History and Context of Traditional American Jazz and Predicates

Jazz music itself is a modern – or Twentieth Century – mixture of several pre-existing musical styles. Jazz is an collective blend of music deriving from African folk and evolving styles in Black American Music. To define jazz appropriately, it must be noted that there is a long lineage of musical genres that predate jazz. These must be defined and analyzed before there is an effective context to define jazz musical style.

Jazz music was predicated on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, in which hundreds of thousands of Africans were forcefully immigrated into the Americas and put into slave labor. These African slaves brought parts of their Sub-Saharan culture with them, especially music.

“A slave-ship captain named Theodore Canot described how the slaves kept their music alive even as they journeyed to unknown fates in the New World: ‘During afternoons of serene weather, men women, girls, and boys are allowed while on deck to unite in African melodies.’” (Haskins 3)

These traditional musical values in the call-and-response style, exclusively vocal for a long time, eventually became the foundation for jazz. As time progressed, the musical style also progressed, and slave music produced common hymns and gospels. These gospels and early blues, a lamenting style of slave work songs, carried through the emancipation of slaves and the Civil War in the 1860s. With the emancipation of the slaves came initiated black artistry and composition. The new artists, with a foundation of their personal heritage of slavery, were influenced by the European heritage of “minstrelsy” (Haskins 20). American minstrels grew tremendously in popularity throughout the nineteenth century, and famous composers like Stephen Foster incorporated what they knew about basic slave culture into their performances.

The combination of traditional slave music and the minstrelsy became a music known as Ragtime. The style was similar to that of minstrelsy with an added foundation of syncopated and upbeat rhythm. The most famous ragtime composer is Scott Joplin. The ideal ragtime song is “Maple Leaf Rag,” composed by Scott Joplin. The popularity of ragtime spread with the development of the Pianola, an invention which allowed the piano to play itself. Developing alongside ragtime was the blues. The blues, instead of using the syncopated rhythms of traditional African music as Ragtime did, combined the call-and-response style of lyrics and the minstrelsy popular at the time. 

Jazz was developed as different styles of ragtime and blues converged. However, creole and caribbean traditions also influenced the development of early jazz, which primarily took place in New Orleans, Louisiana. From there, jazz took off as a wildly popular expression of American individualism. The importance of voice and improvisation were more emphasized as jazz grew in pre-World War I America. After World War I, jazz found different hubs, such as New York during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The most uniform style of traditional jazz was during the pre-World War II period. After World War II, jazz expanded into many different regions, especially in the “fusion” sub-genres.