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Dave Brubeck - All The Things You Are

The history of jazz music is deeply linked to and embedded with the history of New Orleans. As ragtime and the blues began to circulate, New Orleans incubated music that would come to be called jazz, and the unique social construction of the city provided a cadre of musicians as well as an audience to support and sustain a particular form of musical expression. The key element to understanding the early development of jazz relates to its multi dimensional role within New Orleans. The music existed within a fluid spectrum between folk and commerce, with neighbors performing for neighbors in and out of a formal entertainment world. Bars and honkytonks were settings, but so were private gatherings, funerals, dances, and a large array of other events. If the blues reflected a true folk heritage and ragtime connected to the commercial world of selling music, then jazz represented a middle way, a form that helped craft and preserve the identity of the local groups that created this new sound. Ultimately, within this unique multi racial setting, jazz emerged from an unplanned collision of ragtime, the blues, minstrel shows, vaudeville routines, brass band repertoires, string band songs, dance music, marching music, and funeral music. The result was an improvised sound that, within a few years, would captivate the nation.

A significant aspect as to why jazz emerged as it did in New Orleans concerned the city’s unique social order with white, black, and Creole residents living in a landscape defined by French, Spanish, African, and Caribbean influences. Simultaneously the quintessential southern city, as well as a place unlike in other place in the South, New Orleans offered a racial and cultural dynamism few other urban areas in the United States shared. In New Orleans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, creole musicians... white musicians... each contributed in different ways to a flourishing music scene defined by syncopation and improvisation. At the same time, the racial fluidity that had shaped much of the early history of the city had collapsed through a series of legislative, judicial, and violent acts. By the late 1890s, as Plessy v. Ferguson, made Jim Crow a national language, the city’s Creole community, in particular, was broken down as various “One Drop” regulations destroyed the distinctive racial patterns that had long defined New Orleans life. This combination of musical inventiveness and social upheaval provided early jazz a basic form as well as a cultural framework that would soon be disseminated across the entire nation.
Source: Jazz, Blues, and Ragtime in America, 1900–1945 by Court Carney


Dave Brubeck - All The Things You Are
  • Genres: Cool Jazz, Post Bop
  • Released June 1976
  • Released on: All the Things You Are album

"Perhaps the most honored jazz artist of his generation, Brubeck received awards from two sitting United States Presidents, Bill Clinton presented him with the National Medal of the Arts in 1994, and Barack Obama presented him with the Kennedy Center Honors in 2009."

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Location: United States

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