These bands used to be called as ‘New Orleans Jazz’. During 1920s, white jazz bands’ pieces were called ‘Dixieland jazz’. However from 1940s, people combined those two types of bands and call them ‘Dixieland jazz’. Dixieland jazz style was created in the early 1920s. Dixieland jazz style is strongly influenced by the ‘traditions of blues, ragtime and brass band because Dixieland jazz was created when the traditions of blues, ragtime, and brass band were integrated into one musical piece’ (http://www.historyjazz.com).
Southern blacks, delivered from slavery a few decades before, started playing European music Afro modifications. The first place of jazz has many origins: New Orleans, St. Louis, Memphis and Kansas City are just a few. But New Orleans was and still remains an important jazz center.
Rock & Roll history Where did this type of music come from? The rhythm of rock and rock is from Africa. The immediate origins of rock and roll lie in the late 1940s and early 1950s through a mixing together of various popular musical genres of the time. These included gospel, folk music, and the blues - particularly the electric forms being developed in Memphis, Chicago, New Orleans, Texas, California, and elsewhere - piano-based boogie woogie, and jump blues, which were collectively becoming known as rhythm and blues. Also in the melting pot creating a new musical form were country and western music (including Western swing and influences from traditional Appalachian folk music), jazz, and gospel music.
New Orleans, as mentioned before is located along the coast of North America and during times of slavery it was a hub for trade of goods, services and slaves via ships. These slaves, mainly originating from Africa, are what you would call the pioneers of Jazz and Blues. Although the instruments they would have played in their home country were not brought with them, they were still able to express their musical creativity using various European instruments and by the early 19th Century, their ethnic culture and musical traditions were subsequently integrated with the European forms and styles of music. Since then however, the instrumentation and structure of Jazz and Blues has developed and its popularity and sound have changed as well. In the early 19th century approximately half a million African slaves, mainly from West Africa were brought into the U.S. mainland and were used for various menial tasks such as field work and house chores.
In the 20’s this music was Jazz. In the 80’s America saw the same urban African American culture embrace the hip hop movement. Similar in many respects with their secular themes, improvisation, polyrhythm, and use of call-and-response, hip hop became the new way to express the struggles while carrying on the tradition style of African American music. One of the most visible examples of hip hop’s roots in jazz is the basis of the art form, the beat. Hip hop originated when New York DJ’s began isolating the percussion breaks on funk and rock records.
The apparent simplicity of blues music has been played with in a great number of ways along the years. If in the late 1800s, the poor African- Americans used a guitar, a harmonica and a powerful sad voice, things evolved with the adding of blowing instruments, drums and basses at the beginning of the 1900s. Blues music’s evolution was organic, it mend itself naturally to the fashion of the times to become the music that, when listened to, one immediately associates it with America, with all of its history, hardships and diversity of people and feelings. Blues music was born in the South, specifically in the Mississippi Delta, and migrated along with the poor African-Americans to the cultural and cosmopolitan city of New Orleans, Louisiana. These men were seeking for jobs on the docks of the city, trying to escape a very segregated environment where they were still being treated as slaves.
This type of music has a distinct rhythmic and melodic character, one that is constantly involves improvisation and when creating it a melody or its underlying chords may be altered, rhythmic notes may be lengthened or shortened, syncopated or not and there can different patterns involved. Jazz music is quite complex and in order to get a full understanding of its history one must go back to roots, where it all started. Although know for being originated in the United States in the city of New Orleans, jazz music roots actually come from the West African slaves. Its musical styles have developed as a result of the collision of African traditions and European culture. The complex African rhythms are one major factor that distinguished itself from European music.
This year’s other two finalists came with their own notable credentials. Justin Brown, 28, originally from Richmond, Calif., is a member of acclaimed groups led by the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and the pianist Gerald Clayton, who have been finalists in previous Monk Competitions. Colin Stranahan, 26, originally from Denver, Colo., has likewise become an active part of the New York jazz scene. (He’ll be at the Village Vanguard this week, starting Tuesday, with Kurt Rosenwinkel’s Standards Trio.) As the winner of this year’s competition, Mr. Ross will receive a $25,000 scholarship and a recording contract with the Concord Music Group.
This is still evident in recent parodies of film noir, for example on the television cartoon series The Simpsons.78 And although this essay is pri- marily concerned with the use of jazz in the hip-hop world, there were 76 David Malley, “Digable Planets,” Rolling Stone Album Guide, 2004, available at: http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/digableplanets/biography (accessed June 1, 2007). 77 Many other hip-hop groups, such as Organized Konfusion, Stetsasonic, Main Source, Black Moon, Freestyle Fellowship, The Roots, Quasimoto, and Souls of Mischief have incorporated jazz codes that have contributed to their alternative rap categoriza- tions. Although the media gave much less attention to jazz rap after the mid-1990s, the link between jazz and hip-hop continues into the twenty-first century with artists including U.S. trumpeter/rapper Russell Gunn, U.S. pianist Robert Glasper, and U.K. saxophonist/ rapper Soweto Kinch. 78 These musical tropes were still used in the 1980s; one example was the use of the saxophone in the action series MacGyver for a sexually charged fantasy sequence between MacGyver and a woman. JM2704_02.indd 455 11/22/10 5:06:18 PM the journal of musicology 456 instances in which influence flowed in the other
Throughout the story the unnamed narrator struggles to embrace sonny for who is, its not until the end of the story when the narrator goes to one of Sonny’s Jazz shows, where he fully understands and truly fathoms who Sonny really is as a person and musician. I believe James Baldwin uses the genre of Jazz music in order for the audience to fully grasp the concept behind the story. Jazz plays a key role in linking the passage to a more a deeper meaning of life it self in Sonny’s case. Jazz music is a style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in black communities in the Southern United States around the mid 1900. Jazz was a way for African Americans to express their dismay and hardship through music.