Jazz is a musical art form, commonly characterized by blue notes,
syncopation, swing, call and response, polyrhythms and improvisation.
It has been called the first original art form to develop in the
United States of America. Jazz is rooted in West African cultural and
musical expression and in African American music traditions, in folk
blues and ragtime. Originating in African American communities near
the beginning of the 20th century, by the 1920s it had gained
international popularity. Since then, jazz has had a profoundly
pervasive influence on other musical styles worldwide. The word jazz
itself is rooted in American slang, but is of unknown origin, despite
many theories about its source. Rather than being a single, narrowly
definable style, in the early 21st century jazz is an ever-growing
family of musical styles, many of which continue to develop.
Read the rest of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz
Today's selected anniversaries:
1600 Tokugawa Ieyasu established military supermacy over rival
Japanese clans in the Battle of Sekigahara, which marked
the beginning of the Tokugawa shogunate, the final
shogunate to rule in Japan.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sekigahara)
1805 Napoleonic Wars: Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson led the
British fleet to defeat a combined French and Spanish navy
in the Battle of Trafalgar.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Nelson%2c_1st_Viscount_Nelson)
1824 Joseph Aspdin, an English bricklayer, received the patent
for Portland cement.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_cement)
1854 Florence Nightingale and a staff of 38 nurses were sent to
the Crimean War.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Nightingale)
1944 The first kamikaze attack: HMAS Australia was hit by a
Japanese plane carrying a 200 kg (441 pound) bomb off Leyte
Island in the Philippines.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/kamikaze)
1945 Argentine military officer and politician Juan Domingo Perón
married popular actress Evita.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Perón)
Wikiquote of the day:
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the
greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most
obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the
falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to
colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which
they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives."
~ Leo Tolstoy
(
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Leo_Tolstoy)