The History of Jazz Music - Guitarread | When did jazz music first appear?

The birth and development of jazz music are some of the important breaking points in the history of world music. It is very important for the liberation and development of music that the rules begin to be stretched and even broken down with jazz.

In this series of articles, we will begin to examine the history of jazz / Jazz music closely and in-depth through the studies of John Fordham.

Sources of Jazz

When writer F. SCOOTTFITZGERALD spoke of the “Jazz Age” in the 1920s, he chose the word “Jazz” to describe an attitude. You didn’t need to know this music to understand this feeling. What the author wanted to convey was the changing spirit of the 1920s…

The closest war in history was over. Automobile, gramophone, radio broadcasts began to spread; it was changing concepts such as distance, vacation, social life, even freedom. It was 1917…

A group of excited white musicians packed the stylish Reisenveber’s in New York’s Columbus Square. The music they played was wild, unconventional, unheard of until then, but it had an all-encompassing spirit. Customers could not be contained. They were allowed to dance. There wasn’t much to do anyway!

The community acted quickly. He made two records in a row: “Livery Stable Blues” and “Original Dixieland Jazz Band,” who instantly put the word “jazz” into the language used by everyone from sidewalks to royal palaces.

Only a little over 100 years old, jazz has undergone so many changes that those who know it with only one side have difficulty recognizing the other. From the breathtaking swing orchestras to the most secluded blues players, from the most romantic ballet dancers to the free improvisers on the streets, from their roots in the southern states of America to Rio, Bombay, Cape Towen, Melbourne, even Azerbaijan; Jazz is the instant, naive, unpredictable, honest and powerful voice of today’s world.

Jazz; developed alongside electronic communication that became widespread worldwide in dance crazes, cinema, the record industry; It has continually changed the way we perceive tonality and rhythm. Although it is often overshadowed by generally accepted art; The history of jazz and blues is the most vivid story of 20th-century music.

The Relationship Between Blues and jazz

Blues was flexible in the 19th century. But around 1915 he began to regain harmony. However, African influences were evident.

However, jazz was not discovered by members of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. They had heard this music in New Orleans, too. In the “red-light” neighbourhood called Storyville, they heard it at parades, funerals, and were impressed by this uncompromising, laughing-crying music they had never heard before. It is as if military music, vaudeville songs, religious music, rural blues, celebration music, work songs, hijran; they were all together!

The word jazz might not have been heard before he made a fortune with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917, but many Americans have heard parts of that music for years. In the end, the pieces came together and formed a whole. The elements that made this music were so widespread in the United States; Until that day, they had not come together in the right place, at the right time, under the right name.

The black population in the Southern States of America was of course somewhat familiar with this music, but the white bourgeoisie thought that good music could only be heard in concert halls, not in appointment houses! Jazz had long bloomed in the secret gardens of the “New World”. Flowers may have bloomed most in New Orleans, but it wasn’t the only garden.

So where would jazz start if it hadn’t started at Reisenweber’s restaurant in Columbus Square in 1917?

Choose: At the late 1700s migrant camp entertainments; In the churches of the post-Civil War that separated blacks and whites; on the scrapped instruments of the demobilized armies; in the work songs sung by the workers in the railway constructions, ports and cotton fields; in travelling minstrel shows; In “ragtime”, where European music takes the form of a rondo.

Or go back further: in square dances, in drum choirs in which a number of drummers beat separate rhythms at the same time, in ancestral rites, secret societies, and religious ceremonies.

Great Migration

It was not American culture that emerged with this migration, it was largely West African in origin. The slave trade forcibly mixed uprooted African civilization with European culture, and had to live in a completely different climate. An extremely interesting result emerged: Jazz. Trying to discover himself in a “new” “World”; A hybrid created by two ancient civilizations…

The slave trade killed hundreds of thousands of Senegalese, the Yoruba, the Dahomayli, the Ashanti; each year they plucked them from their homeland and left them in the middle of the tobacco and cotton industries of North and South America and the Caribbean.

Just like slaves, the cultures of slave owners were different. Catholics—Portuguese, Spaniards, and French—had much more liberality in West African culture than the protestant British, who outlawed dancing and drumming.

All these conflicts were reflected in jazz. The intertwined African and Catholic customs, through some pruning by the Protestants, initiated the first rhythmic rites. West African and Catholic customs were sometimes so intertwined; st. On Patrick’s Day, slaves began to be seen playing the drums. Another ritual was now mixing with the custom of a religion.

African dances were very common in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Rumba, congo, mambo, Cha-Cha, all African dances. Trinidad’s calypso originated in West Africa. The mix of French and West African cultures in Martinique developed as independent music reminiscent of early jazz, with aspects similar to that of New Orleans.

African Rhythm

The Africans who were brought to the New World in chains had much in common as well as their differences. rhythm in West African music; it dominated melody and harmony, as in European music. As a matter of fact, the main principles in African and European music were close enough to be included in the same song.

The words used, as well as the differences in the pitch and intonation of the spoken languages, brought refinements that were never present in the European music tradition. For example, instead of singing the notes such as falsetto with the clarity of a chorist, stretching or shifting a little.

The importance of drum choirs and percussion instruments in African religious ceremonies filtered through the centuries, creating a highly developed sense of rhythm with overlapping, slightly low, triplet voice groups never thought of in the West.

Of course, none of them created jazz on their own. But jazz would never have been born had it not been for the chemistry they created in a chain of coincidences.

In the mid-19th century, when the slave trade was banned, there were 4 million black slaves in North America. The slaves had no rights or choices, but they left their mark on the New World with the customs, ideas and passions they carried to the continent for 300 years.

White tolerance of African customs is limited to what is necessary for their business to run; Although slavery was abolished, racial discrimination continued with all its violence. Blacks and whites lived side by side, but they could not replace each other. The easiest excuse the whites found for slavery was that it was the only way to make the “infidels” faithful Christians.

In the 18th century, some white clergy held large open-air meetings; they used to resort to demonstrations organized by blacks to excite the public. But over time, this cooperation ended. The 1770s were famous for the fiery and rhythmic sermons delivered by an English priest known as Black Jack Harry.

To those who attend his sermons, always their prayers; it was enlivening with strong accents and high African intonation, with repetitions every two or three lines. In the English church tradition; This method, which emerged as a result of the priest having the illiterate congregation repeat what he read, was also reflected in church music with African “call-response”.

The exchanges of riffs between sections in a band, and even at the end of pieces found in small ensembles of the bebop period, the exchanges of instrumental refrains between drum attacks are always the legacy of today.

European and West African music played side by side while working and praying. Bosses often turned a blind eye to African songs sung at work. Because these songs kept the productivity and morale of the workers high.

“Art music” meant nothing in Africa. Music was everywhere. There was a song for everything: songs of love, songs of rebellion, songs of sailors, songs of worship, war songs.

The rhythm of the songs sung while working matched the sounds of the hammer and pickaxe, and the melody and lyrics came together with a harmony that had never been heard before, like the sailor songs of the black sailors working off Savannah and New Orleans, which included African breezes as well as British music halls.

Blues

Blues is the basis of popular “Western” music as well as almost all genres of jazz. But today, anyone who wants to take a serious guitar education encounters the blues in the 12-bar, 3-chord form, which mixes the relatively younger African-American country music and European church music.

Pre-1900, the travelling blues singer playing around with his guitar or banjo couldn’t even tell himself how many beats a chord change would take. For such a musician, the song itself and its timbre were more important than harmony.

Blues began to be written in more regular forms by the 1900s, for example, W.C. Popular songs such as Handly’s famous “St. Louis Blues” began to be heard…

In the 1920s and early 1930s, the discourse became stronger with the development of the record industry. Record labels for the continental black receiver sprang up. But the impending Great Crisis would slow the blues down, but the genre would come back in the 1950s, this time transformed into “rockn roll”.

Minstrels

At the beginning of the 20th century, there was also the tradition of religious music, ragtime and, of course, saz poetry in the material that fell into the cauldron in which jazz music boiled.

Starting from the mid-1800s until the end of the 19th century, Minstrels, one of the indispensable shows of American entertainment life, have their origins in the representations of whites by painting their faces black in order to caricature the lives of blacks.

One of the most popular performances of this tradition was ‘Jumpin’ Jim Crow, which received a great deal of attention in the UK as well as the US, in which the white minstrel Tom Rice played the bizarre dances of a disabled slave named Crow.

Tim Rice had watched Crow in the southern city of Louisville. It cannot be said that the Minstrels influenced jazz very much. But towards the end of the 19th century, the genre started to attract great attention, and some very famous early jazz and blues musicians such as Ma Rainey, Jerry Roll Morton and Clarence Williams worked in vaudeville and tent theatres.

Many minstrel performances would end with the “cakewalk”, the famous dance of the Az Age. This dance, which made fun of the attitudes of white aristocrats, became very popular.

Moreover, the minstrellar introduced a largely white audience to musical ideas that could be regarded as preparations for jazz. Just as Afro-Amrekian religious music, overlapping with European forms, was heard in concert halls around the world as the first black American music…

Ragtime

And finally, as we entered the last decade of the 19th century, the Ragtime craze that swept all over Europe came… Ragtime is a word meaning “time in rags”.

This technique, which was adapted from some European classics to very complex piano music, the left hand would constantly beat a few march-like beats, while the right hand would hold a rhythm that doubled the tempo, placing precise accents between the strong beats of the left hand. This cross-rhythm mentality of blacks can be found in some ceremonial and very rare voodoo music, as well as in classical western music.

Ragtime was good-sounding, positive vibes music. It was far from the expressive power of the blues; but still, some virtuosos like Tom Turpin were able to bring a fiery and rebellious tone to this discourse.

Upbeat, rhythmic, marching ragtime was the driving force of “early jazz” ensembles and played an important role in the emergence of the ’20s and 30’s the piano style known as “stride”.

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