Traditional jazz

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Traditional jazz , also known as trad jazz in relation to its development in England , is a style of jazz that established itself in the early 1940s to the 1950s, mainly from the USA and Great Britain , and which still has numerous followers today. The term is used in a slightly different sense. The Traditional Jazz is a musical adaptation of the Old Style / New Orleans jazz and Dixieland , where it is mixed in various revival movements with other styles such as Chicago Jazz and Swing and local European music styles ( folk ) and pop. Reclam's jazz guide defined traditional jazz as synonymous with styles of premodern jazz (before modern jazz ).

According to Lawrence Gushee , the term came up in writings in the late 1930s to polemically differentiate the swing of the 1930s from the older jazz of the 1920s, but was later transferred to the New Orleans Revival Bands and, according to Gushee (1984), is only used in used this sense. According to Gushee, the driving forces were: 1. Recordings of prominent black jazz musicians in the allegedly authentic New Orleans style of the 1920s ( Sidney Bechet , who was particularly influential in France and influenced Claude Luter , Jelly Roll Morton , Jimmie Noone ) from around 1938, 2 Recordings of white musicians with explicit reference to the 1920s (especially Turk Murphy , Lu Watters in San Francisco), 3. Recordings of older black New Orleans musicians who otherwise rarely performed outside of Louisiana ( Kid Rena , Bunk Johnson , George Lewis ) , continued around Preservation Hall , 4. Recordings in the 1950s by senior Dixieland musicians who had retired in New Orleans, often under the New Orleans Jazz Club umbrella. Gushee sees it as a regional style oriented towards market demand and also in the eclectic repertoire and the mix of different styles of the subsequent internationally successful traditional jazz movement (according to Gushee, particularly active and successful outside the USA).

According to the British authors of the Rough Guide, Trad (as the name for traditional jazz in England) is a form of Dixieland jazz that occurs exclusively in Europe . They also see this as the primary success story of British groups, based on the enormous success of the Skiffle by Chris Barber , Lonnie Donegan and others in the early 1950s, which also led to bands of a large number of less talented musicians (according to the authors of the Rough Guide whose success in the 50s can only be compared with the heyday of swing in the 30s). In the 1950s and 1960s there was also a permeability of trad in England to other musical styles such as rock, blues and pop. The Rough Guide authors see its role as a springboard for many European jazz musicians, who then developed their own style, as positive. In the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz this is explicitly differentiated as Trad from Traditional Jazz . According to Shipton, this movement ended by 1965 at the latest (contributing to this were clashes between supporters of traditional and modern jazz styles and unrest between fans at the Beaulieu Festival in 1960). Some bands like Chris Barber's continued their success unabated. In the Netherlands there was the Dutch Swing College Band , in Scandinavia Papa Bue's Viking Jazzband and in Germany the Barrelhouse Jazzband and the Old Merry Tale Jazzband were successful. Amateurs often play in traditional jazz bands. With some the influence of Chicago jazz was stronger, with others the New Orleans Revival and the styles also changed over the course of the existence of the bands.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, traditional jazz was preferred to skip jive or swing dance elements . Most fans of trad jazz prefer (d) rather a "traditional" instrumentation that is based on classic New Orleans jazz and usually ends with a solo at the end of the piece.

literature

  • Ian Carr , Digby Fairweather , Brian Priestley : Rough Guide Jazz. The ultimate guide to jazz music. 1700 artists and bands from the beginning until today. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 1999, ISBN 3-476-01584-X .
  • Albert McCarthy : The Re-Emergence of Traditional Jazz. In: Nat Hentoff, AJ McCarthy, Jazz. New Perspectives on the History of Jazz , New York 1959
  • Duncan Heining: Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers , British Jazz, 1960–1975, Equinox Publ. 2012
  • Reimer von Essen : New Orleans Jazz, in Joachim Ernst Berendt (Hrsg.) The story of jazz. From New Orleans to rock jazz. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1975, 1991
  • Reimer von Essen: Article performance practice of traditional jazz, in: Wolfgang Sandner (editor) Jazz, Handbook of Music in the 20th Century, Vol. 9, Laaber Verlag, 2005

Individual evidence

  1. Barry Kernfeld (ed.), New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Macmillan 1994, article Traditional Jazz
  2. ^ Rough Guide, Metzler 1999, p. 759
  3. The article about it is from Alyn Shipton . The definition is similar to the Rough Guide.