Popular Music Relationship

908 Words2 Pages

1. Briefly trace the development of popular song and its relationship to early jazz. What was a standard?

Popular song was one of the main bases of the jazz style, as jazz is not so much a genre of music, but a style of performance that evolved in many ways over the years. Jazz musicians would take American popular songs and use techniques such as improvisation and syncopation to elaborate upon and work around the original. Songs that were considered special favorites of jazzmen were called “standards” and made up a considerable part of their repertoire. However songs could only be considered standards when they became popular to the general public by way of being widely covered by the most influential jazz singers of the time, like Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra. Popular song and jazz rose up around the same times, and relied on each other to work off of. Jazz took popular songs to improvise and elaborate on, and popular musicians …show more content…

Much like the instrumental music of jazz, the electric guitar had a unique human like vocal quality, and lent to the powerful sound of rock music. This sound, paired with its volume capabilities helped guitar virtuosos like Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana, stand out and pierce through the screaming crowds. Another way through which rock musicians could effectively reach their audiences through technology was radio and television. Just as recording technology was crucial to the spread of jazz in the 1920s, the advertisement of songs through repetitive radio plays and music videos on MTV helped to solidify rock in the minds of the youth as something fresh and new. While there was a significant pushback against it towards the end of the 1960’s, this abrasive promotion of rock was very effective in bringing it into popularity. Technology was crucial in defining its unique sound, as well as bringing rock into the ears of the

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