Where did Jazz Originate?
One has just to blow a note on a sax and your feet start tapping to the rhythm and your body starts swaying to the music. That's Jazz for you. Ragtime, hip-hop, be bop, cool, blues - the very names make your finger snap and do a Texas two-step, no?
Jazz has often been called the only art form to originate in the United States, though even this is not exactly true. Jazz, is a kind of music that was sung or played by the African slaves in the plantations of America. In the 18th and 19th century, Africans were lured or kidnapped from their villages and sold in faraway America as slaves to work in large plantations.
After a hard day's labour, these people would gather together and sing, both to forget their worries and also to teach their children about the land and culture they came from.
Different forms of musical notes from various cultures flowed across the Southern United States during the late 1800s. They were part of the cultural baggage that immigrants brought from their countries to the land that was the melting pot of cultures, America.
Jazz music thus, grew from a combination of African folk music and rhythms, Caribbean and black American music, as Africans have a very strong culture of singing and dancing.
Early jazz music was basically the Blues, a soulful and heart-rending composition with simple and repeated harmonies performed by black musicians who had little or no training in Western music.
The Blues was especially widespread in the American South. This was because the American South had the largest number of plantations and so also the largest numbers of slaves. Jazz instrumentalists have long exploited the blues as a vehicle for improvisation.
Apart from its musical influences from Africa, the Caribbean, Latino rhythms, instruments like the clarinet and the saxophone also influenced the sound of jazz.
By the middle of the 19th century, jazz grew in popularity and its sound became influenced by musicians with formal training and classical backgrounds.
In the late 1890s a musical style evolved from St Louis called Ragtime. Its popularity quickly spread to other parts of the United States. This music style emphasized on formal composition and was played on the piano. The music was energetic and lively and quite different from the piano concertos associated with Western classical music. Naturally people loved it.
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