Editing Music of Australia (section)

===Jazz===
[[File:James morrison.jpg|thumb|upright|[[James Morrison (jazz musician)|James Morrison]]]]
{{Main|Australian jazz}}
{{No footnotes|section|date=January 2019}}
The history of jazz and related genres in Australia extends back into the 19th century. During the gold rush locally formed [[blackface]] (white actor-musicians in blackface) [[Minstrel show|minstrel troupes]] began to tour Australia, touring not only the capital cities but also many of the booming regional towns like [[Ballarat]] and [[Bendigo]]. Minstrel orchestra music featured improvisatory embellishment and polyrhythm in the (pre-classic) banjo playing and clever percussion breaks. Some genuine African-American minstrel and jubilee singing troupes toured from the 1870s. A more jazz-like form of minstrelsy reached Australia in the late 1890s in the form of improvisatory and [[syncopated]] [[coon song]] and [[cakewalk]] music, two early forms of [[ragtime]]. The next two decades brought ensemble, piano and vocal ragtime and leading (mostly white) American ragtime artists, including [[Ben Harney]], "Emperor of Ragtime" [[Gene Greene]] and pianist [[Charley Straight]]. Some of these visitors taught Australians how to 'rag' (improvise unsyncopated popular music into ragtime-style music).

By the mid-1920s, [[phonograph]] machines, increased contact with [[American popular music]] and visiting white American dance musicians had firmly established jazz (meaning jazz inflected modern dance and stage music) in Australia. The first recordings of jazz in Australia are Mastertouch piano rolls recorded in Sydney from around 1922 but jazz began to be recorded on disc by 1925, first in Melbourne and soon thereafter in Sydney. Soon after World War II, jazz in Australia diverged into two strands. One was based on the earlier collectively improvised called "dixieland" or traditional jazz. The other so-called modernist stream was based on big band swing, small band progressive swing, boogie woogie, and after WWII, the emerging new style of [[bebop]]. By the 1950s American bop, itself, was dividing into so-called 'cool' and 'hard' bop schools, the latter being more polyrhythmic and aggressive. This division reached Australia on a small scale by the end of the 1950s. From the mid-1950s [[rock and roll]] began to draw young audiences and social dancers away from jazz. British-style dixieland, called Trad, became popular in the early 1960s. Most modern players stuck with the 'cool' (often called West Coast) style, but some experimented with free jazz, modal jazz, experiment with 'Eastern' influences, art music and visual art concept, electronic and jazz-rock fusions.

The 1970s brought tertiary jazz education courses and continuing innovation and diversification in jazz which, by the late 1980s, included world music fusion and contemporary classical and jazz crossovers. From this time, the trend towards eclectic style fusions has continued with ensembles like The Catholics, Australian Art Orchestra, Tongue and Groove, [[Roger Dean (musician)|austraLYSIS]], Wanderlust, The Necks and many others. It is questionable whether the label jazz is elastic enough to continue to embrace the ever-widening range of improvisatory music that is associated with the term jazz in Australia. However, mainstream modern jazz and dixieland still have the strongest following and patron still flock to hear famous mainstream artists who have been around for decades, such as One Night Stand players Dugald Shaw and Blair Jordan, reeds player [[Don Burrows]] and trumpeter [[James Morrison (jazz musician)|James Morrison]] and, sometimes, the famous pioneer of traditional jazz in Australia, [[Graeme Bell]]. A non-academic genre of jazz has also evolved with a harder "street edge" style. The Conglomerate, The Bamboos, Damage, Cookin on Three Burners, Black Money [[John McAll]] are examples of this.
See:
*[[Andrew Bisset]]. ''Black Roots White Flowers'', Golden Press, 1978
*Bruce Johnson. ''The Oxford Companion to Australian Jazz'' OUP, 1987
*John Whiteoak. ''Playing Ad Lib: Improvisatory Music in Australia: 1836–1970'', Currency Press, 1999