Explain the origin and content of the blues as it began in the American South. The blues began in the 1890s as a distinct form of African-American rural music performed by wandering solo musicians who sang and played acoustic guitar, piano and harmonica at gatherings of agricultural laborers. The music reflected the suffering and hopes of a people who had experienced slavery and tenant farming for almost 300 years. Blues singers like Ma Rainey and Blind Willie Johnson made some of the earliest recordings of blues music.
Show how the blues combined with other types of music to evolve into early jazz forms. According to Wynton Marsalis, jazz trumpeter and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, jazz was born in New Orleans around the turn of the 20th century. Early forms of jazz were a fusion of musical influences in New Orleans at the time, including the blues; funeral music; military marching bands; dance, folk and church music; ragtime and remnants of traditional African drumming. The large population of New Orleans supported many brass bands whose members were free to experiment without risking unemployment because of the constant demand for celebratory music. This set the stage for the emergence and popularity of Dixieland jazz.
Use recordings of ragtime, blues and Dixieland jazz to convey the musical ambiance of New Orleans between 1917 and the mid-1920s. Dixieland, a combination of blues, ragtime music and the New Orleans brass band tradition, derived its name from the New Orleans Original Dixieland Jazz Band, which made its first recording in 1917. Its popularity spread to other cities that were destined to develop their own strong jazz traditions: Kansas City, Chicago, New York and San Francisco.
Play two recordings for the students: "Tiger Rag" by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (1917) and "Potato Head Blues" by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven (1927). These recordings will illustrate the important transition from Dixieland, a fusion of ragtime and blues that featured collective improvisation during breaks in the written music, and Armstrong's breakthrough recording where individual soloists took center stage. Improvisation is a fundamental characteristic of jazz as we know it, and Armstrong's innovation led to the later ascendancy of small ensembles featuring brilliant soloists like Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane.
Point out that jazz blues is a still-evolving art form that continues to influence musical forms in every region of the world.