Music

Music makes up a huge part of the world we live in with countless influential genres and styles that are enormous parts of people’s lives. As well as the well known genres such as rock and pop, hip hop and rap music, there are also genres such as jazz, funk and soul music which all have their origins in the United States of the nineteenth and twentieth century.

Within African American communities in the southern states Jazz began to emerge during the turn of the century and is well known for its improvisation, swung note and blue notes as well as its various spin offs and sub genres. These range from bebop, New Orleans Dixieland, Brazilian Jazz, acid jazz and even mentioned musical styles such as funk and hip hop.

Because the boundaries that surround jazz are so blurred and its improvisational nature, there is only one thing that people agree on when it comes to it – that jazz is hard to define. But maybe this is what makes it so appealing; after all when something is easy to define it can become more mundane, less interesting and too constrained. It means that jazz can continue to flourish way into the future because no-one really knows how it can be contained.

Funk is one of the genres that has its influences in jazz, particularly its off-shoots such as soul music and soul jazz, with a strong rhythm and obvious sense of ‘groove’. Many people associate funk music with the likes of James Brown, The Funk Brothers, George Clinton and Prince, imagining music with plenty of electric bass, guitar, organs and drums, though there are various other instruments that are regularly used.

Finally, soul music is related to both these genres because it fused with jazz to lay the foundations of funk. Soul is what you get when r & b is fused with gospel music and just like jazz has been known to use improvisational elements as well as catchy sounds.
Jazz, funk and soul. They are all genres of music with many followers, and rightfully so. Just as other forms of music touch the hearts of many people, these genres have been doing it for decades and there will be no end in sight for these versatile and boundless styles.