Life of Jazz

Jazz is more than music; it is the opportunity for individuals to most thoroughly channel their strongest emotions and effect the lives of others. Although starting off as mere slave songs, throughout history it has snowballed into the back bone of all American music. It is the granddaddy and roots of all modern music, yet it still holds a prevalent mark in today’s modern music society, shown through Herbie Hancocks victory of the 2008 Grammy Album of the Year. Its innovators have been prominent members in society’s culture and their messages have been taken to the hearts of many. The rich history, powerful innovators, and its astounding impact on music and the world has made Jazz the most influential genre in history.

The birth of Jazz is half the picture when it comes to the realness of Jazz. Encyclopedia Britannica describes the birth of Jazz as a product of native West African instruments, beats, and culture brought by African slaves shipped to America meeting with European structured music such as hymns. Africans were stripped of their home and culture and brought to America to be slaves around the 16th century. The slaves were striped of their right to participate in their native rituals of song and dance so they were forced to channel their sorrow filled emotions through the costumes around them. According to Ken Burns this African interpretation of the current American heavily European influenced music was the birth of Jazz. This birth included taking the tribal rhythms and instruments (guitar and percussion) of the African people and putting them together with the European harmonies, musical theories, and conventional instruments such as trumpet, trombone, saxophone, and piano. Ken Burns describes this balance of two different cultures is what makes Jazz; “It [Jazz] is between happy and sad; having and not having; country and city; between black and white and men and women; between the Old Africa and the Old Europe.”

These bluesy slave songs began to be documented on paper and soon enough started to develop into compositions; the white community then took these compositions and put their own spin on it which then created Ragtime. Through the years Ragtime became the prevalent music for black musicians but in the early 1900’s, a cornet player from New Orleans named Joe Oliver started putting his own interpretations on the music, started to add the element of improvisation,