1.
Guitar
–
The guitar is a musical instrument classified as a fretted string instrument with anywhere from four to 18 strings, usually having six. The sound is projected either acoustically, using a wooden or plastic and wood box, or through electrical amplifier. It is typically played by strumming or plucking the strings with the fingers, the guitar is a type of chordophone, traditionally constructed from wood and strung with either gut, nylon or steel strings and distinguished from other chordophones by its construction and tuning. There are three types of modern acoustic guitar, the classical guitar, the steel-string acoustic guitar, and the archtop guitar. The tone of a guitar is produced by the strings vibration, amplified by the hollow body of the guitar. The term finger-picking can also refer to a tradition of folk, blues, bluegrass. The acoustic bass guitar is an instrument that is one octave below a regular guitar. Early amplified guitars employed a body, but a solid wood body was eventually found more suitable during the 1960s and 1970s. As with acoustic guitars, there are a number of types of guitars, including hollowbody guitars, archtop guitars and solid-body guitars. The electric guitar has had a influence on popular culture. The guitar is used in a variety of musical genres worldwide. It is recognized as an instrument in genres such as blues, bluegrass, country, flamenco, folk, jazz, jota, mariachi, metal, punk, reggae, rock, soul. The term is used to refer to a number of chordophones that were developed and used across Europe, beginning in the 12th century and, later, in the Americas. The modern word guitar, and its antecedents, has applied to a wide variety of chordophones since classical times. Many influences are cited as antecedents to the modern guitar, at least two instruments called guitars were in use in Spain by 1200, the guitarra latina and the so-called guitarra morisca. The guitarra morisca had a back, wide fingerboard. The guitarra Latina had a sound hole and a narrower neck. By the 14th century the qualifiers moresca or morisca and latina had been dropped, and it had six courses, lute-like tuning in fourths and a guitar-like body, although early representations reveal an instrument with a sharply cut waist
2.
Mandolin
–
A mandolin is a musical instrument in the lute family and is usually plucked with a plectrum or pick. It commonly has four courses of doubled metal strings tuned in unison, although five, the courses are normally tuned in a succession of perfect fifths. It is the member of a family that includes the mandola, octave mandolin, mandocello. There are many styles of mandolin, but three are common, the Neapolitan or round-backed mandolin, the mandolin and the flat-backed mandolin. The round-back has a bottom, constructed of strips of wood. The carved-top or arch-top mandolin has a shallower, arched back. The flat-backed mandolin uses thin sheets of wood for the body, each style of instrument has its own sound quality and is associated with particular forms of music. Neapolitan mandolins feature prominently in European classical music and traditional music, carved-top instruments are common in American folk music and bluegrass music. Flat-backed instruments are used in Irish, British and Brazilian folk music. Some modern Brazilian instruments feature a fifth course tuned a fifth lower than the standard fourth course. There has also been a type and an instrument with sixteen-strings. Much of mandolin development revolved around the soundboard, pre-mandolin instruments were quiet instruments, strung with as many as six courses of gut strings, and were plucked with the fingers or with a quill. However, modern instruments are louder—using four courses of metal strings, the modern soundboard is designed to withstand the pressure of metal strings that would break earlier instruments. The soundboard comes in many shapes—but generally round or teardrop-shaped, sometimes with scrolls or other projections, there is usually one or more sound holes in the soundboard, either round, oval, or shaped like a calligraphic f. A round or oval sound hole may be covered or bordered with decorative rosettes or purfling, Mandolins evolved from the lute family in Italy during the 17th and 18th centuries, and the deep bowled mandolin, produced particularly in Naples, became common in the 19th century. Dating to around c.13,000 BC, a painting in the Trois Frères cave in France depicts what some believe is a musical bow. From the musical bow, families of stringed instruments developed, since each string played a note, adding strings added new notes, creating bow harps, harps. In turn, this led to being able to play dyads and chords, another innovation occurred when the bow harp was straightened out and a bridge used to lift the strings off the stick-neck, creating the lute
3.
Harpsichord
–
A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It produces sound by plucking a string when a key is pressed, Harpsichord designates the whole family of similar plucked keyboard instruments, including the smaller virginals, muselar, and spinet. The harpsichord was used in Renaissance and Baroque music. During the late 18th century, it disappeared from the musical scene with the rise of the piano. In the 20th century, it made a resurgence, being used in historically informed performances of music, in compositions. Harpsichords vary in size and shape, but all have the basic functional arrangement. The player depresses a key that rocks over a pivot in the middle of its length, the other end of the key lifts a jack that holds a small plectrum, which plucks the string. When the player releases the key, the far end returns to its rest position, the plectrum, mounted on a tongue that can swivel backwards away from the string, passes the string without plucking it again. As the key reaches its rest position, a felt damper atop the jack stops the strings vibrations and these basic principles are explained in detail below. The keylever is a pivot, which rocks on a balance pin that passes through a hole drilled through the keylever. The jack is a thin, rectangular piece of wood that sits upright on the end of the keylever, the jacks are held in place by the registers. These are two strips of wood, which run in the gap between pinblock and bellyrail. The registers have rectangular mortises through which the pass as they can move up. The registers hold the jacks in the location needed to pluck the string. In the jack, a plectrum juts out almost horizontally and passes just under the string, historically, plectra were made of bird quill or leather, many modern harpsichords have plastic plectra. When the front of the key is pressed, the back of the key rises, the jack is lifted, the vertical motion of the jack is then stopped by the jackrail, which is covered with soft felt to muffle the impact. When the key is released, the falls back down under its own weight. This is made possible by having the plectrum held in a tongue attached with a pivot and a spring to the body of the jack
4.
Guitar pick
–
A guitar pick is a plectrum used for guitars. Picks are generally made of one uniform material—such as some kind of plastic, rubber, felt, tortoiseshell, wood, metal, glass, tagua and they are often shaped in an acute isosceles triangle with the two equal corners rounded and the third corner less rounded. They are used to strum chords or to individual notes on a guitar. In British English, guitar picks are referred to as plectrums reserving the term pick to identify the difference between this and finger picks, musicians have used plectrums to play stringed instruments for thousands of years. Feather quills were likely the first standardized plectra and became widely used until the late 19th century, other alternatives had come and gone, but tortoiseshell provided the best combination of tonal sound and physical flexibility for plucking a taut string. There have been innovations in the design of the guitar pick. Most of these were out of the issue of guitar picks slipping and flying out of the hand of the player. In 1896, a Cincinnati man affixed two rubber disks to either side of a pick, which made it the first popular solution to the problem. Over the next two decades more innovations were made, such as corrugating the rounded surface of the pick or drilling a hole through the center to fit the pad of a players thumb. A more notable improvement was attaching cork to the part of the pick. Some of these new designs made picks undesirably expensive, eventually, pickers realized that all they needed was something to sink their fingerprints into so the pick wouldnt slip, such as a high relief imprinted logo. Celluloid was a material on which this could easily be done, tony DAndrea was the one of the first people to use celluloid to produce and sell guitar picks. From the 1920s through the 1950s, DAndrea Manufacturing would dominate the worlds international pick market, providing to major businesses such as Gibson, Fender, and Martin. One of the main reasons celluloid was so popular as guitar pick material was that it very closely imitated the sound and flexibility of a tortoise shell guitar pick. Musicians had been partial to shell picks, and when DAndrea provided an alternative, DAndrea Manufacturing became very successful, Celluloid provided a good alternative in many ways. Tortoise shell was rare, expensive, and had a tendency to break, Celluloid was made from cellulose, one of the most abundant raw materials in the world, and nitrocellulose combined with camphor under heat and pressure produced celluloid. Later, other materials, such as nylon and less popularly wood, glass, or metal would become popular for making guitar picks for their increased grip, flexibility, or tonal qualities. Pick shapes started with guitarists shaping bone, shell, wood, cuttlebone, metal, amber, most of todays guitar pick shapes were created by the company that made the first plastic pick in 1922, DAndrea Picks
5.
Electric guitar
–
The vibrations of the strings are sensed by a pickup, of which the most common type is the magnetic pickup, which uses the principle of direct electromagnetic induction. The signal generated by a guitar is too weak to drive a loudspeaker, so it is plugged into a guitar amplifier before being sent to a loudspeaker. The output of a guitar is an electric signal. Invented in 1931, the electric guitar was adopted by jazz guitarists. Early proponents of the guitar on record included Les Paul, Lonnie Johnson, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, T-Bone Walker. During the 1950s and 1960s, the guitar became the most important instrument in pop music. It has evolved into an instrument that is capable of a multitude of sounds and styles in genres ranging from pop and rock to country music, blues and jazz. It served as a component in the development of electric blues, rock and roll, rock music, heavy metal music. Electric guitar design and construction vary greatly in the shape of the body and the configuration of the neck, bridge, Guitars may have a fixed bridge or a spring-loaded hinged bridge that lets players bend the pitch of notes or chords up or down or perform vibrato effects. The sound of a guitar can be modified by new playing techniques such as string bending, tapping, hammering on, using audio feedback, in a small group, such as a power trio, one guitarist switches between both roles. In larger rock and metal bands, there is often a rhythm guitarist, many experiments at electrically amplifying the vibrations of a string instrument were made dating back to the early part of the 20th century. Patents from the 1910s show telephone transmitters were adapted and placed inside violins, hobbyists in the 1920s used carbon button microphones attached to the bridge, however, these detected vibration from the bridge on top of the instrument, resulting in a weak signal. With numerous people experimenting with electrical instruments in the 1920s and early 1930s, Electric guitars were originally designed by acoustic guitar makers and instrument manufacturers. Some of the earliest electric guitars adapted hollow-bodied acoustic instruments and used tungsten pickups, the first electrically amplified guitar was designed in 1931 by George Beauchamp, the general manager of the National Guitar Corporation, with Paul Barth, who was vice president. The maple body prototype for the one-piece cast aluminum frying pan was built by Harry Watson, commercial production began in late summer of 1932 by the Ro-Pat-In Corporation, in Los Angeles, a partnership of Beauchamp, Adolph Rickenbacker, and Paul Barth. In 1934, the company was renamed the Rickenbacker Electro Stringed Instrument Company, in that year Beauchamp applied for a United States patent for an Electrical Stringed Musical Instrument and the patent was issued in 1937. The Electro-Spanish Ken Roberts provided players a full 25 scale, with 17 frets free of the fretboard and it is estimated that fewer than 50 Electro-Spanish Ken Roberts were constructed between 1933 and 1937, fewer than 10 are known to survive today. The need for the guitar became apparent during the big band era as orchestras increased in size, particularly when acoustic guitars had to compete with large
6.
Bass guitar
–
The bass guitar is a stringed instrument played primarily with the fingers or thumb, by plucking, slapping, popping, strumming, tapping, thumping, or picking with a plectrum, often known as a pick. The bass guitar is similar in appearance and construction to a guitar, but with a longer neck and scale length. The four-string bass, by far the most common, is tuned the same as the double bass. The bass guitar is an instrument, as it is notated in bass clef an octave higher than it sounds to avoid excessive ledger lines. Like the electric guitar, the guitar has pickups and it is plugged into an amplifier and speaker on stage, or into a larger PA system using a DI unit. Since the 1960s, the guitar has largely replaced the double bass in popular music as the bass instrument in the rhythm section. While types of basslines vary widely from one style of music to another, many styles of music utilise the bass guitar, including rock, heavy metal, pop, punk rock, country, reggae, gospel, blues, symphonic rock, and jazz. It is often a solo instrument in jazz, jazz fusion, Latin, funk, progressive rock and other rock, the adoption of a guitar form made the instrument easier to hold and transport than any of the existing stringed bass instruments. The addition of frets enabled bassists to play in more easily than on acoustic or electric upright basses. Around 100 of these instruments were made during this period, around 1947, Tutmarcs son, Bud, began marketing a similar bass under the Serenader brand name, prominently advertised in the nationally distributed L. D. Heater Music Company wholesale jobber catalogue of 1948, however, the Tutmarc family inventions did not achieve market success. In the 1950s, Leo Fender, with the help of his employee George Fullerton and his Fender Precision Bass, which began production in October 1951, became a widely copied industry standard. This split pickup, introduced in 1957, appears to have been two mandolin pickups, the pole pieces and leads of the coils were reversed with respect to each other, producing a humbucking effect. Humbucking is a design that electrically cancels the effect of any AC hum, the Fender Bass was a revolutionary new instrument, which could be easily transported, and which was less prone to feedback when amplified than acoustic bass instruments. Monk Montgomery was the first bass player to tour with the Fender bass guitar, roy Johnson, and Shifty Henry with Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five, were other early Fender bass pioneers. Bill Black, playing with Elvis Presley, switched from bass to the Fender Precision Bass around 1957. The bass guitar was intended to appeal to guitarists as well as upright bass players, following Fenders lead, in 1953, Gibson released the first short scale violin-shaped electric bass with extendable end pin, allowing it to be played upright or horizontally. In 1959 these were followed by the more conventional-looking EB-0 Bass, the EB-0 was very similar to a Gibson SG in appearance
7.
Celluloid
–
Celluloids are a class of compounds created from nitrocellulose and camphor, with added dyes and other agents. Generally considered the first thermoplastic, it was first created as Parkesine in 1856 and as Xylonite in 1869, Celluloid is easily molded and shaped, and it was first widely used as an ivory replacement. The main use was in movie and photography industries, which used only celluloid films prior to acetate films that were introduced in the 1950s. Celluloid is highly flammable, difficult and expensive to produce and no longer used, although its most common uses today are in table tennis balls, musical instruments. Collodion, invented in 1848 and used as a wound dressing, Parkes patented his discovery after realising a solid residue remained after evaporation of the solvent from photographic collodion. Parkes patented it as a clothing waterproofer for woven fabrics in the same year, later Parkes showcased Parkesine at the 1862 International Exhibition in London, where he was awarded a bronze medal for his efforts. The introduction of Parkesine is generally regarded as the birth of the plastics industry and he used cloth, ivory dust, and shellac, and on April 6,1869, patented a method of covering billiard balls with the addition of collodion. With assistance from Peter Kinnear and other investors, Hyatt formed the Albany Billiard Ball Company in Albany, New York, in 1870, John and his brother Isaiah patented a process of making a horn-like material with the inclusion of cellulose nitrate and camphor. Isaiah Hyatt dubbed his material celluloid in 1872, english inventor Daniel Spill had worked with Parkes and formed the Xylonite Co. to take over Parkes patents, describing the new plastic products as Xylonite. He took exception to the Hyatts claims and pursued the brothers in a number of cases between 1877 and 1884. The judge ruled all manufacturing of celluloid could continue both in Spills British Xylonite Company and Hyatts Celluloid Manufacturing Company, Hyatt used heat and pressure to simplify the manufacture of these compounds. Over the years, celluloid has become the term used for this type of plastic. English photographer John Carbutt founded the Keystone Dry Plate Works in 1879 with the intention of producing gelatin dry plates, the Celluloid Manufacturing Company was contracted for this work by means of thinly slicing layers out of celluloid blocks and then removing the slice marks with heated pressure plates. After this, the strips were coated with a photosensitive gelatin emulsion. It is not certain exactly how long it took for Carbutt to standardize his process, a 15-inch-wide sheet of Carbutts film was used by William Dickson for the early Edison motion picture experiments on a cylinder drum Kinetograph. However, the film base produced by this means was still considered too stiff for the needs of motion picture photography. By 1889, more flexible celluloids for photographic film were developed and this ability to produce photographic images on a flexible material was a crucial step toward the advent of motion pictures. Most movie and photography films prior to the move to acetate films in the fifties were made of celluloid
8.
Felt
–
Felt is a textile material that is produced by matting, condensing and pressing fibers together. Felt can be made of fibers such as wool, or from synthetic fibers such as petroleum-based acrylic or acrylonitrile or wood pulp-based rayon. Felt from wool is considered to be the oldest known textile, many cultures have legends as to the origins of felt making. Sumerian legend claims that the secret of feltmaking was discovered by Urnamman of Lagash, the story of Saint Clement and Saint Christopher relates that while fleeing from persecution, the men packed their sandals with wool to prevent blisters. At the end of their journey, the movement and sweat had turned the wool into felt socks, feltmaking is still practised by nomadic peoples in Central Asia, where rugs, tents and clothing are regularly made. Some of these are items, such as the classic yurt, while others are designed for the tourist market. Wrapping the properly arranged fiber in a sturdy, textured material, such as a mat or burlap. The felted material may be finished by fulling, only certain types of fiber can be wet felted successfully. Most types of fleece, such as those taken from the alpaca or the Merino sheep, one may also use mohair, angora, or hair from rodents such as beavers and muskrats. These types of fiber are covered in scales, similar to the scales found on a strand of human hair. Heat, motion, and moisture of the causes the scales to open, while agitating them causes them to latch onto each other. There is a theory that the fibers wind around each other during felting. Plant fibers and synthetic fibers will not wet felt, needle felting is a method of creating felted objects without using water. The special needles used to make 3D sculpture, jewelry, adornments and 2D art have notches along the shaft of the needle that catch fibers and tangle them with other fibers to produce felt. These notches are sometimes erroneously called barbs, but barbs are protrusion, there are many sizes and types of notched needles for different uses while working. Needle felting is used in processes as well as in individual crafting. Invented in the mid 17th century and used until the mid-20th centuries, beaver, rabbit or hare skins were treated with a dilute solution of the mercury compound mercuric nitrate. The skins were dried in an oven where the fur at the sides turned orange
9.
Ukulele
–
The ukulele, sometimes abbreviated to uke, is a member of the lute family of instruments, it generally employs four nylon or gut strings or four courses of strings. Some strings may be paired in courses, giving the instrument a total of six or eight strings and it gained great popularity elsewhere in the United States during the early 20th century and from there spread internationally. The tone and volume of the instrument vary with size and construction, ukuleles commonly come in four sizes, soprano, concert, tenor, and baritone. The ukulele is commonly associated with music from Hawaii where the name translates as jumping flea. Legend attributes it to the nickname of the Englishman Edward William Purvis, one of King Kalākauas officers, because of his size, fidgety manner. According to Queen Liliʻuokalani, the last Hawaiian monarch, the means the gift that came here, from the Hawaiian words uku. Three immigrants in particular, Madeiran cabinet makers Manuel Nunes, José do Espírito Santo, one of the most important factors in establishing the ukulele in Hawaiian music and culture was the ardent support and promotion of the instrument by King Kalākaua. A patron of the arts, he incorporated it into performances at royal gatherings,50,000 schoolchildren and adults learned ukulele through the Doane program at its peak. Today, a program created by James Hill and J. Chalmers Doane continues to be a staple of music education in Canada. The ukulele came to Japan in 1929 after Hawaiian-born Yukihiko Haida returned to the country upon his fathers death, Haida and his brother Katsuhiko formed the Moana Glee Club, enjoying rapid success in an environment of growing enthusiasm for Western popular music, particularly Hawaiian and jazz. During World War II, authorities banned most Western music, but fans and players kept it alive in secret, in 1959, Haida founded the Nihon Ukulele Association. Today, Japan is considered a home for Hawaiian musicians. Demand surged in the new century because of its simplicity and portability. The ukulele was popularized for an audience during the Panama Pacific International Exposition. The Hawaiian Pavilion featured a guitar and ukulele ensemble, George E. K. Awai and his Royal Hawaiian Quartet, the popularity of the ensemble with visitors launched a fad for Hawaiian-themed songs among Tin Pan Alley songwriters. The ensemble also introduced both the lap steel guitar and the ukulele into U. S. mainland popular music, where it was taken up by vaudeville performers such as Roy Smeck and Cliff Ukulele Ike Edwards. On April 15,1923 at the Rivoli Theater in New York City, Smeck appeared, playing the ukulele, in Stringed Harmony, a short film made in the DeForest Phonofilm sound-on-film process. On August 6,1926, Smeck appeared playing the ukulele in a short film His Pastimes, made in the Vitaphone sound-on-disc process, the ukulele soon became an icon of the Jazz Age
10.
Rock and roll
–
While elements of rock and roll can be heard in blues records from the 1920s and in country records of the 1930s, the genre did not acquire its name until the 1950s. For the purpose of differentiation, this deals with the first definition. The beat is essentially a blues rhythm with an accentuated backbeat, classic rock and roll is usually played with one or two electric guitars, a double bass or string bass or an electric bass guitar, and a drum kit. Beyond simply a style, rock and roll, as seen in movies and on television, influenced lifestyles, fashion, attitudes. In addition, rock and roll may have contributed to the civil rights movement because both African-American and white American teens enjoyed the music and it went on to spawn various genres, often without the initially characteristic backbeat, that are now more commonly called simply rock music or rock. The term rock and roll now has at least two different meanings, both in common usage, the American Heritage Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary both define rock and roll as synonymous with rock music. Encyclopædia Britannica, on the hand, regards it as the music that originated in the mid-1950s. In 1934, the song Rock and Roll by the Boswell Sisters appeared in the film Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round, in 1942, Billboard magazine columnist Maurie Orodenker started to use the term rock-and-roll to describe upbeat recordings such as Rock Me by Sister Rosetta Tharpe. By 1943, the Rock and Roll Inn in South Merchantville, in 1951, Cleveland, Ohio disc jockey Alan Freed began playing this music style while popularizing the phrase to describe it. The origins of rock and roll have been debated by commentators. The migration of former slaves and their descendants to major urban centers such as St. The immediate roots of rock and roll lay in the rhythm and blues, then called race music, particularly significant influences were jazz, blues, gospel, country, and folk. The 1940s saw the use of blaring horns, shouted lyrics. In the same period, particularly on the West Coast and in the Midwest, similarly, country boogie and Chicago electric blues supplied many of the elements that would be seen as characteristic of rock and roll. Rock and roll arrived at a time of technological change, soon after the development of the electric guitar, amplifier and microphone. It was the realization that relatively affluent white teenagers were listening to music that led to the development of what was to be defined as rock. Because the development of rock and roll was a process, no single record can be identified as unambiguously the first rock. Other artists with rock and roll hits included Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis
11.
Blues
–
Blues is a genre and musical form originated by African Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the end of the 19th century. The genre developed from roots in African musical traditions, African-American work songs, spirituals, Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. Blue notes, usually thirds or fifths flattened in pitch, are also a part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove, Blues as a genre is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times, Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating the troubles experienced in African-American society. Many elements, such as the format and the use of blue notes. The origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community. The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after the ending of slavery and, later and it is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century, the first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres include country blues, such as Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues, World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a form called blues rock evolved. The term blues may have come from blue devils, meaning melancholy and sadness, the phrase blue devils may also have been derived from Britain in the 1600s, when the term referred to the intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal. As time went on, the phrase lost the reference to devils, by the 1800s in the United States, the term blues was associated with drinking alcohol, a meaning which survives in the phrase blue law, which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sunday. Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to in print since 1912, in lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood. The lyrics of traditional blues verses probably often consisted of a single line repeated four times. Two of the first published songs, Dallas Blues and Saint Louis Blues, were 12-bar blues with the AAB lyric structure. Handy wrote that he adopted this convention to avoid the monotony of lines repeated three times, the lines are often sung following a pattern closer to rhythmic talk than to a melody
12.
Jazz
–
Jazz is a music genre that originated amongst African Americans in New Orleans, United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in Blues and Ragtime. Since the 1920s jazz age, jazz has become recognized as a form of musical expression. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms, 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. Although the foundation of jazz is deeply rooted within the Black experience of the United States, different cultures have contributed their own experience, intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as one of Americas original art forms. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on different national, regional, and local musical cultures, New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass-band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. In the 1930s, heavily arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz, bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging musicians music which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed in the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments. In the early 1980s, a form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful. Other styles and genres abound in the 2000s, such as Latin, the question of the origin of the word jazz has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well documented. It is believed to be related to jasm, a term dating back to 1860 meaning pep. The use of the word in a context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Its first documented use in a context in New Orleans was in a November 14,1916 Times-Picayune article about jas bands. In an interview with NPR, musician Eubie Blake offered his recollections of the slang connotations of the term, saying, When Broadway picked it up. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, the American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Twentieth Century. Jazz has proved to be difficult to define, since it encompasses such a wide range of music spanning a period of over 100 years. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions, in the opinion of Robert Christgau, most of us would say that inventing meaning while letting loose is the essence and promise of jazz. As Duke Ellington, one of jazzs most famous figures, said, although jazz is considered highly difficult to define, at least in part because it contains so many varied subgenres, improvisation is consistently regarded as being one of its key elements
