1 History
1.1 Roots of jazz
At the root of jazz is the blues, the folk musicFolk music in the original sense of the term, is music by and of the people. Folk music arose, and best survives, in societies not yet affected by mass communication and the commercialization of culture. It normally was shared and performed by the entire of former African slaves in the U.S. South and their descendants, heavily influenced by West African cultural and musical traditions that evolved as black musicians migrated to the cities.
Early jazz influences found their first mainstream expression in the marching bandA marching band is a group of instrumental musicians who generally perform outdoors, and who incorporate movement usually some type of marching with their musical performance. In addition to traditional parade performances, many bands also perform field s and dance band music of the day, which was the standard form of popular concert music at the turn of century. The instruments of these groups became the basic instruments of jazz: brassBrass instruments A brass instrument is a musical instrument whose tone is produced by vibration of the lips as a player blows into a tubular resonator. Brass instruments are also called labrosones literally meaning "lip-vibrated instruments" (Baines, 199, reedsReed instruments are musical instruments; they are members of the woodwind family. The performer produces tones on these instruments by blowing air past a cane reed, which vibrates. Pitch is changed by opening or closing holes in the body of the instrumen, and drumFor other kinds of drums, see drum (disambiguation). A drum is a musical percussion instrument, consisting of a membrane which is usually stretched taut over a cylindrical tube that is open at the other end. The membrane is struck, either with the hand ors.
Black musicians frequently used the melody, structure, and beatSee also the beat disambiguation page. A beat is a pulse on the beat level the metric level at which pulses are heard as the basic unit. Thus a beat is the basic time unit of a piece; when you tap your foot to music, each tap is a beat. Depending on the c of marches as points of departure; but, says "North by South, from Charleston to Harlem," a project of the National Endowment for the Humanities: "...a black musical spirit (involving rhythm and melody) was bursting out of the confines of European musical tradition, even though the performers were using European styled instruments. This African-American feel for rephrasing melodies and reshaping rhythm created the embryo from which many great black jazz musicians were to emerge." Many black musicians also made a living playing in small bands hired to lead funeral processions in the New Orleans African-American tradition. These Africanized bands played a seminal role in the articulation and dissemination of early jazz. Traveling throughout black communities in the Deep South and to northern big cities, these musician-pioneers were the Hand helping to fashion the music's howling, raucous, then free-wheeling, "raggedy," ragtime spirit, quickening it to a more eloquent, sophisticated, swing incarnation.
For all its genius, early jazz, with its humble, folk roots, was the product of primarily self-taught musicians. But an impressive postbellum network of black-established and -operated institutions, schools, and civic societies in both the North and the South — of which Jenkins' orphanage was only one — plus widening mainstream opportunities for education, produced ever-increasing numbers of young, formally trained African-American musicians, some of them schooled in classical European musical forms. Lorenzo Tio and Scott Joplin were among this new wave of musically literate jazz artists. Joplin, the son of a former slave and a free-born woman of color, was largely self-taught until age 11, when he received lessons in the fundamentals of music theory from a classically trained German immigrant in Texarkana, Texas.
Also contributing to this trend was a tightening of Jim Crow ( racial segregation) laws in Louisiana in the 1890s, which caused the expulsion from integrated bands of numbers of talented, formally trained African-American musicians. The ability of these musically literate, black jazz men to transpose and then read what was in great part an improvisational art form became an invaluable element in the preservation and dissemination of musical innovation that took on added importance in the approaching big-band era.
