Jazz Music: The Beginning Of African And African American Music

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The beginnings of Jazz are thought to be born at a specific time, but there is more to the birth of jazz. Jazz music was born more or less simultaneously in different parts of the United States and had many sources for its creation. Africans have contributed a lot to the style of making music, free rhythm, and the emotion with which they interpret their folk music that was later transformed into jazz. In the new world they absorbed the harmony and the concept of the Western form and condensed the African and European musical ideas, giving a musical style that can be called African American. Jazz became a type of urban expression that began to take hold in the cafes of New Orleans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The sounds …show more content…

This did not stop African Americans from creating music that was developed by racial prejudices. The end of the American Civil War allowed the arrival of a large number of musical instruments from the military bands to the new free slaves. The old slaves discovered musical instruments and were able to create their tunes. In addition to their banjo and harmonica, they could caress a trombone, a bugle, a clarinet, and drums. The typical "Marching bands" were formed. These bands were contracted for funerals, parades and dances. They played marches, polkas, ballads and other musical genres of European origin that were adapting to their way of playing, thus spreading the first forms of jazz The ragtime is one of the first truly American musical forms and a great influence in the development of jazz. Young Americans were amused, dancing to new syncopated music, popularized in the salons, brothels, and steamboats of the Mississippi River. Ragtime consisted in transferring the musicality of the black songs to an instrumental form at the piano, through melodic lines that had constant rhythm played through the bass. In the founding time of jazz music, from 1904, ragtime had its main exponent in the white pianist Jerry Roll Morton, who came to attribute himself to having been the inventor of

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