NU Jazz

is an umbrella term coined in the late 1990s to refer to music styles that blend jazz textures and sometimes jazz instrumentation, funk, electronic dance music, and free improvisation. Also written nu-jazz or NuJazz, it is sometimes called electronic jazz, electro-jazz, e-jazz, jazztronica, jazz house, phusion, or future jazz.

" Nu Jazz is to (traditional) Jazz what punk or grunge was to Rock.The songs are the focus, not the individual prowess of the musicians. Nu Jazz instrumentation ranges from the traditional to the experimental, the melodies are fresh, and the rhythms new and alive. It makes Jazz fun again. " -- Tony Brewer

Historically, Jazz music has incorporated electronic instruments in production even as early as Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. In the early 90s, jazz music began to embrace production of music with electronic instruments, thereby fusing together a traditional and modern sound, and thus emerging Nu Jazz onto the electronic music scene. The sound of Nu Jazz can be described as jazz music with a slow tempo from about 65-100 B.P.M. generally alongside an ambient beat, and usually little to no vocals are involved. Nu Jazz music rhythms and melodies can often be repetitive in nature. Nu Jazz can also be referred to as Jazz Fusion or Electro-Jazz.

Like the terms electronica and jazz, nu jazz is a loosely defined umbrella musical style. It ranges from combining live instrumentation with beats of jazz house (exemplified by the French St Germain, the German Jazzanova and Fila Brazillia from the UK) to more band-based improvised jazz with electronic elements (such as that of the The Cinematic Orchestra from the UK, the Belgian PhusionCulture, Mexican duo Kobol, nu jazz improvisation collective, the Norwegian "future jazz" style (although that term originates from New Zealand in the early 1990s) pioneered by Bugge Wesseltoft, Jaga Jazzist, Nils Petter Molvær, and others). It is a term sometimes ascribed to Squarepusher's music.

Nu jazz typically ventures farther into the electronic territory than does its close cousin, acid jazz (or groove jazz), which is generally closer to earthier funk, soul, and rhythm and blues, although releases from noted groove jazz artists such as the Groove Collective and Chris Hale blur the distinction between the styles.

Nu jazz can be very experimental in nature and can vary widely in sound and concept. The sound, unlike its cousin Acid Jazz, departs from its blues roots and instead explores electronic sounds and ethereal jazz sensualities. Nu Jazz “is the music itself and not the individual dexterity of the musicians.” Often, Nu Jazz blends elements of traditional Jazz texture with that of modern electronic music and free improvisation, thus, the music can truly evolve into a multitude of sounds and can vary greatly artist to artist.

American Nu Jazz

Nu Jazz is often described as “avant-garde” because it does not follow any rules or specific qualities like consistent rhythm or scales found in more traditional forms of jazz. Instead, Nu Jazz can vary greatly from one artist to another, and can feature broken rhythms, atonal harmonies, and improvised melody. Artist like Matthew Shipp and Ornette Coleman often demonstrate styles coined as “jazztronica” or "electro-jazz" because the style of jazz is offbeat from the more traditional forms.

European Nu Jazz

While still embracing the traditional forms of Jazz, pianist Bugge Wesseltoft and trumpeter Nils Petter Molvær are known for their improvisational nu jazz style.

The Cinematic Orchestra is also known for incorporating a traditional jazz band while fusing electronic elements into their music production.

Artist St. Germain (musician), purveyor of nu jazz music, has sold 1.5 million copies of his Tourist album, thus making it the top-selling jazz album in the United States.

Nu Jazz in the club scene

Nu Jazz is increasingly more vibrant among young generations as the music is being heard more and more in the club environment. Larger cities like Boston, New York and San Francisco have emerged electronic jazz clubs. In New York, SoHo lofts have been transformed into experimental Nu Jazz studios where recording is produced in three to six hour spans.

Thirsty Ear is a record label which emerges many Nu Jazz artists and often associated with the genre for that reason. Some of the Nu Jazz artists include William Parker, Antipop Consortium, Tim Berne, Meat Beat Manifesto, Sex Mobb, Nils Petter Molvaer, Matthew Shipp, Craig Taborn, DJ Spooky, Spring Heel jack, and DJ Wally.

Nu Jazz is also often associated with Ninja Tune, as the majority of Nu Jazz artists are often signed with this music label. Artists signed to Ninja Tune include The Cinematic Orchestra, Funki Porcini, The Herbaliser, Jaga Jazzist, Pest (music), Skalpel, Up, Bustle and Out.

Bossas or Bossa Nova

The musical style evolved from samba but is more complex harmonically and is less percussive. The influence on Bossa Nova of Afro-American jazz styles such as cool jazz is often debated by historians and fans, but a similar "cool sensibility" is apparent. Bossa Nova developed in Brazil in 1958, with Elizete Cardoso's recording of Chega de Saudade on the Canção do Amor Demais LP. Composed by Vinícius de Moraes (lyrics) and Antonio Carlos Jobim (music). The song was soon after released by Gilberto himself.

The initial releases by Gilberto and the 1959 film Black Orpheus brought huge popularity in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America, which spread to North America by way of visiting American jazz musicians. The resulting recordings by Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz cemented its popularity and led to a worldwide boom with 1963's Getz/Gilberto, numerous recordings by famous jazz performers such as Ella Fitzgerald (Ella Abraça Jobim) and Frank Sinatra (Francis Albert Sinatra & Antônio Carlos Jobim), and the entrenchment of the Bossa Nova style as a lasting influence in world music for several decades and even up to the present.

The first Bossa Nova single was perhaps the most successful of all time: The Getz/Gilberto recording "The Girl From Ipanema" edited to include only the singing of Astrud Gilberto (Gilberto's then-wife). The resulting fad was not unlike the disco craze of the 1970s. The genre would withstand substantial "watering down" by popular artists throughout the next four decades.

An early influence of Bossa Nova was the song "Dans mon île" by French singer Henri Salvador, featured in a 1957 Italian movie distributed in Brazil (Europa di notte by Alessandro Blasetti) and covered later by Brazilian artists Eumir Deodato (Los Danseros en Bolero - 1964) and Caetano himself (Outras Palavras - 1981). In 2005, Henri Salvador was awarded the Brazilian Order of Cultural Merit, which he received from singer and Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil, in the presence of President Lula for his influence on Brazilian culture.

Acid Jazz

Acid jazz (also known as club jazz) is a musical genre that combines elements of soul music, funk, disco, particularly looping beats and modal harmony. It developed over the 1980s and 1990s and could be seen as tacking the sound of jazz-funk onto electronic dance/pop music. Acid Jazz is also the name of a recording label in the United Kingdom (founded by Gilles Peterson & Eddie Piller) which issues recordings by artists in this genre.

While acid jazz often contains various types of electronic composition (sometimes including sampling or live DJ cutting and scratching), it is just as likely to be played live by musicians, who often showcase jazz interpretation as part of their performance. The compositions of groups such as The Brand New Heavies and Incognito often feature chord structures usually associated with Jazz music. The Heavies in particular were known in their early years for beginning their songs as catchy pop and rapidly steering them into jazz territory before "resolving" the composition and thus not losing any pop listeners but successfully "exposing" them to jazz elements in "baby steps".

The acid jazz "movement" is also seen as a "revival" of jazz-funk or jazz fusion or soul jazz by leading DJs such as Norman Jay or Gilles Peterson or Patrick Forge, also known as "rare groove crate diggers".

The sound and clubs that went with it arose out of Southern England's rare groove scene of the late seventies and early eighties and various other alternative groups, including the London mod scene. It is distinguished from the Northern Soul scene (then popular in the South of England with clubs such as the 100 Club in Oxford Street) but still portrayed various similarities.

The name came into common parlance with the Acid Jazz label but in reality the scene had existed in disparate forms and without a distinguishing name for some time beforehand. Journalists at the time appeared very confused by the genre and made various attempts to connect it to the London mod scene (by links with various former members of that scene, prominently Eddie Piller and the James Taylor Quartet - Taylor having formerly been Hammond Player for sixties garage band The Prisoners). Infamously, ID magazine ran an article on Acid Jazz Mods which irritated both mods and "acid jazz fans" in equal amounts.

The scene always had two halves, those who liked the original jazz and soul recordings and those who followed the new bands signed by labels like acid jazz. It is the former who still probably support their music, many of the early bands having fallen well by the wayside. Attempts to integrate the music with hip hop and jungle are now regarded by many as misguided attempts to keep the music fresh whilst leading it a long way from its starting point, attempts that were regarded with disdain by many.

An important gauge of the UK scene and the creation of the genre are to be found in the UK's Straight No Chaser magazine. Similarly, clothing labels like Duffer of St George were closely associated with the scene, although the "right outfit" was never essential.

Disc jockeys Gilles Peterson and Chris Bangs are generally credited with coining the term acid jazz at a 1987 'Talkin' Loud Sayin Something' session. At the time, this was Peterson's regular Sunday afternoon club at Dingwalls in Camden, London.

In his Radio 1 biograpahy, Peterson describes how the term Acid jazz came about. "We put on this old 7-inch by Mickey and the Soul Generation which was a rare groove record with a mad rock guitar intro and no beat. I started vary speeding it so it sounded all warped. Chris Bangs got on the microphone and said, 'If that was acid house, this is acid jazz'. That's how acid jazz started, just a joke!"

In the United States notable acid-jazz groups have included The Brand New Heavies and Solsonics; although during the 1990s the major contributions from the US related to jazz dance were predominantly in jazz-house (from labels such as 8 Ball Records) and jazz-rap, particularly by artists such as A Tribe Called Quest, Black Sheep, De la Soul, and the Jungle Brothers. From Japan, notable artists included United Future Organization who released 'I Love my Baby: My Baby Loves Jazz' as well as a cover of Van Morrison's 'Moondance'; another prominent artist from Japan was the female vocalist, Monday Michiru. From the UK, Repercussions who had a top hit, Promise me nothing. Other more recent artists and groups who have produced music in this genre include Medeski, Martin, and Wood, Mother Earth, Mr. Scruff, Visit Venus, Praful, and Down to the Bone.

ESSENTIAL FUSION

Fusion is a pretty big category, and we've lumped a lot of material together here. Basically, these are the grandaddies of the marriage of jazz with electronics, rock, funk, and technology. If you like your music with plenty of guitar and synthesizer work, then this is the stuff for you. But lots of today's top DJs and music fans find plenty to like among the great fusion works of yesteryear. And there's lots of great sample material here as well. So sit back, open up your mind, and check out some of these masterworks of jazztronica's first flowering.

Miles Davis is the grandfather of fusion--but don't tell him that. As he once said, "A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I'm still doing it." Nonetheless, he pretty much started the ball rolling back in 1969 when he released In a Silent Way, an album that uses ambient sound washes created by no less than three keyboards and the guitar of John McLaughlin as a base over which Miles soars.All in all it's a pretty subdued album, but the same cannot be said of the masterpiece Bitches Brew. Released in 1970 as a double LP, it mixed free jazz blowing by a large ensemble with electronic keyboards and guitar, plus a dense mix of percussion. The result isn't like anything that had been done up until then, and it doesn't sound much like other fusion, either. Miles followed that up with Live-Evil, a mind-blowing monster album that mixes studio work with live recordings done at the Cellar Door. As on the previous two albums, producer Teo Macero's studio manipulations of the recording done by the musicians is a major part of the album. Tribute to Jack Johnson is pretty straightforward and probably the most rock-oriented album Miles ever made. There's a lot of John McLaughlin guitar work on it as well.

On the Corner started a new phase for Miles, one which was heavily influenced by the funk of Sly and the Family Stone and James Brown, and which ended up being extremely influential on today's DJ culture and drum 'n' bass experiments. The dense, percussion-heavy music heard on this album is very afro-funk/rock centered and remains very controversial to this day among jazz fans. Miles continued to mine this sound on Get Up With It, his last studio release before a five year period of retirement. The album is known for the track "He Loved Him Madly", a tribute to Duke Ellington that inspired Brian Eno's ambient experiments. Also excellent and similar in nature are the live recordings Agharta and Pangea, recorded at afternoon and evening concerts the same day in Japan.

Following his 1980 comeback, Miles played a much more straightforward funky style of music, and his studio recordings often don't convey the musical intensity he and his groups were capable of reaching live. Still, there are some good moments to Decoy and You're Under Arrest as well as the import only Star People. His best post-comeback moments were three albums he did for Warner Brothers with Marcus Miller recording most of the parts besides Davis' trumpet. For all practical purposes, these are the first true jazztronica recordings: Tutu, Siesta, and Amandla. All three are heartily recommended. Still looking ahead, Miles planned an album that incorporated rap, collaborations with Prince, and his own brand of funk/hip-hop, but he died before the project was completed. The album was finished with the help of rapper Cool Moe Be and released as doo-bop. While not worthy of Miles' legacy, it does show that he was on the cutting edge until the very end.

Much of 1970s fusion in the USA was performed by a core of musicians who had worked with Miles Davis on his influential albums In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew. In addition to Davis, important figures in early fusion were John McLaughlin, Larry Coryell, Billy Cobham (with his album Spectrum), Tony Williams, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea (with his band Return to Forever), Joe Zawinul, and Wayne Shorter with their band Weather Report.

Herbie Hancock first continued the path of Miles Davis with his experimental fusion albums (such as Crossings, 1972), but soon after that he became perhaps the most important developer of "jazz-funk" with his albums Head Hunters (1973) and Thrust (1974). Later in the 1970s and early 1980s Hancock took a yet more commercial approach, though he also recorded some acoustic jazz. Hancock was one of the first jazz musicians to use synthesizers (although at first, he left playing to his sidemen).

In England, the jazz fusion movement was headed by Nucleus led by Ian Carr and whose key players Karl Jenkins and John Marshall both later joined the seminal jazz rock band Soft Machine, oft-acknowledged leaders of what became known as the Canterbury scene. Their best-selling recording, Third (1970), was a double album featuring one track per side in the style of the aforementioned recordings of Miles Davis. A prominent English band in the jazz-rock style of Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago was If, who released a total of seven records in the 1970s.

In the early 1980s much of the original fusion genre was subsumed into other branches of jazz and rock, especially smooth jazz. The merging of jazz and pop/rock music took a more commercial direction in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in the form of compositions with a softer sound palette that could fit comfortably in a soft rock radio playlist. The Allmusic guide's article on Fusion states that "[u]nfortunately, as it became a money-maker and as rock declined artistically from the mid-'70s on, much of what was labeled fusion was actually a combination of jazz with easy-listening pop music and lightweight R&B."Artists like Lee Ritenour, Al Jarreau, Kenny G, Bob James and David Sanborn among others were leading purveyors of this pop-oriented fusion (also known as "west coast" or "AOR fusion"). This genre is most frequently called "smooth jazz" and is controversial among the listeners of both mainstream jazz and jazz fusion, who find it to rarely contain the improvisational qualities that originally surfaced in jazz decades earlier, deferring to a more commercially viable sound more widely enabled for commercial radio airplay in the United States.

Music critic Piero Scaruffi has called pop-fusion music "...mellow, bland, romantic music" made by "mediocre musicians" and "derivative bands." Scaruffi criticized some of the fusion albums of Michael and Randy Brecker as "trivial dance music" and stated that alto saxophonist David Sanborn recorded "[t]rivial collections" of "...catchy and danceable pseudo-jazz". Kenny G in particular is often criticized by both fusion and jazz fans, and some musicians, while having become a huge commercial success. Music reviewer George Graham argues that the “so-called ‘smooth jazz’ sound of people like Kenny G ha[s] none of the fire and creativity that marked the best of the fusion scene during its heyday in the 1970s”.

Jazz fusion has been criticized by jazz traditionalists who prefer conventional mainstream jazz (particularly when fusion was first emerging) and by smooth jazz fans who prefer more "accessible" music. This is analogous to the way swing jazz aficionados criticized be-bop in the mid-1940s, and the way proponents of Dixieland or New Orleans style "jass" reviled the new swing style in the late 1920s. Some critics have also called fusion's approach pretentious, and others have claimed that fusion musicians have become too concerned with musical virtuosity. However, fusion has helped to break down boundaries between different genres of rock, jazz, and led to developments such as the 1980s-era electronica-infused acid jazz.

Ethnic Jazz

Possibly could be considered to be one of kind of jazz music that was united with the musical instrument or with the rhythm of the music that was gotten in the various area. For example jazz music that was affected music from Brazilian (South America), African, Asian or even Europe.

Although then was mix with the rhythm of the area but nuances of the jazz music personally continued to be felt. In fact it could become a special uniqueness from this jazz music.

In Indonesia personally had several group jazz that tried to unit the rhythm of jazz music with the musical equipment from various area, of the example with the traditional whistle, traditional drum, or even with Balinese gamelan.

Swingin' at The Skyline

Jazz began to "swing" as musicians began to adopt swing eighths, th estring bass, high hat cymbals, and a looser, more rythmic feeling . This change occurred gradually starting in the twenties with musicians such as Louis Armstrong, and continued on into the 40's. A lot of the music that came out of this period was played by bands of ten musicians or more. Because of this the swing era is also often known as the big band era. Some big bands didn't include a lot of improvisation. Other big bands such as that of Count Basie placed great emphasis on improvisation.

Jazz music had been played as a form as entertainment since its inception. During the swing era jazz music developed into tremendous music to dance to. Jazz groups seldom performed just for listening. Swing dansing was an extremely popular past time. During this era, jazz achieved wide popular appeal. One of Count Basie's recordings, One O'Clock Jump, sold over a million copies.

The beginnings of the swing era can be traced to developments of larger bands by Fletcher Henderson in New York, and Bennie Moten in Kansas City. Fletcher Henderson along with his brother Horace and with Don Redman created the pattern for swing arrangments. Henderson helped establish the independent use of trumpet, trombone, saxophone, and rhythm sections with the use of soloists. A swing score generally has specific notes for each instrument to play in every measure. Then the music arranger decides which measures will be used for solo improvisation. The score is then taken to a music copyist who extracts the individual parts for the various instruments.

When the depression hit the U.S. in 1929 the entire music business sudddenly failed. Some players, such as Benny Goodman were able to find employment in staff radio jobs. Others, such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington left the United States for Europe. Some jazz authorities believe that the swing era was launched in 1934 when Benny Goodman left the radio business to form his own band. However, by 1934 Duke Ellington as well as Fletcher Henderson had already formed large swing bands that played in the Kansas City area.

Swing bands started to play a large part in people's lives in the late 30's as people tried to shake off the depression by dansing. Large ballrooms were extremely common and therefore large bands were also needed.

Bands of the swing era produced a much fuller sound than the sound produced by earlier dixieland jazz bands. The resulted from the use of two to three times as many players. Because there were more players, swing music was organized in a homophonic construction. This resulted in the music sounding less complex and more organized in its effect. Block chords used by swing bands are a prime example of homophonic construction.

The swing era is dominated by the big bands that played to huge audiences during this period. Two of the largest big bands were Count Basie's and Duke Ellington's. Benny Goodman also led several influential swing bands. Within the big bands there were also many individuals who distinguished themselves. Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins were two extremely talented saxophone players who became well renowned for their improvisational prowess. Ella Fitzgerald wowed crowds with her silky smooth voice and upbeat scat singing.