Jazz History

Jack Claxton

Jazz History Final

Jazz making a fall but can you still make a living on Jazz?

Jazz is, without a doubt, making their way down the slopes with other big genres take their fame and people just losing interest in the genre altogether. Although Jazz has lost a lot of their fame and losing the interest of their fans that use to be ‘so loyal,’ the question is still asked, “can you still make a living while being a jazz performer as your full-time job?” When people think about a Jazz performer or an artist of the genre of jazz, they look and think of someone who will perform for an audience and reel in money from their listeners but in reality, those Jazz prodigies are taking their knowledge to the classrooms.

Although the majority

The origin of this famous genre of music has a long history. It mainly lies with African American musicians. Unlike today where Jazz songs are written down, the early songs were not written down but were passed orally from one musician to the other. In Africa for instance, the culture and life remains concentrated and centered around the village. Everyone participates in his or her own way and the dances and songs composed have specific uses like in occasions such as deaths, births and other rites of passage (Jonas). Some traditional aspects related to the Jazz from an African context is that the music involves the whole body, swaying to the beat, handclapping among others. The singing was in most cases led by a soloist and the group replied in harmony. Like it is the case with traditional African music, rhythm is the heart of jazz

It evolved in Harlem New York City in the 1920’s (Jonas 1998). This dance is considered a jazz music as the movements resemble those of the jazz. It was indeed a fusion of several dances that preceded it. At most times, it is classified under jazz dance.

Improvisation has had great effects on the development of jazz. It brought out several changes on jazz. One of them is where each dance started to be connected to each other hand-to-hand. Improvisation also made it a social culture and more people got involved in it. It thus got more audience. Other than this, improvisation contributed to it being referred to as street dance.

The Harlem renaissance was a time of cultural celebration. The end of bondage made people celebrate (Jonas). Through these celebrations form oppression, dance was invented. This dance spread to various places where people used it to celebrate for other occasions. This was facilitated by migration. For instance, the African Americans migrated in large numbers. This way, they spread the dance.

Dance became used mostly before the existence of movie (Ellenberger). This is became people did not have any other way of relieving themselves. With the movie and film, dance became less common. There was however change in the dancing styles as the film provided the people with several alternatives of