The Historical Roots and Evolution of Jazz Music

The Evolution of Jazz Music

Jazz is one of the major musical movements of the twentieth century and, as such, includes many different streams, from vital, emotional, and direct music to the most avant-garde intellectuals. Since its beginnings rooted in the popular music of a small area of the United States, jazz has become a rich, varied, and universal musical phenomenon.

The Origins of Jazz

The traffic of enslaved Africans in America began in the eighteenth century. During the nineteenth century, Black Americans developed a culture very different from their ancestors. The origins of jazz are in the songs of slaves who worked the plantations in the southern United States. These songs can be classified into three genres:

• Work Songs
• Gospel Songs
• Blues

Work Songs

Enslaved people helped themselves with songs during their hard work in planting cotton or sugar cane. The pace of work served as a basis and was accompanied by the sound of tools. It had a sad and melancholy character, but rhythmic. Often, following an African tradition, it was a worker who started singing and the others responded by repeating the same verses the first had sung.

Gospel Songs

This was the religious song of Black Americans. Enslaved people found a place in the church, reuniting as a singing group to find a new expectancy for a world after death, the same for everyone. But these religious songs followed their usual style, with different rhythmic accentuations and sometimes even changing the tune, according to their way of experiencing music. This song (spiritual) often followed a schema of a soloist (preacher) and chorus (response of the people). Even today, you can hear this kind of music in North American Black congregations. Later versions were polyphonic (different voices) and soloists.

The Blues

In this song, the enslaved person expressed their sadness regarding their situations, accepting their fate with resignation. The climate of the blues is slow, sad, and tense, with a certain dose of irony. The singer identified with the sentiment of the lyrics and tried to present it in all its rawness to the public. The earliest professional blues singers date from the late nineteenth century and lived like the old minstrels, without a fixed home.