jazz! Do you know his story?

Jazz is a musical genre born in the second half of the nineteenth century in the United States, which expanded globally throughout the twentieth century.

The word jazz, in a sense related to music, was not used in the early stages of jazz formation. In fact, it was written for the first time on March 6, 1913, in the San Francisco Bulletin, when, when reviewing the type of music played by an army orchestra, he said that its members trained at the rhythm of ragtime and jazz. According to Walter Kingsley, collaborator of the New York Sun, "the term is of African origin, common in the African Gold Coast and in the interior lands". Much later still, in January of 1917 in New York, the word jazz appeared as a definer of the music contained in an album, recorded by the Original Dixieland Band; during that year, moreover, the term would be popularized, which had probably already been commonly used in oral language between 1913 and 1917.

It can be considered that, just as jazz has had consequences in numerous types of music, nowadays jazz receives different influences from different musical currents and in the same way that it happened in the academic music during the period of romanticism, the composers of contemporary jazz print in their works so unique and personal elements, that aesthetics can vary greatly from composer to composer. However, improvisation and interaction are still maintained as fundamental components of these works, which supports the concept of jazz, not as a totally defined style, but as a procedure. It should be clarified that in contemporary jazz (specifically speaking of the music of composers and arrangers such as Chris Lightcap, Chris Morrissey, Ben Wendel) the way of playing is determined mostly by the sound result that the composer achieves to establish in a work (from all forms, from freedom and improvisation, continue to generate situations beyond what was established by the composer). This is in contrast to the way in which traditional jazz is performed, in which, although each instrument has a rhythmic, harmonic and / or melodic base (be it swing, blues, ballad, etc.), the form in which that each interpreter executes, is free.

Throughout the centuries, human beings have sought to explain their emotions through their senses, always trying to express them in the purest and most authentic way. This is how he found in the sounds a precise language to carry out his search. From improvisations to a full orchestra, he developed the musical art, which has always accompanied the history of humanity. We invented music of war, peace, love, sadness and happiness. There is also music of slavery and music of freedom, the latter is what we call jazz.

Jazz is one of the richest legacies left in its wake by miscegenation and the conquest of the American continent. Its two main roots are African music and European music, derived from the arrival of African slaves to crops and mines in the United States, and traditional European music. In cotton crops, the slaves were forbidden to talk while they worked, so they used messages encrypted in sticky melodies so that the communiqué could go far from voice to voice.