History of Jazz

During the 19th century, music was an important means for black slaves on plantations in the southern United States to express their lives and emotions.

Beginning in the late 19th century, jazz was a "hybrid" of blues, ragtime, and other genres, based on traditional Anglo-American music.

The black music of the Americas retained much of its African character, with distinctive rhythms and collective improvisation.

The combination of this tradition with the music of the new settlements, much of it vocal, resulted in the creation not just of a new sound but of a new form of musical expression.

The best known Afro-American music is religious.

These beautiful, moving songs were listened to by white people too, but with a more upper-class flavor than such songs sung in country black churches.

Gospel music as it is known today is more accurately a reflection of the emotional power and melodicism of the early Afro-Americans than an inheritance of the religiosity of the music of the famous Fisk Jubilee Singers of the early decade of the twentieth century.

Other early forms of music include work songs, children's songs, and dance tunes dating back to the days of slavery, which have become an important musical legacy, especially given the rather severe restrictions on musical activity under the system of the time.

The birth of the blues

After the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of the black slaves, Afro-American music developed rapidly.

The instruments abandoned by the military bands and the new freedom of movement formed the roots of jazz: brass, dance music and the blues.

Seemingly simple as a musical form, but actually capable of almost infinite variations, the blues has always been an important part of any kind of jazz, and it has managed to maintain its own independent existence.

It's fair to say that without the blues there would be no rock and roll today.

A brief description of the blues in general is that it consists of music in sections of eight or twelve bars, with tightly written lyrics, and that its "blue" character is due to a combination of the "mi" and "si" notes in the scale. "si" notes in the scale by dropping them by a semitone.

In fact, the blues began as a secular counterpart to religious music.

By the late 1880s, black brass bands, dance bands, and concert bands were appearing in most southern cities in the United States.

Meanwhile, black music in the northern United States tended to be continental in style.

During this period, ragtime began to take shape.

Although ragtime was primarily played on the piano, some bands began to play it as well.

The golden age of ragtime was from about 1898 to 1908, but it actually spanned a great deal of time, and its influence stretched far and wide.

It was rediscovered in the 2000s, and the new ragtime was characterized by a charming melody and a heavy use of syncopation, but its bluesy elements were almost gone.

Ragtime is closely associated with early jazz, but what is certain is that ragtime rhythms are more stable.

Ragtime's most famous composer was Scott Joplin (1868-1917).

Other famous ragtime masters include James Scott, Louis Chauvink Eubie Blake (1883-1983), and Joseph Lamb, the latter of whom, although white, nevertheless completely absorbed the form.

New Orleans played a key role in its birth and development.

The early history of jazz has been more thoroughly researched and documented here than anywhere else.

New Orleans may have had more and better jazz than anywhere else between 1895 and 1917, but that doesn't mean that New Orleans was the only place where jazz was produced.

The music produced in every southern American city with a sizable black population should be considered a type of early jazz.

In Memphis, for example, there emerged such a blues composer and collector as W. C. Handy (1873-1958).

Other cities included Atlanta and Baltimore.

At the time, New Orleans stood out because of its very open and liberal social climate.

People of different faiths and races could communicate with each other, so the musical traditions were rich, French, Spanish, Irish and African, in an environment of easy communication.

It's no surprise, then, that New Orleans is fertile ground for jazz.

If the notion that New Orleans was the birthplace of jazz is exaggerated but true, the notion that jazz was born in the Red Light District is nonsense.

While it's true that New Orleans legalized prostitution and produced some of the most sophisticated and tasteful "sports houses" in the country, the music played in these places was solo piano, if anything.

In fact, the first time people heard jazz was in something quite different.

At the time, New Orleans was notable for the number of clubs and fraternal organizations, most of which sponsored or hired a band to play at various occasions - indoor or outdoor dances, picnics, store openings, birthday or anniversary parties.

And, of course, playing jazz music was a feature of funeral procession marches, and remains so to this day.

Traditionally, the band *** at the door of the church, playing solemn marches and sad hymns, leads the funeral procession in a gentle march towards the cemetery.

On the way back, the pace quickens, and light marches and ragtime replace the elegies.

Such processions always attracted a lot of people to watch and were significant in the development of jazz.

It was at this point that the trumpeters and clarinettists showed their creative talents, and the drummers produced the rhythmic beats that became the basis for making the beat swing.

Generally speaking, jazz is two-beat, with two or four beats per measure.

This two-beat rhythmic background is always present in the bass, giving jazz a stable, regular rhythmic foundation.

Above the rhythmic bass are melodic, harmonic, and counterpoint voices with irregularly placed accents, whose customary syncopated effects contrast sharply with the regular bass voices.

Most of the musicians in these early bands were artisans of some kind (carpenters, bricklayers, tailors, etc.) or working men who made a little money playing music on weekends or holidays.

The first famous New Orleans musician was Buddy Bolden (1877-1931), the first jazz musician, who was a barber.

He played cornet and formed a band in the late 1890s.

He was probably the first to combine rootsy, gritty blues with traditional band music, a step that is significant in the history of jazz development.

Bolden was admitted for a psychotic episode during a *** performance at Mardi Gras, and spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital for hardened patients.

He is said to have made recordings, but so far this cannot be confirmed.

What we know of his music comes from the recollections of a number of other musicians who heard him perform in their youth.

Bunk Johnson (1889-1949) played second cornet in Bolden's last band.

Bunk Johnson is credited with reviving interest in New Orleans classic jazz in the last decade of his life

He was a brilliant storyteller with a colorful personality.

Much of the New Orleans lore is related to him, but what he told was largely exaggerated.

Many people, including some veteran jazz fans, believe that the early jazz musicians were self-taught geniuses who couldn't read music or take a single day of music lessons.

This is romantic, but it's not true at all.

Almost all of the major figures in early jazz had at least a solid grounding in orthodox music, and in some cases more.

That said, they were uniquely innovative in their use of instruments.

The most notable example is Joseph Oliver (1885-1938), nicknamed King, who was a cornetist and band leader.

He used everything he could find, including drinking glasses, buckets of sand, and plastic bathtub stoppers, to give his cornet a variety of tones.

Freddie Keppard (1889-1933) was Oliver's main competitor, and Keppard's lack of use of mutes allowed him to boast of being the loudest cornetist in New Orleans.

Koppard was also the first New Orleanian to bring jazz to the rest of the United States, performing light cabaret in New York with the Original Creole Orchestra in 1915.

By around 1912, the instrumentation of a typical jazz band included cornet (or trumpet), trombone, clarinet, guitar, double bass and drums.

(Pianos were rarely used because of the inconvenience of carrying them).

The jazz image of the banjo and tuba is more prominent, but in fact jazz bands began using them in later years because early recording technology was not yet able to pick up the softer sounding guitars and basses.

In jazz bands of the time, the cornet was the leader, with the trombone *** echoing it in the bass with a glissando, and the clarinet playing in between.

One of the first clarinetists to improvise in jazz was Sidney Bochet (1897-1959).

He was a skilled player before the age of ten, when he switched to soprano saxophone as his main instrument.

He was also the first jazz musician to make a name for himself abroad.

He visited England and France in 1919, and Moscow in 1927.

Most jazz musicians claim that their music has no name other than ragtime and syncopated sounds.

The first to use the word jazz was the band of trombonist Tom Brown, a white man from New Orleans.

He used the word in Chicago in 1915.

The origin of the word is unknown, and its original meaning has been the subject of much debate.

The first band to use the word "jazz" and to perpetuate it was a white band, also from New Orleans, the Original Dixieland Jazz Orchestra ( OriginaI Dixieland Jass Band).

The band made a big splash in 1917 and 1918, and was more or less the first jazz band to record.

Most of the members of this band had been in "dad's" Jack Laine's (1873-1966) band.

Jack Laine was a drummer and is considered the first white jazz musician.

In any case, musical fusion was more pronounced in New Orleans.

There were a few African Americans who were not too dark "mixed" into the white bands.

By 1917, many important jazz musicians, both white and black, had left New Orleans for the North.

The reason for this was not the closure of New Orleans' notorious red-light district, but simply economics.

The Great War in Europe had made American industry thrive, and these musicians, like those millions of workers, flocked north, where there was the security of a better job.

By the time Oliver invited Armstrong to join his band in Chicago, Chicago had become the new center of world jazz.

Although New York was the scene of great success for the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB), and the dancing to the music they inspired was an instant hit, the New York bands seemed to have inherited the vaudeville style of the ODJB, rather than its musical essence.

They were just imitators (the first and most successful being Ted Lewis).

There were also far fewer Southern musicians in New York at the time, so they couldn't bring the pure style of New Orleans.

But things were different in Chicago, where there were tons of musicians from New Orleans.

Prohibition had just been repealed, and the city had a colorful nightlife.

One of the bands that was a cut above the rest was "King" Joseph Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, especially after Louis Armstrong came to Chicago in 1922. Armstrong came to Chicago in 1922.

The band represented the final glory of the classical jazz ensemble style in New Orleans and heralded the beginning of a new style.

In addition to the two cornetists, other stars of the ensemble included the Dodds brothers, Johnny Dodds (1892-1940) on clarinet and Baby Dodds (1898-1959) on drums.

Baby Dodds brought a new level of subtlety and dynamism to jazz drumming, and along with another New Orleans-born drummer, Zutty Singleton (1897-1975), he brought the concept of "swing" to jazz drumming. "

But it's the swing that's the most important thing.

But the "missionary" of swing is still undoubtedly Louis Armstrong.

The first jazz recordings

The Creole Jazz Orchestra began making records in 1923. It wasn't the first black New Orleans band to make records, but it was the best.

Their recordings were distributed nationally, and the band's influence on other musicians was enormous.

Two years earlier, trombonist Kid Ory's (1886-1973) Sunshine Orchestra had been the first to make jazz recordings, but they did so on an obscure California company, which soon became the first to do so.

Also in 1923, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, a white ensemble based in Chicago, began recording.

The group was far more musically sophisticated than the Original Dixieland Jazz Orchestra.

For one recording session, the group hired Ferdinand Morton, the famous New Orleans-based pianist and composer nicknamed Jelly Roll.

That same year, Ferdinand Morton also began recording his own albums.

In the same year, Ferdinand Morton also began recording his own albums.

In the same year, Ferdinand Morton also began recording his own albums.