ATLANTA, Georgia -- It was the music of rebellion and youth. Artists traded witty improvisations onstage chronicling the pain and the promise of being black in America, inspiring inner-city and rural Southern audiences alike in nightclubs and on street corners.
Today, Jaspects, an Atlanta-based group of young musicians who were born in the hip-hop era, fuse rap and jazz melodies to introduce younger audiences to jazz and the broader ideas regarding African-American society.
For Jaspects, whose music has appeared in the movie “Hustle & Flow" and recently was featured in the CNN documentary series “Black in America," the lessons of jazz go beyond its artistic merits to questions about the ownership and control of black music in general.
Veteran saxophonist Jimmy Heath, who has performed with nearly all the jazz greats of the last 50 years, says that the music called jazz today began as a voice of the repressed.
“The history of jazz comes with the history of African-American people. Because whenever they were permitted, they always sang and played their music when they were in their own quarters, and eventually I think, when instruments were available, they started to play music on those instruments," Heath says.
Jazz was born a raw and energetic rebuttal of what was musically acceptable at the time, and became the voice of a generation of African-American youth.
“These people wanted to do more than just Bach and Beethoven. They didn't want to play history; they wanted to make history," Brown says. “I guess when jazz [and] the Harlem Renaissance began to give birth people really felt the need to express themselves and that is similar to how hip-hop was created."
As jazz started to gain popularity outside of black America in the 1940s and gained an international following, many say the music became distanced from its cultural origins.
In his exhaustive work on the African-American experience, “Africana," Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes that while black musicians were the principal innovators during this era, white musicians often reaped the fame and benefits and that “the black musicians who found greatest favor with whites were those with a happy-go-lucky air and a ready grin."
With the exception of groups such as Jaspects, jazz today is considered by Brown and some others to be a “museum piece" that aged instead of evolving. Brown says hip-hop is following a similar route, and he says a major reason is a lack of ownership of the music.
Today, Jaspects, an Atlanta-based group of young musicians who were born in the hip-hop era, fuse rap and jazz melodies to introduce younger audiences to jazz and the broader ideas regarding African-American society.
For Jaspects, whose music has appeared in the movie “Hustle & Flow" and recently was featured in the CNN documentary series “Black in America," the lessons of jazz go beyond its artistic merits to questions about the ownership and control of black music in general.
Veteran saxophonist Jimmy Heath, who has performed with nearly all the jazz greats of the last 50 years, says that the music called jazz today began as a voice of the repressed.
“The history of jazz comes with the history of African-American people. Because whenever they were permitted, they always sang and played their music when they were in their own quarters, and eventually I think, when instruments were available, they started to play music on those instruments," Heath says.
Jazz was born a raw and energetic rebuttal of what was musically acceptable at the time, and became the voice of a generation of African-American youth.
“These people wanted to do more than just Bach and Beethoven. They didn't want to play history; they wanted to make history," Brown says. “I guess when jazz [and] the Harlem Renaissance began to give birth people really felt the need to express themselves and that is similar to how hip-hop was created."
As jazz started to gain popularity outside of black America in the 1940s and gained an international following, many say the music became distanced from its cultural origins.
In his exhaustive work on the African-American experience, “Africana," Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes that while black musicians were the principal innovators during this era, white musicians often reaped the fame and benefits and that “the black musicians who found greatest favor with whites were those with a happy-go-lucky air and a ready grin."
With the exception of groups such as Jaspects, jazz today is considered by Brown and some others to be a “museum piece" that aged instead of evolving. Brown says hip-hop is following a similar route, and he says a major reason is a lack of ownership of the music.
For more information contact All About Jazz.
