Development of Jazz in the U.S.

During the 1920s, while European classical music was being "turned upside down" by such composers as Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, the United States was quietly, developing its own distinct and separate musical form with a decidedly unclassical name--jazz. At this point, jazz was not the product of a handful of composers or formal creative innovators. Instead, it was a relatively unsophisticated folkmusic, more sociologically motivated than musically, coalesced from a variety of sources into a distinct idiom (Schuller 3).

The legacy of the art form, so distinctly American yet international in its flavor, remains globally popular and one of the easiest American idioms to recognize. In fact, jazz has become far less the popular, afterhours style than an imitated and distinctly American musical form that continues to be imitated even within the classical genre (Ames 55). Jazz is not only imitated in the classical genre, however; several of the new generation

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rse, spirituals were often joyous, and the blues, if not generally joyous, are sometimes comic and often filled with sexual innuendo. "Clearly, the blues evolved not from the spiritual but from the common musical practice that undergrit the work song, the prison song, the street cry, as well as the spiritual" (Collier 35). Ragtime, another form of early jazz, constitutes a concrete musical idiom that arose in the late 1800s and early 1900s, often in dance halls, bordellos, and gambling establishments. It is, however, a complex musical medium, with established rules and formats. Typically containing three or four distinct sections, it is the syncopation and the rhythmic activity present in ragtime that makes it so popular and enjoyable. "It was not a syncopated treatment of a straightlaced song, but a music whose melodies were conceived as fully syncopated. The distinction between ragtime and other styles of music containing syncopated elements was thus qualitative, not quantitative" (Jasen and Tichenor 5). Of a more ironic nature in the history of American Jazz, the first group to record jazz, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, was white musicians from New Orleans. There is even some doubt that this recording portrayed th
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Approximate Word count = 2444
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)