Did We Do That Or Did It Just Happen?

        

        The19th Century saw jazz develop from folk blues music in the Deep South, to an internationally recognized art form. This process of development incorporated increasingly complex techniques and expressed a wider and more profound range of human emotion and experience. Jazz, although uniquely American in origin, is an art form that combines many different cultural influences and musical traditions such as Classic Blues and Country Blues. Excellent jazz players, such as: Duke Ellington,  Jimmy Lunceford, Cab Calloway, Artie Shaw, and Count Basie all came from different parts of the United States with differing backgrounds. However, many of the innovators and leading voices, were black Americans, the descendants of slaves. This concurrence between the black population in the United States and jazz music has led to much political and sociological debate. The essential lines of the dispute put those who see jazz as an art form which transcends questions of race against those who contend jazz as a black product, therefore, belonging to black people. The latter position has, not surprisingly been enthusiastically embraced not only by blacks and the middle-class left throughout America. Although the arguing of claim to Jazz is important, the most important thing to be analyzed is the evolution of Bebop into Jazz.        

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        Although many may put forth the argument that the Swing Era launched the popular artistic status of jazz throughout America, by placing its rhythmic big band sound in the ears and minds of the world, however its successor, bebop, also claimed mainstream status by evolving jazz to a higher level of achievement. When bebop exploded onto the scene as World War II was ending, the rhythmic intricacies, advanced harmonies, and sometimes frantic tempos of the improvisers, seemed an extreme departure from the big dance bands that dominated popular music during the prewar years. Many established jazz musicians, including the  Louis ...

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