Editing Jazz (section)

===Blended African and European music sensibilities===

[[File:Dancing in Congo Square - Edward Winsor Kemble, 1886.jpg|thumb|right|Dance in Congo Square in the late 1700s, artist's conception by [[E. W. Kemble]] from a century later]]
[[File:Slave dance to banjo, 1780s.jpg|thumb|right|The late 18th-century painting ''[[The Old Plantation]]'', depicting African-Americans on a [[Virginia]] plantation dancing to percussion and a banjo]]
By the 18th century, slaves in the New Orleans area gathered socially at a special market, in an area which later became known as [[Congo Square]], famous for its African dances.<ref>{{cite web|url = https://www.nps.gov/jazz/learn/historyculture/history_early.htm|title = Jazz Origins in New Orleans|publisher = U.S. National Park Service|website = New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park|date = April 14, 2015}}</ref>

By 1866, the [[Atlantic slave trade]] had brought nearly 400,000 Africans to North America.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/how-many-slaves-landed-in-the-us/|title=How Many Slaves Landed in the U.S.? |website =The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross |date= January 2, 2013|publisher=PBS|url-status=live  |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150921182328/http://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/how-many-slaves-landed-in-the-us |archive-date=September 21, 2015|author-link=Henry Louis Gates Jr|last = Gates|first = Henry Louis Jr.}}</ref> The slaves came largely from [[West Africa]] and the greater [[Congo River]] basin and brought strong musical traditions with them.{{sfn|Cooke|1999|pp=7–9}} The African traditions primarily use a single-line melody and [[Call and response (music)|call-and-response]] pattern, and the rhythms have a [[cross-beat|counter-metric]] structure and reflect African speech patterns.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=DeVeaux|first=Scott|date=1991|title=Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography|jstor=3041812|journal=[[Black American Literature Forum]]|volume=25|issue=3|pages=525–560|doi=10.2307/3041812|issn=0148-6179}}</ref>

An 1885 account says that they were making strange music (Creole) on an equally strange variety of 'instruments'—washboards, washtubs, jugs, boxes beaten with sticks or bones and a drum made by stretching skin over a flour-barrel.<ref name=":0"/><ref name="Hearn2017">{{cite book|last=Hearn|first=Lafcadio |title=Delphi Complete Works of Lafcadio Hearn|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=XlwvDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT4079|access-date= January 2, 2019|date= August 3, 2017|publisher=Delphi Classics|isbn=978-1-7865-6090-2|pages=4079–}}</ref>

Lavish festivals with African-based dances to drums were organized on Sundays at Place Congo, or Congo Square, in New Orleans until 1843.<ref>"The primary instrument for a cultural music expression was a long narrow African drum. It came in various sized from three to eight feet long and had previously been banned in the South by whites. Other instruments used were the triangle, a jawbone, and early ancestors to the banjo. Many types of dances were performed in Congo Square, including the 'flat-footed-shuffle' and the 'Bamboula.'" [http://www.aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/congo-square-soul-new-orleans African American Registry.] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141202083601/http://aaregistry.org/historic_events/view/congo-square-soul-new-orleans |date=December 2, 2014}}</ref> There are historical accounts of other music and dance gatherings elsewhere in the southern United States. [[Robert Palmer (American writer)|Robert Palmer]] said of percussive slave music:

<blockquote>Usually such music was associated with annual festivals, when the year's crop was harvested and several days were set aside for celebration. As late as 1861, a traveler in North Carolina saw dancers dressed in costumes that included horned headdresses and cow tails and heard music provided by a sheepskin-covered "gumbo box", apparently a frame drum; triangles and jawbones furnished the auxiliary percussion. There are quite a few [accounts] from the southeastern states and Louisiana dating from the period 1820–1850. Some of the earliest [Mississippi] Delta settlers came from the vicinity of New Orleans, where drumming was never actively discouraged for very long and homemade drums were used to accompany public dancing until the outbreak of the Civil War.{{sfn|Palmer|1981|p=37}}
</blockquote>

Another influence came from the harmonic style of [[hymn]]s of the church, which black slaves had learned and incorporated into their own music as [[spirituals]].{{sfn|Cooke|1999|pp=14–17, 27–28}} The [[origins of the blues]] are undocumented, though they can be seen as the secular counterpart of the spirituals. However, as [[Gerhard Kubik]] points out, whereas the spirituals are [[Homophony|homophonic]], rural blues and early jazz "was largely based on concepts of [[heterophony]]".{{sfn|Kubik|1999|p=112}}

[[File:Virginia Minstrels, 1843.jpg|thumb|right|The blackface [[Virginia Minstrels]] in 1843, featuring tambourine, fiddle, banjo, and [[Bones (instrument)|bones]]]]

During the early 19th century an increasing number of black musicians learned to play European instruments, particularly the violin, which they used to parody European dance music in their own [[cakewalk]] dances. In turn, European American [[minstrel show]] performers in [[blackface]] popularized the music internationally, combining [[syncopation]] with European harmonic accompaniment. In the mid-1800s the white New Orleans composer [[Louis Moreau Gottschalk]] adapted slave rhythms and melodies from Cuba and other Caribbean islands into piano salon music. New Orleans was the main nexus between the Afro-Caribbean and African American cultures.