Joachim-Ernst Berendt (1922–2000) was an internationally known authority on jazz and the author of more than 20 books. His Jazz Book was first published in 1952 and has been translated into many languages. Günther Huesmann studied musicology, film and television, and pedagogy; a festival organizer and writer for jazz radio shows, he was responsible for the previous revision of The Jazz Book.

The Styles of Jazz

Jazz has always been the concern of a minority — always. Even in the age of Swing, the thirties, the jazz of creative black musicians was — except for very few recordings — recognized by only a few. Still, taking an active interest in jazz means working for a majority, because the popular music of our times feeds on jazz: all the music we hear in TV series and elevators, in hotel lobbies and in ads, in movies and on MP3 players; all the music to which we dance, from Charleston to rock, funk and hip-hop; all those sounds that daily engulf us — all that music comes from jazz (because their beats came to Western music through jazz).

Taking an active interest in jazz means improving the quality of the "sounds around us" — the level of musical quality, which implies, if there is any justification in talking about musical quality, the spiritual, intellectual, human quality — the level of our consciousness. In these times, when musical sounds accompany the takeoff of a plane as well as a detergent sales pitch, the "sounds around us" directly influence our way of life, the quality of our lives. That is why we can say that taking an active interest in jazz means carrying some of the power, warmth, and intensity of jazz into our lives.

Because of this, there is a direct and concretely demonstrable connection between the different kinds, forms, and styles of jazz on the one hand and the periods and spaces of time of their creation on the other hand.

The most impressive thing about jazz, aside from its musical value, in our opinion is its stylistic development. The evolution of jazz shows the continuity, logic, unity, and inner necessity that characterize all true art. This development constitutes a whole, and those who single out one phase and view it as either uniquely valid or as an aberration destroy this wholeness of conception. They distort that unity of large-scale evolution without which one can speak of fashions, but not of styles. It is our conviction that the styles of jazz are genuine and reflect their own particular times in the same sense that classicism, baroque, romanticism, and impressionism reflect their respective periods in European concert music.

Let's suggest one way of getting an impression of the wealth and scope of the different jazz styles. After reading about the early styles, ragtime and New Orleans, skip a few chapters and jump into the one on free jazz, listening to some of the characteristic records as well (which can easily be found with the help of the discography at the end of the book). What other art form has developed such contrasting, yet clearly interrelated, styles within a span of only fifty years?

It is important to be aware of the flowing, streamlike character of jazz history. It certainly is no coincidence that the word stream has been used again and again by jazz critics and musicians in connection with different jazz styles — interestingly enough, as "mainstream" first for Swing jazz, later for the main tendency of today's jazz, or as in "third stream." There is one mighty stream that flows from New Orleans right up to our contemporary music. Even breaks or revolutions in this history, such as the emergence of bebop or, later, free jazz, appear in retrospect as organic or even inevitable developments. The stream may flow over cataracts or form eddies or rapids from time to time, but it continues to flow on as ever the same stream. No one style "replaces" another; one isn't "better" than another. Each incorporates what went before — everything that went before.

Many great jazz musicians have felt the connection between their playing styles and the times in which they live. The untroubled joy of Dixieland corresponds to the days just prior to World War I. The restlessness of the Roaring Twenties comes to life in the Chicago style. Swing embodies the massive standardization of life before World War II; perhaps, to quote Marshall Stearns, Swing "was the answer to the American — and very human — love of bigness." Bebop captures the nervous restlessness of the forties. Cool jazz seems to reflect the resignation of men who live well yet know that H-bombs are being stockpiled. Hard bop is full of protest, soon turned into conformity by the fashion for funk and soul music. This protest gains uncompromising, often angry urgency in free jazz, which characterized the period of the civil rights movement and the student revolt. In the seventies there was a renewed phase of consolidation. Some aspects of jazz-rock went along with the age's faith in technology. The jazz of the eighties, on the other hand, expresses much of the skepticism of people who live amid affluence but also know where ongoing unquestioned progress has brought them. In its pluralism and its aggressive multistylistic tendencies, the jazz of the nineties is a reaction to the data explosion of the information age. What has been said in such a generalized and simplified way here is even more applicable to the many different styles of individual musicians and bands.

Many jazz musicians have viewed attempts at reconstructing past jazz styles with skepticism. They know that historicism runs counter to the nature of jazz. Jazz stands and falls on being alive, and whatever lives, changes. When Count Basie's music became a worldwide success in the fifties, Lester Young, who had been one of the leading soloists of the old Basie band, was asked to participate in a recording with his old teammates for the purpose of reconstructing the Basie style of the thirties. "I can't do it," Lester said. "I don't play that way any more. I play different; I live different. This is later. That was then. We change, move on." Obviously, this is also true about contemporary reconstructions of historical jazz styles.

Around 1890: Ragtime

Jazz originated in New Orleans: a truism, with all that is true and false about such statements. It is true that New Orleans was the most important city in the genesis of jazz. It is false that it was the only one. Jazz — the music of a continent, a century, a civilization — was too much in the air to be reducible to the patented product of a single city. Similar ways of playing evolved in Memphis and St. Louis, in Dallas and Kansas City, in other cities of the South and Midwest. And this, too, is the hallmark of a style: different people in different places making the same (or similar) artistic discoveries independently of each other.

It has become customary to speak of New Orleans style as the first style in jazz. But before New Orleans style developed, there was ragtime. Its capital was not New Orleans but Sedalia, Missouri, where Scott Joplin had settled. Joplin, born in Texas in 1868, was the leading ragtime composer and pianist — and thus we have made the decisive point about ragtime: It was largely composed, primarily pianistic...