Jazz

Jazz

Jazz is a type of music hard to define, since in most cases its theoretical study has been approached from the principles of classical music by European musicologists. Jazz, like many other arts is self-explanatory, and only can be understood by listening to it.

Jazz is the fruit of the encounter of African and European musical tradition, in a specific scenario, the United States, following the arrival of black slaves from the early seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century, the Christian religion was imposed on many of these slaves, mostly Baptist and Methodist churches. Where slaves found in the texts of the Old Testament numerous analogies applicable to their own situation and the choirs a form of musical expression. Over time these psalms that show pure African tradition give rise to what is known as GOSPELL, religious chant that takes many forms: the preaching of the pastor, vocal groups and a large number of soloists especially female.

Religious music coexisted with the Profane: plantation songs, ballads, and other forms of popular expression, both African and European, that would feed one of the great pillars of African-American music, Blues.

On the other hand emerges in Saint Louis around 1870 one pianistic style, without becoming much about jazz for its dynamic and restless character, is the RAGTIME, its main characteristic is the superposition of a regular rhythm played by the left hand and a syncopated rhythm going by the right hand, sometimes use "blue notes". Its origin seems to be that it is in the dances danced slaves parodying their masters. Sheet music ragtime recordings were "cardboard rolls" for mechanical piano and its most representative musician was Scott Joplin.

The birth of jazz is lost in this confluence of musical forms and styles of African American culture that occurs in the late nineteenth century: GOSPELL, blues, ragtime, military marches, dance European music. All this mixture created the background against which Jerry Roll Morton would proclaim himself "the inventor of jazz.”

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