History of Jazz Lesson

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 elements from American popular music.

Blending European and African Music Sensibilities

Early Congo Image By 1808 the Atlantic slave trade had brought almost half a million Sub-Saharan Africans to the United States. The slaves largely came from West Africa and the greater Congo River basin. They brought strong musical traditions with them. The rhythms had a counter-metric structure, and reflected African speech patterns. African music was largely functional, for work or ritual. The African traditions made use of a single-line melody and call-and-response pattern but without the European concept of harmony.

Slave dance to banjo 1780s Image Lavish festivals featuring African-based dances to drums were organized on Sundays at Place Congo, or Congo Square, in New Orleans until 1843. There are historical accounts of other music and dance gatherings elsewhere in the southern United States.

The Black Church

Another influence came from black slaves who had learned the harmonic style of hymns of the church and incorporated it into their own music as spirituals. The origins of the blues are undocumented, though they can be seen as the secular counterpart of the spirituals.

Minstrel and Salon Music

In the early 19th century an increasing number of black musicians learned to play European instruments, particularly the violin, which they used to parody European dance music in their own cakewalk dances. In turn, European-American minstrel show performers in blackface popularized such music internationally, combining syncopation with European harmonic accompaniment. New Orleans was the main nexus between the Afro-Caribbean and African American culture.

African Rhythmic Retention

In the opinion of jazz historian Ernest Borneman, what preceded New Orleans jazz before 1890, was "Afro-Latin music," similar to what was played in the Caribbean at the time. A fundamental rhythmic figure heard in Gottschalk's compositions, such as "Souvenirs From Havana" (1859), many different slave musics of the Caribbean, the bamboula, and other Afro-Caribbean folk dances performed in New Orleans Congo Square, is the three-stroke pattern known in Cuban music as tresillo. Tresillo is the most basic and by far, the most prevalent duple-pulse rhythmic cell in Sub-Saharan African music traditions.

Musicians from Havana and New Orleans would take the twice-daily ferry between both cities to perform, and not surprisingly, the habanera quickly took root in the musically fertile Crescent City. The habanera was the first of many Cuban music genres which enjoyed periods of popularity in the United States and reinforced and inspired the use of tresillo-based rhythms in African American music.

In 1892 St. Louis, Missouri, W.C. Handy, an out of work African American cornet player, with experience in minstrel shows and brass bands, encountered his first blues (or proto-blues) song. It had numerous one-line verses "and they would sing it all night." In 1912, Handy published what he heard that night as "St. Louis Blues." In 1903, while traveling through the Mississippi Delta, Handy experienced a form of blues with more pronounced African traits. The Delta blues style intrigued him. The singer improvised freely, and the melodic range was limited, sounding like a field holler. The guitar accompaniment was not strummed, but was instead like a small drum that responded in syncopated accents. The guitar was another "voice." Handy's "St. Louis Blues" and "Memphis Blues" (1912) are jazz standards.

The music of New Orleans had a profound effect on the creation of early jazz. Many early jazz performers played in venues throughout the city: the brothels and bars of the red-light district around Basin Street, called "Storyville." It was only one of numerous neighborhoods relevant to the early days of New Orleans jazz. In addition to dance bands, numerous marching bands played at lavish funerals arranged by the African American and European American community. The instruments used in marching bands and dance bands became the basic instruments of jazz: brass and reeds tuned in the European 12-tone scale and drums. Small bands mixing self-taught and well educated African American musicians, many of whom came from the funeral-procession tradition of New Orleans, played a role in the development and dissemination of early jazz, traveling throughout Black communities in the Deep South and, from around 1914 on, African American musicians playing in vaudeville shows took jazz to western and northern US cities.

Prohibition in the United States (from 1920 to 1933) banned the sale of alcoholic drinks, resulting in illicit speakeasies becoming lively venues of Jazz, and the "Jazz Age" was born.

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