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How Did Jazz Changed African-American Society

1760 Words8 Pages

Nicholas Pinto

Professor Lynch

7/16/17

Analyzing How Jazz Changed African-American Society For The Better Jazz has been undeniably been tied to African American society since its creation. In her piece called the Social Effects of Jazz Zola Phillips tells us some of the origins of jazz, “Jazz developed from Afro-American music which included: work songs, spiritual music, minstrelsy, and other forms”. Another big contributor to the creation of Jazz is its direct descendant—the blues. The blues are a type of music created by blacks in America that includes the blues scale. The blues scale has what is called a blue note that gives the blues its aforementioned name. The blues uses wails, stories of the musician’s troubles, and of course the …show more content…

Jazz meant much more than just a type of music to blacks in the United States. Jazz gave African-Americans pride to be black, it gave them a strong identity of the culture that was stripped away from them, it gave them a reason to fight the injustice that they faced, and it allowed several …show more content…

As a matter of fact one of the supporters of jazz was a white man who happened to be a composer. In Lawrence W. Levine’s journal Jazz and American Culture he writes of Czech composer Antonin Dvorak saying: “Czech composer Antonin Dvorak was teaching and composing in the United States when he made this striking statement in 1893: ‘I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies’.”.1 In all reality Dvorak was right. Jazz would evolve and be the building block that created several other genres of “American music” such as rock n’ roll. Jazz ended up helping black society in America by eventually integrating whites in to the fold.
One of the white people that believed in jazz and tried to help the African-American community was Norman Granz. Norman Granz was an activist that used jazz as a platform to try and aid the black community. Granz helped several black artists make recordings of their jazz songs. With the help of Granz jazz music went from being played in nightclubs to actual theaters or concert venues. With Jazz being available at concert venues
Nicholas

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