jazz,musical form, often improvisational, developed byAfrican Americans and influenced by both European harmonic structure andAfrican rhythms. It was developed partially fromragtime andblues and is often characterized by syncopatedrhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, varying degrees of improvisation, often deliberate deviations ofpitch, and the use of originaltimbres.

Any attempt to arrive at a precise, all-encompassing definition of jazz is probablyfutile. Jazz has been, from its very beginnings at the turn of the 20th century, a constantly evolving, expanding, changing music, passing through several distinctive phases of development; a definition that might apply to one phase—for instance, toNew Orleans style orswing—becomes inappropriate when applied to another segment of its history, say, tofree jazz. Early attempts to define jazz as a music whose chief characteristic wasimprovisation, for example, turned out to be too restrictive and largely untrue, sincecomposition,arrangement, and ensemble have also been essential components of jazz for most of its history. Similarly,syncopation and swing, often considered essential and unique to jazz, are in fact lacking in much authentic jazz, whether of the1920s or of later decades. Again, the long-held notion that swing could not occur without syncopation was roundly disproved when trumpetersLouis Armstrong and Bunny Berigan (among others) frequently generated enormous swing while playing repeated, unsyncopated quarter notes.

Jazz, in fact, is not—and never has been—an entirely composed, predetermined music, nor is it an entirely extemporized one. For almost all of its history it has employed both creative approaches in varying degrees and endless permutations. And yet, despite thesediverse terminological confusions, jazz seems to be instantly recognized and distinguished as something separate from all other forms ofmusical expression. To repeat Armstrong’s famous reply when asked whatswing meant: “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.” To add to the confusion, there often have been seemingly unbridgeable perceptual differences between the producers of jazz (performers, composers, and arrangers) and its audiences. For example, with the arrival of free jazz and other latter-day avant-gardemanifestations, many senior musicians maintained that music that didn’t swing was not jazz.

Most early classical composers (such asAaron Copland,John Alden Carpenter—and evenIgor Stravinsky, who became smitten with jazz) were drawn to its instrumental sounds and timbres, the unusual effects and inflections of jazz playing (brass mutes, glissandos, scoops, bends, and stringless ensembles), and its syncopations, completely ignoring, or at least underappreciating, the extemporized aspects of jazz. Indeed, the sounds that jazz musicians make on their instruments—the way they attack, inflect, release, embellish, and color notes—characterize jazz playing to such an extent that if a classical piece were played by jazz musicians in their idiomatic phrasings, it would in all likelihood be called jazz.

Nonetheless, one important aspect of jazz clearly does distinguish it from other traditionalmusical areas, especially from classical music: The jazz performer is primarily or wholly a creative, improvising composer—his own composer, as it were—whereas in classical music the performer typically expresses and interprets someone else’scomposition.

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West Africa in the American South: Gathering the musical elements of jazz

The elements that make jazz distinctive derive primarily from West African musical sources as taken to the North American continent byenslaved people, who partially preserved them against all odds in theplantationculture of the AmericanSouth. These elements are not precisely identifiable because they were not documented—at least not until the mid- to late 19th century, and then only sparsely. Furthermore, enslaved African Americans came from diverse West African tribalcultures with distinct musical traditions. Thus, a great variety of Black musical sensibilities were assembled on American soil. These in turn rather quickly encountered European musical elements—for example, simple dance and entertainment musics andshape-note hymn tunes, such as were prevalent in early 19th-centuryNorth America.

The music that eventually became jazz evolved out of a wide-ranging, graduallyassimilated mixture of Black and whitefolk musics and popular styles, with roots in both West Africa and Europe. It is only a slight oversimplification to assert that therhythmic and structural elements of jazz, as well as some aspects of its customary instrumentation (e.g.,banjo orguitar andpercussion), derive primarily from West African traditions, whereas the European influences can be heard not only in the harmonic language of jazz but in its use of such conventional instruments astrumpet,trombone,saxophone,string bass, andpiano.

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The syncopations of jazz were not entirely new—they had been the central attraction of one of its forerunners,ragtime, and could be heard even earlier inminstrel music and in the work of Creole composerLouis Moreau Gottschalk (Bamboula, subtitledDanse des Nègres, 1844–45, andOjos Criollos, 1859, among others). Nevertheless, jazz syncopation struck non-Black listeners as fascinating and novel, because that particular type of syncopation was not present in European classical music. The syncopations in ragtime and jazz were, in fact, the result of reducing and simplifying (over a period of at least a century) the complex, multilayered, polyrhythmic, and polymetric designsindigenous to all kinds of West African ritual dance and ensemble music. In other words, the former accentuations of multiple vertically competing meters were drastically simplified to syncopated accents.

Theprovenance of melody (tune, theme, motive, riff) in jazz is more obscure. In all likelihood, jazz melody evolved out of a simplified residue and mixture of African and European vocal materials intuitively developed by people enslaved in theUnited States in the 1700s and 1800s—for example, unaccompanied field hollers andwork songs associated with the changed social conditions of Black people. The widely prevalent emphasis onpentatonic formations came primarily from West Africa, whereas thediatonic (and later more chromatic) melodic lines of jazz grew from late 19th- and early 20th-century Europeanantecedents.

Harmony was probably the last aspect of European music to be absorbed by Black Americans. But once acquired, harmony was applied as an additional musical resource to religious texts; one result was the gradual development ofspirituals, borrowing from the white religious revival meetings that African Americans in many parts of the South were urged to attend. One crucial outcome of these musicalacculturations was the development by Black musicians of the so-calledblues scale, with its “blue notes”—the flatted third and seventh degrees. This scale is neither particularly African nor particularly European but acquired its peculiarmodality frompitch inflections common to any number of West African languages and musical forms. In effect these highly expressive—and in African terms very meaningful—pitch deviations were superimposed on the diatonic scale common to almost all European classical andvernacular music.

That jazz developed uniquely in the United States, not in the Caribbean or inSouth America (or any other realm to which thousands of Black Africans were also transported) is historically fascinating. Many Black people in those other regions were very often emancipated by the early 1800s and thus were free individuals who actively participated in the cultural development of their own countries. In the case of Brazil, the Black population was so geographically and socially isolated from the white establishment that they simply were able to retain their own African musical traditions in a virtually pure form. It is thusironic that jazz would probably never have evolved had it not been for theslave trade as it was practiced specifically in the United States.

Jazz grew from enslaved African Americans who were prevented from maintaining their native musical traditions and felt the need to substitute some homegrown form of musical expression. Such composers as the Brazilianmulatto José Maurício Nunes Garcia were fully in touch with the musical advances of their time that were developing in Europe and wrote music in those styles and traditions. Enslaved Americans, by contrast, were restricted not only in their work conditions and religious observances but in leisure activities, including music making. Although enslaved people who played such instruments as theviolin,horn, andoboe were exploited for their musical talents in such cities as Charleston,South Carolina, these were exceptional situations. By and large such musicians wererelegated to picking up whatever little scraps of music were allowed them.