How to Listen to Jazz

I don’t think it’s mere coincidence that jazz first emerged in New Orleans.

In many instances, they will play on every beat, bar after bar—the so-called walking bass line—

the next decade is remembered as the Jazz Age.

the most joyous sound invented during the entire course of twentieth-century music.

Duke Ellington’s band:

The blues at this juncture rarely appeared in large cities; the most likely place to hear it in the early 1900s would be agricultural regions of the South where black sharecroppers and rural workers resided.

Gunther Schuller,

But the Harlem stride sound was something different, namely a bravura piano style that required no support beyond the ten supple fingers of its exponents.

Harlem stride piano—sometimes simply called “stride”—still stands out as the most self-contained and individualistic performance style in the history of jazz.