How Jazz Came From Various Elements Essay

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Earliest Origins of Jazz

Jazz has several origins and influences that make it what it is today. The earliest origins of jazz can be traced back to the Congo where the slave trade was based. Here the Congo natives had a tradition of music that consisted of a single line of melody and had a pattern of the call-and-response that is typical of jazz today. The rhythms found in this native music also consisted of a structure that was a cross-beat. This cross-rhythm drove the sub-Saharan styles of music in Africa and was related to the speech patterns of the Africans. The relationship between the beats of the music is what made it complex, for one could not be separated from the other, as they participated in a kind of dialogue, so to speak. This supports the call-and-repeat scheme of the overall structure of this early influence on the development of jazz (Cooke 8).

But there were other origins of jazz as well and these were rooted in the harmonies of the rural hymns in the South where African-Americans heard the church music of the choirs and where they sang these hymns and made them part of their own culture and musical styles. These harmonies were rich and deep and explored tensions of melancholy, sadness and joy that went along with the various religious feelings which the hymns produced (Cooke 15). The African-Americans made these songs into their "spirituals" and these spirituals were often spirited, which would give to jazz its rollicking, lively, and spirited vibe. Still, while these hymnals and spirituals were essentially of a single melody, the jazz that developed out of them consisted of multiple melodies and was more complex in terms of creating a texture in the music that would produce these different melodies at the same time, filling the ear with a burst of sound that went in different directions at once (Kubik, 112).

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European instruments also played a role in serving as an early origin of jazz as instruments like the violin (the fiddle) began to be popular among African-Americans. They developed a love for the fast, swinging rhythms that these strings could produce and the minstrel shows of the 19th/20th centuries helped to spread this kind of music. One of the first composers to use all these influences in a composition was the American Louis Gottschalk, who took the rhythmic sub-Saharan structure and the island melodies from the South and used them to produce piano music that could be played as popular music in salons. Gottschalk hailed from New Orleans, and this city was very influential geographically speaking because it was a port city that….....

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