Louis Armstrong ("...and I think to myself, what a wonderful world") grew up in a brothel - which, believe it or not, explains his immersion in jazz music. Armstrong's neighbourhood of Storyville, New Orleans, was a multi-racial red-light district where a blend of African rhythms (which came to America with slaves and stayed with their descendants) and European melodies became the basis of what we now know as jazz. Although the roots of jazz can be traced back to the seventeenth century, the first jazz record, Livery Stable Blues, was launched in 1917 in a trendy New York restaurant - where the sound was so strange the customers had to be told they could dance to it.
However, within weeks the Original Dixieland Jazz Band was putting the word jazz into vocabularies everywhere from street corners to elegant parlours. Within a few years, writer F. Scott Fitzgerald was defining the 1920s as "The Jazz Age". The sound which developed in the first two decades of the 20th century rose from a mish-mash of influences, from rural blues and field music of the American South, the boogie piano sounds of saloons, the rhythmic energy of ragtime, marching bands, funeral bands and brothel piano "professors". These elements thrived elsewhere in America too, but the ethnic make-up and culture of New Orleans made it a unique centre of this innovative sound. While in its heyday jazz was denounced as the embodiment of debauchery, one of its most important "roots" came straight from the pulpit.
In 18th century America, white preachers would enlist Africans to help swell crowds at outdoor meetings. In the 1770s a parson known as Black Harry became celebrated for his rhythmic sermonising; he used a particularly effective technique called "lining out" to captivate his audience. The congregation would rhythmically repeat the preacher's words every few lines, a call-and-response interplay familiar from Africa - and similar to the exchange of riffs between the sections in big-band jazz. By the 1930s, jazz had gained popular acceptance in America.
For decades to come jazz thrived, throwing up names like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday and Thelonius Monk, mutating into swing, bebop, through cool jazz, hard bop and on into free jazz. "Fusion" music saw rock exerting an influence on jazz. By the end of the eighties and the "House" era, acid jazz label mixed jazz phrasing and ensemble sounds to dance beats. Nowadays, thanks to "sampling", jazz riffs crop up in a whole variety of musical contexts, and jazz musicians mine the rich tradition of their music.
Over the decades, as musicians around the globe began to play jazz, the influences have become increasingly diverse. Jazz has impacted on musicians everywhere from, northern Europe to the far east.
