1.
Jazz
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Jazz is a music genre that originated amongst African Americans in New Orleans, United States, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and developed from roots in Blues and Ragtime. Since the 1920s jazz age, jazz has become recognized as a form of musical expression. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response vocals, polyrhythms, Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions including blues and ragtime, as well as European military band music. Although the foundation of jazz is deeply rooted within the Black experience of the United States, different cultures have contributed their own experience, intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as one of Americas original art forms. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on different national, regional, and local musical cultures, New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass-band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. In the 1930s, heavily arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz, bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging musicians music which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed in the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, modal jazz developed in the late 1950s, using the mode, or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electric instruments. In the early 1980s, a form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful. Other styles and genres abound in the 2000s, such as Latin, the question of the origin of the word jazz has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well documented. It is believed to be related to jasm, a term dating back to 1860 meaning pep. The use of the word in a context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune. Its first documented use in a context in New Orleans was in a November 14,1916 Times-Picayune article about jas bands. In an interview with NPR, musician Eubie Blake offered his recollections of the slang connotations of the term, saying, When Broadway picked it up. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, the American Dialect Society named it the Word of the Twentieth Century. Jazz has proved to be difficult to define, since it encompasses such a wide range of music spanning a period of over 100 years. Attempts have been made to define jazz from the perspective of other musical traditions, in the opinion of Robert Christgau, most of us would say that inventing meaning while letting loose is the essence and promise of jazz. As Duke Ellington, one of jazzs most famous figures, said, although jazz is considered highly difficult to define, at least in part because it contains so many varied subgenres, improvisation is consistently regarded as being one of its key elements
2.
Blues
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Blues is a genre and musical form originated by African Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the end of the 19th century. The genre developed from roots in African musical traditions, African-American work songs, spirituals, Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. Blue notes, usually thirds or fifths flattened in pitch, are also a part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove, Blues as a genre is also characterized by its lyrics, bass lines, and instrumentation. Early traditional blues verses consisted of a single line repeated four times, Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating the troubles experienced in African-American society. Many elements, such as the format and the use of blue notes. The origins of the blues are closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community. The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after the ending of slavery and, later and it is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century, the first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres include country blues, such as Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues, World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners. In the 1960s and 1970s, a form called blues rock evolved. The term blues may have come from blue devils, meaning melancholy and sadness, the phrase blue devils may also have been derived from Britain in the 1600s, when the term referred to the intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal. As time went on, the phrase lost the reference to devils, by the 1800s in the United States, the term blues was associated with drinking alcohol, a meaning which survives in the phrase blue law, which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sunday. Though the use of the phrase in African-American music may be older, it has been attested to in print since 1912, in lyrics the phrase is often used to describe a depressed mood. The lyrics of traditional blues verses probably often consisted of a single line repeated four times. Two of the first published songs, Dallas Blues and Saint Louis Blues, were 12-bar blues with the AAB lyric structure. Handy wrote that he adopted this convention to avoid the monotony of lines repeated three times, the lines are often sung following a pattern closer to rhythmic talk than to a melody
3.
Electric blues
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Electric blues refers to any type of blues music distinguished by the use of electric amplification for musical instruments. The guitar was the first instrument to be amplified and used by early pioneers T-Bone Walker in the late 1930s and John Lee Hooker. Their styles developed into West Coast blues, Detroit blues, and post-World War II Chicago blues, by the early 1950s, Little Walter was a featured soloist on blues harmonica or blues harp using a small hand-held microphone fed into a guitar amplifier. Although it took a longer, the electric bass guitar gradually replaced the stand-up bass by the early 1960s. Electric organs and especially keyboards later became used in electric blues. The blues, like jazz, probably began to be amplified in the late 1930s. After World War II, amplified blues music popular in American cities that had seen widespread African American migration, such as Chicago, Memphis, Detroit, St. Louis. The initial impulse was to be heard above the noise of lively rent parties, playing in small venues, electric blues bands tended to remain modest in size compared with larger jazz bands. In its early electric blues typically used amplified electric guitars, double bass, and harmonica played through a microphone. By the late 1940s several Chicago-based blues artists had begun to use amplification, including John Lee Williamson, early recordings in the new style were made in 1947 and 1948 by musicians such as Johnny Young, Floyd Jones, and Snooky Pryor. The format was perfected by Muddy Waters, who utilized various small groups that provided a strong rhythm section and his I Cant Be Satisfied was followed by a series of ground-breaking recordings. Chicago blues is influenced to an extent by the Mississippi blues style. Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Jimmy Reed were all born in Mississippi and moved to Chicago during the Great Migration. In addition to guitar, harmonica, and a rhythm section of bass and drums. Lenoirs also used saxophones, largely as a supporting instrument, Muddy Waters and Elmore James were known for their innovative use of slide electric guitar. Howlin Wolf and Muddy Waters were for their deep, gravelly voices, bassist and composer Willie Dixon played a major role on the Chicago blues scene. He composed and wrote many standard blues songs of the period, such as Hoochie Coochie Man, I Just Want to Make Love to You and, Wang Dang Doodle, Spoonful and Back Door Man for Howlin Wolf. Most artists of the Chicago blues style recorded for the Chicago-based Chess Records and Checker Records labels, there were also smaller blues labels in this era including Vee-Jay Records and J. O. B
4.
Pittsburgh
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Pittsburgh is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the United States, and is the county seat of Allegheny County. The city proper has a population of 304,391. The metropolitan population of 2,353,045 is the largest in both the Ohio Valley and Appalachia, the second-largest in Pennsylvania, and the 26th-largest in the U. S. The city features 30 skyscrapers, two inclines, a fortification and the Point State Park at the confluence of the rivers. Aside from steel, Pittsburgh has led in manufacturing of aluminum, glass, shipbuilding, petroleum, foods, sports, transportation, computing, autos, and electronics. For part of the 20th century, Pittsburgh was behind only New York and Chicago in corporate headquarters employment, Americas 1980s deindustrialization laid off area blue-collar workers and thousands of downtown white-collar workers when the longtime Pittsburgh-based world headquarters moved out. The area has served also as the federal agency headquarters for cyber defense, software engineering, robotics, energy research. The area is home to 68 colleges and universities, including research and development leaders Carnegie Mellon University, the region is a hub for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, sustainable energy, and energy extraction. Pittsburgh was named in 1758 by General John Forbes, in honor of British statesman William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham. The current pronunciation, which is unusual in English speaking countries, is almost certainly a result of a printing error in some copies of the City Charter of March 18,1816. The error was repeated commonly enough throughout the rest of the 19th century that the pronunciation was lost. After a public campaign the original spelling was restored by the United States Board on Geographic Names in 1911. The area of the Ohio headwaters was long inhabited by the Shawnee, the first known European to enter the region was the French explorer/trader Robert de La Salle from Quebec during his 1669 expedition down the Ohio River. European pioneers, primarily Dutch, followed in the early 18th century, Michael Bezallion was the first to describe the forks of the Ohio in a 1717 manuscript, and later that year European fur traders established area posts and settlements. In 1749, French soldiers from Quebec launched an expedition to the forks to unite Canada with French Louisiana via the rivers, during 1753–54, the British hastily built Fort Prince George before a larger French force drove them off. The French built Fort Duquesne based on LaSalles 1669 claims, the French and Indian War, the North American front of the Seven Years War, began with the future Pittsburgh as its center. British General Edward Braddock was dispatched with Major George Washington as his aide to take Fort Duquesne, the British and colonial force were defeated at Braddocks Field. General John Forbes finally took the forks in 1758, Forbes began construction on Fort Pitt, named after William Pitt the Elder while the settlement was named Pittsborough
5.
Columbus, Ohio
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Columbus is the capital and largest city of the U. S. state of Ohio. It is the 15th-largest city in the United States, with a population of 850,106 as of 2015 estimates and this makes Columbus the fourth-most populous state capital in the United States, and the third-largest city in the Midwestern United States. It is the city of the Columbus, Ohio, Metropolitan Statistical Area. With a population of 2,021,632, it is Ohios third-largest metropolitan area, Columbus is the county seat of Franklin County. The city proper has also expanded and annexed portions of adjoining Delaware County, named for explorer Christopher Columbus, the city was founded in 1812 at the confluence of the Scioto and Olentangy rivers, and assumed the functions of state capital in 1816. As of 2013, the city has the headquarters of five corporations in the U. S, fortune 500, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company, American Electric Power, L Brands, Big Lots, and Cardinal Health. In 2012, Columbus was ranked in BusinessWeeks 50 best cities in America. In 2013, Forbes gave Columbus an A rating as one of the top cities for business in the U. S. and later that included the city on its list of Best Places for Business. Columbus was also ranked as the No.1 up-and-coming tech city in the nation by Forbes in 2008, and the city was ranked a top-ten city by Relocate America in 2010. In 2007, fDi Magazine ranked the city no.3 in the U. S. for cities of the future, and the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium was rated no.1 in 2009 by USA Travel Guide. The area including modern-day Columbus once comprised the Ohio Country, under the control of the French colonial empire through the Viceroyalty of New France from 1663 until 1763. In the 18th century, European traders flocked to the area, the area found itself frequently caught between warring factions, including American Indian and European interests. In the 1740s, Pennsylvania traders overran the territory until the French forcibly evicted them, in the early 1750s, the Ohio Company sent George Washington to the Ohio Country to survey. Fighting for control of the territory in the French and Indian War became part of the international Seven Years War, during this period, the region routinely suffered turmoil, massacres, and battles. The 1763 Treaty of Paris ceded the Ohio Country to the British Empire, after the American Revolution, the Ohio Country became part of the Virginia Military District, under the control of the United States. Colonists from the East Coast moved in, but rather finding a empty frontier, they encountered people of the Miami, Delaware, Wyandot, Shawnee. The tribes resisted expansion by the fledgling United States, leading to years of bitter conflict, the decisive Battle of Fallen Timbers resulted in the Treaty of Greenville, which finally opened the way for new settlements. By 1797, a surveyor from Virginia named Lucas Sullivant had founded a permanent settlement on the west bank of the forks of the Scioto River
6.
Art Blakey
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Arthur Art Blakey was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. He was known as Abdullah Ibn Buhaina after he became a Muslim, Blakey made a name for himself in the 1940s in the big bands of Fletcher Henderson and Billy Eckstine. He worked with bebop musicians Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, in the mid-1950s Horace Silver and Blakey formed the Jazz Messengers, a group that the drummer was associated with for the next 35 years. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz calls the Jazz Messengers the archetypal hard bop group of the late 50s and he was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame, the Grammy Hall of Fame, and was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005. He was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1991, Blakey was born on October 11,1919 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to a single mother, who died shortly after his birth. According to Leslie Gourses biography, the mother figure was Annie Peron. The stories related by family and friends, and by Blakey himself, are contradictory as to how long he spent with the Peron family, equally clouded by contradiction are stories of Blakeys early music career. He switched from piano to drums at a date in the early 1930s. An oft-quoted account of the event states that Blakey was forced at gunpoint to move from piano to drums by a club owner, the veracity of this story is called into question in the Gourse biography, as Blakey himself gives other accounts in addition to this one. The style Blakey assumed was the swing style of Chick Webb, Sid Catlett. From 1939-44, Blakey played with fellow Pittsburgh native Mary Lou Williams, while sources differ on the timing, most agree that he traveled to New York with Williams in 1942 before joining Henderson a year later. While playing in Hendersons band, Blakey got into a scuffle with Georgia police and he then led his own band at the Tic Toc Club in Boston for a short time. From 1944-47, Blakey worked with Billy Eckstines big band, after the Eckstine band broke up, Blakey states that he traveled to Africa for a time, In 1947, after the Eckstine band broke up, we -- took a trip to Africa. I was supposed to stay three months and I stayed two years because I wanted to live among the people and find out just how they lived. Blakey is known to have recorded in 1947,1948 and 1949, Blakey toured with Buddy DeFranco from 1951 to 1953 in a band that also included Kenny Drew. On December 17,1947, Blakey led a group known as Art Blakeys Messengers in his first recording session as a leader, the records were released as 78 rpm records at the time, and two of the songs were released on the New Sounds 10 LP compilation. The octet included Kenny Dorham, Sahib Shihab, Musa Kaleem, around the same time, or 1949 he led a big band called Seventeen Messengers. The band proved to be unstable and broke up soon after
