Word: jazz
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fashions come and go in pop and classical music alike, but never has the same idea hit both ends of the street at the same time the way jazz did in the first quarter of this century. Unlike such other seismic events as rock 'n' roll (downtown) and atonality (up), jazz contained a bit of everything: the tingle and immediacy of pop but also the sophisticated harmonies of classical and the authenticity and rootedness of folk...
...whatever music you wrote, the question was, "What do we do with this thing called jazz?" It's generally agreed by now that George Gershwin, whose centennial is being celebrated this week, gave not one but two answers to this question better than anyone else--by taking jazz upmarket with his Rhapsody in Blue and Piano Concerto in F Major, and by weaving it back into folklore with Porgy and Bess...
...maybe Gershwin's greatest legacy is his third answer: how to use jazz in songs. To put it another way, What greater musical legacy has America given the world than the songs of Gershwin, Cole Porter and the rest of the gang? What body of our music has been more widely played, admired and memorized around the world than the jazz-flavored songs known as standards? And where did they come from? Listen...
...confidently assert that Everybody's Doing It (Doing It, Doing It) Now--and not just Americans either. Dukes and lords and Russian Czars were doing it too, as Berlin noted elsewhere. And a few years later, ragtime became part of the sound track for World War I and the jazz age that followed...
...there's a lot more to jazz than just a catchy beat. There were whole new chords and phrases and key changes--and moods--that the rag writers hadn't even touched yet. From 1919 to 1924 these would virtually serve as Gershwin's private playground and personal gold mine, from which the Brooklyn-born son of immigrants proceeded to extract all kinds of music, including, in one glittering shovelful, not just his famous Rhapsody but also a related song called The Man I Love. This would beget almost instantly a new kind of American song, exemplified by Porter...