Jazz

Jazz is the blues’ worldly cousin: born in the same era from the same African American inheritance, but in a city unlike anywhere else in the South. New Orleans had brass bands, Creole conservatory training, Caribbean rhythm in its port, and a living memory of African drumming in Congo Square — ingredients no Delta plantation possessed (Gioia 2011).

Around 1900, dance bands led by cornetists like the unrecorded Buddy Bolden began roughing up ragtime and pop tunes with blues tonality and collective improvisation — every horn embellishing at once, a polyphony the city’s funeral parades had rehearsed for decades. After the original generation scattered north (the Great Migration again — Joe “King” Oliver to Chicago in 1918, his protégé Louis Armstrong following in 1922), jazz became a national craze on record. Armstrong’s Hot Five sides then changed the music’s center of gravity: the improvising soloist, not the ensemble, became jazz’s protagonist — a template every later genre of American music absorbed (Gioia 2011).

Jazz’s relationship to the blues family is influence flowing both ways, not descent. Jazz musicians treated the blues as a permanent dialect — Armstrong backed Bessie Smith, Ellington built tone poems on blues form — while jazz phrasing fed back into rhythm and blues and beyond. From this node the jazz branch runs through swing, bebop, cool and fusion, with the Paris-born gypsy jazz as its first transatlantic offshoot.