All YOU need to know about Jazz!

By: I.Doherty

Have you ever wondered where Jazz came from? In this article, you will learn about its origination and many other facts about Jazz that you never knew you needed to know. Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. The blues describes a musical form, some blues are about sad things, and many are delivered in a tone of general unhappiness. Other blues can be angry, moody and some are even joyous, exuberant, and happy. The blues is unusually rich in emotional expression. Ragtime is another genre of music found in Jazz which is of musical composition for the piano. It was influenced by minstrel-show songs, African- American banjo styles and off-beat dance rhythms, and also elements of European music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms, and improvisation. As Jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles, genres, and types of Jazz. 

New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, it combines French quadrilles with brass-band marches, beguine, ragtime, and blues. In the 1930s Kansas City jazz emerged, it was a hard-swinging, bluesy improvisational style, and gypsy jazz. In 1940 bebop began to appear, shifting jazz from danceable popular music towards a more challenging musician’s music which was played at a much faster pace and used more chord-based improvisations. Cool Jazz developed near the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sound and long, linear melodic lines. In the mid-1950s the hard pop emerged which introduced influences from rhythm and blues, gospel, and blues, especially in the saxophone and piano playing. Modal jazz was another type of jazz that appeared in the late 1950s, it used the mode, or musical scale as the basis of musical structure and improvisation, as did free jazz which explored playing without regular meter, beat, and formal structures. Jazz-rock fusion started to get famous around the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock music rhythms, electric instruments, and highly amplified stage sound. In the 1980s a commercial form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful. Latin and Afro-Cuban Jazz are other styles of jazz that abound in the 2000s. 

Everything from fashion and poetry to the Civil Rights movement was touched by its influences. The style of clothing was changed to make it easier to dance along to jazz tunes. Even poetry evolved because of jazz. Jazz is a music genre that can shape our character because it gives us courage, and prepares us to improvise, innovate, give others a voice, and teaches us how to listen. Jazz is educational and important for young and old minds. Jazz is recognized around the world for its rich cultural heritage rooted in the African American experience. Since its inception in the 20th century, jazz has contributed tremendously and has been a reflection of culture, it is considered to be the only truly original American art form.  ​