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Jazz is a genre of music that arose from the meeting of African and Afro-American as well as European musical traditions. However, numerous elements derived from European musical culture were used in jazz in their own way. The focus is on a rhythm related to the feeling of movement (swing, groove), intensive, spontaneous interaction and a tone formation oriented to vocal expression. These elements, especially the rhythm, can be traced back to the musical sensitivity of African musical cultures. Jazz has managed to assert itself and gain popularity over the decades among a few musical genres. Jazz originated in the southern United States. It first appeared around 1900.
Singing styles flowed from the African musical tradition, which gave the singer a great deal of freedom for vocal expression, as well as the tradition of improvisation, the question-and-answer scheme and the rhythmic complexity. Other formative forms of Afro-American music were work songs and other rhythmic work songs of the slaves as well as lullabies and later religious songs (spirituals) and the blues (secular tradition).
In the early days of jazz, musicians mostly played without notes. Around 1910, the orchestra leader W. C. Handy broke with the tradition of the blues, which had been purely oral until then, and published his first blues songs. These pieces were particularly popular with jazz musicians.
In its early days, jazz was played by small brass bands or solo pianists. In addition to ragtime and marches, the repertoire included hymns, spirituals and blues, which were played at picnics, weddings, parades, funerals and other events. Usually at funerals, eulogies were played on the way to the cemetery, and happy marches on the way back. Blues and ragtime arose independently of jazz and continued to exist alongside that genre. However, they influenced the style and forms of jazz and provided it with the stylistic means for improvisation.
