"Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains." - John Phillip Sousa

Jazz is a twentieth century creation. A traditional Afro-American music that grew out of the southern black folk music, jazz developed gradually to a sophisicated, well-developed modern art. As basically improvised music, jazz's goal has always been to express and reach within the emotion of the listener, composer and player. Jazz composers or more accurately - improvisers adopted a standard wind band with the use of the classical bass for rhythm and tempo. Syncopation, largely neglected in most other types of music is almost always present in jazz.

Jazz musicians read and create music while playing.

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The impromtu jazz solo may be a variation or a series of variations of the theme, or an entirely new melody. Many jazz musicians say that jazz solos "tell a story". Early jazz was a huge derivative of ragtime and blues - two early eighteenth and nineteenth century music. The first jazz band was made up of cornet players playing the melody, the clarinet and/or trombone playing the countermelodies and a rhythm section composed of one or more of the following: the piano, tuba, bass, or drums. New Orleans, Chicago and New York were the three most important cities of the birth of jazz.

Louis Armstrong was the first great jazz soloist. He masterfully played the cornet or trumpet vividly and

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dramatically. Duke Ellington, a jazz musician and composer, composed music spilling with color and imaginative melodies. Other noteworthy jazz musicians and singers are Cole Hawkins who played the tenor saxophone, the singers Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.

The Bop era blossomed in New York's Harlem in the 1940s and lasted until 1965. Charles Parker of this era, an alto saxophone player was also called the "Bird". Bop required fine and virtuoso technique to play and Parker was perhaps the best of them all. Bop featured many notes played at the same time in solos and quick changes in harmony. Bop, therefore was very hard to sing because it required quick changes in pitch in a large range.

At a slight slump during the previous few years, Jazz revived in 1965 with the creation of the organization "Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians". AACM musicians played instruments never played before - bells, sirens, and self-built instruments! By the 1970s through the 1990s, jazz began to grow in popularity in Europe and other parts of the world. These new kinds of improvised jazz was a way of joining Afro-American jazz with music styles from all over the world. This has resulted in jazz mixed with rock and Latin American rhythm.