Muzak
Muzak grew out of the work of George Owen Squier, a US Army Signal Corps officer and inventor who patented ways of sending signals over electrical wires. In 1922 the North American Company acquired the rights and set up Wired Radio, and in 1934 the service was renamed Muzak, a blend of music and the […]
nu jazz
Nu jazz, sometimes spelled nü jazz and also known as future jazz or jazztronica, is a loose label for music that combines jazz improvisation and harmony with electronic production. It went further into electronic territory than acid jazz, borrowing from house, drum and bass, trip hop and ambient music, and ranged from dancefloor tracks to […]
Nujabes
Nujabes, his own name Jun Seba written backwards, was a Tokyo producer, DJ and label owner. In 1995 he opened a record shop in Shibuya, Guinness Records, and he later ran Hydeout Productions, the label that released nearly all his music, starting with the 12-inch single Ain’t No Mystery in 1999. His albums Metaphorical Music […]
The Real Book
The Real Book is a collection of lead sheets, each tune’s melody written out with chord symbols above it, covering hundreds of jazz standards and more recent jazz compositions. It was put together in the mid-1970s by two students at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, with help from members of the faculty, and […]
soul jazz
Soul jazz grew out of hard bop in the late 1950s and flourished through the 1960s. It is built from the bottom up: a steady, often syncopated bass line locks with the drums into a groove, and riffs and melodies coloured by gospel, blues and rhythm and blues are layered on top. Tunes are catchy […]
trip hop
Trip hop is a downtempo style that emerged in Bristol, England, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It pairs slow, heavy hip hop breakbeats with dub bass, samples from soul, jazz, funk and film soundtracks, and dark, cinematic atmospheres, often topped by a female vocalist. Massive Attack’s Blue Lines (1991), Portishead’s Dummy (1994), which […]
vaporwave
Vaporwave emerged online in the early 2010s, its name a pun on vaporware, software that is announced but never delivered. Producers took fragments of 1980s and 1990s smooth jazz, R&B, elevator music and Japanese city pop, slowed and pitched them down, chopped them into loops and soaked them in reverb, creating a woozy, dreamlike picture […]
Madlib
Madlib is the best-known name of Otis Jackson Jr., a producer, DJ and multi-instrumentalist born in 1973 and raised in Oxnard, California. Signed to Stones Throw with his group Lootpack in 1998, he became known for an enormous record collection and a restless output under many aliases, including the alter ego Quasimoto, the jazz project […]
modal jazz
In modal jazz, improvisers work from musical modes, scales such as the Dorian, held over long stretches, rather than racing through a dense sequence of chords as in bebop. The harmony moves slowly, sometimes resting on a single chord for many bars, which leaves room for melody, space and atmosphere. The theorist and composer George […]
furniture music
Furniture music, in French musique d’ameublement, is the name Erik Satie gave from 1917 to pieces meant to be part of the surroundings, like furniture or wallpaper, rather than the centre of attention. He wrote three sets of these short, repetitive pieces for small ensembles between 1917 and 1923. The best-known performance took place in […]