Around 1900, Black New Orleans fused the blues, ragtime, spirituals, and brass-band tradition into something built on improvisation, swing, and call-and-response. Carried north and east by the Great Migration, jazz became the century's defining American music: the soloist's art of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington's orchestral ambition, big-band swing, Charlie Parker's bebop, and the modal and free explorations of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Its Black creators were segregated and exploited by a white-run industry even as their art entered concert halls worldwide. Amiri Baraka and Albert Murray staked out the terms in which it is still debated.
It is the music America made and then refused, for decades, to call art. Born around 1900 in Black New Orleans among the grandchildren of enslaved people — in a country that segregated, cheated, and policed them — jazz became the sound of a people inventing a freedom in music that their country denied them in life.