Sam Cooke - Summertime

Jazz is the music, not of repression or immorality, but of freedom, our American watchword. In fact, the music itself may be the freedom. The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrow, from everything that would confine the soul of man and hinder its riding free on air... Jazz with its mocking disregard for formality is a leveler and makes for democracy.

Yet democracy relies on self rule, as a society, and as individuals. We depend on taking responsibility, not on waiting for a king or a political party to do it for us. We depend on using our clear minds to find our own answers. Out of this attentiveness comes personal freedom. Or as the author William Least Heat-Moon wrote after observing boys with kites, “No strings, no flight.” In this responsibility, we make a statement... To solve the lack of order they saw all around them, the founding fathers seized on one of the great, and often missed, ironies in world history, the only thing that could make men forsake their own freedom and still believe they were free was self rule. Early jazz music had no rule books, much of it came from the freewheeling sanctified churches.

So if jazz breaks from formality, the rigid observance of convention, what rule does it follow? Where, in fact, are the rules? To find the moment of swing, do we need a formula? And if jazz has no standard form, how do we recognize it? What template did musicians use to develop their skills. They were blowing stuff not on the sheet, stars blinking in and out. They were talking without words.

Ironically, it is no secret that early American music evolved from the historic forms of European harmony and Afro/Caribbean rhythms. Throughout the 1800s, village bands by the thousands paraded through streets playing European marches, reels, and hymns. Later, ragtime, coming from the plantation banjo, brought strains, symphonic movements on American soil. And it brought regular syncopation, for which there was little counterpart... To the general populace, the European stuff was not new, the African rhythms were. Today, the whole nation dances to them.
Source: Prohibition and the Rise of Jazz, Part One by Peter Gerler


Sam Cooke - Summertime

• Written by: Ira Gershwin, George
  Gershwin
• Genre: Doo Wop, Soul
• Released on: September 1957

"Ira and George Gershwin's highly evocative writing brilliantly mixes elements of jazz and the song styles of blacks, inspiration for the lyrics were from the spiritual lullaby 'All My Trials.'"

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