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April 2020 Spotlight is on Jazz Appreciation Month

by Unknown User on 2020-04-02T09:00:00-04:00 | 0 Comments

Despite complex origins, the status of jazz as a distinctively African-American music is beyond question. Nonetheless, in its development from folk and popular sources in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America, jazz has transcended boundaries of ethnicity and genre. Played in every country of the globe, it is perhaps twentieth-century America's most influential cultural creation, and its worldwide impact, on both popular and art music, has been enormous. Jazz has proved to be immensely protean and has existed in a number of diverse though related styles, from New Orleans–and Chicago-style Dixieland jazz, big band or swing, bebop, funky cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, free jazz, and jazz rock. One reason for the variety in jazz is thatPage 1160  |  Top of Article it is basically a way of performing music rather than a particular repertory. It originated in blends of the folk music, popular music, and light classical music being created just prior to 1900, and now embraces a variety of popular musical styles from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa, as well as diverse modern, classical, and avantgarde performance traditions.

Jazz also has an inescapable political thrust. It originated during a time of enormous oppression and violence in the South against African Americans. The early African-American practitioners of jazz found racial discrimination in virtually every aspect of their lives, from segregated dance halls, cafés, and saloons to exploitative record companies. Like blackface minstrelsy, early jazz was popular with whites, in part because it reinforced "darkie" stereotypes of African Americans as happy-go-lucky and irrepressibly rhythmic. Nonetheless, many black jazz musicians used jazz as a vehicle for cultural, artistic, and economic advancement, and were able to shape their own destinies in an often hostile environment. African-American jazz was, from its earliest days, often performed for or by whites, and it was assimilated into the overall fabric of popular music, to the uneasiness of some on both sides of the racial divide. It has continued to mirror and exemplify the complexities and ironies of the changing status of African Americans within the broader culture and polity of the United States.

Description from:

Goines, L. (2006). Jazz: Overview. In C. A. Palmer (Ed.), Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History (2nd ed., Vol. 3, pp. 1159–1167). Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA. Retrieved from http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX3444700667/GVRL?u=berea&sid=GVRL&xid=d5f34a26


Check out the titles below for more info on Jazz:

Cover Art King of Jazz by James Layton; David Pierce; Richard Koszarski (Editor); Crystal Kui (Appendix by)
ISBN: 9780997380101
Publication Date: 2016-11-21

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