Jazz

“Jazz” and early variants “jaz” and “jas” have uncertain and contested roots. The term may or may not have origins in Chicago, New Orleans, Africa, baseball, or sex, although all would make sense given subsequent associations. We do know that the word “jazz” was, during the 1910s, increasingly used to describe a musical orientation (if not quite a genre) being developed by composers, solo pianists, and ensembles of various size. This music was hybrid, incorporating elements of African American blues and religious song, Caribbean dance genres, U.S. popular dance and folk music, marching band music, European classical music, ragtime piano, and the transplanted, modified West African rhythms that shaped some of these and other constituent forms. The music’s hybridity plotted its emergence at a particular set of coordinates in Black diasporic time and space. It sounded a contradictory postemancipation experience defined by movement across regions, from country to city and sometimes to metropolis, as it simultaneously reflected increased access to education, the encounters with different kinds of labor, and the thrill of new forms of sociability and intimacy. This early music also expressed—­by virtue of where it could be played and how it was interpreted—­the limits of all of these things. Jazz may thus be understood alongside other, sometimes mutually influential, diasporic expressions—­son cubano, for example—­that articulated the pulse of Black modernity in the early twentieth century.