West Coast jazz refers to various styles of jazz music that developed around Los Angeles and San Francisco during the 1950s. West Coast jazz is often seen as a sub-genre of cool jazz, which featured a less frenetic, calmer style than bebop or hard bop. The music tended to be more heavily arranged, and more often composition-based. While this style was prominent for a while, it was by no means the only style of jazz played on the West Coast, which exhibited more variety than could be conveyed by a simple name.
Famous quotes containing the words west, coast and/or jazz:
“We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“Forced from home, and all its pleasures,
Afric’s coast I left forlorn;
To increase a stranger’s treasures,
O’er the raging billows borne.
Men from England bought and sold me,
Paid my price in paltry gold;
But, though theirs they have enroll’d me,
Minds are never to be sold.”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)
“Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)