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Trad jazz which is shorthand for "traditional jazz" (although that term is never actually used) may either refer to a music genre popular in Britain and Australia from the 1940s onward through the 1950s, or to the American "hot jazz" of the 1920s and early 1930s, which developed from the New Orleans and Ragtime styles of music. The British and Australian bands of this genre copied the playing style of such artists as Sidney Bechet or King Oliver, while the American genre is more properly exemplified by artists such as Red Nichols and Louis Armstrong.
Opinions are divided about whether "trad jazz" is a valid name because one point of view would have it that jazz is a folk music tradition like any other, while the opposite point of view[citation needed] holds that jazz playing breaks loose from traditions and conventions so that, therefore, "traditional jazz" is a contradiction in terms. Many jazz radio stations however, feature so-called "trad jazz" programs, and the term is widely and freely utilized among music industry professionals.
In Britain during the 1950s and 1960s trad jazz was used to dance and skip jive, a descendant of jive, and swing dance. The Humphrey Lyttelton band pioneered the genre in Britain just after the second world war, whilst Ken Colyer's Crane River band added a strong thread of New Orleans purism. Some hold that this led to the stagnation of British "trad" in the early 1960s and its eventual near-demise. In the meantime, bands like those of Chris Barber, Acker Bilk - and Kenny Ball had earned a small fortune during the boom. Those bands continue to work, but a host of commercially lesser lights (such as the cheerfully anarchic Mick Mulligan Band) folded whilst others - like the Mike Cotton band - "went R'n'B". in 1963-4.
The host of KMHD-FM's "Trad Jazz" show, Sean Leonard, has offered the definition that today trad is generally considered to be the traditional playing of a piece with solo after solo leading up to a finish, while "hot jazz", although similar to trad and indeed containing many of the same tunes, tends to be more ensemble playing with less individual virtuosity brought to the forefront. Early King Oliver pieces exemplify this style of hot jazz; however, as individual performers began stepping to the front as soloists, a new form of music emerged. Ironically, one of the ensemble players in King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, Louis Armstrong, was by far the most influential of the soloists, creating, in his wake, a demand for this "new" style of jazz, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Other influential stylists who are still revered in traditional jazz circles today include Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke, Wingy Manone and Muggsy Spanier. Additionally, many of the featured artists of the Big Band era had their beginnings in trad jazz bands, including Glenn Miller, Gene Krupa and Benny Goodman.
Following a re-birth and revival of interest in the late 1980s, a number of musical groups and musicians began performing and recording, not only original trad jazz tunes, but new compositions in the trad jazz style as well. Thanks to their efforts, trad jazz continued as a viable performance and recording art form; some modern musicians who are renowned for their preservation of the "trad jazz" style, include the Squirrel Nut Zippers and Wynton Marsalis. By 2010, there was still a large sub-culture of amateur and semi-professional trad jazz bands in Britain, Germany, Denmark, Hungary and Australia, as well as in America, Canada and several other countries.
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