How jazz came to be...

After checking out the poll, the results showed that your most favorable type of jazz was the New Orleans Jazz. What is really New Orleans Jazz? The fact is that New Orleans is definitely the birth place of jazz in general. Jazz is an original American musical art form that developed around the start of the 20th century in New Orleans, rooted in a confluence of numerous American music traditions.Or this is how they say in wikipedia. So how did this happen? We can say it all started in the late 19th century when public dance halls, clubs and tea rooms started to open in the cities. The music between whites and blacks had already started to interact, African dance moves had already been adopted by the whites (like the shimmy, turkey trot, buzzard lope, etc.) after seeing them in vaudeville shows. The popular music at the time was blues-ragtime.This kind of music was vibrant, enthusiastic and in the early stages was in the format of marches, waltzes and other traditional forms of music but with one constant figure - syncopation.

New Orleans was the musical center in the region which had the greatest number of free people of color. The early jazz style that was developed in that area was called Dixieland (New Orleans Jazz). They used more intricate rhythmic improvisation than ragtime, and incorporated "blues" style elements including "bent" and "blue" notes, and using the European instruments in novel ways. The band which was credited with starting the jazz revolution was the Original Dixieland Jass Band, who arguably made the first recordings of jazz in April of 1917; in mid 1917, the band respelled "Jass" as "Jazz."


And that's how the Dixie was born. More about the history of jazz - click here!