American Jazz: Birth, Improvisation, and Diversity

AMERICAN JAZZ
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American Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that can be traced to the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. The genre was famous in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and borrowed significantly from the blues and ragtime. It is a blend of many different cultures, making it “uniquely American” because America too has many cultures. It features a West African culture, the spirituals of the black slaves in America, and also utilizes instruments such as piano and trumpet. As the music spread further across the world, it borrowed national, regional, and local musical cultures that resulted in different styles. An assessment of the genre’s history and development to date helps one comprehend the cultural influences of jazz in modern art and any other contributions of the music to the modern world.
The Birth of Jazz
The genre is extremely important to the Americans because, throughout the 1920s, it infiltrated into almost every aspect of the country’s culture. It even contributed to the music that came up afterward. It has had a ripple effect on almost every aspect of the country’s life, ranging from style and social movements to other art forms that came after it. After World War I, many jazz musicians migrated from New Orleans to major northern cities, including Chicago and New York, which resulted in an extensive spread of the style. As the musicians moved to these cities, they found different cultures from their new homes and merged them with their music styles. Since music expresses the language of the culture, the musicians continued spreading the jazz characteristics among the locals, ultimately changing the type of music that they liked listening to. The music had a significant impact on the country’s culture as it influenced not only fashion and poetry but also the Civil Rights Movement. The people changed their style of clothing to make it easier to dance to jazz tunes. What began as a new style morphed and came with many different genres in the country’s culture. The Jazz rhythms have influenced other music genres including Rock, Hip-Hop, Pop among other genres. Even the poetry evolved because of jazz, in which jazz poetry became an emerging genre in the era. Unlike before, the poems assumed the emotional and improvisational feel of jazz music.[Parsonage, Catherine. The evolution of jazz in Britain, 1880–1935. Routledge, 2017.] [Hardie, Daniel. Exploring Early Jazz: The Origins and Evolution of the New Orleans Style. iUniverse, 2002.]
Jazz also contributed to the establishment of women’s liberation, a significant cultural moment. The increase in dance halls and jazz clubs saw an increasing number of women seek a place to go and vent their rebellions against the established traditional roles. They were not restricted on how to dress, and as a result, they decided to wear dresses that were associated with jazz performance freely. Therefore, jazz helped spice up their meetings, and during this process, they met other women and were able to plan their activities. As the women began adopting a certain dress code, and other people also changed s...