Early 20th Century Jazz Music

The music of the early 20th century was heavily jazz and blues. The bases of jazz music were influenced by the field hollers, hymns, and work songs from African Americans in the 1800s. Until 1901, improvisation, the style of Dixieland, created the genre of jazz, where every performer is playing different rhythms and tunes at the same time. Cornet player, Louis Armstrong, changed the Dixieland style and gave the idea for players to perform separate solos at different times. In the 1930s, Swing was introduced to American music. Performers established the style of Swing by playing in sync with one another in contrast to the 1920s jazz when players followed their own path of tunes and rhythms. The Great Depression was a time of sorrow and misery,
but Swing music, along with Swing dancing, lifted the spirits of many. Jazz in the 1940s consisted of “fast tempos, intricate melodies, and complex melodies” (History of Jazz) known as Bebop. The creation of Bebop was achieved through the reinvention of jazz by John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Charlie Parker reinvented the jazz sound the achieve the creation of Bebop. Moving into the 1950s, jazz was a consolidation of Latin American cultures such as African Americans and Spaniards. Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie portrayed the Latin sound into their own music with musicians from Cuba (History of Jazz). In the 1960s, jazz music started to lose its popularity from the closing of clubs and media pointing to the new genre of rock ‘n’ roll. Jazz also could not keep up with the youth of the new generation and the new technologies such as amplifiers and music manipulations (DeVeaux). Struggling with the new rock ‘n’ roll and disco genres of the 1970s, jazz and blues fusioned with funk to produce new rhythms and energies of rock.