Jazz and Culture Essay -- American History Music Cultural Essays

discern and Culture never is the inadequacy of language more apparent than when trying to discuss or describe music. thither is a colloquial axiom that suggests that talking round music is like dancing about literature. What words are adequate to explain your favorite album to a person who cannot h spindle? There are none. James Baldwin, in his story Sonnys Blues, does as well as anyone can Creole began to tell us what the blue devils were all about. They were not about anything very newfound. He and his boys up at that place were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. I forget do my best to talk to you today about jazz. In the 1890s, hot Orleans black population was divided along Canal Street. On one side were the Creoles, French or Spanish speak ing shift blacks who were generally well educated and had achieved upper class status in their community. Creoles developed a musical tradition based on the European model and, according to Len Weinstock, prided themselves on their formal knowledge of European music, tiny technique and soft delicate tone and had all of the social and heathen values that characterize the upper class (redhotjazz.com). Across Canal Street, freshly freed blacks, mostly poor and uneducated, were developing their own music these musicians were schooled in the blues, credo music, and work songs that they sang or played mostly by ear (Weinstock). In 1894, a segregation law forced the Creole blacks across Canal Street and the musical styles were forced into contact. So, while music that... ...l as a result of the attention this countrys jazz musicians acquire abroad. Jazz, Levine writes, was an expression of that other side of ourselves that strove to recognize the positive aspects of our newnes s and our heterogeneity that lettered to be comfortable with the fact that a significant part of our hereditary pattern derived from Africa and other non-European source and that recognized in the various syncretized cultures that became so characteristic of the United States, not an embarrassing weakness but a slashing source of strength (Levine, 8).Works CitedJones, LeRoi. Blues People. New York Harper Collins, 2002Levine, Lawrence W. Jazz and American Culture, Journal of American Folklore, v. 102 n. 403, Jan. Mar. 1989Weinstock, Len. The Origins of Jazz, located at http//redhotjazz.com/originsarticle.html