What makes "jazz" the revolutionary music of the 20th century, and will it be revolutionary for the 21st century?

African American Review, Summer, 1995 by Fred Wei-han Ho

It's entire history has been the freeing of time, pitch, and harmony from fixed, regulated, predictable standards. Every major innovation in the history of the music has been from the struggle of musicians to attain greater and greater levels of expressive freedom through liberating the two basic fundamentals of music: time (meter) and sound (pitch/temperament/harmony). I shall briefly discuss the basic changes that have resulted from this process of music making.

New and Reconfigured Instrumentation

A new instrument was introduced to the world of music during the 1890s and early 1900s in the U.S.A.: the drum kit (see royal hartigan's essay in this issue, 234-236). The multiple, layered rhythms of both West African and New Orleans drum ensembles merged into a kit played by one person instead of several players. For the first time, one individual using all four limbs played several percussion parts simultaneously.

European instruments such as the piano and bass violin (string bass) were transformed both in their role and in their manner of playing. In the Western European orchestra, their roles were primarily melodic. But in the African American music ensemble, both instruments became part of the "rhythm section." The piano's role is both rhythmic and harmonic. The string bass, now rarely played in its traditionally Western European arco or bowed manner, is played primarily pizzicato or plucked, supplying rhythm, keeping time, and providing a harmonic foundation. Piano playing (especially in "comping" - from the word "accompaniment") now involves a rhythmic approach to harmony - supplying chordal/harmonic percussion-like rhythms. By the 1960s, as musicians sought more boldly to escape from fixed, Western temperament, the piano was either left out entirely or played without regard to conventional harmony. Pulse and some establishment of tonality were left to the bass. Even the drum kit no longer was confined to keeping time or to meter. Certainly Max Roach since the 1940s has demonstrated the melodic artistry of the drum kit.

Probably the most characteristically "jazz" instrument is still the saxophone. Created by a Belgian, Adolphe Sax, in the mid-19th century (see Al Rose's essay in this issue, 233) the saxophone would have become an obsolete, novelty instrument, archived in some works by French and Belgian composers, if it were not for its role in 20th-century African American music. Replacing the clarinet, the saxophone became the "voice" of the "jazz band." Heretofore, popular music had been predominantly a vocal music. But with the saxophone, an instrumental popular music has emerged. Much has been made of the saxophone's vocal qualifies. In the clearest examples of the dialectical nature of African American 20th-century music, horns perform like voices (from the cries, shouts, screams, hollers, and talkin' to its yakety-yak, burlesquey humor and caricature) and voices perform like horns (from the inflection and phrasing of the human voice to "scat" soloing, etc.).