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That certain feeling: blues and jazz … in 1890?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 November 2008

Paul Oliver
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‘And this, after all, we do know with certainty: that in the 1880s in and around New Orleans and in other parts of the South, they were beginning to play the music we call jazz.’ So wrote Barry Ulanov who was convinced that jazz ‘reached back to the twelve bar form of the folk tune … and evolved that most durable and most thoroughly adaptable of jazz forms, the blues’. Picked out by ‘men and women in the backwoods and the front parlors making the delicate little changes, insisting upon the famous “blue notes”’, it took shape ‘long before the famous early names of jazz – before Buddy Bolden and Freddie Keppard and Papa Laine’ (Ulanov 1958a, p. 17). Ulanov was writing in 1957, more than thirty years closer to the origins of jazz, when a number of the veteran musicians of the first and second generations were still living. His ‘certainty’ implied that the blues was the wellspring of jazz from which it drew its inspiration and its improvisation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Popular Music , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , January 1991 , pp. 11 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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