Pre-History
Jazz is the result of a unique chemistry of coincidences. One break in the chain, and we probably wouldn't have the privilege of hearing the jazz we hear today.
This unique music was not born on any one day. It just happened. Its genes sown far and wide across the new continent, took root. And grew.
In the cotton fields of America's Southern States. In its segregated churches. It grew out of travelling minstrel shows, work songs of the railroads and the busy ports.You'll find its roots in the 'ring shouts' of camp-meetings and religious gatherings of the late 1700s. Or, maybe, you should go back in time. For much of what happened in the 1700s was not American at all.
The slave trade dumped hundreds and thousands of West Africans - Senegalese, Yorubas, Dahomeans, Ashantis - into the cotton and tobacco industries of the Caribbean and the Americas. The traditions of these slaves were not all alike...and neither were those of their 'owners'.
The Portuguese, Spanish and French left this West African culture more intact than British Protestantism - which, banned dancing and drumming.
So African and Catholic rites cross-fertilised, to the extent, that the drumbeats of one ancient religion disguised the rituals of the relatively more recent one on Catholic feast days.On the other side of the coin, Protestantism's ban on 'disrespectful' movement spawned the vocally rhythmic preaching of revivalism. Conflicts which eventually flowed into jazz.
But for all the differences among the thousands of slaves in the New World, there were commonalties too.
In West African music, rhythm had a pre-eminence over melody and harmony. Spoken languages were dependent on pitch and intonation for meaning...subtleties of sound which had no place in European musical tradition...singing in falsetto and the bending and sliding of notes evolved from here.
Also consider the significance of percussion music in African religious music. Over the centuries it resulted in a sophistication of rhythm - often with sounds grouped in triplets, set slightly out of phase and overlaid with each other. Techniques unthinkable in European music.
But still, none of these differences, on their own, would have led to jazz the way we know it today.
In the pages which follow, we will see how history, with all its ups and downs, paved the way for jazz. Prostitution, The World Wars, Prohibition, Chicago's Gangland, Union Strikes...they all helped the music mature.
Indeed, if history didn't happen the way it did, we would all be poorer by the absence of jazz.
