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.

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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_Per%C3%B3n)

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)