A Study On The Variation, Composition And Improvisation Of Jazz

Jazz, originated in New Orleans of the United States at the beginning of the 20th century and then spreading rapidly to the rest of the US, is a unique music style with novel features and forms. With the growing prominence of America's political, military, economic, cultural performance in the international arena in modern times, jazz is widely spreading around the world and has become a major part in influencing the historical progress of contemporary Western music and culture as one of the music genres in the 20th century music art, among others such as expressionism, neoclassicism, new folk music, serialism and the like.The introduction of this paper gives brief introduction to the origination and development of jazz, its style, and the social background and historical significance it brings. The body of the paper is divided into three chapters. The first chapter studies and elaborates one of the major improvising methods of jazz, i.e., the jazz style variation, its succession relationship with the classical style variation in the western music, its innovation and development. The second chapter focuses on the improvisation, composition and performance features of three major style genres in the jazz music domain, namely, Blues, Swing and Be Bop. The third chapter analyses the distinctive features and technique characteristics of improvisation of four outstanding and representative maestros at different stages of jazz development, and also selects several of their classic music work for data analysis. The conclusion part briefly summarizes the thesis of the paper and points out "Improvisation is the inexhaustible creativity source of Jazz, its indispensable spiritual support; and most importantly, it's where its life and sole lies!"...