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jazz
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Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong
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Category: Arts & Culture
Key People:
Roberta Flack
Astrud Gilberto
George Gershwin
Benny Goodman
Duke Ellington
Related Topics:
Latin jazz
Dixieland
swing
jazz-rock
free jazz
See all related content →

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jazz, musical form, often improvisational, developed by African Americans and influenced by both European harmonic structure and African rhythms. It was developed partially from ragtime and blues and is often characterized by syncopated rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, varying degrees of improvisation, often deliberate deviations of pitch, and the use of original timbres. Any attempt to arrive at a precise, all-encompassing definition of jazz is probably futile. Jazz has been, from its very beginnings at the turn of the 20th century, a constantly evolving, expanding, changing music, passing through several distinctive phases of development; a definition that might apply to one ...(100 of 9795 words)

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