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HOW JAZZ DEVELOPED 11
imparts a vibrato to the tone by shaking the drum with knee pressure. African drums are, literally, speaking drums.
The Value of Recordings
Here, right at the start, you can begin to see the impossibility of putting real jazz down on paper in conventional European notation. You might possibly write something near the rhythm (although the resultant notation would seem enormously complicated to the average white reader), but you could not begin to give an indication of the speech inflections. The only way, in fact, in which you could communicate the rhythm and sound would be through a recording which the executant would listen to and then copy.
In short, the gramophone record is the means of communicating jazz—and that is why we shall place such emphasis on recordings in the course of this book.
When negroes arrived, as slaves, in the Southern States of America, they came in contact with hymn tunes and folk music from Britain and France. They adopted this music and blended it with their own. But they had no leisure in which to develop any sort of musical culture or style in the European sense. Their music was, simply, part of their life.
Work Songs
What was their life? Most of it was work—this |
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