In the post-1945 period, jazz moved rapidly from one major avant-garde revolution (the birth of bebop) to another (the emergence of free jazz) while developing a profusion of subgenres (hard bop, progressive, modal, Third Stream, soul jazz) and a new idiomatic persona (cool or hip) that originated as a form of African American resistance but soon became a signature of transgression and authenticity across the modern arts and culture. Jazz’s long-standing affiliation with African American urban life and culture intensified through its central role in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. By the 1970s, jazz, now fully eclipsed in popular culture by rock n’ roll, turned to electric instruments and fractured into a multitude of hyphenated styles (jazz-funk, jazz-rock, fusion, Latin jazz). The move away from acoustic performance and traditional codes of blues and swing musicianship generated a neoclassical reaction in the 1980s that coincided with a mission to establish an orthodox jazz canon and honor the music’s history in elite cultural institutions. Post-1980s jazz has been characterized by tension between tradition and innovation, earnest preservation and intrepid exploration, Americanism and internationalism.
Explanation: In the years between the two world wars, jazz was nothing less than the pulse of American modernity. With its youthful dynamism, formal flexibility, emotional honesty, tolerant social norms, and racial mixing, jazz helped supplant entrenched Victorian ideals of hierarchy, purity, moral discipline, and cultural uplift. Jazz was the sound of an urban, industrial America humanized by the warmth, spontaneity, and expressiveness of African American culture. The music and its surrounding culture marked a shift in the United States from a largely traditional rural and small-town Anglo-German Protestant culture to a dynamic, forward-looking one centered in bustling metropolitan centers like Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. There, African American migrants and southern and Eastern European immigrants jostled and mingled, while the most forward-looking white intellectuals, artists, and bohemians went “slumming” among these lower classes as they absorbed ideas and energies unleashed by Darwinism, socialism, Freudianism, feminism, primitivism, Futurism, and other modern modes of thought and action. Jazz changed the way American bodies sounded, looked, and moved, in turn changing the shape of American imagination and desire. Jazz was modern energy and movement: it catalyzed the shift from old to new, field to factory, prim and proper social dancing to the revved-up vigor of the Lindy Hop, rigidly scored compositions to improvised hot solos. Throughout the Depression and World War II, millions of Americans danced to the big bands of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Jimmie Lunceford, and a host of others. The hallmark of the swing big band, an American modernization of the Germanic symphonic orchestra, was a streamlined rhythmic groove that echoed the propulsive dynamism of the fast-moving railroad train.
