Late 1800s
In the 18th century white preachers recognized the potential of their black partners to draw crowds at their large outdoor meetings with theatrical performances.
One such parson, called Black Harry, was known for his rhythmic sermonizing.
He rejuvenated standard psalms by using an exciting sliding-pitch African intonation, a compelling beat, and having the congregation rhythmically repeat his words after every two or three lines.
Inherited from British church practice to help those who couldn't read the prayer book, it echoed the African call-and-response interplay which today runs through gospel music, the exchange of riffs between sections of big-band jazz and the swapping of instrumental choruses against drum-breaks that frequently winds up a theme in small-band bebop jazz.
European and West African music came together both at church and at work. Overseers often did not interfere with African work songs because they seemed to improve both the output and the mood of their slaves.
But music as an art form did not exist in Africa. It was omnipresent. Songs for courtship, gossip and abuse. Songs with rhythms suited for a particular task at hand. Songs for sailors, worship and war. Among the slaves in the New World, work songs found their rhythms in the clang of the hammer and the pickaxe and blended with chanteys and musical themes from the English music hall. This rural music became the basis of the blues.
Blues is one the fundamental elements of jazz. In fact, a great deal of Western popular music also derives from the blues. But the 12-bar-3-chord favourite of every young aspiring guitarist of today is a relatively late development of mixing African-American rural music and the harmonies of European church song.
Before the 1900s a travelling solo blues musician with a guitar or banjo wouldn't really care for how many beats a chord change should last. The song was more important...the sliding of pitch...the falsetto cry...the lyrics..the punchlines...these mattered more than just harmony. This approach resulted in the use of extensive unrehearsed improvisations.
As the 20th century dawned other ingredients dropped into the cauldron from which jazz would emerge. Elements like Minstrelsy, Spirituals and Ragtime.
Minstrelsy was not a big influence on jazz. But it was at the black minstrel shows of the late 19th century where early jazz and blues musicians like Ma Rainey, Jelly Roll Morton and Clarence Williams performed. More importantly, these shows acquainted a growing white audience with musical ideas that would prepare it for the ultimate birth of jazz.
Spirituals did the same groundwork for the coming of jazz. These contemplative, slow variations of African-American religious music came closest to the precepts of European music form. Spirituals were the first type of black American music to make it to to the world's concert halls.
Ragtime was the final craze in the final decade of the 19th century. A technically complex piano music form - with a jaunty, chugging beat mingling with a straight march time - it became an important undertow to the music of early jazz bands and to the dynamic 20s and 30s jazz piano style known as 'stride'.
There was, and still is, a great seaport near the mouth of the Mississippi River called the city of New Orleans. At the end of the 19th Century and into the beginning of the next, it was a teeming potpourri of Afro-American, Anglo-American, French, German, Italian, Mexican, Caribbean and Native-American influences. New Orleans, by its very nature, was to become the world's first center - if not the birthplace- of jazz..
Playing
in the background:
A Tennessee Tantaliser
by Chas Hunter (1900)