How Jazz BeganAfter slavery was abolished in 1863, those former slaves who were in and nea

How Jazz Began

After slavery was abolished in 1863, those former slaves who were in and near New Orleans found themselves surrounded by many different kinds of music.

Among the freed slaves, two very different types of music developed from the African rhythms that had formed the basis for the Negroes' work songs. One line of musical development led to the creation of religious songs, which were called spirituals. The other produced songs that were not religious, but worldly; these songs were called blues.

In the years following the end of the Civil War in 1865, a whole new musical world opened up to the freed Negroes. They have had musical instruments when they were slaves, but these were mostly stringed instruments. Now they were able to use professionally-made wind instruments. Many of these were horns that had been left behind by soldiers in the northern and southern armies. The freed slaves taught themselves to play these wind instruments, inventing their own methods of relating horn sounds to the sounds made by human voices. At first, they played the hymns and marches familiar to them. But these musicians were basically singers, and when they blew on the horns they tried to produce what they could hear "singing" in their minds. Through these "singing horns", the marches and hymns developed a rhythm they had never had before. The horns also gave the players the addition of two "blue" notes—a flattened third and a flattened seventh. This was characteristic of Negro singing that became a basic characteristic of jazz.

There was still another element contributing to the development of jazz. This was a kind of piano music which was called ragtime(拉格泰姆音乐). In ragtime, the piano player keeps a steady beat with his left hand while his right hand changes the beat in unexpected ways. This produces an effect called syncopation(切分)—another characteristic of jazz.

The first important jazz band was a group led by Buddy Bolden, a barber. In 1895 and 1896 Bolden was known as the "King" among New Orleans musicians. When Bolden played for outdoor dancing in a park, his playing was powerful enough to attract all the dancers from another park a block away. "Calling my children home" was how Bold- en described this.

For Bolden's band and others that grew up around it in New Orleans, each player could compose his music while he was playing it; the music was improvised(即兴创作), not written in advance. Usually there was no piano because these bands served many purposes: playing for dances at night, marching in daytime parades, playing for funerals or riding around the city on wagons to advertise products. As a result, the piano in jazz developed in a separate line of its own until the 1920s.

As the nineteenth century became the twentieth, Negro bands were being heard more and more on the streets of New Orleans. Included in the crowd of listeners who followed them were black youngsters such as Louis Armstrong, The new music excited young white musicians, too, and soon there were white bands trying to copy this Negro style. of playing.

But the "blue" tones that came so naturally to the Negroes were not easy for the white musicians. For them, the ragtime rhythms were easier than the curving roll of Negro music. The white musicians created the foundation for what is now called Dixieland jazz.

At first, jazz was known as "good-time music"; it was mainly music for dancing. In New Orleans, and in other towns in the United Sates, jazz was most often heard it sections of the town where "respectable" citizens were not supposed to be seen. Thus, in New Orleans, this young style. of music became popular during the first twenty years of the twentieth century in Storyville, a section of the city where streets were lined with dance halls and bars, along with even less acceptable places for entertainment.

In 1917, du

A．Y

B．N

C．NG