the history of jazz

The History Of JazzThe first jazz was played in the early 20th century.
The work chants and folk music of black Americans are among the
sources of jazz, which reflects the rhythms and expressions of West
African song. Ragtime, an Afro-American music that first appeared in the
1890s, was composed for the piano, and each rag is a composition with
several themes. The leading ragtime composer was Scott Joplin. The
first improvising jazz musician was the cornetist Buddy Bolden, leader of
a band in New Orleans. The first jazz bands were usually made up of one
or two cornet players who played the principal melodies, a clarinetist and
trombonist who improvised countermelodies, and a rhythm section (piano,
banjo, string bass or tuba, and drums) to accompany the horns. These
bands played for dancers or marched in parades in the South. Some of
the first New Orleans musicians were among the most stirring of all jazz
artists. They include clarinetist Johnny Dodds, clarinetist-soprano
saxophonist Sidney Bechet, pianist Jelly Roll Morton, and cornetist King
Oliver. The first jazz record was made in 1917 by a New Orleans band
the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, made up of white musicians who copied
black styles. The New Orleans musicians discovered that audiences were
eager for their music in the cities of the North and the Midwest. In the
1920s Chicago became the second major jazz center. White Chicago
youths, such as tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman and clarinetist Benny
Goodman, were excited by the New Orleans masters including the
thrilling Louis Armstrong, who played in King Oliver's band. The third
major jazz center was New York City, and it became the most important.
In New York, pianists such as James P. Johnson created the piano style
by transforming rags and Southern black folk dances into jazz. Jazz was
first played in the ballrooms and theaters of New York. Louis Armstrong
was among the jazz musicians who accompanied Ma Rainey and the
rich-voiced Bessie Smith, the classic blues singers of the 1920s. When
Armstrong began singing, too, he scattered songs by improvising his own
phrases and nonsense syllables. Billie Holiday was only a teenager when

she began her singing career. She subtly changed the notes and rhythms
of popular songs to give them new, often ironic meanings. Ella Fitzgerald
was the popular favorite among later swing scat vocalists. The bop era,
which lasted from about 1945 to 1960, was also the period of cool jazz.
Bop blossomed out of informal performances, in New York City's Harlem
in the early 1940s. Many bop pieces were played at the fastest tempos
yet heard in jazz. Bop featured many-noted solos and unusual, quickly
changing harmonies. The opposite of cool jazz was hard bop, which was
played in the Eastern cities. Hard bop was vigorous and energetic and
emphasized the Afro-American basis of jazz. The 1950s also brought
forth composers who were not considered either bop or hard bop
creators. The traditional forms of jazz songs were abandoned by Lewis,
Nichols, and George Russell, who wrote complex, brightly colorful works
for big bands. Chicago revived as a jazz center in 1965 when a
cooperative, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians ,
was formed to produce concerts and to teach music to inner-city youths.
European enthusiasm about post-1960 jazz led to two important trends of
the 1970s and 1980s. First, improvising musicians from many countries
were inspired to draw on their individual musical heritages to create new
kinds of jazz. The most popular result of this trend to variety has been
fusion music, which joins jazz, rock, and Latin-American rhythms. The
concert on Wednesday night was pretty monotonous, my passion is for
dance music and hard ,uplifting beats,such as rap, rock, and house. I did
enter the auditorium with an open mind, but jazz did not click.