Question

HELP!!!
how has the West African music culture influenced some of the music written and performed through the United States?

Answer 1

In the 19th century, African-Americans were freed from slavery following the American Civil War. Their music was a mixture of Scottish and African origin, like African American gospel displaying polyrhythm and other distinctly African traits. Work songs and field hollers were popular, but it was spirituals which became a major foundation for music in the 20th century.
Spirituals(or Negro spirituals, as they were then known) were Christian songs, dominated by passionate and earthy vocals are similar to the church music of Scotland, which were performed in an African-style and Scottish style call-and-response format using hymns derived from those sung in colonial New England choirs, which were based on Moravian, English and Dutch church music.

These hymns spread south through Appalachia in the late 18th century, where they were partnered with the music of the African slaves. During the Great Awakening of religious fervor in the early 19th century, spirituals spread across the south. Among some whites, slave music grew increasingly popular, especially after the American Civil War, when black and white soldiers worked together and Southern slaves fled north in huge numbers.

By the end of the 19th century, minstrel shows had spread across the country, and even to continental Europe. In minstrel shows, performers imitated slaves in crude caricatures, singing and dancing to what was called "Negro music", though it had little in common with authentic African American folk styles. An African American variety of dance music called the cakewalk also became popular, evolving into ragtime by the start of the 20th century.


The cornetist Buddy Bolden led a band often mentioned as one of the prime movers of the style later to be called "jazz". He played in New Orleans around 1895–1906, but became mentally ill and there are no recordings of him playing. Bolden's band is credited with creating the big four, the first syncopated bass drum pattern to deviate from the standard on-the-beat march. As the example below shows, the second half of the big four pattern is the habanera rhythm.

Morton published "Jelly Roll Blues" in 1915, the first jazz work in print.
Afro-Creole pianist Jelly Roll Morton began his career in Storyville. From 1904, he toured with vaudeville shows around southern cities, also playing in Chicago and New York. His "Jelly Roll Blues", which he composed around 1905, was published in 1915 as the first jazz arrangement in print, introducing more musicians to the New Orleans style.
Morton considered the tresillo/habanera (which he called the Spanish tinge) to be an essential ingredient of jazz. In his own words: "Now in one of my earliest tunes, "New Orleans Blues," you can notice the Spanish tinge. In fact, if you can't manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz."


Excerpt from Jelly Roll Morton's "New Orleans Blues" (c. 1902). The left hand plays the tresillo rhythm. The right hand plays variations on cinquillo. Some early jazz musicians referred to their music as ragtime. Morton was a crucial innovator in the evolution from ragtime to jazz piano. He could perform pieces in either style. Morton's solos were still close to ragtime, and were not merely improvisations over chord changes, as with later jazz. His use of the blues was of equal importance however.

Morton loosened ragtime's rhythmic feeling, decreasing its embellishments, and employing a swing feeling. Swing is the most important, and enduring African-based rhythmic technique used in jazz. An oft quoted definition of swing by Louis Armstrong is: "if you don't feel it, you'll never know it." The New Harvard Dictionary of Music states that swing is: "An intangible rhythmic momentum in jazz ... Swing defies analysis; claims to its presence may inspire arguments." However, the dictionary does provide the useful description of triple subdivisions of the beat contrasted with duple subdivisions. Swing superimposes six subdivisions of the beat over a basic pulse structure or four subdivisions. This aspect of swing is far more prevalent in African American music than in Afro-Caribbean music. One aspect of swing, which is heard in more rhythmically complex Diaspora musics, places strokes in-between the triple and duple-pulse “grids.”


Bottom: even duple subdivisions of the beat. Top: swung correlative—contrasting of duple and triple subdivisions of the beat. New Orleans brass bands are a lasting influence contributing horn players to the world of professional jazz with the distinct sound of the city while helping black children escape poverty. The leader of the Camelia Brass Band, D'Jalma Ganier, taught Louis Armstrong to play trumpet. Armstrong popularized the New Orleans style of trumpet playing, and then expanded it. Like Jelly Roll Morton, Armstrong is also credited with the abandonment of ragtime's stiffness, in favor of swung notes. Armstrong, perhaps more than any other musician, codified the rhythmic technique of swing in jazz, and broadened the jazz solo vocabulary.
The Original Dixieland Jass Band made the music's first recordings early in 1917, and their "Livery Stable Blues" became the earliest released jazz record. That year numerous other bands made recordings featuring "jazz" in the title or band name, mostly ragtime or novelty records rather than jazz. In February 1918 James Reese Europe's "Hellfighters" infantry band took ragtime to Europe during World War I, then on return recorded Dixieland standards including "Darktown Strutters' Ball".