Term | Defined |
Barrel House or Honky Tonk | extremely percussive and rhythmic blues piano style. Came from the buildings where loggers or other laborers went for entertainment. |
Be-Bop | Dominant jazz style of the 1940s, long melodic lines, complex rhythms and impressionistic harmonic patterns. Often ending on an upbeat |
Blues | Started as vocal music. Important in all jazz styles. Three basic chorsd to harmonize melodies. |
Boogie-Woogie | A blues piano style orginated by unschooled southern black pianists, recurring bass patterns. More folklike then ragtime. |
Break | A point in the performance where the rhythmic accompaniment stops and the soloist continues |
Call and Response | Solo music statement answered by an ensemble or other soloist. |
Chord | A combination of musical tones sounded simultaneously. |
Church Modes | arrangement of notes. Church modes refer to the scales orginally used to systematize early church music. |
Concerto Grosso | Seen with Third Stream, Musical form of the European classical tradition, small groups playing against the full orchestra. |
Cool Jazz | Jazz style of the 1940s and early 1950s featuring rhythms and syncopations more subtle than those of Bebop. Atonal souds and melodies similar to those of contemporary concert music. |
Density | Clusters of chords, often played in the lower register |
Funky Jazz | Very rhythmic, blues and gospel influenced jazz |
Fusion | The unuion or two or more styles into one: example ebing Afro-Cuban Jazz |
Hard-Bop | Bebop played with more emphatic rhythm |
Impressionistic | Music that suggests rather than states, using various chord combinations and other musical devices to provide a sense of atmosphere without struct attention to structure |
Improvisation | Alteration or revision of the rhythmic harmonic and melodic potentialities of a composition. |
Jazz | A way of playing musical repertory that defines and gives graphic examples of various aspects of that way of playing. |
Minstrel Shows | Theatrical presentations by white showmen who took credit for the minstrel songs and dances they imitated. |
Vaudville Shows | The terms used for variety shows early in the 20th century |
Vibrato | A fluctuation of pitch on sustained notes |