Traditional/ Dixieland

Dixieland music is a style of jazz. Dixieland developed in New Orleans at the start of the 20th century, and spread to Chicago and New York City by New Orleans bands in the 1910s, and was, for a period, quite popular among the general public. more...

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It is often considered the first true type of jazz, and was the first music referred to by the term jazz (before 1917 often spelled jass).

History

The style combined earlier brass band marches, French Quadrilles, ragtime and blues with collective, polyphonic improvisation. While instrumentation and size of bands can be very flexible, the "standard" band consists of a "front line" of trumpet (or cornet), trombone, and clarinet, with a "rhythm section" of at least two of the following instruments: guitar or banjo, string bass or tuba, piano, and drums.

The term Dixieland became widely used after the advent of the first million-selling hit records of the Original Dixieland Jass Band in 1917. The music has been played continuously since the early part of the 20th century. Louis Armstrong's All-Stars was the band most popularly identified with Dixieland, although Armstrong's own influence runs through all of jazz.

Many Dixieland groups consciously imitated the recordings and bands of decades earlier. Other musicians continued to create innovative performances and new tunes. Some fans of post bebop jazz consider Dixieland no longer to be a vital part of jazz, while some adherents consider music in the traditional style, when well and creatively played, every bit as modern as any other jazz style.

The definitive Dixieland sound is created when one instrument (usually the trumpet) plays the melody or a recognizable paraphase or variation on it, and the other instruments of the "front line" improvise around that melody. This creates a more chaotic sound than the extremely regimented big band sound or the unison melody of bebop.

The swing era of the 1930s led to the end of many Dixieland Jazz musicians' careers. Only a few musicians were able to maintain popularity. Most retired.

With the advent of bebop in the 1940s, the earlier group-improvisation style fell out of favor with the majority of younger black players, while some older players of both races continued on in the older style. Though younger musicians developed new forms, many bebopers revered Armstrong, and quoted fragments of his recorded music in their own improvisations.

There was a revival of Dixieland in the late 1940s and 1950s, which brought many semi-retired musicians a measure of fame late in their lives as well as bringing retired musicians back onto the jazz circuit after years of not playing (e.g. Kid Ory). This period is sometimes seen as a fad.

There was also in the 1950s a style called "Progressive Dixieland" which sought to blend traditional Dixieland melody with bebop-style rhythm. Steve Lacy played with several such bands early in his career. This style is sometimes called "Dixie-bop".

Read more at Wikipedia.org