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The Original American Sound

Jazz is an original American art form developed in the early 20th century. Combining both African rhythms and European melodies and harmonies, jazz evolved from several earlier Afro-American musical styles, including ragtime and the blues. Ragtime—a piano style developed in the 1890s—is considered the forerunner of jazz and gave jazz one of its most distinctive features, syncopated rhythm, in which accents fall on unexpected beats. Scott Joplin ("Maple Leaf," "Entertainer"), James Scott, and Tom Turpin are among the major ragtime composers. Some contributions of the blues to jazz include: a 12-bar song form, which provided a common platform for musicians to jam on; the use of blue notes (a slight pitch-bending of the 3rd, 5th, and 7th notes of the major scale); and, most importantly, the practice of improvisation.

The merger of ragtime, the blues, and European brass bands into the earliest jazz style, known as New Orleans or Dixieland jazz, occurred sometime between the 1900s and 1910s in New Orleans, Louisiana. Founded by the cornetist Charles "Buddy" Bolden, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band was the first jazz band to record (in 1917) and popularize what became known as Dixieland jazz. A largely instrumental idiom with great rhythmic and emotional variety, the early jazz band consisted of a front line of cornet (or trumpet), clarinet, and trombone and a rhythm section of banjo (or guitar), double bass, and drums, and occasionally a piano and tuba. While the rhythm section accompanied, the front-line players simultaneously improvised on, or embellished, a theme—a method called collective improvisation. The great composers and instrumentalists of this era include: Jelly Roll Morton (piano), Joseph "King" Oliver (cornet), and Sidney Bechet (clarinet).

Among the early musicians, it was the cornetist-trumpeter Louis Armstrong who almost single-handedly shaped the sound of jazz and laid its foundation. A superb instrumentalist and singer, Armstrong was able to turn an ordinary melody into an eloquent musical statement. He was so innovative in rhythm, melody, and harmony that his music transcended the chiefly ensemble style and established jazz improvisation as a soloist’s art. When Armstrong joined the band led by Fletcher Henderson in 1924, his collaboration with Henderson and with the band’s composer-arranger, Don Redman, also established the sound and style of jazz ensemble, which would heavily influence composers, arrangers, and instrumentalists for the next two decades.

(From http://www.sixstringsmusicpub.com/GCAAseries/09X/JazzHistory.htm)