Jazz Pianism in Context of Piano Performance Style Tendencies of 20th Century

Abstract

DOI:    https://doi.org/10.28925/2518-766X.201614045

The acticle is devoted to the development and style specifics of the jazz pianism in performing arts of the 20th century. It is an attempt to consider historic pre-conditions for the contemporary piano jazz image, special attention is paid to the individual style characteristics and creative peculiarities of the most prominent musicians of the last century and contemporary young jazz performers.
Piano is an instrument with long history and rich traditions. Over the past three hundred years creating and performing piano music (first for the keyboard instruments) has been playing a vital and steadily growing role both in music creativity and in the development of music instrumentalism on the whole.
Therefore, piano creativity and art have become the phenomenon to a certain degree comparable to music art in general. Piano jazz performing based on the musical instrument, which made up a great epoch in the European academic music, could not avoid influence on the vast heritage of the piano art.
The emergence of piano in jazz allowed to discover new, truly endless horizons of the further development for piano performance. It is to be noted that the instrument with a three-century history has managed to harmoniously express the heart of jazz thinking, most efficiently show the merits of jazz music, and encourage the appearance of a powerful range of performers to make up a most valuable asset and pride for the jazz history. Like any live art, jazz is continuously developing, and, as history has shown, quite rapidly. Indeed, the huge distance between the music of New Orleans street orchestras of the early 20th century and today’s electronic innovations has been covered at a high speed. Over its 100-year history it has coped with the style evolution comparable to that of the European academic music, which took over four centuries. Archaic, traditional, swing, bebop, hard bop, cool jazz, modal jazz, third stream, and further on to the unrestricted free jazz improvisation — this is the diachronic outline of the sequence of jazz styles.