Jazz: The Role Of Jazz In New Orleans

Jazz came from nineteenth century in New Orleans, In fact, this music genre came for African American underclass. Since the early times of seventeenth century, many native born Africans had been brought to America. They were unwilling to immigrate, and they hoped they can take away the elements of the their culture. Thus, they remained music and folktales. Most of these people were illiterate, they did not have entertaining activities, so they could only sing their songs. When the time passes by, this kind of music got popular throughout the south of the United States, lots of people mimicked African American and sung their songs.
In 1817, the New Orleans City Council established an official site for slave dances, they allowed African American
Jazz musicians always play Jazz music in improvisation, so it require them to create music quickly. In order to create music quickly, some of musicians often do this by changing melodies rhythmically or embellishing the melody. The rhythm of Jazz is often syncopated, and the typical instrument of Jazz include double bass, drums, guitar,piano, saxophone, trumpet, etc. After 1970s, electric bass, electric piano and synthesizer were started to use in Jazz.(Gunther ,1986)
The Evolution of Jazz
Early Jazz
Work songs
Since mid nineteenth century, work songs were widespread in south of United State. This kind of song were created by African slaves, when these labors working in the cotton fields, ports, and railway, they sang work songs to amusement. Work songs reflected the depressed life of slaves. (Ted Gioia, 2011)
B. Different kinds of Jazz
Nearly a century, the development of Jazz was consecutive, and a variety of genres had appeared. Generally speaking, nowadays it can be divided into the following nineteen kinds of style. There are the different style of Jazz in every period.
New Orlean
Goodman had won a spot on the radio show, but he had only a few songs to play. However, the audience of young white dancers favored Goodman's rhythm and daring arrangements.Then, from 1935 to 1946, swing became the most popular music in the United States, and this period is known as the swing era. (Gunther ,1986)
Bebop
Bebop is a style of Jazz that developed in mid-1940s in United State. It developed from younger generation of Jazz musician, they wanted to developed an non-danceable music,which only suitable to listening. Since bebop was no longer a dance music, the musician can play it faster than early Jazz, and drumming shifted to a more elusive and explosive style (Krin,1995).
Latin Jazz
From 1960s to 1970s, Latin jazz is a kind of music genre with Latin American rhythms. It has two main categories of Latin jazz: Afro-Cuban Jazz and Afro-Brazilian Jazz. Afro-Cuban jazz often uses Afro-Cuban instruments such as congas and combined with piano, double bass, etc. Brazilian jazz such as bossa nova is derived from samba. Bossa is generally moderately paced, with melodies sung in Portuguese or English, whilst he related term jazz-samba describes an adaptation of street samba into