Nick LaRocca & The Original Dixieland Jazz (Jass) Band (ODJB) Recording Tiger Rag in 1917

[Ish Gibor]

The channel owner claims that Jazz originated with Italians. And that the word Jazz stems from a Sicilian word “jass”.

From the channel:

“In this episode of Celebrating Culture: Bandleader David Hansen speaks with Charles Marsala about the "Father of Modern Jazz", Sicilian Cornetist & Trumpeter Nick LaRocca. From his early beginnings in New Orleans with Papa Jack Laine to his leadership of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band which took him across the globe. We'll stop by George's Schmidt's art studio to look at his painting featuring Nick LaRocca playing with Papa Jack Laine in 1915 at the corner of Canal & Royal St. This historically accurate work features a significant moment in Jazz History, where Nick LaRocca was offered the chance to go to Chicago to perform. From there the rest is history as the ODJB transformed the future of music.”

Nick LaRocca & The Original Dixieland Jazz (Jass) Band (ODJB) Recording Tiger Rag in 1917



Of course this bothered me extremely, as I know the root of jazz is not by any Italian, but by Black Americans.

"The Harlem Renaissance was the development of the Harlem neighborhood in New York City as a Black cultural mecca in the early 20th Century and the subsequent social and artistic explosion that resulted. Lasting roughly from the 1910s through the mid-1930s, the period is considered a golden age in African American culture, manifesting in literature, music, stage performance and art."
Harlem Renaissance - Definition, Artists & How It Started | HISTORY

"Jazz harmony at its structural and aesthetic level is based predominantly on African matrices,..."
https://www.jstor.org/stable/30039290
(Gerhard Kubik, The African Matrix in Jazz Harmonic Practices)
Black Music Research Journal
Vol. 25, No. 1/2 (Spring - Fall, 2005), pp. 167-222 (56 pages)
Published By: Center for Black Music Research


"Blues is considered an “American” genre of music but it’s still a historical and cultural continuation of African folk music adapted to a new environment. Therefore, African-American blues is both a foundation of American popular music and, stylistically, part of the larger African cultural family because it is fundamentally an African style of music."
[...]
That African scale system is the fundamental root of blues music.

Nketia also explains the various melodies, rhythms, scale patterns, and notations of indigenous African music. In the chapter on vocal melodies in The Music of Africa, Nketia shows the pentatonic system, which includes a flatted fifth, in an African vocal melody: C-D-E-G-B♭ [pg. 150]. Nketia explains:

…instead of a major sixth, a minor seventh is used. That is, instead of C-D-E-G-A, we have C-D-E-G-B♭… this gives a distinctive character to the music. An important feature of melodic organization associated with pentatonic structures is that of transposition, whereby the melody is shifted from one position of a trichord to another. The shift may be a whole step, or as much as two or three steps, up or down. That is, there could be a shift from a G-A-B or E-G-A-B sequence to an F-G-A or D-F-G-A sequence within the same song, or from A-G-F to D’-C-B♭ in the same song” [pg. 150]".

About Adam

Adam Hudson (he/him) is an African-American writer/journalist, commentator, musician, Pan-Africanist, and co-host of the podcast Real Sankara Hours. He holds a BA in International Relations fro…

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@IllmaticDelta @HarlemHottie

 

[Ty Daniels]

Each and everything we've created, some Group of Clowns tries to claim they did it.

Jealousy and Envy is a MF

 

[Ish Gibor]

Each and everything we've created, some Group of Clowns tries to claim they did it.

Jealousy and Envy is a MF

This guy started to annoy me extremely, and I did respond. The biggest problem is that they feel they have right the capitalize on it, and now we understand why. This is the psyche behind all this. They feel they made it first... although the facts speak different.

True that, when I responded to his video, he said the following as you can see in the screen shot. African Americans "contributed" to Jazz, Blues, Swing and Rock and Roll. And African Americans basically have been accepted by Italians, as Italians let allowed African Americans to collaborate with them.

"African-American musician and musicologist Samuel Floyd, Jr. also explained that the pentatonic scale enslaved Africans were playing was from Africa. In his book The Power of Black Music, Floyd writes:

“Whatever their African source, early blues melodies were based on a pentatonic arrangement that included blue notes — or the potential for blue notes — on the third and fifth degrees of its scale. As the same neutral intervals are found in the music of some African societies, the blues intonation was not new to African Americans; it was new and strange only to those who were not in tune with the culture. Early blues was as free as the other African-American genres, only later becoming tamed and forced into the eight-, twelve-, and sixteen-bar frameworks that became somewhat common” [pg. 76].

As he points out, the African pentatonic system either has blue notes or naturally makes room for blue notes. Floyd is correct, the African-based pentatonic system of the blues was later “tamed” into a standard that can appeal to a broader audience, i.e., the 12-bar blues that everyone is familiar with. But when we are talking about the blues and its origin, you can’t start with the 12-bar blues; that came later and “tamed” the actual blues.

Floyd further explains the African traditions that undergird the music of early African-American blues musicians:

“The earliest great southern blues musicians for whom we have good documentation are Blind Lemon Jefferson (1897-1929) of the Texas tradition and Charley Patton of the Delta, both of whom were seminal figures. But there were others, too, of singular influence, of whom Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter [1888-1949]) and Mississippi John Hurt (1893-1966) were among the most versatile and original. They all had in common the vocal quality and variations in timbre that make the genre distinctive: the nasal, foggy, hoarse texture that delivered the elisions, hums, growls, blue notes, and falsetto, and the percussive oral effects of their ancestors. Instrumentally, these bluesmen followed the African tradition of timbral distortion: the guitar players applied bottle necks and knife blades to the strings of their instruments to modify their naturally produced sounds; the mouth-harp players produced variations in timbre and volume by alternately blowing and sucking and, with their cupped fingers and palms, covering and uncovering the air columns of their instruments” [pg. 80].

Kubik, in an interview, explains how the integration of the indigenous African pentatonic system was formed by African-American blues guitarists:

“Across the West African savanna you often find a characteristic pentatonic system. We discovered that it is generated from the use of harmonics up to the 9th, sometimes the 10th partial. That is this kind of the scale, from top to bottom:

D C Bb G E C

It is a so-called natural scale. It is slightly different from the notes found on European instruments with their tuning temperament. If you can construct the natural harmonic series over a fundamental you call see, the 5th partial will be a somewhat flat major third which we call E-386, and the 7th partial is indeed flat by 31 cents, we call it B-flat-969. It’s not nuclear physics, of course. Now B-flat-969 is the higher blue note. Next, if you transpose this West African savanna scale from the level of C to the level of F, the fifth down, or a fourth up (it doesn’t matter), you get this scale:

G F Eb C A F

Essentially, African-American musicians used the pentatonic system they already knew and were familiar with from Africa, played them on string instruments, and matched them with the field hollers on plantations, which were also in an African pentatonic system. That pentatonic system included blue notes or the potential for blue notes.
[...]
Engel’s book proves that the African origins of the blues scale were actually noted by music historians as far back as 1870, just five years after the American Civil War ended and without the advent of modern music recording. The reason why these specific notes and scales are important is because they don’t exist in the European standard of music."

Other African retentions in blues

The African pentatonic system, with its natural blue notes, is not the only African music tradition brought to the United States by enslaved Africans. As mentioned earlier, enslaved Africans brought their string instruments, such as the banjo, with them from Africa to North America. Writer and recording artist Ken Hymes explains, “These were “monophonic” instruments, on which only one note was played at a time. The melodies were mostly pentatonic, based on a five note scale (play the black keys on a piano and you’re playing a version of that scale).” It was through these string instruments that the African pentatonic system was preserved in the United States on plantations during slavery.

“The so-called ‘Spanish tinge’ with its ‘additive’ rhythms, characteristic of New Orleans, testifies to the proximity of the Caribbean. It is much less ‘Spanish’ than it is a conglomerate of Guinea Coast and west Central African rhythm patterns retained in the Spanish-speaking areas of the Caribbean. Influences upon the Deep South from Louisiana, whose musical cultures were much closer to those of the Caribbean in the nineteenth century and had a large share of Congo/Angola and Guinea Coast west African elements, can also be felt in some idiosyncrasies within the blues tradition of the twentieth century” [pgs. 100-101].

Congo Square is crucial to understanding this. Again, while drumming was banned in North America, Congo Square in New Orleans was a place where enslaved Africans were able to play their traditional African music."

The African roots of blues music (the blues scale)

The Banjo Lesson by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1893) I’ve played drums in an all-nonwhite rock band called Sunata for seven years (2013-2020, before the pandemic) and djembe for about five years. Music, …

adamhudson.org

 

[Ish Gibor]

Here he really goes in with these claims how Europeans are at the root of Jazz and Blues and how they were able emulated all these "animal sounds with instruments". In the second video has also claiming that an Italian first made a song with word Blues in it, so therefore...


From the channel:

"Charles Geno Marsala interviews drummer & bandleader David Hansen about the legendary Sicilian jazz musician Nick LaRocca. Some consider LaRocca to be the "Father of Modern Jazz", initially called "Jass". Artist & historian George Schmidt reveals just how LaRocca was able to popularize the new sound by traveling to Chicago & New York as the leader of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB). Next we sit down with professional Sicilian folk singer Michela Musolino who educates us on the history of traditional Sicilian music. Exploring how the famed reputation of Sicilian musicians ended up motivating Thomas Jefferson to invite Sicilians to become a core part of the US Marine Band. Director of the New Orleans Marine Reserve Band, Mst. Sgt. Brad Rehrig, explains just what it's like to be an enlisted member of the US Marine Band. In 1804, Venerando Pulizzi enlisted as a 12 year old boy and would go on to become the bandleader during his 47 years of service. Salvador Catalano was the pilot of Decatur's ship the USS Intrepid and a crucial player in Americas's success during the Barbary Coast Wars."

 

[Ish Gibor]

I did drop these sources for him in his comment section, so he has some explaining to do. The algorithm or some admin on YT tried to remove it, but I forced it.


Here is more on the history and development, from Blues to Jazz.



"The Banjo Player, a genre portrait painted in the tradition of the Dutch master Frans Hals, is one of Mount's best-known paintings."

Details
Title: The Banjo Player
Creator: Mount, William Sidney
Date Created: 1856
Location Created: United States/New York/Long Island
Physical Dimensions: 47" x 40 1/4"
Provenance: Purchased from an appraiser in Chicago, by the Old Print Shop., Purchased from the Old Print Shop, 1/ 15/ 45, by Ward Melville. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ward Melville, 1955.
Subject Keywords: Paintings, Oil paintings
Medium: Oil on canvas

https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-banjo-player-mount-william-sidney/WAFqaiSKzQ1JlA?hl=en

"Which is not to say that slaveholders who appreciated the musical skills of their slaves were enlightened precursors to Abraham Lincoln. In fact, Dubois’s book contains numerous references to newspaper advertisements written by slaveholders searching for their runaway slaves.
In addition to the usual list of distinguishing characteristics—age, height, weight, scars—these slaveholders would also highlight the ability of their slaves to play instruments such as fiddles and banjos. As a result, runaways ran the risk of being caught in the act of playing music, which happened to be one of the few ways for people of color to earn money away from the plantation. For runaway slaves, music could be a trap."

Top: “The Banjo Player,” 1856, by William Sidney Mount. Via Wikimedia. Above: “The Old Plantation,” 1785-1790, depicts life on a South Carolina plantation. From the collection of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. Courtesy SlaveryImages.org, a project of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

A page from Hans Sloane’s A Voyage to the Islands of Madera Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, 1707. This image was taken from a copy of the book in the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Courtesy SlaveryImages.org, a project of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

A replica by Pete Ross of the “Haiti Banza.” The original has been in the collection of the Musee de la Musique, Paris, since 1840. Via Pete Ross Custom Banjos.

A Pete Rose re-creation of the banjo shown in Hans Sloane’s A Voyage to the Islands of Madera Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica from 1707. Via Pete Ross Custom Banjos.

Illustration of “A Carolina rice planter” from “Harper’s New Monthly Magazine,” 1859. Image taken from a copy of the magazine in the Special Collections Department of the University of Virginia Library. Courtesy SlaveryImages.org, a project of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Illustration from an 1852 copy of a critique of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Robert Criswell. Courtesy SlaveryImages.org, a project of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Sheet music for the Ethiopian Serenaders from 1847. Via Old Hat Records.

Strummin’ on the Old Banjo: How an African Instrument Got a Racist Reinvention

"The banjo in postwar America was perceived primarily as a white, rural instrument."There are entire websites devoted to banjo jokes, so we could spend al...

www.collectorsweekly.com

Here is a drawing from Stedman of Instruments he encountered in Suriname in 1776:

Image from Rijksmuseum showing a Bania from 1771:

https://surinameafricanheritage.wor...-instruments-from-africa-banjo-bania-agwadjo/

“A pentatonic scale is a five-note scale, while heptatonic is seven notes. That specific scale originates from Africa, particularly West Africa. It is not found in the classical Western tradition or other musical traditions around the world, which have their own unique musical systems.”

The African roots of blues music (the blues scale)

The Banjo Lesson by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1893) I’ve played drums in an all-nonwhite rock band called Sunata for seven years (2013-2020, before the pandemic) and djembe for about five years. Music, …

adamhudson.org