No
one description
of jazz adequately outlines this ever changing music;
no definition can pinpoint simply when and where it
all began, nor even settle when the name "jazz" took
hold over variants like "jass" or "Jasz." The
spelling of the word took years to stabilize.
Jazz represents a multiformity of musical ideas and
originating influences.
African American music forms of
slave culture and the black American experience were
already shaping this emerging musical idiom (and
others) for probably a hundred years. Music of
rent and house parties, after work dances, religious
song, cries of street vendors, work songs, and field
hollers, blues, jug bands, and juking were some of
the places and art forms created within African
American communities.
Even before the composed rags
of Joplin, Turpin, Scott, and Lamb, in the early
1900s, there had existed for nearly two decades
"shout piano" or "jig piano." Piano ragging
was an improvisational reworking the tempos of known
tunes played by ear. Ragging style was applied
by the popular virtuoso banjo players, in minstrel
show music, in string bands, and for buck
dancing. Later, the immense distribution of
parlor uprights and player pianos throughout the
country allowed ragtime to be easily incorporated
into the repertoires of music reading players at
home as well as in clubs.
Jazz's New Orleans roots
represent just one stage of growth; it did not
simply spring forth as the entertainment of the
professional parlors of the Storyville district of
New Orleans. The new jazz bore the stamp of
Caribbean, Spanish, French, and South American
ideas. Although most of the jazz innovators
and emulated masters of early jazz were African
American, jazz's musical core also incorporates
Western European ideas. New Orleans at the
turn of the century was home to many music
organizations; there were frequent ragtime balls and
an availability of brass instruments. Numerous
New Orleans Creoles and former slaves were
classically trained as well as being accomplished
pianists, kept busy by the high level of musical
activity.
Missouri played no small role
in developing jazz forms. St. Louis was a
major stopping off point for musicians headed to New
York and Chicago from New Orleans in the 1910s and
1920s. Kansas City was on the western edge of
the TOBA circuit (Theater Owners Booking Agency,
provided bookings for black performers). It
was a major stop for the traveling musicians on a
circuit already established by earlier minstrel
shows, carnivals, and vaudeville acts where mainstay
blues performers such as Ma Rainey, Mamie Smith, and
Bessie Smith performed for the mainstream.
Kansas City also became home to musicians when tours
disbanded which brought no less a contributor than
Count Basie to Kansas City when his band broke up.
Publishing in Sedalia ushered
in the smashing success of Scott Joplin's "The Maple
Leaf Rag" in 1899, selling a million copies, a first
in the publishing industry, and the mutually
supportive relationships between entertainers,
businessmen, and city officials created the so
called "wide open" cities. This generated a
context of ample work for musicians in Sedalia when
it was a major railhead, and Kansas City, during the
Pendergast regime. Work meant, then as now, in
any genre, being exposed to outside musical ideas,
other artists, and having ample occasion to invent
and develop performance and stylistic ideas.
Jazz was immensely popular as
dance music (until the 1940s when bop came in) and
in rural areas, bands regularly played at road
houses, dance clubs, movie theaters, juke joints,
and vaudeville stops. Bands nurtured
enthusiasm for dance and influenced other genres
while the bands themselves developed regional
styles. The jazz that flourished in Kansas
City in the 1930s was so influential it came to be
known as Kansas City style. This style swept
the nation because of its swing, upbeat danceable
drive, and strong sense of rhythm around which riffs
were improvised. St. Louis hosted the
development of key blues and rhythm and blues
players.
Leadership still emanates from
these cities. In St. Louis, the formation in
1968 of The Black Musicians Group (BAG) created a
nucleus of musicians devoted to fostering the
creativity and livelihoods of not strictly bop
musicians by assisting with promotion, concerts, and
recording. Kansas City has a Jazz Commission
as part of city government. Both cities have
jazz and blues organizations and host outstanding
jazz and blues festivals and concerts throughout the
year.
Source page -
http://www.coin.missouri.edu/
community/folkarts/jazz.html