Jazz Music

  
     
 

ˇ@ˇ@The saxophones and the jazz music are closely intertwined. That's why when saxophones are mentioned, one automatically thinks of jazz music. The saxophones came into prominence in the hands of African-Americans. The jazz music itself doesn't have an ethnic color to it, but in the U.S., there are lots and lots of stories about the blacks in the southern jazz culture.

 
     
  ˇ@ˇ@To understand the origin of the jazz music, one needs to go back to southern U.S. at the end of the nineteenth century. It was a time when agriculture was the mainstay of the society there, and thousands of African immigrants came to this region for employment in the fields. For these low wage-earning workers, besides religions, their only other means of motivation for their works were through developing their own kind of music. This type of music later came to be known as the ˇ§work songˇ¨.  
     
  ˇ@ˇ@Since these immigrants came from different races and nations, they all had different cultural backgrounds. In order for them to socialize together, they needed to have their common songs so they could relate to each other. Therefore people of different backgrounds selected the unique musical elements and instruments from their backgrounds to be mixed together in the same song.  
     
 
ˇ@ˇ@Not only was the music a hybrid of different things, even the earlier black musicians were mostly creoles, such as the most representative of the jazz music, Jelly Roll Morton, and famous ragtime musician Scott Joplin. In other words, jazz music is a mixture of different music, as well as the music of the mixed generation.
Scott Joplin
Scott Joplin
 
     
 
ˇ@ˇ@The jazz music is an all-inclusive musical art. After the 1990's the jazz musicians had put a lot of efforts into making the art better and better, with the hope of incorporating some elements of every musical form in the future.