Jazz Is One of the Key Genres of Music - Essay Example

Jazz is one of the key genres of music. For an effective development, and performance of jazz music, there should not be less than two and not more than twenty people playing the musical instruments and doing the actual singing of the jazz.

In jazz, Rizzo (1997) points out that an artist will research the taste and preference of the audience, the season, time, and age of the audience before engaging them in an entertaining session. These factors determine the kind or extent of additives that should be used to improvise the music during performance. When each member of the band pays close attention to the improvisation, the outcome can be of a higher standard compared with other music genres that are written, and the band has to follow the standard and sometimes boring notes and songs (Kramer, 2009). With improvisation comes the response of the audience to the performances of the soloist and the singers. In most cases, the stanzas voiced by the soloist are followed by those that require the participation of the singers or participants forming to create a rhyme. The audience response is common mostly in African musicians that are fond of it.

According to Rosenthal (1993), making a strong beat weak and a weak beat strong or syncopation is also synonymous with jazz music. To achieve this musical style, members of the ensemble and by extension, the audience normally responds by stomping their feet while counting the strong beats and between the counts clapping their hands to represent weak beats. This syncopation style of jazz music enables the artists to easily divide off beats into eighths and sixteenths and engage the listeners appropriately. The ensuing playing of two rhythms against each other results in jazz music.
Another style that is synonymous with jazz music is the use of blue notes. Blue notes appear when some of the notes are not played strongly and an artist slips across a scale (Rizzo, 1997). A blue scale in jazz is also known as a pentatonic scale, when an ensemble flattens the third and seventh notes to create a minor scale and when the second and sixth notes are omitted to make a five-note. Talented jazz musicians like Cannonball Adderley.
Cannonball Adderley

Cannonball Adderley is one of the few gifted jazz musicians of the mid-twentieth century. Though Adderley was not regarded as a significant force to reckon with in the early 1950s, his critics may have been true in their judgment of the artist. He was by then restless, and very attractive but without any track record in jazz. Within a couple of years his input in high-standard music, harmony and was developing (Rizzo, 1997). During those years jazz met stiff competition from other musical genres like pop music, and he almost gave up.
Adderley sought help from the audience who liked jazz to enable him to remain in the field. He was also one of the key characters who promoted many musicians who wanted to achieve their goals through music as well as take part in uplifting jazz. Adderley took a great part in marketing jazz in different learning institutions and government committees together with all relevant institutions and gatherings to prevent the collapse of jazz.

In 1957, Adderley’s efforts bore fruit when he embarked upon one-and-a-half years of training on how to play trumpet under Miles Davis. His stint in the new band proved to be one of the greatest achievements he had ever made (Rosenthal, 1993). He managed to hone his creativity and expertise as a trumpeter. Working in Davis’s band alongside John Coltrane, a saxophone expert, Adderley liked a vigorous style of playing jazz, which was the complete opposite of his mentor, Davis’ lifestyle. Adderley appeared in several of Davis’ albums released in the late 1950s such as “Kind of Blue” (1959); one of the most popular jazz albums of the mid-twentieth century.

Mercy Mercy Mercy
After his stint at Davis, Adderely ventured into the jazz music industry by establishing his ensemble around the early 1960s. His recording of “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” propelled him to greater heights in the years that followed the album’s release in 1966. The song was composed by Joe Zawinul, with the tune taking the popularity and convenience of B-flat major. The melody contains a rather unique twenty-bar structure; one-fifth of which is distinct. The harmony progression is generally composed of key seventh chords on the initial, fourth, and fifth levels, which integrate to inject a sense of blue qualities into the song. Read More