National Recording Registry: Jazz

"What is jazz? It's almost like asking, What is French? Jazz is a musical language -- a dialect that actually embodies the spirit of America." - Branford Marsalis

Jazz is, if not the most American genre in this Registry, the most successful genre of American origin. It is among the few styles so prevalent that individual harmonies (the seventh and ninth) and chord progressions (ii-V-I) are associated with it. Jazz is generally believed to have originated in New Orleans around 1900, with roots in older African and Carribbean music, and to have grown to rival classical music in popularity around the world.

While ragtime was known nationwide at the turn of the century, and would later be considered jazz, and brass bands and marches were just as well-known and would not be considered jazz, jazz music is thought to have not gained popularity outside of New Orleans until the prevalence of Dixieland jazz in the 1910s. In the 1920s, the "hot" style of Louis Armstrong, with strong, sharp, bouncing brass lines, or the "stomp" style brought by Jelly Roll Morton from the Mississippi valley, became the most popular music in the country, with history classes still associating "jazz" with that lone decade and insisting that it was considered subversive and sexual by conservatives of the time.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the most popular recording artists were either big bands or crooners accompanied by big bands - big band music, including swing, like that of Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, is inextricable from pop music at that point in history, in America and in Europe. But while this style grew popular and even conservative, jazz was changing. While jazz had always involved improvisation, such things as the "jam session" or the form of extended variations emerged slowly. Bebop, a hard and fast sub-genre, was developed in the late 1940s by musicians such as Charlie Parker; soft jazz emerged around the same time.

Through the 1950s, jazz became a part of counterculture and postmodernism and other fancy movements that were studied by historians nearly as soon as they started. Jazz musicians's experiments throughout the 1950s came to fruition in 1959, with the release of several landmark jazz albums, most famously Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, but also John Coltrane's Giant Steps (the title pieces of which famously changes keys every second), Charles Mingus's Mingus Ah Um, and two other registry entries.

Jazz since then has been considered "modern jazz", and has been known to music theorists for its unusual harmonies and rhythms, and to listeners for its unusually long songs. The registry notes a few of the post-modern jazz albums, as well as the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Aided by the willingness of the Registry when it was young to include complete collections such as Louis Armstrong's entire Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings and Duke Ellington's entire Blanton-Webster era recordings, the jazz recordings in the National Recording Registry total forty-five hours.