Реферат: The JAZZ Story

system.

BIRTH OF THE BLUES

After the slaves were freed, Afro-American music grew rapidly. The

availability of musical instruments, including military band discards, and

the new-found mobility gave birth to the basic roots of Jazz: brass and

dance band music and the blues.

The blues, a seemingly simple form of music that nevertheless lends itself

to almost infinite variation, has been a significant part of every Jazz style,

and has also survived in its own right. Today's rock and soul music would

be impossible without the blues. Simply explained, it is and eight (or

twelve) bar strain with lyrics in which the first stanza is repeated. It gets its

characteristic "blue" quality from a flattening of the third and seventh notes

of the tempered scale. In effect, the blues is the secular counterpart of the

spirituals.

BRASS BANDS AND RAGTIME

By the late 1880's, there were black brass, dance and concert bands in

most southern cities. (At the same time, black music in the north was

generally more European-oriented.) Around this era, ragtime began to

emerge. Though primarily piano music, bands also began to pick it up and

perform it. Ragtime's golden age was roughly from 1898 to 1908, but its

total span began earlier and lingered much later. Recently, it has been

rediscovered. A music of great melodic charm, its rhythms are heavily

syncopated, but it has almost no blues elements. Ragtime and early Jazz

are closely related, but ragtime certainly was more sedate.

Greatest of the ragtime composers was Scott Joplin (1868-1917). Other

masters of the form include James Scott, Louis Chauvink Eubie Blake

(1883-1983) and Joseph Lamb, a white man who absorbed the idiom

completely.

ENTER JASS