could someone PLEASE explain the history of jazz to me??!? I'm COMPLETELY lost!!!!!?

Answer 1

Wow--that is pretty involved for just a quick answer.

It started in the South--primarily New Orleans. It is based upon African musical traditons, along with other influences--latin, french, and just homogenization in america.

Jazz is imporvisation. It is not written. There is a melody and the players change it around with each other. It is never really played the same way twice.

At first it was just African-American music. But over time, of course, white folks got involved (and of course now days people of all nationalities.)

Jazz drifted up the Missippi River. Chicago Jazz developed, St Louis Jazz, there was jazz in NY, and it went to the coast.

In New Orleans,and else where developed the stuff called Dixieland. This was a sanitized version of jazz primarily designed for white middle america.

In the 1960's with Miles Davis, and John Coltrane cool jazz developed.

And then Miles Davis again did a big revolution in jazz creating what he called "Fusion Jazz"--it combined jazz traditons, with rock, latin,blues and other types of music. And this has been integrated in what is now modern jazz.

There is a very wide variety of jazz now--all the old schools. Guys that experiment. Various degrees of fusion. But the essence is that it is still improvisiation. It is not a written, for ever set in stone, music such as classical music is.

Answer 2

You have a couple of good answers here, and the Wikipedia article is quite good.

I am a jazz musician from New Orleans and I've even played with Wynton Marsallis' father. I don't understand what you could possibly be confused about. If you would like to email me with particulars, I'll try to help.

The main thing about the birth of jazz, as I understand it, is that the music of the time was very rigid. Even early ragtime was very regimented. Joplin,for example, wrote his pieces out note-for-note and played them with "little" variation.

But the black musicians had this multi-rhythmic African tribal heritage. These tribal rhythms could be very complex and would morph FREELY into different forms in the duration of playing for a long period of time with many musicians, almost all percussionists. The black musicians of the early 1900's developed techniques to make popular songs of the day morph into more complex entities. It was a musical simile or substitute for the physical freedom that most black people in the South didn't have!

This desire for freedom from rigidity in music echoed the desire for freedom in reality. There were more instruments than just percussion available at that time in Southern America, so they developed ways to get the melody and the harmony, not just the rhythm, to FREELY morph into different forms. Obviously, you have to be a masterful musician with complete control over your instrument to do this.

Answer 3

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Answer 4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz