Recent developments

The trumpet has been at the center of jazz for almost a century; however, it was the cornet (invented in France in the 1830s) that initially took center stage as the brass band tradition of New Orleans evolved into jazz. With Louis Armstrong’s rise to fame, the trumpet became the instrument of choice with fewer musicians electing to play the cornet.

The trombone was popular in early jazz due to the ability to “slur” notes. Because New Orleans jazz bands advertised their performances by playing on horse drawn wagons, the trombonist was required to stand on the tailgate of the wagon so he would have room to play. Ultimately the term “tailgate jazz” became synonymous with the style of the music played.

Russell Malone will be appearing in Vail over the Labor Day Weekend. Before he was 5 his mother purchased a toy guitar for him and he started playing the music he heard in church on his guitar, but it wasn’t long before he could play any style of music on his guitar. A member of Diana Krall’s break-through trio, he helped propel Diana to the summit of the jazz world.
Ragtime music was popular from the 1890s until WWI. It got its name because of the ragged time of the piece (known as syncopation), an important element in jazz. Not truly jazz, but clearly part of the roots of the music, the term would later be used to describe the era and lead to other distinctive piano styles including stride and boogie-woogie.

Jean Baptiste “Django” Reinardt, the first great European jazz musician, grew up in a gypsy camp outside of Paris. Badly burned in a camp fire at the age of 18, he lost the use of two fingers on his left hand. He overcame the disability by inventing a unique fingering technique and toured internationally becoming one of the most important jazz guitarists of all time.

Only one jazz musician has become a saint, John Coltrane, one of the most revolutionary tenor sax players of all-time. St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco was established after his death at the age of 40. Coltrane kicked his drug habit and had a self described “spiritual awakening” in the last decade of his life, acquiring an almost saintly reputation among jazz musicians.

Johnny O’Neal will be appearing in Vail over the Labor Day Weekend. A pianist equally comfortable playing the blues, straight ahead jazz and gospel, he is also known as a soulful vocalist who loves to shout the blues. A member of the Jazz Hall of Fame, he recently played the role of the legendary jazz pianist Art Tatum in the award winning feature film “Ray”.

Jazz has some unique vocal techniques, one of which is scat singing - the art of using nonsense syllables as improvised lyrics. It was reportedly invented by Louis Armstrong when his music stand fell over, thereby “scattering” the lyrics and forcing him to improvise the vocal part of a tune.

In today’s jargon something is cool if you really like it. In fac, today’s usage is traceable to a style of jazz playing made popular in 1950s on the West Coast. To play in the “cool” style was to be restrained and detached (the opposite of earlier jazz described as “hot”). The term was popularized by the Miles Davis album entitled Birth of the Cool.

Before amplification, a jazz violinist was at a distinct disadvantage, unable to be heard over the brass instruments. With the advent of electric sound systems in the 1920s, the violinist had a chance to be heard, but it wasn’t until the late 1930s, when a violinist named “Stuff” Smith was able to amplify his violin, that the violin could really be heard.

Kurt Elling will be appearing in Vail over the Labor Day Weekend. A six-time Grammy nominee, Kurt’s transformation from graduate divinity student to jazz vocalist has been a remarkable journey. In less than a decade he has risen to international prominence as a groundbreaking jazz artist.

“King Pleasure” (Clarence Beeks) was an eccentric jazz singer who gained some fame in the 1950s popularizing vocalese-singing original lyrics to famous instrumental solos or tunes. Ultimately he slipped into obscurity, but not before claiming in album liner notes that he was “the real saviour (sic) of humanity”.

Woody Herman, organized many different bands over a fifty year career, the most famous of which were Herman’s Herd, the Second Herd and the Swinging Heard. Igor Stravinsky, the great composer, was a fan of Woody’s and composed his Ebony Concerto for Herman’s Herd, which performed its world premiere at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1946.

Lester “Prez” Young, one of the most influential saxophonists in jazz history, was highly unorthodox. He had a unique sound and style of play, he held his sax off center towards a horizontal position, he wore zoot suits and his distinctive “pork pie” hat, and he invented and used a complete hip jazz vocabulary. The film Round Midnight (1986) was largely based on his life.

At this year’s Labor Day Weekend Jazz Party, Bill Cunliffe will present a multi-media salute to Bill Evans, who in the 1960s-70s influenced future generations of pianists by forging a new style of playing in the “piano trio format.” Enduring the suicides of his brother and his wife, Evans died at the age of 51 due to a lifetime of drug abuse.

Phil Woods began playing the alto sax at 12, but says he wasn’t excited to do so. His uncle died and left him his alto and when he seemed reluctant to take a lesson he was advised, “The man died. The least you can do is take a lesson.” He ended up going to Juilliard and becoming one of the most acclaimed jazz musicians of the last quarter of the 20th century.

Most jazz musicians can remember the moment they knew they would be a jazz musician…Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis said “(b)y watching musicians I saw that they drank, they smoked, they got all the broads and they didn’t get up early in the morning.” So he decided he wanted to play jazz and selected the tenor sax over the drums since “the drums looked like too much work.”

A “good ear” was more important than being able to read music in the early days of jazz, since much of the music was (and is) improvised. Many great players couldn’t read music at all and Erroll Garner was one, but he could play anything on the piano after hearing it once. He thought the ability to read music was overrate and said, “Hell, man, nobody can hear you read.”

Bootsie Barnes will be appearing in Vail over the Labor Day Weekend. This living legend on the tenor saxophonist grew-up in Philadelphia and was boyhood friends with a drummer by the name of Bill Cosby. In the late 1980s he toured with Bill and made guest appearances on "The Bill Cosby Show", as well as many other television appearances.

“Axe” in the world of jazz is a player’s instrument. Originally referring to a horn, it now means any instrument. The origin of the word is traceable to the early jazz competitions, known as cutting contests, where players vied for supremacy on their instruments and took their axe to the competition to cut the other players down.

Jazz may have started in New Orleans, but in the mid-1930s and for the next decade, 52nd St. in New York was the center of the jazz world. Many famous jazz clubs were located in the two blocks between 5 th and 7th Avenues - the Onyx, the Hickory House, Three Deuces, Jimmy Ryan’s, the Famous Door, Kelly’s Stable, the Yacht Club, the Downbeat and the Spotlite.

Jazz was in its infancy when the recording industry came on the scene (before radio and TV) and its impact on the development of the music cannot be overstated. Being an improvised art form, jazz benefited by the ability of a recording to capture the uniqueness of each performance and to disseminate the new music that was sweeping the country.

The Mile High Chapter Choir will be appearing in Vail over the Labor Day Weekend. The Choir is a part of the Gospel Music Workshop of America, which is the largest gospel music organization in the world with over 300,000 international members. This will be the fourth time they will have appeared in Vail at the very popular Sunday morning Gospel Prayer Meetin’.

Charlie Parker, the great alto player, was riding in car that hit a chicken in the road. Stopping to pick it up so he could have it served for dinner, he earned the nickname of “Yardbird”, which was ultimately shortened to “Bird”. After his death several jazz clubs adopted the name Birdland and graffiti could found proclaiming that “Bird Lives”.

Bessie Smith (“Empress of the Blues”) was the most successful black performer in America in the 1920s, earning large sums of money and recording over 200 records. Alcoholism began to take a toll on her career in the mid 1930s and she tragically died from a loss of blood due to an automobile accident in 1937, after allegedly being refused medical care at a segregated hospital.

Leon “Bix” Beiderbeck, a white jazz cornet player with a very short career, died at 28 from alcoholism in 1931. He played with a beautiful and unique style that was admired by many black musicians, but was largely unknown to the general public. After his death he gained fame when the novel Young Man with a Horn, which was loosely based on his life and career, was published.

John Clayton will be performing in Vail over the Labor Day Weekend as well as teaching the week before at the Vail Jazz Workshop. John plays the bass and is a dedicated jazz musician, but he also has played classical music and was the principal bassist for the Amsterdam Philharmonic for over 5 years.

Bebop (bop, rebop), a style of jazz developed by Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and others in the mid-1940s, was a radical departure from the swing music of the 1930s by altering the rhythmic interplay of the instruments, using more complex melodies and chords and favoring small ensemble playing over big band performances.

Black musicians playing in brass bands in the 1880s and thereafter in New Orleans were important in the development of jazz. Playing at a slow tempo as they accompanied a funeral processional on its way to the graveyard, they played “jazzy” music on the return journey encouraging the mourners to rejoice by dancing and singing in order to celebrate the life of the deceased.

Improvisation, the hallmark of jazz, offers the player the opportunity to spontaneously create a musical composition. Inherent in improvisation is the risk that a mistake will be made by the player, but it is this aspect of jazz that many feel gives the music its unique vitality. Charlie Parker is generally considered to be the greatest improviser in jazz history.

Each year the VJF organizes the Vail Jazz Workshop, an intensive learning experience for some of the most dedicated and gifted high school musicians in the country who receive scholarships to study and perform in Vail. The students are known as the Vail Jazz Workshop All-Stars and they will perform throughout Labor Day Weekend as part of the 11th Annual Vail Jazz Party.

Thelonious Sphere Monk was a pianist with an unusual playing technique and a composer of advanced compositions. Initially many musicians branded him as crazy. His strange name, weird hats and introverted nature didn’t help, but slowly he and his music were accepted and he gained much respect, ultimately appearing on the cover of Time magazine.

Diana Krall is the reigning diva of the jazz world. Born on an island off the coast of British Columbia, she paid her dues playing piano and singing from the early 1980s until her career began to take off in 1999 when she recorded When I Look in Your Eyes. A blockbuster hit, she received a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance.

Jazz has been a fertile ground for the development of slang. A word like “jive” could be used by jazz musicians in many different ways - to refer to a weird form of speech (noun), to someone who tried to trick or fool you (verb), or to someone or something that was phoney or fake (adjective). On the other hand “bad” had only one meaning-good.

The Vail Jazz Party carries on a forty-two-year tradition of jazz in Colorado over Labor Day Weekend that began with the first Colorado Jazz Party organized by Dick Gibson in 1963. The “Party”, a mix of group performances and jam sessions, was the first event of its kind to be held annually and in 1977 it was the subject of the film The Great Rocky Mountain Jazz Party.

Jazz has an aural tradition of listening and then trying to play what you heard. When jazz records became available in the 1920s, musicians slowed down the speed of the records and painstakingly wrote down the notes played in a process called transcription. Instead of trying to remember what they heard in a live performance, they were able to practice what was actually played.

Frank Sinatra got his start as a singer with the big bands of Harry James and Tommy Dorsey in the late 30s and early 40s. Often associated with people in the world of jazz, he recorded albums with jazz greats Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Even though he was more a “pop singer” than a jazz singer, his technique of phrasing lyrics was the epitome of jazz.

Dave Brubeck is a jazz pianist who pioneered playing jazz concerts on college campuses in the 1950s. His quartet was extremely popular and by 1954 he was on the cover of Time magazine. In 1959, his album Take Five explored unconventional time signatures (e.g. 5/4 instead of the standard 4 beats per measure) and was the first million seller jazz instrumental album.

Bill Cunliffe will be appearing in Vail over the Labor Day Weekend as well as teaching the week before at the Vail Jazz Workshop. Bill somehow manages a career that encompasses performing, arranging (he was recently nominated for a Grammy Award for one of his arrangements), writing (both jazz and classical music), teaching and publishing. Bill was the winner of the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Award.

In jazz slang “shedding”, (short for “woodshedding”) means to practice playing your instrument. The term derives from the custom of early jazz musicians taking their “axe” (slang for instrument) to the woodshed to do some serious work.

William “Count” Basie was one of the most popular bandleaders in jazz history. He lead the band from the piano, where he played very few notes and it was said, “The less he played, the more he conveyed.” The band was known for playing in the “ Kansas City” style - orchestral jazz based on the blues with a very strong rhythmic drive.

Sarah “Sassy” Vaughan won an amateur contest as a teenager in 1942 and shortly thereafter she began singing with the big bands of Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine. Influenced by the emerging jazz style known as bebop, she incorporated it into her phrasing and was also a masterful scat singer, but it was her wonderful voice that ultimately made her an international star.

In the early days of jazz, it was not the drummer who was the timekeeper, but the bass player, by playing a note on every beat. The bass replaced the tuba, also used in early jazz as the timekeeper, and has been the butt of jokes ever since. Jazz musicians are fond of saying the only difference between a bass and a cello is the bass burns longer.

Terell Stafford will be appearing in Vail over Labor Day Weekend as well as teaching the week before at the Vail Jazz Workshop. This is Terell’s tenth consecutive year performing and teaching in Vail. Terell balances a very busy international performance career while heading up the Jazz Studies Program at Temple University.

The invention of the base-drum pedal and cymbal pedal in the late 19th century allowed drummers the opportunity to sit down and play many instruments at the same time. The modern drum set (also know as a trap set or drum kit) allows the drummer to play the bass drum and hi-hat cymbals with his feet, freeing his hands to play a multitude of drums and cymbals.

Jazz players have competed for recognition since the beginning of the art form. Buddy Bolden was the first “king” of the cornet followed by Joe “King” Oliver with other supreme rulers to follow - Paul Whiteman, the King of Jazz and Benny Goodman, the King of Swing. With so many kings reigning at the same time, the rest of the royal court was quickly filled with a Duke (Ellington) and a Count (Basie).

Ferdinand J. “Jelly Roll Morton” La Menthe, a Creole born in New Orleans in 1890, was a ragtime piano player in the bordellos of New Orleans. Besides being a musician he was also a pimp, gambler and pool shark. Credited with being the first important jazz composer, he fused ragtime with the black culture that was evolving in New Orleans into the beginnings of jazz.

Lewis Nash will be appearing in Vail over the Labor Day Weekend as well as teaching the week before at the Vail Jazz Workshop. Lewis is the drummer of choice for an amazing array of artists - from jazz masters to some of today’s brightest new names. He has over 300 CDs to his credit and was a member of the great Tommy Flanagan trio for ten years.

Storyville, the red light district of New Orleans in the late 19 th century, was where musicians performed several styles of music that would ultimately become part of the “gumbo” called jazz. Storyville became so associated with jazz that several jazz record companies and nightclubs to signify their connection to the music adopted the name.

John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie earned his nickname because of his clownish behavior, but was one of the most influential jazz players of all time, pioneering bebop jazz and creating the fusion of Afro-Cuban music with jazz. He played a trumpet with the bell pointed upwards - someone fell on his instrument creating the unique look - and he discovered he liked the sound.

The King of Swing, Benny Goodman, was a virtuoso clarinet player (classical and jazz) and the bandleader credited with popularizing swing. In the mid-1930s he was the most popular musician in American. The first major White jazz musician to integrate his band, Goodman’s band is said to have been the first jazz ensemble to be presented in a concert setting (Carnegie Hall in 1938).

Rahsaan Roland Kirk, blind at the age of two, played the bugle, trumpet and most woodwind instruments. He favored the tenor saxophone and was famous for simultaneously playing three at the same time, using a technique known as circular breathing. In addition, he played many other instruments including homemade inventions, the trumpophone and slidesophone.

Although the harmonica is often associated with the blues, it is rarely heard in jazz performances, but Belgian musician Toots Thielemans has been the reigning king of the jazz harmonica for the past 50 years and is also known for his virtuosity as a whistler.

The “blues” are not only a state of mind, but also a formal structure for the music (12-bar blues). Traceable to the 16th century description of a melancholic mood as the “Blue Devils”, the word was not associated with music until the beginning of the 20th century. Blues music is widely viewed as one of the key components that influenced the development of jazz.

Charlie Parker, alto sax player, was one of the most influential jazz musicians of all time and a living legend when he died in 1955 at the age of 35, due to drugs and alcohol. A principal force behind the development of bebop jazz, he is considered to be the most important jazz improviser on any instrument. Known as “Bird”, his life was chronicled in a film of the same name.

Theater organs were introduced by the Wurlitzer Co. when silent films became popular and this lead to their use by jazz musicians in the late 1920s. However, it was the invention of the electronic Hammond organ in 1935 that really accelerated the trend due to the relative portability of the instrument.

The saxophone, one of the mainstays of jazz and pop music for over three-quarters of a century, was invented by Adolphe Sax, a Belgian musician/inventor who in 1842 attached a mouthpiece with a reed to an “ophicleide, a brass trombone like instrument, and then adding keys to create a unique instrument that was rarely played for the next three-quarters of a century.

Charles Joseph “Buddy” Bolden was the first “king” of the cornet in New Orleans, with many to follow - King Oliver and Louis Armstrong to name a few. A professional musician in the early 1900s, he was the best-known musician in New Orleans. Unfortunately, no known recordings of Buddy survived and his career was cut short by mental illness.

Use of a mute to modify the timbre of a brass instrument is a technique used in jazz. In the early 1900s, players initially used their hands over the bells of their instruments, but this technique was quickly followed by use of the rubber cup from a sink plunger. Thereafter, many types of mutes were invented that could be placed in the bell of a horn and removed at will.

Ella Fitzgerald, one of the greatest jazz vocalists of all time, wanted to be a dancer. When she got her first break to dance at the famous Apollo Theater in an amateur competition at the age of 17, she panicked and without any preparation sang instead, winning the competition. Within a couple of years she was on her way to worldwide fame and a career spanning 50 years.

Billie Holiday, one of the most famous jazz vocalists of all time, was jailed at 14 for working in a whorehouse. A heroin addict, she died in 1959 at the age of 44. Lover Man, Good Morning Heartache and God Bless the Child were some of the songs that made “Lady Day” famous. Diana Ross stared in the fictionalize account of her life in Lady Sings the Blues in 1972.

In the early 1900’s as jazz was evolving, the clarinet was adopted by many players because of its ability to be played in so many expressive ways, e.g. a deep woody sound or a whining or crying sound. Famous early players were Johnny Dodds and Sidney Bechet, but it was Benny Goodman (the King of Swing) and Artie Shaw in the 1930s that really put the clarinet on the map.

Born (in 1900?) in New Orleans, Louis Armstrong (known as Pops, Satchmo and Sachelmouth) became by nearly all accounts the most important jazz musician the world has ever known. Starting on the cornet and moving to the trumpet, he is credited with inventing just about every important early jazz technique on a horn, as well as inventing the style of singing known as scat.

Riley King is probably the best-known blues sing in the world. He began his career as a disc jockey on a Memphis radio station where he played his guitar and sang requests from listeners. When he started to perform in local clubs he was initially billed as “The Beale Street Blues Boy” and that nickname got shortened to “Blues Boy” and ultimately to B.B.

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, one of the most famous jazz musicians (piano) and bandleaders of all time, wrote over 2,000 musical compositions - popular songs and instrumental pieces, suites, film scores and scared works. Many of his jazz tunes have become “standards” - Mood Indigo, Sophisticated Lady, C-Jam Blues and Satin Doll are just a few.

Miles Dewey Davis III, one of the most innovative trumpeters in jazz, had a highly incendiary personality and was known as the “Prince of Darkness”. A reformed heroin addict, he trained as a boxer later in life. Credited with constantly reinventing himself as a musician, Miles played with all of the greats of jazz from the 1940s-1970s.

In New Orleans at the beginning of the 20th century, brass bands that crossed paths while out on the street attempting to publicize up-coming performances engaged in spontaneous competitions to determine who was best. Known as cutting contests (also bucking or carving contests), they were the precursor to the battle of the bands during the swing era.

Jazz has not only evolved as a stylistic approach to music making but also has supported a way of expressing oneself in the manner of dress. Whether it was Cab Calloway’s flamboyant white tux and tails, the zoot suits of the 1940s, or Lester Young’s pork pie hat, jazz musicians have been known for their distinctive and sometimes outrageous dress.

In its early years, jazz was seen as the devil’s music. Played by black musicians in bordellos and honky-tonk bars, it was perceived to be vulgar and low class by the white establishment. It didn’t help much that early jazz tunes focused on sexual matters. Struttin’ with Some Barbecue by Louis Armstrong wasn’t about a picnic. Barbeque was slang for a sexy lady.

George Wein, a jazz pianist and singer in the late 1940s, became a booking agent and jazz club owner in 1950 but continued to play well into the 1980s. In 1954, he founded the Newport Jazz Festival and went on to organize jazz festivals throughout the world as the head of the largest jazz festival production company in the world.

Stan Kenton was one of the most innovative bandleaders in the history of jazz. His 20-piece band in 1949 was known as “Progressive Jazz” and lead to the adoption of the name as a type of orchestral jazz. Shortly thereafter he had a 43-piece band known as “Innovations in Modern Music”.

Julian Edwin Adderley, an alto sax player, got the nickname of “Cannibal” as a kid due to his large appetite, but the name got corrupted and he became known as “Cannonball”. In the 1950s, he played with Miles Davis and John Coltrane, but in the 1960s Cannonball along with his brother, Nat, are credited with popularizing soul-jazz.

The first written use of the word “jazz” was in 1916 with earlier spellings “jass”. Some have suggested that the word was drawn from the names of early performers, "Chas" Washington or “Jasbo” Brown. Other theories suggest that jazz derives from the New Orleans French word “jaser”, meaning to speed up or to chatter, while others note that the root word was slang for fornicating.

The vibraphone appeared in the US in 1916 and was known as a “steel marimba.” Lionel Hampton popularized the “vibes” as a jazz instrument in the 1930s. With metal bars arranged like piano keys suspended over tube resonators that have a revolving discs inside (operated by an electric motor), the player has the ability to control the vibrato of each note.

To most people “chops” are a cut of meat. To jazz musicians it means something else. Used colloquially for some time to refer to the mouth or jaw, jazz players used it to refer to a horn player’s embrochure (facial muscles and lip used to control air into a horn), then to any part of the body used to play (fingers of a pianist) and ultimately to a player’s technique.

Nicknames have been a part of jazz for over a hundred years. Not always complimentary, there were plenty of players tagged with “Fats”, “Tiny”, “Skinny” and other descriptive terms, but in many cases it got more personal than that: Milt Jackson the great vibes player was known as “Bags” because of the bags under his eyes; and the legendary tenor player, Ben Webster, was known as “Frog”, because of his bulging eyes.

Nat “King” Cole was one of the most respected jazz pianists in the early 1940s; however, it was his singing that ultimately made him world famous. Legend has it that he only began singing in a club to quiet a drunk patron who kept on requesting a song from the piano player. His vocal performance was so well received, King Cole decided to make it a regular part of his act.