Chicago's music scene has been well known for its blues music for many years. "Chicago Blues" uses a variety of instruments in a way which heavily influenced early rock and roll music, including instruments like electrically amplified guitar, drums, piano, bass guitar and sometimes the saxophone or harmonica, which are generally used in Delta blues, which originated in Mississippi. Chicago Blues has a more extended palette of notes than the standard six-note blues scale; often, notes from the major scale and dominant 9th chords are added, which gives the music more of a "jazz feel" while still being in the blues genre. Chicago blues is also known for its heavy rolling bass. The music developed mainly as a result of the "Great Migration" of poor black workers from the South into the industrial cities of the North, such as Chicago in particular, in the first half of the 20th century.[3]
Chicago is one of the places where the faster, juicier boogie-woogie emerged from the blues. The most renowned early recordings of boogies were made in Chicago with Clarence Pinetop Smith, who might have been influenced by the brothers Hersal Thomas and George W. Thomas from Houston, who were together in Chicago in the 1920s.[4]
House music originated in a Chicago nightclub called The Warehouse. Chicago house is the earliest style of house music. While the origins of the name "house music" are unclear, the most popular belief is that it can be traced to the name of that club. DJ Frankie Knuckles originally popularized house music while working at The Warehouse.[6]
House music was developed in the houses, garages and clubs of Chicago, and was initially for local club-goers in the "underground" club scenes, rather than for widespread commercial release. As a result, the recordings were much more conceptual, and longer than the music usually played on commercial radio. House musicians used analog synthesizers and sequencers to create and arrange the electronic elements and samples on their tracks, combining live traditional instruments and percussion and soulful vocals with preprogrammed electronic synthesizers and "beat-boxes".
House, perhaps more than any other form of black music, has birthed many offshoots and spread its sound far and wide. The prevalence of four on the floor beats in dance music is largely derived from house. It has influenced, in some capacity, Garage house, Jungle music, Eurodance, Electropop, Dubstep, and even certain elements of Alternative rock and Hip hop.[7]
Dixieland largely evolved into Chicago style in the late 1910s and the new style was popularly called that name by the early 1920s.[11]
King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton became stars of the Chicago jazz scene. King Oliver in particular brought Louis Armstrong to Chicago in 1922 while he was performing at the Dreamland Café with his "Creole Jazz Band".[12] More importantly, white musicians, or "alligators", attended Oliver's performances in order to learn how to play jazz.[13]Louis Armstrong's recordings with his Chicago-based Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five and Hot Seven band came out in the years 1925 to 1928 and were popular with both black and white audiences.[14] These recordings marked the transition of original New Orleans jazz to a more sophisticated type of American improvised music with more emphasis on solo choruses instead of just little solo breaks. This style of playing was adopted by white musicians who favored meters of 2 instead of 4.[15] Emphasis on solos, faster tempos, string bass and guitar (replacing the traditional tuba and banjo) and saxophones also distinguish Chicago-style playing from New Orleans style. When Chicago musicians started playing four-beat measures, they laid the foundation for the swing era. The Lindy Hop was originally danced to four-beat Chicago style jazz and went on to become one of the iconic features of the swing era.
Musicians from all surviving eras of jazz perform regularly in the city, release recordings, and tour nationally and internationally.
Sinyan Shen, internationally known for his Shanghai classical repertoire and Shanghai jazz performances based on tonal interests and just intervals, is based in Chicago.
During the mid-1960s to the late 1970s a new style of soul music emerged from Chicago. Its sound, like southern soul with its rich influence of black gospel music, also exhibited an unmistakable gospel sound, but was somewhat lighter and more delicate in its approach, and was sometimes called "soft soul".
Vee-Jay Records is an American record label founded in the 1950s, located in Chicago and specializing in blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and rock and roll. The label was founded in Gary, Indiana in 1953 by Vivian Carter and James C. Bracken (shortly after moving to Chicago), a husband-and-wife team who used their initials for the label's name.[19] Vee-Jay hold historical significance being one of the first African American and female owned record companies.[20]
Fall Out Boy, from Wilmette, Illinois, has been the most commercially successful band to come from the Chicago area in recent years, scoring 4 #1 albums on the Billboard Hot 200.
Chicago's music scene varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, but overall has a large focus on independent music due to its influences from local record stores and local radio stations WXRT-FM and Loyola University Chicago's WLUW.
Chicago is home to media tastemakers Pitchfork Media, The Onion's The A.V. Club, Consequence of Sound, the nationally syndicated Sound Opinions radio talk show, and CHIRP,[27] a community radio station providing the internet with independent music. The station also bids for support to convince the United States Congress and the FCC to remove existing barriers to low power FM radio licenses in urban areas.
Hip-hop/rap
The hip hop of Chicago is sometimes called "Chi-town"[28] in the music industry. It became commonplace for serious rappers to cite the Nation of Islam, a Black Muslim organization headquartered in Chicago, as a lyrical and ideological influence in the 1980s and 1990s, a rap theme often resulting in controversy.[29]
Today, Chicago is well established within the hip hop industry. Drill music was also born in Chicago.
Gospel
Chicago artists and impresarios have been important in the development of the Gospel music genre.[30] Its origin and rise in popularity is mainly due to the "godfather of Gospel music", Thomas A. Dorsey. Dorsey began his career as a blues pianist, but later began composing religious music to the rhythms of jazz and blues, later calling it "Gospel".[31] His most popular song, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand", was a favorite of Martin Luther King Jr., and was sung by Mahalia Jackson by his request at his funeral. Many other artists have recorded their own renditions of "Precious Lord", including another Chicago Gospel artist, Albertina Walker. Dorsey influenced other Chicago Gospel artists such as The Caravans and Little Joey McClork.
Tired of the treatment he received in other music publishing houses, Dorsey founded his own called Dorsey House of Music.
^Calkins, Caroll C.; Balaban, Priscilla B.; Kelleher, Mary; Latham, Frank B.; Conefrey, Rosemarie; Huber, Robert V.; Pace, Georgea A.; Woodward, Robert J., eds. (1975). The Story of America. United States: Reader's Digest. p. 398.
^Brothers, Thomas (2014). Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 70. ISBN978-0-393-06582-4.
^Brothers, Thomas (2014). Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 34. ISBN978-0-393-06582-4.
^Brothers, Thomas (2014). Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. pp. 204–16. ISBN978-0-393-06582-4.
^ ab*Owsley, Dennis C.; Owsley, Rosa B. "Jazz History: A Study Guide". Jazz Unlimited. Dennis C. and Rosa B. Owsley. Archived from the original on 2008-05-13. Retrieved 2008-03-22. Many southern blacks migrated to Chicago during and after World War I and the musicians migrated with them. White Chicagoans developed a style based on what they heard the blacks play. ... Most of the important early jazz recordings were made in the area.
^Brothers, Thomas (2014). Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism. W.W. Norton & Company: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 227. ISBN978-0-393-06582-4.
^Swartz, Mike (2005). "Entries: Rap". Encyclopedia of Chicago. Retrieved August 5, 2022.
^Marovich, Robert M. (2015). A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. p. 7. ISBN978-0-252-08069-2.
"Chicago Jazz Archive". The University of Chicago Library This site may move. Uncomment this archive if it is suddenly lost. Archived from the original on 2007-08-20. Retrieved 2008-03-22.
Independent Music The Black Musician and the White City: Race and Music in Chicago, 1900-1967 by Amy Absher