When discussing musical styles native to the United States, jazz usually comes to the forefront. Emerging from New Orleans’ Black community in the late 19th century, the versatile and improvisational genre blended blues, ragtime and West African rhythms to create a sound that was definitely unique and has become one of our country’s premiere artistic exports.
But as is often the case with how we recount history, pushing jazz as a music native to the U.S. often paints over the actual Native music of this land, which existed well before European settlers and the forced immigration of African bloodlines that would eventually spawn that New Orleans sound. And there may be more crossover between the music passed down for generations in Indigenous tribes and jazz than most people realize.
“I think there’s a larger discussion around the origins of jazz,” says Julia Keefe, director of the Julia Keefe Indigenous Big Band. “I’m no ethnomusicologist, and I don’t pretend to be, however jazz very much comes from the Black experience in America [coming out of] that amazing melting pot of cultures that was New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century. And I do know that Indigenous people were there as well. There’s a larger conversation around the Stomp Dance from the Muscogee Nation. Did the syncopation in that Stomp Dance have an influence on the early iterations of jazz? It is hard to say, but there is this underlying triplet subdivision in North American Indigenous music that is also very much present in Indigenous music from West Africa.”…