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Jazz
Jazz is music in which the melody is made as it is played: a fixed sequence of chords underneath, and the player inventing over it. New Orleans was the one place in the United States where the conditions existed: French and Spanish colonial history, a free Creole middle class, Congo Square where drumming had been permitted, and military band instruments cheap after the Civil War. Jazz is the most influential art form North America has produced, and its principle of improvisation carried into nearly all the popular music that followed.
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