Jazz music: a very short summary.

by James K. Sayre

19th century jazz music had its roots in the blues, created and sung by African-Americans whose ancestors had been brought to the southern United States under conditions of slavery to work on the cotton plantations.

Dixieland jazz is music that was first created and noted in the late 19th century in southern United States (Dixie was the land south of the Mason-Dixon Line, which was partially surveyed by George Washington and which separated the Free Commonwealth of Pennsylvania from the slave-allowing State of Maryland.

In the early 20th century, jazz and blues music gradually spread northward, especially to St. Louis and Chicago, with the black worker migrations out of the deep South. Dixieland music was played and enjoyed in many areas.

In the 1930s and the 1940s Big Band music came to the fore. In the early 1940s, jazz evolved into many new forms, with the music of vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, drummer Max Roach and pianist Thelonoius Monk. Jazz has continued to evolve since the 1940s.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, jazz is heard on the radio at 91.1 FM on KCSM, www.kcsm.org/. KCSM

A few personal favorites:

Jimmy Rushing, a blues singer. He sings some great songs on records with the Count Basie band, recorded probably in the late 1940s. Check out www.jimmyrushing.com: Jimmy Rushing

Lionel Hampton, vibraphonist

Mose Allison, a vocalist and pianist. In the summer of 1966, a very charming and wise girl friend dragged me off to Club 47 in Cambridge, Massachusetts to hear Mose sing and play piano. He was great.

and Christmas Jazz.

Christmas jazz is not really a separate genre, but many jazz artists and groups put out a Christmas album or CD for their fans.

Reference:

Encyclopedia Britannica, 1964 edition.

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