What makes jazz american

New Orleans, near the mouth of the Mississippi River, played a key role in this development. The city's population was more diverse than anywhere else in the South, and people of African, French, Caribbean, Italian, German, Mexican, and American Indian, as well as English, descent interacted with one another.

African-American musical traditions mixed with others and gradually jazz emerged from a blend of ragtime, marches, blues, and other kinds of music. At first jazz was mostly for dancing. In later years, people would sit and listen to it. After the first recordings of jazz were made in , the music spread widely and developed rapidly. Jazz developed a series of different styles including traditional jazz, swing listen, for example, to Benny Carter, who got his start in swing music, in Benny's Music Class bebop, cool jazz, and jazz?

At the same time, jazz spread from the United States to many parts of the world, and today jazz musicians--and jazz festivals--can be found in dozens of nations. Jazz is one of the United States's greatest exports to the world. Skip to main content. What is Jazz? Sign up for Monthly E-newsletter. Search Google Appliance Enter the terms you wish to search for. Whether its future lies as a high-culture, transnational, privileged form of taste and practice or in a new synthesis joining jazz artistry with global hip hop and the popular is an open question.

In either case, jazz today is a form of cosmopolitanism. But perhaps that was always what it was striving to be. Whatever jazz today has lost in the size of its audience as compared with forms of popular music with bigger market shares, it has gained in the high esteem in which it is held in the business and art worlds as a sophisticated artistic expression it is frequently used as mood music in upscale business establishments, in museums and galleries, and in commercials promoting upscale products and in the institutionalization it has experienced as a formal course of study at many colleges and universities.

Indeed, if it were not for colleges, universities, and high school jazz bands, and institutions such as Jazz at Lincoln Center and SF Jazz, it is quite possible that few young people in the United States would be playing or hearing jazz today.

Freedom of expression, human freedom, freedom of thought, and the freedom that results from an ongoing pursuit of racial justice. But if jazz was, at one point in its history, about freeing oneself from artificial and arbitrary constraints in both popular and classical music, about freeing society from its restrictions and repressions, then, for many of its fans and practitioners, it has now become about preserving and conserving a tradition, an ideology, a set of standards, a form of practice.

Today, jazz is an art that can satisfy the compulsions of the liberationist and the conservative, of those who seek change and of those who prefer stasis. Is jazz still a relevant form of artistic expression, still a significant force in the world of popular music or the world of art music?

In other words, is jazz so insufficiently hip that its pretensions and its conceit no longer matter as either a theory or a practice? Has it become, in many respects, like mainline Protestantism, a theory and a practice prized by its followers because of its limited and slowly declining appeal and its glorious history as something that once did matter?

Fifty or one hundred years from now will more accessible and commercial jazzers like saxophonist Kenny G and trumpeter Chris Botti be more remembered than trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and pianist Brad Mehldau?

To be sure, for many of its fans and followers, jazz has gone from being an anti-establishment to an establishment art form, something that may have drained the art form of its purpose and its emotional correlatives.

If jazz has acquired a new power, a new appeal, then what precisely is it and what is the relationship of this new power, this new appeal, to the power and appeal that jazz once had when it was the dominant music of the United States? Has jazz transcended the marketplace or is it a music that deserves to be protected from the desecrations of the market as we try to protect classical music? Protectionism, when it comes to the arts, has usually been a lost cause. There is no question that jazz is still present in the culture, but the larger question is: does jazz still matter?

We think it does in ways that are rather astonishing in their implications. Jazz artists like Robert Glasper and Kamasi Washington and avant hip hop artists like Kendrick Lamar may forge a new synthesis of jazz, the avant-garde, and the popular that rivets new audiences or may provide a radically new relationship between art and the popular.

We suggest that jazz improvisation remains a compelling metaphor for interrelationship, group creativity, and freedom that is both aesthetic and social. Improvisation transforms, one-ups, reinterprets, and synthesizes evolving human experience and its sonic signatures regardless of their classical, popular, or cultural origins.

The most innovative popular musicians are returning to its acoustic power, representing the screams of Aunt Hester, as Fred Moten has put it, with the unconventional timbres and tones of haunting jazz.

A mixture of historical reckoning and utopian possibility bracket the ever-changing character of jazz now. This issue hopes to begin to answer for readers: What made and continues to make jazz different from other forms of music? Why did jazz happen? How did jazz, as popular music, gain and lose its popularity or, put another way, how did it lose its status as a music for the ordinary or casual musical palette?

How did and how do musicians in other countries change jazz and how much did that change affect how Americans performed it? How have the changes that affect the selling of music affected jazz? Did jazz transcend social constructions of race or did it reinscribe them? How did jazz generate criticism of itself? Who constructs the official history of a form of popular music like jazz?

Can music without words, as most jazz is, contain any specific political meaning? Can a music fade away and not fade away at the same time? Spring Why Jazz Still Matters.

Author Information. Bird was, Too. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, , 7, Most recently jazz has been lauded as a business strategy or as a model for group creativity and collaboration. See Michael H. Critics ranging from T. Eliot to Ernest Hemingway used the expression. Indeed, despite how much he deplored the characterization, even Ralph Ellison used it.

This is only to point out how much the N -word, far from being just a lower-class obscenity, penetrated the reaches of high culture. This realization only underscores the impact of the word on the Western world and how powerful its stigmatizing reach. It is important to recognize this. It is not our purpose here to do so either, although a certain amount of music appreciation is unavoidable in some of these essays because the writers love the music and inevitably wish for others to recognize its virtues as well as its importance.

It bears all the earmarks of middlebrow school lessons and the quest for bourgeois respectability. And it is, in the end, not persuasive because it diminishes the art it is trying to promote.

The true goal here with these essays is to remind readers that the culture we have and the society we live in owe a great many of its admirable aspects to the monumental achievement of jazz as both a music and an art movement. Langston Hughes, in responding to the question of why he was not a member of the Communist Party, defended the need for the artist to be independent and for art to be free of political coercion from the state. In some vital ways, the essays in this volume, as is this introduction, are arguing that jazz itself was a world revolution.