Improvisation In Swing Music

History of Jazz music

Jazz is music genre that originated from New Orleans in the early 20th century. A major port city, people from all over the world, of different ethnic groups came together and as a result, musicians were exposed to a variety of music (Verity, 2016). Jazz was born out of and evolved from the African American experience in the United States. Jazz evolved from slave and religious folk songs and its originators were primarily African American (Dyas, 2016). However, its roots can be traced from the musical traditions of Africa and Europe. Jazz is also categorised by polyrhythms, blue notes, call and response and improvisation.

Swing music

The swing era was the period of time around 1935–1946, when big band swing music became the most popular music in the United States. The era's beginning is dated from Benny Goodman's performance at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles in 1935, bringing the music to the rest of the country. Swing music was performed by large dance orchestras divided into sections

It refers to the spontaneous creative process of making music while it is being performed. Some examples of improvisation include harmonic improvisation, melodic paraphrase and modal improvisation.

Harmonic improvisation discards the original melody and relies on chord progression. Each chord is made up of only a handful of notes. An E♭ triad, for example, features the chord tones E♭, G, and B♭. It excludes all the other notes, such as E, A, or B. In their earliest training, jazz musicians analyse the chords in a tune and learn to play the consonant chord tones in their improvisation. Decisions must be made instantly as one chord changes to another, because melody notes that were consonant with one chord can become painfully dissonant with the next (DeVeaux and Giddins, 2009). Furthermore, its chordal complexity, unusual chords and ii-V-I progressions distinguishes jazz