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April was Jazz Appreciation Month April was Jazz Appreciation Month and the hardest
thing might be the job of defining “Jazz”.
Looking to many sources for a firm definition only confuses the issue as
“JAZZ” has come to mean many things to people.
Pre-1920 jazz referred to ragtime dance music, the one-step, and the
menagerie of animal dances, not to mention the blues. In the late 1930s it
functioned as a popular art called “Swing” and by the late 1950s it was in the
peak popularity of “modern jazz”. In jazz, with certain things usually
agreed upon (a tune – or at least its underlying harmonic structure – the
relative roles of the instruments, a tempo, a key) as many as eight instruments
might all play at the same time, each going off in their own direction. Spontaneity is always an element of jazz.
Jazz is produced in an atmosphere of improvisation and the ability to
extemporize is just part of the make-up of a jazz player. Today jazz functions in a world where it
competes for its audiences with popular music of various types. But Jazz, this musical art of America, has
received the highest and most widespread praise and respect and has been
awarded much critical and scholarly attention.
Changes in other popular music sometimes seem to be a matter of
fashion. Jazz, on the other hand, has
evolved and developed; its players have learned from and built on the music’s
past. For years jazz was enjoyed as
bands hummed a tune and then played it, unwritten, for an audience wild to hear
“our native music”. William Christopher Handy, born in 1873,
was the first composer to take the rhythm of an old Negro song of the south and
turn it into a popular jazz tune of the 1920s.
He took the ‘blues’ from a not very well-known regional music style, to
one of the dominant forces in American music.
W. C. Handy was an educated musician who used folk material in his
compositions. He played the piano,
cornet, trumpet and did vocals, which allowed him to experience a piece of
music in many different forms. Handy’s first popular success “Memphis
Blues” was recorded in 1914 and it introduced a style of 12-bar blues to many
households. It was the inspiration for the invention of the foxtrot dance
step. Remembered even more is the St.
Louis Blues by Handy which was played in front of a dance crowd for the first
time in 1914. Handy is quoted as saying
“the one-step and other dances had been done in the tempo of |