All musical genres are the results of the synthetic process of other styles. Jazz is a musical style formed in the USA at the beginning of the 20s century. This style covers the combinability of polyrhythms and involves improvisation. It is the embodiment of Western music together with the techniques of Afro-American rhythms and theory.
This style began to function as the music of African slaves and it gained recognition and popularity only in the 1940s. It refers to the classical sound presentation where improvisation is considered to be the main characteristic. In the 1960s this style faced some difficulties and its significance had dropped. All the jazz players suffered strong criticism on the part of the masses. Jazz was considered to be devoid of the ability to cooperate with the public and involve the majority of the listeners. The features of neoclassicism had been characteristic of the jazz style since the late 1970s. This period in the development of the musical style contained the combinability of improvisation together with mentality; neoclassicists mixed standard jazz music with classical fusion.
In the 1940s the pop character of jazz was changed to more challenging and “musician”. Such music performers as Thelonious Monk, Clifford Brown, and Wardell Gray tried to represent a more abstract form of jazz involving chord-based improvisation. Their works can help the contemporary generation to understand the history of jazz and of course the music itself. The character preserved in these musical masterpieces reflects the atmosphere of that time allowing us to understand a lot from the history and cultural import to the art.
One of the most outstanding musicians of that period in jazz history is Wynton Marsalis who is considered to be a famous composer and a jazz trumpeter. His agenda was to show music characters combining discipline, a great improvisation, and some compositional form. His project Blue Interlude seemed to change the state and vision of that contemporary jazz music. His conservative views were completely reflected in his style. The attention was more devoted to the composer rather than to the soloist. The basic and most important principle of his jazz band was democracy. His music was represented all over the world and he was the author of the special jazz program performed at Lincoln center with symphony orchestra and choir. The saturation of this program was of great importance for the sphere of art and education. It was presented on the international level and was mostly directed to educational activities and art development. As a result of this program, jazz was recognized as a world form of art and Lincoln center as an institution of culture. The richness of the program helped to recognize this style of music as an individual independent prestige style.
Together with the trend of neoclassicists jazz has been widening its possibilities and becomes more organized. It has its history and provided with the development of completely new jazz directions such as Afro-Cuban or Brazilian. Of course, all of them cannot exist without some common features which all the styles combine. The development of jazz as a form of art provided the modern epoch with the complete characteristic of the very beginning of jazz existence to feel the atmosphere of it and evaluate the significance of music development in different periods, besides evaluate the level of contribution of the jazz performers and compare with a contemporary one.