Dictionary of Music - Birding America

202 jazz bandfingering instruments, also came to be called avantgardeor free jazz, especially as played by Coltraneand Coleman.Almost from its beginnings jazz interested andinfluenced composers of other kinds of music.Among them, showing direct or indirect influence,are Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Paul Hindemith,Ernst Krenek, Kurt Weill, Aaron Copland,John Alden Carpenter, Meyer Kupferman, LeonardBernstein, occasionally Milton Babbitt and StefanWolpe, and, perhaps most of all, George Gershwin.In the 1950s and 1960s the influence of contemporaryserious music on jazz musicians was also seen.The merging of elements of serial music, chromaticism,and jazz is sometimes called third stream, aterm coined by Gunther Schuller. Another developmentof the 1960s was the use of jazz in religiousservices of the Roman Catholic and various Protestantchurches, a leader in this movement being“Duke” Ellington. By the late 1960s America’s popularmusic was no longer jazz but rock. In order tosurvive, many black jazz musicians formed cooperatives.One was the Art Ensemble of Chicago,founded in the mid-1960s and still active twodecades later. That same period—from the late1960s to the late 1970s—saw the development ofrock-jazz fusion (also called jazz-rock or electricjazz) by Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, and others,who combined the electronic amplification and drivingenergy of rock with the complex harmoniesand improvisatory freedom of jazz. Another fusionwas the funk jazz of the late 1970s, inspired byAfrican music and the black jazz musicians’ interestin their ancient origins. Still another offshoot wasLatin jazz, which combined the rhythms andinstrumental colors of Latin American music withthe jazz tradition.By the 1980s jazz musicians had developed atotally eclectic style known as new jazz, which drewon the entire sweep of jazz history: African roots,swing, bop, free jazz, free-form improvisation,along with folk music from all over the world andthe complex structures of contemporary classicalmusic. Many of these jazz composers had a thoroughtraining in classical music. The groups rangedin size from small (trio, quartet, quintet) to mediumsize(octet) to big band (twelve or more players).They performed in nightclubs and concert halls andat jazz festivals. By the 1990s, jazz history and performancewere gradually being accepted as an academicdiscipline, with leading jazz musiciansemployed on college and conservatory faculties, andthere was no doubt that jazz would remain a permanentpart of America’s musical heritage.jazz band See BAND, def. 7.jeté (zh Œ tā′) French: “thrown.” Also, ricochet(rik′′ô shā′). A direction to throw the bow againstthe string in such a way that it will bounce severaltimes on the down-bow. It is indicated by staccatodots and a slur.Jewish chant The traditional music of Jewishreligious services. Three principal kinds of musicare used. The first, and oldest, is the chanting of theprose books of the Old Testament, which is anessential part of the service. The style used is calledcantillation, and it is performed by a soloist, usuallya tenor, called the cantor. Cantillation consists of aseries of melodic formulas, highly ornamented andin free rhythm; each book of the Bible is assigned itsown mode, not unlike the modes used in themedieval Christian church (see CHURCH MODES).The texts are marked with special signs that indicatethe formula to be used. A second type of music isused for the prayers. Each prayer or category ofprayers has special melodies or motifs associatedwith it, but the cantor is free to embellish or improviseon them as he pleases. The third type of musicis a standard group of chants, with fixed melodies.This last category, which is only a few hundredyears old and thus is the most recent in origin, occasionallyincludes melodies and themes taken fromnon-Jewish sources, among them opera, Protestantchurch music, and Gregorian chant.Jew’s-harp A small musical instrument, only afew inches long, consisting of a wooden or metalframe, shaped somewhat like a horseshoe, with anarrow, flexible metal tongue attached at one end.The player holds the narrow end of the frameloosely between the teeth and plucks the metaltongue with one finger, making it vibrate. Although