2 Improvisation
It is difficult to define precisely what jazz is, but unquestionably a key element of the form is improvisation. Improvisation has been since early times an essential element in African and African-American music and is closely related to the pervasiveness of call and response in West African and African-American cultural expression. The exact form of improvisation has changed over time. Early folk blues music often was based around a call and response pattern, and improvisation would factor into the lyrics, the melody, or both. Part of the Dixieland style involves musicians taking turns playing the melody while the others make up counter lines to go with it. By the Swing era, big bands played carefully arranged sheet music, but the music often would call for one member of the band to stand up and play a short, improvised solo. Finally, in Bebop, improvisation takes center stage, as almost the entire focus of the music is on clever, improvised solos, with little attention given to the melody, or "head", of each piece.
When jazz musicians improvise, they usually use a chord progression — the series of chords that define the harmonic structure of a piece of music. For example, the Charlie Parker composition "Now's the Time" is 12 bars long and follows what jazz musicians call a "twelve-bar blues" progression. After the melody, the rhythm section keeps playing the same 12 bars of music, while each soloist in turn improvises new melodies within the harmonic structure of the chords. It is possible to get a better idea of what is happening musically by humming the melody while listening to the solo. In this manner, it becomes clearer that the improvised melody is closely related to the chord progression of the piece. Fitting an improvised melody to the harmony is known as "playing the (chord) changes." As previously noted, later styles of jazz, such as modal jazz, abandoned the strict notion of a chord progression, allowing the individual musicians to improvise more freely within the context of a given scale or mode. When a pianist or guitarist improvises chords while a soloist is playing, it is called comping.
3 Styles
4 See also
5 External links
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American music
Jazz
