Jazz

Jazz is a musical movement and tradition that emerged among African American musicians in New Orleans around the turn of the twentieth century, drawing together the blues, ragtime, and brass band and church music traditions into a new idiom built on collective and individual improvisation, syncopated rhythm and a distinctive vocal-inflected approach to instrumental tone. Its instrumentation centers on the horn and rhythm sections of American popular music, cornet or trumpet, clarinet, trombone, piano, banjo or guitar, bass and drums, deployed in ensembles ranging from small improvising combos to large touring dance orchestras. From its origins in New Orleans, jazz spread north along touring and migration routes to Chicago, New York and beyond over the 1910s and 1920s, carried in part by musicians performing on Mississippi riverboats and in the era new recording studios, and it became, over the course of the twentieth century, one of the most widely influential musical exports of American culture.