WRITING ACTIVITIES

Ex.13.Read the text and summarize it in 150-200 words.

Jazz

Jazz is a kind of music characterized by swung and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Though originally a kind of dance music, jazz has been a major of popular music, and has also become a major element of Western classical music. Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African American music traditions including blues and ragtime, as well as European military band music. Early jazz was closely related to ragtime, with which it could be distinguished by the use of more intricate rhythmic improvisation. The earliest jazz bands adopted much of the vocabulary of the blues, including bent and blue notes and instrumental "growls" and smears otherwise not used on European instruments. Jazz's roots come from the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, populated by Cajuns and black Creoles, who combined the French-Canadian culture of the Cajuns with their own styles of music in the 19th century. Large Creole bands that played for funerals and parades became a major basis for early jazz, which spread from New Orleans to Chicago and other northern urban centers.

Though jazz had long since achieved some limited popularity, it was Louis Armstrong, who became one of the first popular stars and a major force in the development of jazz. Armstrong was an improviser, capable of creating numerous variations on a single melody; he also popularized scat singing, an improvisational vocal technique in which nonsensical syllables (vocables) are sung. He was influential in the rise of a kind of pop big band jazz called swing. Swing is characterized by a strong rhythm section, usually consisting of double bass and drums, medium to fast tempo, and rhythmic devices like the swung note, which is common to most jazz. Swing is primarily a fusion of 1930s jazz fused with elements of the blues and Tin Pan Alley. Swing used bigger bands than other kinds of jazz had, which led to the use of bandleaders that tightly arranged the material, discouraging improvisation, which had previously been an integral part of jazz. Swing became a major part of African American dance, and came to be accompanied by a popular dance called the swing dance.

Jazz influenced countless performers of all the major styles of later popular music, though jazz itself never again became such a major part of American popular music as during the swing era. The modern American jazz scene did, however, produce some popular crossover stars like Miles Davis. In the middle of the 20th century, jazz evolved into a variety of subgenres, beginning with bebop. Bebop is a form of jazz characterized by fast tempos, improvisation based on harmonic structure rather than melody, and use of the flatted fifth. Bebop was developed in the early and mid-1940s, later evolving into styles like hard bop and free jazz. Innovators of the style included Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who arose from small jazz clubs in New York City. Hard bop is an even less accessible and more avant-garde style of jazz, characterized by each altered chord implying a scale or mode. The capacity to improvise over a complex sequence of altered chords using only the implied scales requires a mental agility of a mathematical, problem-solving kind that is another hallmark of bebop.

Ex. 14. ? Choose one of the quotations and write an essay, giving your arguments for or against.

1. “It is in serious music, where the main richness of music art is concentrated” (M.I. Chulaki)

2. “Most of the pop music industry is simply an attempt to find an audience and give them what they want. Quality and originality do not come into it.”

3. “Almost all sound can have rhythmic and vibrational designs and patterns which are a kind of music.” (L. Stokowskiy)

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