Jazz Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Jazz is a musical style that developed from both African and European traditions emerging around the beginning of the twentieth century in African American communities, particularly in New Orleans. Most jazz styles share some or many of the following musical qualities: syncopation, swing, improvisation, ”blue notes,” call and response, sound innovation such as growls and stretched notes and polyrhythmic structure.

Ragtime (where brass instruments and African rhythm and beat fused to form ”raggedy” music) was quickly absorbed into early twentieth century mainstream white musical cultures. As the New Orleans ragtime moved north through California to Chicago and New York, new variants appeared: ”big band” in the 1930s, ”swing” in the 1940s and ”bebop” in the 1940s and 1950s. Then there were new styles and fusions from the avant-garde sound of Keith Jarrett and Eberhard Weber through jazz funk and acid jazz to jazz house and nu jazz.

Jazz clubs emerged in the days of alcohol prohibition as sites away from surveillance and the policing of alcohol and drugs. It then became synonymous with a variety of counter cultures (black, gangster, immigrant, youth) in which individual freedom and Dionysian values were cultivated. Critically, jazz opened up spaces of cultural transition: ”jazz was welcoming, inclusive, open. It replaced minstrelsy with a cultural site where all Americans could participate, speak to one another, override or ignore or challenge or slide by the society’s fixations on racial and ethnic stereotypes. Black Americans (and other ethnic outsiders) could use it to enter mainstream society, white Americans could flee to it from mainstream society, and the transactions created a flux and flow that powered American cultural syntheses” (Santano 2001).

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