Jazz is an American art form born out of the creativity of African-Americans during the early part of the 20th century, and their desire to adjust and cope with often, adverse conditions in the United States during the post-slavery era. The unique blending of European and African musical sensibilities gave birth to a new music that would emancipate the spirit of the practitioner and thus elevate the status of a people often relegated to the lowest level in the hierarchy of a dignified society.
We can never underestimate the importance of Africa’s contribution to the inception of an improvisational art form born in America that has endured the test of time and disseminated its wings across the globe.
From the early evidence of slave work songs, field hollers, call and response, early “Negro” spirituals, ring shouts, and the blues, we have a substantial trove of musical offerings that laid the groundwork to an early form of jazz expression. Congo Square in New Orleans served as an incubator mixing European and African auditory flavors.
It is a well-documented fact that the inception of the “Blues” gave rise to jazz in the USA. The connections between early blues practitioners in the Mississippi Delta and the African Griot or Jali are quite astounding. The Griot is the oral historian of any particular region or society in Africa. They are master musicians who play specified, traditional African instruments and can resonate a vocal style very reminiscent of the early blues singers in the American south.
The Motherland Connections explore these correlations between jazz musicians in America and traditional African musicians from the “Motherland” In addition we will explore the music of the African diaspora, which also carries the torch and cultural aesthetic of a continent rich in ethnic diversity. Jazz has evolved into a very broad term that can be reflected in a variety of surroundings, which are continually manifested throughout the world’s global musical community.
Sincerely T.K. Blue