Roots

• African Influences
• The Blues
• Gospel Music
• Ragtime
• Band Music

This is a preview of the educational program A Jazz Improvisation Almanac which is under development for the Outside Shore Music Online School. Feel free to browse this preview and learn what you can from it. For a more completed product, though, check out the original freely browsable jazz textbook, A Jazz Improvisation Primer.

Jazz is a music that emphasizes performance over composition, so it is difficult to study its history through written scores as we can with classical music. Furthermore, jazz was born before the popularity of the phonograph, so we cannot track the early development of the music through recordings as we can with rock and roll. As a result, there is considerable controversy over how jazz came to be, with various historians promoting conflicting theories, and various musicians claiming to have invented it. There are also sociological debates over the significance of race in the development of the music. I do not claim to be able to provide definitive answers, but I can summarize the conventional wisom and provide musical examples.

What seems to be generally agreed upon is that jazz was not the creation of any single person, but rather was the natural product of the convergence of various musical cultures in the American South around the turn of the 20^th century. In particular, it appears that jazz was the natural result of the blending from the European musical tradition with the musics of various American cultures - for the most part, Southern black cultures.

African Influences

The musical culture of black Americans during the latter half of the 19th century was not directly African in nature, although it was no doubt influenced by African traditions. The earliest form of music from this culture that can be traced to jazz were the work songs and field hollers the slaves sung during their work during the early 19^th century. This tradition was kept alive after the end of slavery whenever blacks were imprisoned and forced to work on chain gangs. This music often involved repetitive, chant-like melodies that relied on typical African scales of five or six notes. While some of these field hollers were sung in solitude, others invited participation by nearby workers, using the call and response patterns typical of African music:

Syncopation, polyrhythms, and other rhythmic complexities were other African elements that became important in jazz. Much more so than the rhythms of any European music, these rhythms were central to the birth of jazz. It is important to note, however, that most slaves were not allowed to play the drums by their owners. The rhythms were just as often played through hand clapping and shouts. This is actually in keeping with many African traditions. Here is an example of some traditional music from Zimbabwe that demonstrates the types of rhythms that slaves in America were able to incorporate into their music:

The Blues

Eventually, instruments such as the guitar, fife, and other instruments from the American folk tradition came to be incorporated into the music sung by these African-Americans. The style of music we know as the blues came from the attempt to sing essentially African melodies on top of European harmonies. Musically, this created blue notes - notes that are flat compared to their European counterparts. Here is an example of such a melody:

The African influence was also apparent in the use of call and response. As has been described earlier in the section on the theme in jazz composition, the most common blues form consists of a phrase that is repeated and then followed by a related phrase in answer to the first two, yielding an AAB form. Call and response might also be used within each phrase, as the sung melody would be answered by an instrumental fill or background vocals. Here is a typical example:

This form is the basis for many songs in style of the blues, although other chord progressions, including ones of eight or sixteen bars, were used as well. But regardless of the length, the blues form constitutes one only verse of a song. A complete blues performance would involve several different verses. The various verses of a blues do not always relate to one another in subject matter so much as they help convey an overall feeling. The word "blues" has long had the connotation of hardship, pain, and sadness. Emotionally, blues music dealt with the realities of life as a black person in the American South during the late 19^th and early 20^th century. While the days of slavery were over by then, life was still not easy for the ex-slaves. The lyrics generally reflected this fact and spoke of poverty, racism, hunger, and unemployment, as well as problems with love. Of course, not all blues lyrics are negative; the element of hope is often contained within them as well.

The early blues musicians were usually singers and guitarists, such as Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter and Blind Lemon Jefferson. The style of blues they played is known as country blues, and is more apt than others to vary from the standard twelve bar pattern. Robert Johnson is perhaps the best known of musicians who played in this style. Here is an example of his music:

As jazz became established, a number of blues singers worked with jazz bands. Most of these were women, such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. The resultant music is known as city or classic blues:

The musicians mentioned above are known through their recordings made in the 1920's and 1930's, but the music clearly existed prior to this time. A number of blues compositions were published around the turn of the century, with W.C. Handy in particular often singled out as the father of the blues. But since the blues is essentially a folk music, it seems it must have existed long before any examples were published.

Gospel Music

European culture also influenced black American musicians through the church. When the slaves were converted to Christianity, they continued to worship in their new religion as they had in their own culture. While white spiritual music was based on European hymns, black spiritual music traditionally involved a more celebratory or sermon-like style of singing known as gospel. This music made use of blue notes, call and response patterns, and other devices associated with African music. In many ways, gospel and blues can be seen simply as religious and secular manifestations of the same confluence of musical styles. However, the emotional content of these styles differed markedly. While blues was about hardship and pain and matters of the flesh, gospel was about fervor and ecstasy and matters of the spirit.

The following example demonstrates a typical spiritual sung at a black church. Note how the leader can "solo" over the accompaniment of the congregation:

The techniques of gospel music were not reserved for songs such as this, however. Even improvised sermons could be "sung" by the preacher, with accompaniment from the congregation:

Ragtime

Another form of music that resulted from the meeting of African and European cultures was ragtime. The term itself is a contraction of "ragged time" and refers to the use of syncopation that typifies the genre. Unlike the blues and gospel music, or indeed jazz in general, we have something of a record of the birth of ragtime, because the music was fully notated and published as sheet music, and it was "recorded" through the use of piano rolls.

A typical ragtime composition uses harmony that is similar in complexity to that found in 18^th century classical music, but it also includes syncopated rhythms that are more African in origin. Note, however, that "swing" eighth notes were not generally used. In ragtime, the left hand keeps steady time, often by playing alternating bass notes and chords, while the right hand plays a syncopated melody, often voiced with chords as well. Ragtime music was generally intended to be played as written, with little or no improvisation. It is a composed music, and may therefore contain complexity that is not as common in improvised music. For example, rather than employing the chorus structure of a blues or popular song, where a composition would consist of a number of verses that shared the same melodic and harmonic material, a ragtime composition generally contained a series of distinct sections that were not simply variations on each other, but rather provided contrast, much as the different sections of classical composition do. A typical form might be AABBACCDD, with each section lasting eight or sixteen measures. This form represents not one chorus, but the entire composition. Often, it would include a key change, usually to the key of the IV chord, in one or more of the middle sections.

Here is a complete example of a typical ragtime composition:

Scott Joplin was the most important and well known composer and pianist in this style. Here is an example of one his rags, recorded by the composer onto a piano roll:

While some consider ragtime to be the first form of jazz, others are more reluctant to equate ragtime with jazz because of the lack of improvisation and the relative lack of blues harmonies. Jelly Roll Morton was one of the first pianists to improvise rags and perform them with a blues sensibility, and he is one of the musicians who claimed most strenuously to have invented jazz. He was no doubt influential on the course of jazz, and his legacy will be touched on in the section on piano jazz.

Band Music

Another factor in the birth of jazz was the military band and the march music they played. The music played by these bands was the music of John Philip Sousa and other march composers, and it used drums to keep a steady beat. It also used syncopation to some degree, although not nearly so much as ragtime:

There were also dance orchestras that used similar instrumentation but which played for ballroom dances and in traveling minstrel shows rather than for parades and concerts. A popular dance style at the time was the cakewalk, which involved syncopation, and could be performed to ragtime music. This music was generally arranged for the instrumentation of the dance orchestra. It was through this type of music that many black musicians in New Orleans and other cities came upon and learned instruments such as the trumpet or cornet, clarinet, and trombone. Patterning themselves after military marching bands, they formed mobile groups that played music in the streets of New Orleans, but they also performed in traveling shows, as the dance orchestras did. Here is an example of New Orleans band music:

The music these bands played incorporated elements of marches, blues, gospel, and ragtime. It was the fusion of all these musical influences that yielded what we now know as jazz.

Cornetist Buddy Bolden, who unfortunately never had the opportunity to record, is often credited as having led the first true jazz band, around the turn of the century. His band was the direct antecedent for the first style of jazz we know from records, variously known as New Orleans style, Dixieland, or, in hindsight, simply traditional jazz. This is the subject of the next section.

Copyright 2000 Outside Shore Music
Authored by Marc Sabatella

Roots