Jazz is a musical art form which originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States from a confluence of African and European music traditions. Because of the continuing popularity of Jazz we explore it’s history and how to relate to jazz artists.
Jazz music was, ultimately, the product of New Orleans’ melting pot. These groups were formed by Italians, Creoles and all sorts of European immigrants. Jazz bands took the piano from ragtime, and the saxophone and trumpet from dance hall bands. This type of music was very much a continuation of blues music, except that it took advantage of the instruments of the marching band.
Jazz would eventually be assimilated by white pop music (from Broadway show tunes to Tin Pan Alley ballads) without causing any major upheaval. This became the unchallenged popular music of America during the Swing era of the 1930s and 1940s.
It was, indirectly, also another stage in the process of black assimilation of white musical styles, because jazz was founded on ragtime, and ragtime was fundamentally the grafting of European musical styles (such as marches and waltzes) onto West-African syncopated rhythms.
Jazz has, from its early 20th century inception, spawned a variety of subgenres, from New Orleans Dixieland dating from the early 1910s, big band-style swing from the 1930s and 1940s, Bebop from the mid-1940s, a variety of Latin jazz fusions such as Afro-Cuban and Brazilian jazz from the 1950s and 1960s, jazz-rock fusion from the 1970s and late 1980s developments such as acid jazz, which blended jazz influences into funk and hip-hop. Read more...
