Teach Yourself Jazz - online guidebook

For the beginning player, with sheet music samples

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CHAPTER THREE
HOW JAZZ DEVELOPED
THE BIRTH OF THE BLUES
If we trace negro music back to Africa, we shall not meet any musical sound that is familiar to our European ears.
In a primitive society, you don't have trumpets, trombones and clarinets. You have drums—of a kind. But the main instrument is the one we are born with—the voice.
In a tribe that fights and scratches for its living, there is no room for more than the bare essentials. Our voice is an essential: for demanding food and shelter, ordering or obeying or refusing, crying for help. African vocal music is not the trained singing we are accustomed to from the concert platform: it is speech, heightened by chanting, shouting or rhythmic repetition.
Even African drums differ vitally from the drums we are used to. They do not beat out our mathematical European rhythms, but something far more subtle—they copy the rhythms of speech. In addition, the African drummer varies the pitch by altering the pressure on the drumhead, and
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