How has Jazz Influenced Modern Music  Jazz is as American as
apple pie. It is original music, created in America. Jazz is the
most influential of all music styles in the 20th century. No
other music can make that claim. What jazz is, is a mainly
improvisational style of playing with syncopated rhythms laid
down under the melody. It was created in the Mississippi River
Delta country, growing out of ragtime and the blues, in the
early 1900′s.  And because it is an improvisational style of
playing, there are many different periods of jazz and many
different styles of playing jazz. In other words, there is
always somebody, somewhere, doing something a little differently
than the next guy around the corner. Looking at it historically,
jazz followed the Black migration out of the south to the
north,by way of Kansas City, Chicago and New York. Each city
developed its own sound, from say the jazz that came to be in
the French Quarter and lowlands of New Orleans.  Jazz can
rightly be called the people’s music because