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During the current season, enjoy these jazz events at Krannert Center:
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Distinctly American in origin, jazz, blues, and pop are lively musical styles that call for audiences to clap, sing, dance, and shout, expressing that they're having a great time. These forms, known for improvisation, merged African-American culture with European-American art music to create an enormously popular musical style that has had a profound effect on international culture.
The histories of jazz, blues, and popular music are intertwined, and the styles often inspire each other. These styles are particularly American, with their roots in both indigenous African music brought by black slaves to the United States and in European-American art music.
Blues -- expresses a particular melancholy state of mind -- developed from hollers and ballads, call-and-response songs performed by black field laborers.
Various styles of blues developed as the music moved from the rural, deep South to industrial cities and then incorporated electric instruments. Certain areas or cities, including the Mississippi Delta, Memphis, and Chicago, have become known for their styles of blues.
Jazz -- known as "hot music" in the early days -- developed from the addition of blues rhythms and pitch inflections to rags and other popular song and dance forms and from the traditions of brass bands, Creole bands, dance bands, and parade bands.
Jazz great Charlie Parker is reported to have said that "jazz is happy blues." Jazz evolved tremendously during the 20th century, giving rise to styles as varied as classic New Orleans jazz (New Orleans is considered the birthplace of jazz), ragtime, Dixieland, swing, big band, bop, modern, free-form, and fusion.
Jazz, blues, and popular music all got their start in back rooms, clubs, honky-tonks, and underground or subculture environments. Then they moved into elegant restaurants and clubs. Now we recognize these genres as sophisticated art forms and we're as likely to hear them in concert halls as in clubs. In fact, a new performance center -- of the magnitude of Lincoln Center -- being built in New York City will be dedicated to jazz, blues, and popular music styles.
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