Royalty Free Jazz Music

Since it began, Jazz music has reached into so many styles that no description fits all of them with complete accuracy. Here's a brief generalisation however! Jazz performers improvise within the conventions of their chosen style, usually to the accompaniment of a repeated chord progression. Yeah, any definition is always going to be proved wrong, but it's a start...

The birthplace of Jazz music is said to be New Orleans amongst the Black American and Creoles at the turn of the 20th century, between the 1890's and the 1900's, "Ragtime" and the Blues was the new music craze. Jazz really came into effect by the 1920's when the whites (The Original Dixieland Jazz Band) adapted and imitated it, bringing it to widespread popularity outside of New Orleans . Musicians and bandleaders such as Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, Gene Krupa, and Benny Goodman became household names recording and touring across America from the 1920's.

By the 1930's Jazz had developed a new musical direction into so called Big Bands, when groups of Jazz musicians played together, and the best developers of this form were Duke Ellington , Fletcher Henderson and Count Basie, and when singers such as Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday were the leading vocalists.

In the 1940's, saxophist Charlie Parker brought a new direction to Jazz music, with faster tempos, more complex and longer phrases, and a greater emotional expression through the music. Other musicians well known from this period are trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, pianist Thelonius Monk and the Jazz singer Sarah Vaughan. One of Charlie Parker's protégées who rose to prominence in the 1950's was trumpeter Miles Davis, whose band's tone was soft but they played very complex arrangements. This 'cool' form of the music became known as West-Coast Jazz. With tenor saxophonist John Coltrane and pianist Bill Evans, Miles Davis took Jazz music to another level in the 1959 with his "Kind Of Blue" album, which featured 'modal Jazz', where a chord or phrase is often repeated for many bars allowing more freedom for the improvising soloist.

From this high point in the late 1950's, Jazz music waned in popularity in the 1960's as younger audiences preferred pop and soul music. It wasn't until the 1980's that Jazz began to re-emerge to wider audiences, when musicians such as acclaimed classical trumpeter Winton Marsalis came to prominence playing Jazz music. While recordings have consistently comprised a small percentage of all music sales - an indication that the number of devoted fans remains small - Jazz music is now considered attractive and fashionable by a much greater number of casual listeners. With all its variety, Jazz remains a rich and vital presence in the world of music.

Being a popular choice for production music requirements, our extensive stock of royalty free jazz music can give you the variety and quality you're looking for from a world-beating resource for copyright free music of every genre.

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