of jazz. Although Coleman's wailing sound and rough technique shocked many critics, others recognized the wit, sincerity, and rare sense of form that characterized his solos. He inspired a whole school of avant-garde jazz that flourished in the 1960s and 70s and included the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the clarinettist Jimmy Giuffre, the pianist Cecil Taylor, and even Coltrane, who ventured into avant-garde improvisation before his death in 1967. Mainstream Developments Meanwhile, the mainstream of jazz, although incorporating many of Coltrane's melodic ideas and even some modal jazz pieces, continued to build improvisations largely on the chord progressions of popular songs. Brazilian songs, especially those in the bossa nova style, were added to the repertoire in the early 1960s. Their Latin rhythms and fresh chord progressions appealed to jazz musicians of several generations, notably Stan Getz and the flautist Herbie Mann. Even after the bossa nova style declined, the sambas that gave rise to it remained staples of the jazz repertoire, and many groups augmented their regular drum set with Caribbean percussion. The trio formed by the pianist Bill Evans treated popular songs with depth, the musicians constantly interacting instead of simply taking turns for solos. This interactive approach was carried even further by the rhythm section of Davis's quintet of 1963 and later, which included the drummer Tony Williams, the bassist Ron Carter, the pianist Herbie Hancock, and later the highly original tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Fusion Jazz Jazz underwent an economic crisis in the late 1960s. Younger audiences favoured soul music and rock, while older aficionados turned away from the abstractness and emotional rawness of much modern jazz. Jazz musicians realized that to regain an audience they must draw ideas from popular music. Some of these ideas came from rock, but most were drawn from the dance rhythms and chord progressions of soul musicians such as James Brown. Some groups also added elements of music from other cultures. The initial examples of this new fusion jazz met with varying success, but in 1969 Davis recorded Bitches Brew, a highly successful album that combined soul rhythms and electronically amplified instruments with uncompromising, highly dissonant jazz. Not surprisingly, alumni of Davis's groups created some of the most musically successful fusion recordings of the 1970s: Herbie Hancock; Wayne Shorter and the Austrian-born pianist Joe Zawinul, co-leaders of the ensemble Weather Report; the English electric guitarist John McLaughlin; and the brilliant pianist Chick Corea and his group Return to Forever. Rock musicians, in turn, began featuring jazz phrasings and solos over a rock-based rhythm. These groups included Chase; Chicago; and Blood, Sweat and Tears. During this same period another Davis alumnus, the iconoclastic pianist Keith Jarrett, succeeded commercially while eschewing electronic instruments and popular styles. His performances of popular standards and original songs with a quartet, as well as his improvisations alone at the keyboard, marked him as a major contemporary pianist of jazz. The 1980s In the mid-1980s jazz artists were once again performing, in a variety of styles, to sizeable audiences, and there was renewed interest in serious (as opposed to pop-oriented) jazz. Associated with this interest was the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who has also been acclaimed for his performances of classical music. Although jazz remained essentially the provenance of American musicians, its international audience flourished to the extent that non-American musicians formed an increasingly significant subgroup within jazz in the 1970s and 80s, as their predecessors, including the Belgian guitarist Django Reinhardt, and French violinist Stephane Grappelli, had done in the 1930s and later.