Jazz and recorded sound
African American music becomes global within twenty years, because it can be recorded.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 40 years
- Known to
- ± 5 years
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
Jazz emerges in New Orleans from blues, ragtime and brass band traditions in the early twentieth century, and the phonograph carries it worldwide with a speed no earlier musical form could match. Armstrong makes the improvising soloist central. Recording changes music itself: a performance becomes a fixed object that can be studied and copied, and musicians everywhere learn from records rather than from teachers in the room.