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A Black American classmate of mine told me one of her " Africana Studies" professor said Caribbeans creates Jazz. The professor was an African. That& #39;s dangerous to the knowledge and confidence of Black American students to usurp them out of their own cultural traditions.
Influences & incorporations of other cultures is not the same as innovation. "Caribbean" is also vague, and the fact is Buddy Bolden & Scott Joplin utilized habanera as a result of travelling back and forth on cruise ships from NOLA to Cuba. They liked the sound & incorporated it
Jazz is distinct as a musical genre from the rest of the Diaspora specifically because of its birthplace and the people who birthed it. Jazz couldn& #39;t be found anywhere outside the Southern United States because there were no Baptist churches nor prevalence of certain instruments
Jazz in NOLA at least was a product of Africans being free enough to practice their cultural traditions on a wider scale. Many of those enslaved Africans were moved from the Upper South as well as the original Fon people who were enslaved there as a French territory
The Slaves from the Upper South were mainly of Mandinka, Wolof, Jola , Fulani , Hausa etc. tribes or descent , thus the prevalence of the Banjo, field holler , Baptist churches they converted to etc. as well. Kongo peoples also were brought to the South East, thus Conjure in NOLA
The banjo is not a NOLA exclusive instrument , it was recorded to be prevalent in any place where " Senegambian"( Hausa, Fulani, Mandinka , Jola , Wolof, Bamileke or Islamic influenced Africans) were at. That includes the Carolinas and a lot of the States near it.
Jazz is fundamentally an African-American experience, with minor incorporations of other Diasporic musical forms to spice it up, that& #39;s it. It was developed by us for us , it is a Pan-Afro-American thing as it early innovators came from other parts of the South than NOLA. Read!
