Harlem Jazz Genesis of Jazz:

Harlem Jazz

Genesis of Jazz: The Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance

Music, as with all art and other cultural elements -- indeed, just like culture itself -- is in a constant state of evolution. New artists bring subtle individual variations that are built upon by contemporary and subsequent artists, and so genres evolve and blossom into new genres, styles, and sounds. At times, however, new types of music emerge on a more concentrated timescale due to more substantive and rapid changes in culture. Both types of musical evolution can be greatly impacted by the movement of populations of people, which generally creates a separation from one set of cultural influences and the meeting of new cultures and influences. Irish immigrants to the United States in the nineteenth century, for example, brought their Irish folk music over with them. Over the next many decades, separated from their Irish influences yet faced with new lives and new communities, this music developed into bluegrass and other forms of folk music throughout a wide region of the country.

A more sudden musical evolution was precipitated by the movement of the African-American population within the United States' borders during what has been dubbed the Great Migration occurring after World War I and into the 1920s. The following paragraphs will detail how and why this Great Migration occurred, and how it led to the development of Jazz in New York City. Music was only one feature of the artistic and literary explosion amongst New York City African-Americans that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, yet in many ways Jazz is the most evocative of the energy of creation, crowd, and consternation that was brewing amongst African-Americans in the era.

Due to the use of slave labor on Southern farms and plantations and the continued sharecropping and employment as farm laborers of many after the end of the Civil War and slavery, the majority of the United States' African-American population was still living in the South by 1910 (Mintz 2006). World War I saw much of the workforce joining the military and heading overseas, however, and manufacturing jobs in the North promised a new and potentially more lucrative way of life for many of the blacks living in the South, where rates of impoverishment were high (Mintz 2006). These jobs were the first cause of the Great Migration of African-Americans to the North, especially to large urban areas, and soon these communities themselves became a draw (Mintz 2006). In this way, concentrations of African-Americans in many cities, especially New York, began to develop their own unique culture due to their concentration in a new place and their separation from the old.

Jazz was a style of music that had already been developing in the South, starting with the blues of various regions and coalescing in New Orleans especially (Scholastic 2011). The roots of such music can be traced back still further to the gospel hymns, work songs, and field calls that developed amongst slave populations in the south during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Scholastic 2011). The Southern and decidedly African-American sounds of blues and early jazz were brought along with the Great migration, where New Orleans styles like Dixieland met with the calmer strains of the Mississippi blues and other styles (Scholastic 2011). In New York, with the greatest concentration of African-Americans, new collaborations and iterations sprang up quite rapidly.

The Harlem Renaissance, named for the neighborhood in Manhattan where the African-American community was concentrated and centralized, was an explosion of artistic, literary, and musical expression largely because it represented the first major community of African-Americans located in a small geographical area (McDougal & Littell 2008). The jazz music that developed in New York as a part of this Renaissance was especially dependent on the concentration of African-Americans from different parts of the South, with their own musical traditions and styles, as it was the blend and evolution of these combined styles that led to the styles and sounds of what can now be thought of as Jazz proper (McDougal & Littell 2008). With only white audiences allowed in the most popular clubs, the sounds of Jazz became popular outside of the African-American community and developed into mainstream styles that persisted for decades (McDougal & Littell 2008).