Black church music played a huge influence on jazz music. Black churchgoers learned harmonic styles which featured in church hymns. They would incorporate these styles into their own music and it is through this that jazz music relates to Gospel music. It is often said that jazz singers are also Gospel singers e.g. Aretha Franklin. Aretha started singing in her father's church and after that began a career a in jazz and R&B. Below is a video of Aretha Franklin singing a very jazzed up version of Amazing Grace. 

Most jazz singers are often compared to Gospel singers and for this reason, sing Gospel music. It is quite a popular tradition.

Over the weekend, I was lucky enough to play with an orchestra from South Africa, the Limpopo Youth Orchestra. The orchestra was full of amazing musicians from the town of Limpopo in South Africa. My orchestra was teaming up with their orchestra for a concert yesterday. The concert ended up being dedicated to the memory of Nelson Mandela, however this was not a planned dedication and it was a huge privilege to play with this orchestra at such a mournful time.

We played one piece with them, "Kwela, Kwela". Kwela is a type of street music played in many parts of South Africa. Its strong jazzy features and catchy rhythms made it for easy-listening! I must admit that on more than one occasion I was tempted to drop my violin and stand up to dance! Somehow, I resisted. When we were learning this piece in orchestra rehearsals prior to last weekend, we played the notes as written, i.e. quavers as quavers. As classical musicians, this is what we expected to go like, however, something was telling me at the back of my head that we were wrong. I was right! When the South Africans came over on Saturday morning, they played their music in more of a swing style, i.e. two quavers as one dotted quaver and one semiquaver. This was a natural rhythm for them and they seemed to find our classical style of playing strange. I was particularly interested in their conductor. I can't remember his name, but something that I certainly can remember is his dancing and singing as he conducted while still conducting clear enough to keep us going. He also informed us of a style of playing in which you "flick" the bow on the string to make the rhythm easier to play. They called this particular style shoe-shining as the motion is similar to that when shining your shoes.
Below is the original version of this song played by the Soweto String Quartet. Listen to this and then imagine the same song live with at least eight times as many of each instrument here, also, imagine trumpets, saxophones, keyboardists, percussionists, etc. Each and every one of these musicians was able to play the somewhat peculiar rhythms you'll hear in the recording below! Amazing!!!

Jazz music can be traced back to the early 1800s. At this time there were almost half a million Sub-Saharan Africans working as slaves in United States. Coming mostly from the West of Africa and the Congo Basin, they brought with them many African music traditions. An easily recognisable tradition is the counter-metric structure, a tradition which has had a huge impact on jazz music. They also used traditions such as the call and response structure when working or carrying out rituals. Their music differed from European music in many ways; the overall structure, rhythym, harmonies - African music did not feature any harmonies (unless in the circumstances of accidental harmonies due to singing a major 3rd out of tune, but the chances of this are quite low... Nobody is that lucky). African music tends to stick to single-line melodies. Although, there was never a lack of people at rituals so it wasn't as if there weren't enough people to sing both melodies and harmonies. Up until 1843, slaves in New Orleans would meet on Sundays at Congo Square. There they would have African dance festivals which were accompanied only by drums. These festivals were very popular and soon spread all around the USA. These festivals stopped taking place possibly because of the growing opposition to slavery in America.

Hey! David Callaghan here!. For the next few weeks I will be writing about the origins of Jazz music; where it all started, who it started with and how it has developed to the jazz music we have today. I chose to write about this topic as it is coming up to Christmas time and my mother's blaring her old Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole Christmas Albums 24/7... I'm not complaining! So yeah, tune in!