The origins of the jazz are smoky. Everyone knows it.
New-Orléans, boats and their paddle wheels, brothels of Storyville, mélodieuses churches, and here is the decoration planted for a musical remake of the box of the uncle Tom. He would all the more be trying to ratify this legend which it satisfies everyone, of the experts to the less scholars, for which the jazz remains the ideal davit of the lost illusions, of the life carefree, alcoholic, rythmée, of the mad years, loincloth-bananas of Joséphine or the suit three parts of Louis Armstrong.
One will still add what made its glory well a long time, before the national academies do not invent the “Gold medal” of Jazz! , the expression of the popular counter-culture, the emancipation, the fight against racism and finally of a theory liberator of the music engoncée in traditional diagrams to which the popular layers did not have access, because the culture, Saint-Bourdieu said it, is not made for all.
Too bad !
They is false. The jazz like the traditional one, the baroque or the Indian music obey laws, austere if not Draconian; as for its beginnings they is true that they have the appearance of a merry brothel and heteroclite tribulations, related to commercial requirements than with scrupulous research on experimental art.
Moreover, more than with its African origins, its roots drawing from the source of the Blues, and with all that the unconscious collective can stick to him on the back, the jazz owes all with the classical music, ours, the Western one, because it is well thanks to its “temperament” that it formatted the various inspirations of which it could be nourished.
Do not import, the history of the Jazz thus starts in America at last century with the ragtime.
More than any other instrument it is still the piano, instrument moderated par excellence, the person in charge. Some rags of Scott Joplin could give you an idea of this time. Do not listen to too much of it. They are not good for the ear.
Rather try to get some recordings of the orchestras of then, Blues, Dixieland, even some blues to you sung by Bessie Smith. You will not fail to note what makes the characteristic essential of the jazz of its origins at our days: Swing and the improvisation. The swing is a ternary perception of the binary measure, with inevitably a very clear stressing of the second and the fourth time of measurement. Obviously.