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How Jazz Began After slavery was abo

游客2024-03-06  8
问题                                         How Jazz Began
    After slavery was abolished in 1863, those former slaves who were in and near New Orleans found themselves surrounded by many different kinds of music.
    Among the freed slaves, two very different types of music developed from the African rhythms that had formed the basis for the Negroes’ work songs. One line of musical development led to the creation of religious songs, which were called spirituals. The other produced songs that were not religious, but worldly; these songs were called blues.
    In the years following the end of the Civil War in 1865, a whole new musical world opened up to the freed Negroes. They have had musical instruments when they were slaves, but these were mostly stringed instruments. Now they were able to use professionally-made wind instruments. Many of these were horns that had been left behind by soldiers in the northern and southern armies. The freed slaves taught themselves to play these wind instruments, inventing their own methods of relating horn sounds to the sounds made by human voices. At first, they played the hymns and marches familiar to them. But these musicians were basically singers, and when they blew on the horns they tried to produce what they could hear "singing" in their minds. Through these "singing horns", the marches and hymns developed a rhythm they had never had before. The horns also gave the players the addition of two "blue" notes—a flattened third and a flattened seventh. This was characteristic of Negro singing that became a basic characteristic of jazz.
    There was still another element contributing to the development of jazz. This was a kind of piano music which was called ragtime(拉格泰姆音乐). In ragtime, the piano player keeps a steady beat with his left hand while his right hand changes the beat in unexpected ways. This produces an effect called syncopation(切分)—another characteristic of jazz.
    The first important jazz band was a group led by Buddy Bolden, a barber. In 1895 and 1896 Bolden was known as the "King" among New Orleans musicians. When Bolden played for outdoor dancing in a park, his playing was powerful enough to attract all the dancers from another park a block away. "Calling my children home" was how Bold- en described this.
    For Bolden’s band and others that grew up around it in New Orleans, each player could compose his music while he was playing it; the music was improvised(即兴创作), not written in advance. Usually there was no piano because these bands served many purposes: playing for dances at night, marching in daytime parades, playing for funerals or riding around the city on wagons to advertise products. As a result, the piano in jazz developed in a separate line of its own until the 1920s.
    As the nineteenth century became the twentieth, Negro bands were being heard more and more on the streets of New Orleans. Included in the crowd of listeners who followed them were black youngsters such as Louis Armstrong, The new music excited young white musicians, too, and soon there were white bands trying to copy this Negro style of playing.
    But the "blue" tones that came so naturally to the Negroes were not easy for the white musicians. For them, the ragtime rhythms were easier than the curving roll of Negro music. The white musicians created the foundation for what is now called Dixieland jazz.
    At first, jazz was known as "good-time music"; it was mainly music for dancing. In New Orleans, and in other towns in the United Sates, jazz was most often heard it sections of the town where "respectable" citizens were not supposed to be seen. Thus, in New Orleans, this young style of music became popular during the first twenty years of the twentieth century in Storyville, a section of the city where streets were lined with dance halls and bars, along with even less acceptable places for entertainment.
    In 1917, during Word War I, the bars and other establishments in Storyville were closed and jazz musicians began looking for other places to work. By then, some had already moved up the Mississippi River to Memphis, St, Louis, and Chicago, working their way north on riverboats. Many of those boats carried dance hands made up of New Orleans musicians. Traveling with the bands was a broadening experience for the musicians, who were usually self-taught.
    Louis Armstrong, who had played without instruction before he traveled on a riverboat, was taught to read music by a horn player on the S.S. Sidney.
    Most of the musicians who had left New Orleans wanted to go to Chicago. When the United States passed a law against selling alcoholic drinks in 1920, the unlawful sale of liquor became profitable for criminals in big cities. Despite the law, there were large restaurants in Chicago where people could buy ’alcoholic drinks and dance. Chicago had a free-and-easy atmosphere much like that of Storyvillle.
    It was in Chicago that Louis Armstrong became famous. By that time he began making records under his own name, in 1925, Armstrong was a star. His playing of a solo—while the others in the band remain silent—was the major event in every performance.
    While Armstrong was changing the nature of jazz in Chicago, other changes were developing in the northeastern part of the United States. Around Baltimore and Washington and New York and Boston, the piano, which, had been left out of New Orleans jazz, was becoming important. The main figure in this period of jazz history was James P. Johnson, a pianist from New Jersey who played in Harlem, the largest Negro section of New York City. Johnson and others(including Duke Ellington from Washington) usually played at "rent parties" in Harlem, where the money collected  from listeners was used to pay the host’s rent.
    During this same period, white musicians in New York were playing music similar to Dixieland jazz. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band(or ODJB, as this band is usually known) was a group of five New Orleans musicians who performed at Reisenweber’s Restaurant in New York early in 1917. As a result of their success, the ODJB became the first jazz band to be beard on records throughout the United States. They set a style that continues to this day.
    Since the time of ODJB, jazz has continued to change and develop. Bands have grown in size. Some jazz bands have included musicians with university education; jazz has spread and become popular among all classes of people in the U.S.A. and abroad.
    During the 1930s, famous bands traveled in buses from town to town. Some settled into ballrooms or theaters or hotels for weeks or months at a time. Every college wanted to engage a famous band for the big dance of the year. Jazz, which had been born among the poor, was making many rich.
    More recently, smaller bands have again become popular. Many bands now play only for listening, not for dancing. Some have women singers as their stars. New instruments have been introduced; today jazz musicians and instruments come from all parts of the world.
选项 A、Y
B、N
C、NG
答案 A
解析 由题干a general description可知本题旨在考察文章大意，浏览文章标题和全文可知本文是关于爵士乐的起源与发展的，故本题正确。
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