Bebop in the context of "Swing music"

Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its roots are in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, hymns, marches, vaudeville song, and dance music. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation.

As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. However, jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz (a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisational style), and gypsy jazz (a style that emphasized musette waltzes) were the prominent styles. Bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging "musician's music" which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed near the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, linear melodic lines.

Kansas City jazz is a style of jazz that developed in Kansas City, Missouri during the 1920s and 1930s, which marked the transition from the structured big band style to the much more improvisational style of bebop. The hard-swinging, bluesy transition style is bracketed by Count Basie, who in 1929 signed with Bennie Moten's Kansas City Orchestra, and Kansas City native Charlie Parker, who promoted the bebop style in America.

Kansas City is known as one of the most popular "cradles of jazz". Other cities include New Orleans, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and New York City. Kansas City was known for the organized musicians of the Local 627 A.F.M., which controlled a number of venues in the city. Almost every jazz history depicts Kansas City jazz as a fertile ground for the development of big bands, virtuosic performances, and legendary performers. In the 1920s was a Great Migration from the south and the search for musical work in Kansas City, Missouri, where the Black population rose from 23,500 to 42,000 between 1912 and 1940. Russell, Diggs, and Pearson have well documented how the vice district expanded within black neighborhoods of Kansas City, resulting in economic success for jazz musicians. Many musicians from the Southwest moved to Kansas City for its plentiful jobs. "Nightclubs in Kansas City served up prostitution, gambling, and narcotics along with liquor".

Cool jazz is a style and genre of modern jazz music inspired by bebop and big band that arose in the United States after World War II. It is characterized by relaxed tempos and a lighter tone than that used in the fast and complex bebop style. Cool jazz often employs formal arrangements and incorporates elements of classical music. Broadly, the genre refers to a number of post-war jazz styles employing a more subdued approach than that of contemporaneous jazz idioms. As Paul Tanner, Maurice Gerow, and David Megill suggest, "the tonal sonorities of these conservative players could be compared to pastel colors, while the solos of [Dizzy] Gillespie and his followers could be compared to fiery red colors."

The term cool started being applied to this music around 1953, when Capitol Records released the album Classics in Jazz: Cool and Quiet. Mark C. Gridley, writing in the All Music Guide to Jazz, identifies four overlapping sub-categories of cool jazz:

Old Compton Street is a road that runs east–west through Soho in the West End of London, named after Henry Compton who raised funds for St Anne's Church in 1686. The area, particularly this street, became home to French Protestant refugees in 1681. Known for its diverse and artistic traditions, the street housed businesses, artists, philosophers, and was frequented by communists and proto-beatniks. The Algerian Coffee Stores, one of the oldest shops on the street, was established in 1887. After World War II, the street became a centre for modern and trad jazz. Since the 1970s, Old Compton Street has been a focal point for London's gay community, with numerous gay bars, restaurants, and specialty shops. The Admiral Duncan pub, a notable gay venue, was bombed in 1999 in a hate crime attack. The street is also home to the Prince Edward Theatre.

Four-on-the-floor (or four-to-the-floor) is a rhythm used primarily in dance genres such as disco and electronic dance music. It is a steady, uniformly accented beat in
₄ time in which the bass drum is hit on every beat (1, 2, 3, 4).This was popularized in the disco music of the 1970sand the term four-on-the-floor was widely used in that era, since on a drum set, the beat is played with the pedal-operated, drum-kit bass drum.

Four on the floor was common in jazz drumming until bebop styles expanded rhythmic roles beyond the basics in the 1940s. Garage rock bands of the 1960s such as the Troggs and the Seeds used four-on-the-floor on some of their hits.

Free jazz (also known as free form jazz) is a style of avant-garde jazz or an experimental approach to jazz improvisation that developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when musicians attempted to change or break down jazz conventions, such as regular tempos, tones, and chord changes. Musicians during this period believed that the bebop and modal jazz that had been played before them was too limiting, and became preoccupied with creating something new. The term "free jazz" was drawn from the 1960 Ornette Coleman recording Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. Europeans tend to favor the term "free improvisation". Others have used "modern jazz", "creative music", and "art music".

The ambiguity of free jazz presents problems of definition. Although it is usually played by small groups or individuals, free jazz big bands have existed. Although musicians and critics claim it is innovative and forward-looking, it draws on early styles of jazz and has been described as an attempt to return to primitive, often religious, roots. Although jazz is an American invention, free jazz musicians drew heavily from world music and ethnic music traditions from around the world. Sometimes they played African or Asian instruments, unusual instruments, or invented their own. They emphasized emotional intensity and sound for its own sake, exploring timbre.

"I Got Rhythm" is a piece composed by George Gershwin with lyrics by Ira Gershwin and published in 1930, which became a jazz standard. Its chord progression, known as the "rhythm changes", is the foundation for many other jazz tunes such as Charlie Parker's and Dizzy Gillespie's bebop standard "Anthropology (Thrivin' on a Riff)".

The terms hipster or hepcat, as used in the 1940s, referred to aficionados of jump blues and jazz, in particular bebop, which became popular in the early 1940s. The hipster subculture adopted the lifestyle of the jazz musician, including some or all of the following features: Conk hairstyles, loose fitting or oversize suits with loud colors, jive talk slang, use of tobacco, cannabis, and other recreational drugs, relaxed attitude, love for jazz or jump blues music, and styles of swing dancing, especially Lindy hop.

The zoot suit was the popular style amongst hepcats. It incorporated baggy or oversize suits sometimes with loud colors, thick chalk stripes, floppy hats, and long watch chains. Many zoot suiters would often wear a fedora or pork pie hat, color-coordinated with the suit. Occasionally, they would have a long feather on the fedora or pork pie hat as decoration.