Description

The easy assumption about jazz is that it is free, or that it represents attempts at freedom, and makes it seem easy to evoke an spirit of an unbounded freedom. In fact, the driving force behind jazz is in many cases the story of liberation from existing cultural and societal structures set in place by the largely white world of central Europe. Jazz could be seen as an attempt to break barriers created by three hundred years of white domination of music and the rigidity of the structure of tonal music, beginning with the development of equal temperament in the 17th Century. It is amusingly ironic, too, that the invention of equal temperament was an attempt to re-map the octave into 12 parts, thereby creating new boundaries within which music is created. As a result, we continue to see and hear the world with ears that have evolved from those boundaries.