Nope -it is an AMERICAN art form. There were certainly black roots to it, but it the practitioners were of both European and African descent during it’s hay-day.
<><><><>
I would recommend reading a bit more jazz history.
Early Jazz by Gunther Schuller would be a great start.
Of course I don’t what era you consider to be jazz’s heyday.
“Jazz Music emerged as as a recognizable musical form around the turn of the 20the century. The roots of jazz, however, extend backward over several centuries. Jazz music represents the “synthesis of many cultural influences...that was achieved through the institution of slavery.” Jazz music combines elements of African music with elements of Western European music.”
This from http://library.thinkquest.org/18602/history/beginnings/beginningstart.html
Your post is short so I’m not sure quite what you are implying I missed here? From another web-site “As a musical language of communication, jazz is the first indigenous American style to affect music in the rest of the World.”
I believe both of these statements back up the simple point I made, which was that Jazz evolved in the US from multiple cultural influences, including the Black American experience.
As for Jazz history - well I’m not a professional musician - having explicitly chosen to be an engineer instead of a Trumpet player. So the majority of my music education involved technicalities involved with playing classical music on the trumpet.
That being said - I listened to a fair amount of Jazz growing up in the 60s, and performed some of it while in school. I don’t claim to be an expert on music histor, just someone who enjoys the art form. From my own reading - and having listened to people like Al Hurt, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Benny Goodman, Stan Kenton, Harry James, etc. So I do mix the big-bands in with Jazz as far as what I enjoyed.. and to answer the basic question, to me the 30’s-early 50’s would maybe be Jazz’s hay-day.
When I play that first ODJB record on my Victrola (it’s a pretty common disc) as I was doing again not too many weeks ago, I can’t help but think how mind-blowing and downright ‘startling’ it must have been to folks in 1917, hearing it for the first time. Like it must have been something ‘from Mars.’ Quite a jarring step from the earlier ragtime-type stuff from “Six Brown Brothers” and whatnot that preceded it. Maybe a few folks who lived in New Orleans or who traveled on riverboats, listening to King Oliver and Sidney Bechet might have already been a little acclimatized to such fare, but I suspect over 99% of the folks out in the country were quite jarred.