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Many of these virtuoso musicians were not good sight readers and some could not read music at all, never the less their playing thrilled audiences and the spontaneous music they created captured a joy and sense of adventure that was an exciting and radical departure from the music of that time. The first Jazz was played by African Americans and Creole musicians in New Orleans. The cornet player, Buddy Bolden is generally considered to be the first real Jazz musician. Other early players included Freddie Keppard, Bunk Johnson, and Clarence Williams. Although these musicians names are unknown to most people, then and now, their ideas are still being elaborated on to this day. Most of these men could not make a living with their music and were forced to work menial jobs to get by. The second wave of New Orleans Jazz musicians like Joe "King" Oliver, Kid Ory, and Jelly Roll Morton formed small bands, that took the music of these older men and increased the complexity and dynamic of their music, as well as gaining greater commercial success. This music became know as "Hot Jazz", because of the often break neck speeds and amazing improvised polyphony that these bands produced. A young virtuoso cornet player named Louis Armstrong was discovered in New Orleans by King Oliver. Armstrong soon grew to become the greatest Jazz musician of his era and eventually one of the biggest stars in the world. The impact of Armstrong and other Jazz musicians altered the course of both popular and Classical music. African American musical styles became the dominant force in 20th century music.
Scott Alexander
However, no one would question that American music took a crucial step in the city of New Orleans and became a relatively complex instrumental music there.
The city produced Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver and Henry Allen - not to mention Louis Armstrong and several other very important musicians whom could be mentioned.
But jazz was, first of all, the music of certain communities in the city: the uptown Negro community, the downtown colored Creole community, and soon thereafter, a segment of the white community.
All this comes from the blues. Longer ago than we know, playing the blues could mean making spontaneous melodies within a harmonic framework, with no reference to a main melody or theme. By the late `20s jazz musicians had clearly begun to discover that they could also - so to speak - "play the blues" on chord changes that didn't belong to the blues. They spent the `30s exploring the idea. Similarly, they found they could also write new themes on old changes - themes that were more appropriate to their own idiom than the popular songs they came from.
Such fundamental practices did not change with modern jazz. What Parker and Gillespie and the rest did was find a new way of continuing and expanding the old ideas passed down through the blues idiom. Admittedly their harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic language was more sophisticated. But what they did was revitalize the tradition, not break radically from it.
