Jazz Music

Jazz Music

Introduction

Jazz is, above all, improvisation, life, expression, constant evolution. Jazz is also the voice of a clarinet that celebrates life, and is also a prayer to God. Jazz is a music that has its origins in the meeting of two different conceptions of Music: African design and European design. Of course, the Jazz did not appear as such, simply by bringing an African population, deported to the Americas to serve as labor for European settlers who had seized it. A slow cultural maturation first had to make African-American contributions and Euro-American contributions merged gradually as encounters between the two communities, the meetings that took most often the appearance of curiosity tinged distrust of one of these two communities to the cultural practices of the other (www.blues-and-jazz-piano.com).

The birth of Jazz

Jazz is a type of music that is difficult to define, since in most cases their theoretical study has been approached from the principles of European classical music and jazz musicologists, which resists being approached from outside their own universe (www.historyjazz.com).

Jazz, like many other arts is self-explanatory. Jazz is the result of the meeting of the African and European musical tradition in a precise scenario, the United States, following the arrival of African slaves from the early seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century, the Christian religion (mostly Baptist and Methodist churches) was imposed on many of these slaves, who found in the texts of the Old Testament numerous analogies applicable to their own situation and the corals a form of musical expression (www.articlesbase.com).

Over time these psalms dyed African tradition would lead to what is known as Beier, religious song that takes different forms: the preaching of the pastor, vocal groups and soloists especially many women.

Religious music coexisted with the secular: plantation songs, ballads, and other forms of popular expression, both African and European, that would feed one of the great pillars of American music, the Blues. If you stick to the blues musical criteria, it is a twelve-bar structure, which uses so-called “blue notes”, changes in the third and seventh notes of the scale, but the blues is more than just that, it a translation for sadness, but a more accurate definition comes from the blues singers themselves: “Blues is a feeling, is a sensation, a feeling” (Scaruffi, 2005).

On the other hand arises in Saint Louis around 1870 style piano, which without being jazz is very close by its dynamic and jumping in nature. It is commonly known as Ragtime. Its main feature is the superposition of a regular rhythm played by the left hand and a syncopated rhythm that goes by the right hand, which sometimes also use “blue notes” (www.humanities.uci.edu).

African American music is too simplistic. Jazz is a form of individual and a spontaneous expression. It represents improvisation, freedom, protest song and marginalization. The Black created the Southern slave states-Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia - while working on plantations cotton (Scaruffi, 2005). The blues and spirituals were the seeds. The sound of authentic jazz was born through ...