African American Music Characteristics

There are many different types of music in the world, and each one is different because of certain characteristics that help to make that genre stand apart from all the others. One of these genres is Jazz. Jazz is a type of music that was created mainly by black Americans during the early twentieth century, and is a combination of American and African tribal music. There are many different characteristics that set Jazz apart from every other kind of music, but there are three main distinctions; the first is its particular combination of rhythm, melody and harmony, second is the subtle differences that make every Jazz player almost instantly recognizable and finally is the way that Jazz players interact and react with their surroundings, they do not simply play a designated set of notes.

The first characteristic that helps to make Jazz so different from other genres of music is the rhythm, melody and harmony. Not only do these apply to the music of the Jazz era though, these same rhythms can be
One of the first examples that comes to mind is William Carlos Williams’ “The Great Figure”. This poem seems to make almost no sense, and have no reason for being written. It is the simple story of a fire truck going through the city on a rainy day. There were not too many styles of music, or literature, which produced poems as seemingly random, yet meaningful as the Jazz era. Another example of this is by the poet Hilda Doolittle, who is actually said to be the creator of the Imagist style of poetry. In Doolittle’s poem “Heat” she speaks of a wind that is coming through to cool down the heat. She says that the fruit will not all in thick air, and that the wind will cut the fruit down in its