Jazz Music History

Jazz has roots in the combination of West African and Western music traditions, including spirituals, blues and ragtime, stemming from West Africa, western Sahel, and New England's religious hymns, hillbilly music, and European military band music.

After originating in African American communities near the beginning of the 20th century, jazz styles spread in the 1920s, influencing other musical styles. The origins of the word jazz are uncertain. The word is rooted in American slang, and various derivations have been suggested.

Jazz is rooted in the blues, the folk music of former enslaved Africans in the U.S. South and their
descendants, which is influenced by West African cultural and musical traditions that evolved as black musicians migrated to the cities. Jazz musicianWynton Marsalis states that "Jazz is something Negroes invented...the nobility of the race put into sound ... Jazz music has all the elements, from the spare and penetrating to the complex and enveloping.

The instruments used in marching bands and dance band music at the turn of century became the basic instruments of jazz: brass, reeds, and drums, using the Western 12-tone scale. A "...black musical spirit (involving rhythm and melody) was bursting out of the confines of European musical tradition [ of the marching bands], even though the performers were using European styled instruments."

Small bands of black musicians, mostly self taught, who led funeral processions in New Orleans played a seminal role in the articulation and dissemination of early jazz, traveling throughout black communities in the Deep South and to northern cities.

The postbellum network of black-established schools, as well as civic societies and widening mainstream opportunities for education, produced more formally trained African-American musicians. Lorenzo Tio and Scott Joplin were schooled in classical European musical forms. Joplin, the son of a former slave and a free-born woman of color, was largely self-taught until age 11, when he received lessons in the fundamentals of music theory. Black musicians with formal music skills helped to preserve and disseminate the essentially
improvisational musical styles of jazz.