Trad jazz - short for "traditional jazz" - refers to the Dixieland and Ragtime jazz styles of the early 20th century in contrast to any more modern style.

A Dixieland revival began on the west coast in the late 1930s as a backlash to the Chicago style, which was close to swing. Lu Watters and the Yerba Buena Jazz Band, and trombonist Turk Murphy, adopted the repertoire of Joe "King" Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and W.C. Handy: bands included banjo and tuba in the rhythm sections. A New Orleans-based traditional revival began with the later recordings of Jelly-Roll Morton and the rediscovery of Bunk Johnson in 1942, leading to the founding of Preservation Hall in the French Quarter during the 1960s.

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. 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. Many artists of the Big Band era, including Glenn Miller, Gene Krupa and Benny Goodman, had their beginnings in trad jazz.

Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in black communities in the Southern United States.

It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. Its African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swung note. From its early development until the present day jazz has also incorporated music from American popular music.

As the music has developed and spread around the world it has drawn on many different national, regional and local musical cultures giving rise, since its early 20th century American beginnings, to many distinctive styles: New Orleans jazz dating from the early 1910s, big band swing, Kansas City jazz and Gypsy jazz from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s and on down through West Coast jazz, cool jazz, avant-garde jazz, Afro-Cuban jazz, modal jazz, free jazz, Latin jazz in various forms, soul jazz, jazz fusion and jazz rock, smooth jazz, jazz-funk, punk jazz, acid jazz, ethno jazz, jazz rap, cyber jazz, Indo jazz, M-Base, nu jazz, urban jazz and other ways of playing the music.

Bernard Stanley "Acker" Bilk MBE (born 28 January 1929) is an English clarinettist. He is known for his trademark goatee, bowler hat, striped waistcoat and his breathy, vibrato-rich, lower-register clarinet style.

Bilk earned the nickname Acker from the Somerset slang for 'friend' or 'mate'. His parents tried to teach him the piano, but as a boy, Bilk found it restricted his love of outdoor activities including football. He lost two front teeth in a school fight and half a finger in a sledging accident, both of which Bilk has claimed to have affected his eventual clarinet style. He learned the clarinet while serving in the Royal Engineers in the Suez Canal Zone after his sapper friend John A. Britten gave him a clarinet that he had bought at a bazaar and had no use for. The clarinet had no reed and Britten fashioned a makeshift reed for the instrument out of some scrap wood, and by the mid-1950s he was playing professionally.

Bilk was part of the boom in traditional jazz that swept the United Kingdom in the late 1950s. He first joined Ken Colyer's band in 1954, and then formed his own ensemble, The Paramount Jazz Band, in 1956. Four years later, their single "Summer Set," a pun on their home county co-written by Bilk and pianist Dave Collett, reached number five in the British charts and began a run of eleven top 50 hit singles.

Rob Wright (sometimes known as Mr. Wrong - born 1954) is a Canadian musician and songwriter best known as the bassist, lead vocalist and occasional guitarist of the progressive punk rock band Nomeansno, as well as the bassist of the pop punk band The Hanson Brothers. Wright was born in Montreal, Quebec, and currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia.

In addition to Nomeansno and The Hanson Brothers, both of which feature his brother John and guitarist Tom Holliston, Wright has composed and recorded an occasional solo act called Mr. Wrong where he sings and plays bass while performing in an authoritarian priest outfit. He has also recorded with Ford Pier, Itch and the instrumental progressive power-trio Removal (as the Mr. Wrong character in the latter.) In the late '70s and early '80s, Wright dabbled in record production, recording and/or producing many noted underground BC punk groups, most notably the Neos.

As a bassist, Wright utilizes a distinct technique to create a sound that relies on frequencies traditionally associated with a guitar. He took the inspiration for his amplification (involving a Marshall solid state head through a Marshall guitar 4x12 cabinet) from Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead, and has cited jazz bassists such as Jimmy Blanton and Paul Chambers as influential players. His hard-picked, fast-fretted playing is highly respected among bassists, and has been praised by Mike Watt of The Minutemen, among other musicians.

Kelly Thomas (born January 9, 1981) is a British bobsledder who has competed since 2007. She finished 11th in the two-woman event at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Thomas also competed in the two-woman event at the FIBT World Championships, but did not place either in 2008 or 2009. Her best World Cup finish was 11th in the two-woman event at Altenberg, Germany in December 2009.