Devil legend[edit]

According to legend, as a young man living on a plantation in rural Mississippi, Robert Johnson had a
tremendous desire to become a great blues musician. He was instructed to take his guitar to a
crossroad near Dockery Plantation at midnight. There he was met by a large black man (actually the
Devil) who took the guitar and tuned it. The Devil played a few songs and then returned the guitar to
Johnson, giving him mastery of the instrument. This was in effect, a deal with the Devil mirroring the
legend of Faust. In exchange for his soul, Robert Johnson was able to create the blues for which he
became famous.
Jazz is a genre of music that originated in African American communities in the United States in the late
19th and early 20th century. It emerged in the form of independent popular musical styles, all linked by
the common bonds of African American and European American musical parentage with a performance
orientation.[1] Jazz spans a period of over a hundred years, encompassing a range of music
from ragtime to that of the present day, and has proved to be very difficult to define. Jazz makes heavy
use ofimprovisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swung note,[2] as well as aspects of European
harmony, American popular music,[3]the brass band tradition, and African musical elements such
as blue notes and ragtime.[1] The birth of Jazz in the multicultural society of America has led
intellectuals from around the world to hail Jazz as "one of America's original art forms". [4]

As jazz spread around the world, it drew on different national, regional, and local musical cultures,
giving rise to many distinctive styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier
brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime andblues with
collective polyphonic improvisation. In the 1930s, heavily arranged dance-oriented swing big
bands, Kansas City jazz, a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisational style and Gypsy jazz (a style that
emphasized musette waltzes) were the prominent styles.Bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz
from danceable popular music towards a more challenging "musician's 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, linear melodic lines.

The 1950s saw the emergence of free jazz, which explored playing without regular meter, beat and
formal structures, and in the mid-1950s, hard bop, which introduced influences from rhythm and blues,
gospel music, and blues, especially in the saxophone and piano playing. 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 and the highly amplified stage sound of rock. In the early 1980s, a
commercial form of jazz fusion called smooth jazzbecame successful, garnering significant radio
airplay. Other styles and genres abound today, such as Latin jazz and Afro-Cuban jazz.
Prominent jazz musician Louis Armstrong observed: "At one time they were calling it levee camp music,
then in my day it was ragtime. When I got up North I commenced to hear about jazz, Chicago style,
Dixieland, swing. All refinements of what we played in New Orleans... There ain't nothing new." [5] Or as
jazz musician J. J. Johnson put it in a 1988 interview: "Jazz is restless. It won't stay put and it never
will."[6]