Factors That Has Shaped The Development Of Jazz Music

Between 1900 and 1945, there were multiple contextual factors that affected the development of jazz music as a whole. These factors include economy, race/ethnicity and politics, three factors that ultimately shaped not only jazz music, but jazz musicians, and helped form what we now know as the history of jazz.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, something we know as the Great Depression occurred. In short, the Great Depression was a financial crisis that began on ‘Black Friday’ due to the Wall Street stock market crash. Stock prices fell as far as 23 percent in the first 4 days (Amadeo, 2019). The Great Depression lasted an entire decade, affecting most of the western world as we know it, including all musicians. While travelling jazz musicians had previously been fairly common, many more began to emerge in the 1920s. Musicians began to travel to more scattered places, as there was less work and they had to scour everywhere to find enough work to get by. They even started charging less for their live performances, as finding any sort of work was lucky, let alone a paid job. However, the hardship of having a lack of work did not deter jazz musicians. In fact, many great songs emerged from their struggles as they hadn’t been through something quite like this before. Lyrically, they could write a whole new range of music, and stop people from living with the devastating reality of the Depression, just for a while. People who lived through the Depression have said, “you can’t be sad and dance at the same time. ” (Reinhardt & Ganzel, 2003). </p><p>In other words, the jazz music and dancing that went with it took people’s minds away from the harrowing thought of the Depression. People would enjoy dancing to big band songs lead by people like Count Basie, Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey. More and more of these big band songs and big bands in general began to emerge around this time too, because larger bands were no longer expensive. (Gioia, 2011, p. 127). Due to the Depression, those larger bands and jazz musicians also began to alter their music and expand their repertoire (used more instruments). Around this time period, swing began to become a much more popularized genre of jazz, especially in the white communities. White people would journey into town and mostly African-American dominated places just to hear the swing music the black people could play. This was due to the fact that people were looking for an out – a way to escape the Depression – so they would dance to the unique beats of swing music. Because of this, bands grew larger and the types of instruments grew broader. Guitar replaced the banjo; string bass replaced the tuba; and bands would have as many as 15 members. (Reference lecture here). 15 members was a lot for a big band back in that day and age, and was only possible because of the fact that musicians were desperate for any amount of money and work, regardless of what it was.

One could say that the Depression changed jazz music forever. Because of the way that swing was popularized and big bands were changed, many songs and famous bands were created and put into the world just because of the Depression. Had the Depression not occurred, there’s a chance that swing would’ve stayed exclusively in the black community for a significantly longer time, and some of the songs written that are still sung today wouldn’t have been written at all. The Depression, while a low point in the worlds’ economy, managed to shape and mould jazz music into something even more unique and poignant in musical history.

Another factor that shaped jazz music was race, and the oppression of African-American people for many years. Black enslavement had been around since before 1400 and continued for a long time. The number of slaves being shipped grew rapidly in the 17th century, however, jumping from 3000 to as many as 40 000. (find book). While slaves were oppressed in many different ways and separated from white people in most situations, slaves were allowed to participate very limitedly in music. Since most African tribes would drum, slaves would play their drums in order to maintain a form of camaraderie and unity, as well as reminding them of their time in homeland Africa. “…this African New Yorker slave chanted over and over ‘the ever wild, though euphonic cry of Hi-a-bomba, bomba, bomba,’ in full harmony with the drum’s thumping sounds. ” (White & White, 2005, p. 9). African slave drumming was quickly banned by the white people, as they assumed it was being used as communication between the slaves, as well as white people thinking it had ties to paganism and satanism. Because of this, slaves began finding other ways to make music. They would slap their hips as a rhythm, sing percussion, and do their work in opposite beats, which meant a rhythm was created that way. However, white people did begin to allow their slaves to create bowed and stringed instruments, one example of this being the Diddley Bow. The Diddley Bow was predominantly played by children in West Africa, with a stick being used by one child to hit the string, and another stick by a different child to change the pitch.