Jazz

Jazz is a genre of music that originated in African American communities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Jazz emerged in many parts of the United States as an independent popular music style; linked by common ties of European American and African American musical origins with a performance orientation. Jazz encompasses a wide range of music from ragtime to the present - a period of over 100 years - and has proven very difficult to define. Jazz makes heavy use of improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation, and swinging notes, as well as aspects of European harmony, American popular music, brass band traditions, and African musical elements such as blue notes and ragtime. A musical group that plays jazz is called a jazz band.