Playing jazz represents more extensive freedom of creativity than in any other art form. Each performance requires at least some of the music to be spontaneously composed during the act of performance. Most styles require the solos as well as some of their accompaniment to be improvised freshly on site for each performance.

A common misunderstanding among journalists and historians is that during the 1960s African Americans striving for their political freedoms also transferred those strivings to originate musical approaches (subsequently termed “free-form” or “free jazz”)

Writing about the origins of bebop, Dave Banks, for example, contended that to understand bebop we must consider the “creative musician’s psychological response toward the war” which had “forced the musical imagination further into the infinite reaches of its expression producing a revolutionary approach to music.”

The variety of jazz styles that emerged during the 1950s was followed by very little agreement about how to describe them. Moreover, there is only limited consistency in how journalists and historians apply labels when they discuss jazz styles of that period.

This was the original manuscript for an article that was heavily edited by the publisher of The Instrumentalist magazine. It was ultimately published in its edited form in volume 41, number 8 (March 1987) on pages 19-22, 25-26 and 85. It won the Outstanding Achievement Award of the Educational

This article appeared in THE MUSICAL QUARTERLY, 1989, Volume 73, Issue 4, pages 513-531, and was reprinted in JAZZ: A CENTURY OF CHANGE: READINGS AND NEW ESSAYS, Edited by Lewis Porter (Schirmer, 1997). It was developed from the “What is Jazz?” chapter of the Jazz Styles book by Mark

Mark C. Gridley ABSTRACT – Knowing that the jazz improviser creates his own material while performing, some jazz listeners assume that the improvisations can reveal the musician’s emotions. To evaluate this assumption, fifteen studies were conducted. These studies focused on the possible perception of anger upon hearing

Mark C. Gridley ABSTRACT – The Spielberger Trait Anger test was administered to 287 undergraduate college students enrolled in courses in jazz appreciation. The recording of a jazz saxophone improvisation was played for the students, and they were asked to rate its emotion. The mean trait anger

Mark C. Gridley and Robert Hoff ABSTRACT – A study was undertaken to determine whether journalist perceptions of emotion would bias the perception of listeners. A sample of 142 undergraduate psychology students from two different colleges listened to a recorded jazz saxophone improvisation and indicated their perception of