Influenced by spirituals, cakewalks, ragtime and the blues, jazz first developed as its own style in the early 1900s but did not become popular until the “jazz age" of the 1920s, again in the swing era of the late 1930s, and once more during the bebop jazz era in the late 1950s.
The influence of blues in the jazz style has been presumably the most important of all the styles that helped to shape jazz as we know it today. In fact, blues are still viewed as a sort of “standard” guideline for the beginning jazz musician and is a style still continued today by jazz musicians. In fact, artists that sang the blues style are also referred to as jazz musicians. Artists such as Bessie Smith, Ma Raney, and Louis Armstrong used blues as the foundation of their writing and playing.
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Improvisational music first became popular in dance bands during the early 1900s. Dixieland Jazz, Kansas City, Chicago Swing, and Stride Piano all contributed to the “Classic Jazz” sound created during this time.
Jazz began as a sort of fusion of European and African styles of music. In the 1890s, Ragtime was one of the first styles to combine the syncopated rhythms of African music and the more complex harmony of European music, but was usually performed by a solo pianist (it wasn’t until the 1900s that the ragtime style was performed by small groups). Scott Joplin, one of the popular composers of the time, wrote the “Maple Leaf Rag”, a well-known ragtime piece. Other ragtime composers were William Krell, James Scott, Louis Chauvin, and Joseph Lamb.
Dixieland, another early form of jazz that established itself as a style in the 1910s after ragtime, was improvised ensemble music that was performed primarily in Chicago and New Orleans. Dixieland jazz can essentially be defined by its ensemble of piano, guitar, cornet, clarinet, trombone, banjo, tuba, bass, and drums playing the rags, blues, marches and popular tunes of that time. Some well-known Dixieland musicians include King Oliver, Bix Biederbecke, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, and Johnny Dodds. Eventually, the Dixieland style expanded to include saxophone and piano.
A third early style of jazz was Tin Pan Alley. Tin Pan Alley was established with the growth in the number of music publishers in New York that went out in pursuit of musicians to do “song-plugging” so they could print sheet music. Tin Pan Alley provided popular music that could be sold to the common person who had hopes of performing the pieces at home, but also was a priceless resource to musicians. Irving Berlin published "Alexander’s Ragtime Band," through Tin Pan Alley and it changed the way Americans listened to music – for the first time, radios and phonographs became popular items to buy and own. American Society of Composers,Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) was formed after World War I, making Tin Pan Alley the number one music sales company, making up 90% of music sales.
