OK, this is something which is not being addressed on the Ken Burns series. What is the difference between these types of music?
• Ragtime
• Jazz
• Swing
• Be-Bop
And keep it simple. When Ukulele Ike tries to explain the difference between a tenor and alto sax to me, I try to look intelligent—I really do—but he can tell I am mentally counting backwards from 99.
Dum… dum, dum… while we’re waiting…
Hey, Eve, good to see you’re back on the boards. Hope you had a good New Year. You were missed at the latest NYC Doperfest.
Hey Uke (…who will no doubt drop in any minute now to answer the OP and/or smite Eve for her disrespect…) can you email me your address? I want to send you a dub of a song we talked about at the Village Idiot. Thanks.
Louis Armstrong was once asked to define “jazz.” His answer was, “Man, if you have to ask, you’ll never understand.”
Having said that, I’ve always considered “jazz” to be a blanket term that encompasses swing, ragtime, be-bop, and other types of music.
“Swing” I consider to be that Big Band, great to dance to music - Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, etc.
“Ragtime” to me is the piano-heavy music of the 1920s - Fats Waller, Scott Joplin, those cats.
“Be-bop” I’m not too familiar with, except that Charlie Parker played it. Can’t really think of a definition, except that it’s very unstructured compared to swing or ragtime.
Someone smarter than me put this together.
Piece o’ cake.
“Ragtime” is a composed, written-down music meant for dancing, extremely popular between the 1880s and WWI. It’s a strongly rhythmic music due to “syncopation,” which means temporary displacement of the regular metrical accent caused, typically, by stressing the weak beat…oh, hell. Just hum a few bars of “The Entertainer” or “Maple Leaf Rag,” you’ll see what it means.
Usually thought of as a piano music, ragtime was also performed and recorded by guitarists, banjo-players, bands, and orchestras.
“Jazz” is a catch-all term for 20th century improvised music which encompasses several subgenres, including…
“Swing,” which usually refers to big band jazz of the 1930s and early 1940s. Swing music was the most commercially successful jazz in history. Fletcher Henderson and Don Redman began arranging dance music for “hot” bands in the '20s. The Casa Loma orchestra proved that there was an audience. By 1938, white bandleaders like Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Harry James, and Gene Krupa were pulling down big bucks. Black bandleaders like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, and Andy Kirk were creating some of the most sophisticated and elegant orchestral jazz ever. These types of bands, incidentally, usually included 3-5 trumpets, 3-4 trombones, a AATTB quintet of saxophones (some of whom doubled on clarinet), guitar, piano, bass, and drums.
“Bebop” was an early-1940s rebellion against the Swing “establishment,” started by young black musicians. It featured more complex harmonies, convoluted melodic lines, and rapid, frantic tempo. It was a form of musical one-upmanship…“See, you’re full of shit as a jazzman, 'cause you can’t keep up with us!” Early bop was performed by small combos instead of large bands, usually trumpet/sax/piano/bass/drums. (The trombone and the larger saxes were initially considered too clumsy for such a fleet music…it wasn’t until later in the 1940s that J.J. Johnson and Serge Chaloff, to give two examples, got on board.) Among the innovators were alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, pianist Bud Powell, and drummer Kenny Clarke, who developed a style of keeping the time primarily on his cymbals rather than snare and tom-tom (as a Swing drummer would), and by dropping “bombs”: loud crashes on the bass drum. That distinctive drum sound gave “bebop” its name. By 1950 it had been decisively shortened to “bop.”
Word.
Thanks! Me, I’m a ragtime gal. Not surprising:
"My daddy was a ragtime trombone player;
My mammy was a ragtime cabareter;
They met one day at a tango tea—
There was a syncopated wedding, and then came me . . . "
That’s not the way I heared it. The story goes that a confused music journalist asked Dizzy Gillespie what he was playing. DG replied ‘Bebop’ - the name of the tune but the journo took it to mean the genre.
Okay, so that TUNE was named after the drum thing (as was the equally classic “Ooo Bop Sh’Bam”). I’m easy.
Good thing he wasn’t playing “A Night in Tunisia.”