Black Rights Movement Chicago Essay

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The Role of Chicago Jazz in the Black Rights Movement Jazz and music in general is a form of expression that can reveal a lot of information about the culture and tastes of its listeners and performers alike. Jazz as a genre of music has various definitions owing to the different ways people perceive it. According to Ted Pease (2003, p. ix), jazz is a unique and important American musical art form with nineteenthandearly twentieth-century African-American origins that is characterized by instrumental solos, syncopated melody and rhythm, idiomatic voicing and chord progressions, characteristic instrumentation, and a highly personalized approach to vocal and instrumental performance. Jazz is believed to have come to Chicago when Negro bands moved to the city after the Secretary of the Navy closed Storyville in 1917(Seago, 2000, p. 43). The presence of these bands meant that the original dwellers of Chicago that was mostly whites would be exposed to jazz as a genre of music.…show more content…
To answer these and other such questions it is important to understand what aspects in the black rights movement jazz could affect. One of the key issues during the black rights movement was segregation and by extension housing discrimination. This caused black people to live together mainly in the Black Belt on the city's South Side causing the Negro bands to have a majorly black audience (Seago, 2000, p. 43). It was so serious that even white music companies did not record black jazz musicians. In addition, even after some acceptance of jazz music, white and black jazz musicians were not allowed to perform together publicly(Hentoff, 2009, para. 3). However, music being an art has the tendency of attracting curiosity from fellow musicians or just music lovers no matter their race. Somehow the white people would eventually listen to jazz music of the black people despite the criticism they would level against the art in the

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