How Jazz Came From Various Elements

¶ … Earliest Origins of Jazz Jazz has several origins and influences that make it what it is today. The earliest origins of jazz can be traced back to the Congo where the slave trade was based. Here the Congo natives had a tradition of music that consisted of a single line of melody and had a pattern of the call-and-response that is typical of jazz today. The rhythms found in this native music also consisted of a structure that was a cross-beat.

This cross-rhythm drove the sub-Saharan styles of music in Africa and was related to the speech patterns of the Africans. The relationship between the beats of the music is what made it complex, for one could not be separated from the other, as they participated in a kind of dialogue, so to speak. This supports the call-and-repeat scheme of the overall structure of this early influence on the development of jazz (Cooke 8).

But there were other origins of jazz as well and these were rooted in the harmonies of the rural hymns in the South where African-Americans heard the church music of the choirs and where they sang these hymns and made them part of their own culture and musical styles. These harmonies were rich and deep and explored tensions of melancholy, sadness and joy that went along with the various religious feelings which the hymns produced (Cooke 15).

The African-Americans made these songs into their "spirituals" and these spirituals were often spirited, which would give to jazz its rollicking, lively, and spirited vibe. Still, while these hymnals and spirituals were essentially of a single melody, the jazz that developed out of them consisted of multiple melodies and was more complex in terms of creating a texture in the music that would produce these different melodies at the same time, filling the ear with a burst of sound that went in different directions at once (Kubik, 112).

European instruments also played a role in serving as an early origin of jazz as instruments like the violin (the fiddle) began to be popular among African-Americans. They developed a love for the fast, swinging rhythms that these strings could produce and the minstrel shows of the 19th/20th centuries helped to spread this kind of music.

One of the first composers to use all these influences in a composition was the American Louis Gottschalk, who took the rhythmic sub-Saharan structure and the island melodies from the South and used them to produce piano music that could be played as popular music in salons. Gottschalk hailed from New Orleans, and this city was very influential geographically speaking because it was a port city that served as a central destination point of people, crossing over from the Caribbean and mixing with the African-American communities of the South.

Jazz even has an origin in the racist laws of America known as the "Black Codes" which were post-Civil War laws that were enacted in the South and were designed to keep freed African-Americans from really enjoying their freedom. One of these Black Code laws was that blacks were not allowed to "drum" as was a custom for black music in the islands in the Caribbean.

Thus what happened was that African-Americans used their bodies to produce rhythmic beats: they clapped and stomped their feet, and this was later incorporated into jazz too. So all of these elements were there being combined together to originate a new style of music that was wholly unique and unlike anything the world had ever seen before (Palmer 39).

Ragtime can be considered a forerunner of jazz because it was the kind of music that African-Americans produced for entertainment after the Civil War when they were freed and allowed to move around from city to city. This was a popular form of music and was like swing and blues in that it had regional influences that also impacted the development of style which fed into the jazz style.

Brass bands using rhythms from swing and ragtime thus helped to fuse all of these elements together to combine the earliest origins of jazz into one movement. The backbeat became rhythmically important in this manner. Moreover, the unexpected surprises in rhythm generated from the minstrel show music that spread throughout the States created an effect of syncopation that helped to drive the main force of jazz music as it began to really originate.