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FACT FILES
GENRES
HISTORY
THEORY
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History of Jazz:-
Jazz Roots
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At the root of jazz is the blues, the folk music of former
African slaves in the American South and their descendants,
heavily influenced by West African cultural and musical traditions
that evolved as black musicians migrated to the cities -- most
notably, the Storyville district of New Orleans -- in the late
19th century.
Early jazz influences found their first mainstream expression in the
marching 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: brass, reeds, and drums.
Purportedly, the availability of war-surplus band instruments from
the American Civil War aided the trend.
Black musicians frequently used the melody, structure and beat 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
its more eloquent, sophisticated, swing incarnation.
One unlikely player in this phenomenon was African-American minister
Rev. Daniel J. Jenkins of Charleston, South Carolina, who in 1891
established The Jenkins Orphanage for boys. In 1895, Jenkins instituted
a rigorous music program in which the orphanage's young charges were
taught the religious and secular music of the day, including overtures
and marches. Precocious orphans and defiant runaways, some of whom played
ragtime in bars and brothels, were delivered to the orphanage for
"salvation" and rehabilitation and made their contributions, as well.
In the fashion of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and Fisk University, the
Jenkins Orphanage Bands traveled widely, earning money to keep the
orphanage afloat. It was an expensive enterprise. Jenkins typically
took in approximately 125-150 "black lambs" yearly, and many of them
received formal musical training. Less than 30 years later, five bands
operated nationally, with one traveling to England--again in the
Fisk tradition. It would be virtually impossible to overstate the
influence of the Jenkins Orphanage Bands on early jazz, scores of
whose members went on to play with jazz legends like
Duke Ellington,
Lionel Hampton and
Count Basie.
Among them were the likes of trumpet virtuosos
Cladys Anderson,
Gus Aitkin and
Jabbo Smith.
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 and increasingly
important in the approaching big-band era.
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