Continental Jazz

19 profiles tagged Continental Jazz, A-Z.

Continental jazz is a retrospective term for the hot dance-jazz bands active across mainland Europe (outside Britain) from the mid-1920s through the end of World War II, with Paris and Berlin as its principal centers alongside scenes in Scandinavia, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere. It resembled American hot jazz and swing but was tempered by local popular idioms such as French chanson or German operetta, giving it a distinct regional flavor. The style faded from currency with the rise of bebop in the later 1940s, though it has seen small-scale revival by specialist ensembles since the 1990s.