Jazz music is a high art musical form amongst only a few, enjoying a worldwide audience. Jazz consists of many subgenres which employs many different instruments. Jazz encourages rules to be broken in order to explore creativity, expression and freedom. The etymology of the word “jazz” is connected with the root meaning of energy, spirit or courage – it is all traits that were necessary to counter Western methods of formality, repetition and perfect harmony that had been the norm for centuries (Music in Africa, 2017).
The English Oxford Dictionary refers to Transcultural as; relating to or involving more than one culture; cross-cultural (English Oxford Living Dictionaries). African Americans are an ethnic group of Americans with total or partial ancestry from any of the black racial groups of Africa. The term African Americans refers to descendants of enslaved black people who are from the United States (Forson, 2018).
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Louis Armstrong was born in 1901 in New Orleans, the place of origin for jazz music. In 1913 Armstrong was sent to the Colored Waifs home where he learned to play cornet in the home’s band. Playing music became a passion as he listened to jazz artists including King Oliver, leading New Orleans cornetist. Armstrong developed his musical skills rapidly and started playing in marching and jazz bands and quickly became a familiar name in the jazz music industry (Encyclopaedia Britannica).
In the year of 1936 Armstrong was the first African-American jazz musician to write an autobiography: Swing That Music. Not only was Armstrong first to write an autobiography as African-American but the first to get featured in a Hollywood movie and to host a nationally sponsored radio show when he took over from Rudy Vallee's Fleischmann's Yeast Show for 12 weeks. (Encyclopaedia