Entering into this class, I had virtually no prior knowledge of jazz. The extent of my jazz background included knowing names such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, and having listened to some swing music (which I didn’t even know was jazz), but that was it. I assumed that we would learn about different artist and their music, but never expected to be taken on a road trip across America through different eras to examine how distinct forms of jazz developed and affected American culture.
To begin, I had no idea of how rich the background of jazz was. One thing that surprised me was that the roots of jazz dated all the way back to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. I knew that Jazz came out of New Orleans, but I never thought of how it emerged as a genre of music. Another fact I was ignorant to, was how large an influence African culture had on jazz’s formation. Elements such as vital aliveness, beat focus, call and response and propulsive rhythm can be seen in the earliest forms of jazz to modern jazz. It was interesting to learn how jazz spread from New Orleans to Chicago and New York and how jazz affected those cities’ culture.
I expected to learn about different jazz musicians (which we did), but I was surprised to learn how those musicians, and the music they played, could totally transform a society. Prior to this course, I did not have the slightest inkling of how jazz music shaped the American culture throughout the 20th century. Jazz changed the way people thought about race, business and even living conditions. It went from music for hicks in New Orleans, to the epitome of modernity in Chicago and New York during the 1920s, to music for the masses during the Swing Era then to a counter-cultural movement with Bebop. Within Chicago, jazz night clubs provided day laborers the means to escape the reality of their hard days, while simultaneously providing mobsters a front at which they could sell alcohol during Prohibition. In New York, jazz provided a way for people to make rent, popularize jazz under the name of swing and legitimize jazz as a discipline through Bebop. Jazz as a musical style is not given proper acknowledgement of its importance in forming American culture.
I never knew how important jazz actually was. It was America’s first original musical form; that everything before it was simply imitations of European musical styles. The emergence of jazz was a mixture of different cultural influences creating something new that America could call its own. Without it, music, and American culture while we’re at it, would not exist as we know it. If nothing else, I have come to appreciate jazz for its contribution of shaping American society to what it is today.
