Jazz

Our mission is to serve jazz and improvised music from a global perspective by advancing musicians, facilitating education, and increasing public awareness of the players and their medium. Our unique position as an Internet publication enables us to leverage information technology in order to organize and disseminate information, opinion, and music itself. As the central repository for jazz content on the web, we aim to provide a haven for jazz enthusiasts, neophytes and industry professionals. And by stimulating personal expression, we also hope to advance progressive ideas and exchanges which will help shape the future of jazz.

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Group Improvisation is the allowance made for degrees of disciplined expansion and contraction of a given theme. The big shapes are provided by the composer of the theme, for example, the basic melodic, harmonic and rhythmic components of a certain song. The rest is up to the participants to flesh out their own parts in correspondence with each other's interpretation at that moment in time. Most group activities have room for some degree of Group Improvisation. The nature of this expansion and contraction is determined by the composition and the way it has been presented by the composer or by the way the presiding group of participants is reinterpreting it.

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The Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra (SJMO) is the orchestra-in-residence at the National Museum of American History. Our mission is to explore, present, promote, and perpetuate the historical legacy of jazz. We enrich the public's understanding of the character and importance of this unique American treasure by presenting significant jazz masterworks in engaging musical performances, and stimulating educational activities that are based on scholarship and research.

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The mission of the International Association for Jazz Education is to assure the continued worldwide growth and development of jazz and jazz education. As a means of advancing its mission, International Association for Jazz Education initiates programs which nurture and promote the understanding and appreciation of jazz and its heritage, provide leadership to educators regarding curricula, aesthetics and performance; assists teachers and practitioners with information and resources; and takes an active part in organizing clinics, festivals and symposia at local, regional, national and international levels.

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As a musical language of communication, jazz is the first indigenous American style to affect music in the rest of the World. Brass Band From the beat of ragtime syncopation and driving brass bands to soaring gospel choirs mixed with field hollers and the deep down growl of the blues, jazz's many roots are celebrated almost everywhere in the United States. The city of New Orleans features prominently in early development of jazz. A port city with doors to the spicy sounds of the Caribbean and Mexico and a large, well-established black population, the Crescent City was ripe for the development of new music at the turn of the century.

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The music called Jazz was born sometime around 1895 in New Orleans. It combined elements of Ragtime, marching band music and Blues. What differentiated Jazz from these earlier styles was the widespread use of improvisation, often by more than one player at a time. Jazz represented a break from Western musical traditions, where the composer wrote a piece of music on paper and the musicians then tried their best to play exactly what was in the score. In a Jazz piece, the song is often just a starting point or frame of reference for the musicians to improvise around. The song might have been a popular ditty or blues that they didn't compose, but by the time they were finished with it they had composed a new piece that often bore little resemblance to the original song.

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You can trigger so many different emotions in people when you play, and it is one of the main things that excites me about music. Created in 1991, Jazz Online was the world’s first commercial interactive network devoted exclusively to jazz. What started as a San Francisco based bulletin board system evolved into the first commercial jazz web site in 1994 and remains the leading online destination for jazz. With original content and exclusive features that utilize interactive technologies, Jazz Online’s mission has always been to increase the visibility of jazz music.

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