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Gary Moore - Looking At Your Picture

More than other forms of popular music Jazz is particularly fraught with these kind of debates, but some of the most heated arguments among jazz aficionados are even more fundamental,  what qualifies as jazz? Does jazz have some essential ingredient? Where does the term jazz even come from? One hundred years after the first jazz recording, the answers remain elusive.

But as to who actually invented jazz, if such an achievement could be attributed to one person, that’s a tricky matter. Some say Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry invented rock n’ roll, others would argue DJ Kool Herc or Grandmaster Flash created hip hop. Nick La Rocca, the Original Dixieland Jass Band’s cornet player and composer, claimed that he personally invented jazz... calling the Original Dixieland Jass Band the first great jazz orchestra and that LaRocca had an instrumentation different from anything before, an instrumentation that made the old songs sound new. But LaRocca’s later statements follow a long tradition in the US of white artists dependent on African American culture publicly degrading it in order to justify their exploitation of it.

Jazz’ was named the Word of the 20th Century by the American Dialect Society, which is remarkable since we don’t actually know for sure from where the term originates. One of the most striking features of jazz to its earliest listeners was its speed, its sheer energy. Dating back to 1860 there had been an African American slang term, jasm, which means vim or energy. On 14 November 1916, the New Orleans Times Picayune newspaper referred for the first time to jas bands. That particular spelling suggests jas could have come from jasm. Or perhaps it referred to the jasmine perfume that prostitutes in New Orleans’ famed Storyville red light district often wore, jazz music had developed, in part, as the music played in brothels.


Gary Moore - Looking At Your Picture
  • Released on: How Blue Can You Get album
  • Release on: April 30, 2021
  • Genre: Blues Rock

"Acknowledged as one of the finest musicians that the British Isles has ever produced, and with a career that dated back to the 1960s, there were few musical genres that Gary Moore had not turned his musical hand."

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