History of Jazz: The Roots of Jazz

African and European Fusion

• African music featured complex cross-rhythms, slurs, melissma, falsetto, vibrato and simple melodies.
• Call and response form was employed. The leader would throw out a line and a chorus responded.
• Griots were African historians who kept complex records in their heads and related them via song. The Blues form may have derived from this West African culture.
• Derision songs were popular.
• European music featured complex melodies and simple rhythms.

Characteristics of Early African-American Music

• Off beat and syncopated to simulate the complex cross-rhythms.
• Based primarily on the pentatonic scale and other truncated scales.
• Employed blue notes (flatted thirds, sevenths and later fifths) to eliminate half steps.
• Ensemble style singing employed (no true harmony).

Types of Early African-American Music

• Work songs were sung to ease the pain of hard work.
• Field hollers.
• Boat songs.
• Corn shucking songs, etc.
• Spiritual songs were songs based on white hymns and spirituals meant to praise God.
• Lining out, a call and response form derived from African and British roots, was used in white and black churches because there was not enough money for hymn books.
• Camp meetings and ring shouts became popular in black and white churches.
• In the early 1800s, white and black churches split and their Spirituals took separate paths.
• Street vendors' songs were another form of early African-American music.
• There were also play songs.
• Prison songs, which contributed to the Blues, were heard after the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Four distinct fusions have occurred:

• Early African-American folk music was a fusion of African and European musics to form work songs, etc.
• Europeanized African-American folk music was a fusion of African-American folk and European music to form Spirituals, Minstrelsy, Vaudeville, etc.
• Ragtime was another fusion of African-American folk with European band music.
• Jazz-Rock or Fusion is a fusion of Jazz and its distant derivative, Rock.