Jazz is not Blues and Blues is not Jazz.......

The two have obviously diverged but they come from the same place blues being a bit more ancient. Jazz frequently plays homage to blues as in Kind of Blue. But the intent of genres has changed so much that blues in particular is hardly recognizable. Jazz is now composed of numerous mini genres some of which are hardly recognizable as music. I can always listen to John Lee But the Art Ensemble of Chicago can get a bit tedious and I have to be in the mood and alone in the house. 

That Clarksdale clip pretty much defined the "real" Blues, and Jazz is still jazz; my ears tell me so. When I hear any of the classic Blues players from Clarksdale playing "On Green Dolphin Street" I might have a change of heart.

I notice nobody has mentioned "Ragtime", which is linked to Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton who claims to have invented jazz.

It seems that what's called modern jazz has come a long way. While modern jazz borrows from many genres of music, I don't believe they are connected in a linear sort of way, like if we didn't have this we couldn't have that. Where does "Ragtime" come in;


        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPmruHc4S9Q


        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCxLAr_bwpA

Ragtime was a precursor of Jazz. Late 1800’s-early 1900’s.

RAGtime . Ragged rhythm : syncopation; the main defining characteristic of Jazz (the “swing”). Ragtime was not really Jazz in the strictest sense of the word since there was no improvisation to speak of . Players (Morton) would later incorporate improvisation along with other influences such as Blues and Jazz was born. No big mystery here as it is well documented.

The evolution of Jazz is linear; it builds on what came before. Same can be said of practically all art.

Through sheer good fortune, a book of piano sheet music a neighbor laid on me happened to have a xerox of Scott Joplin's rag "The Chrysanthemum" hidden inside.  I thought I was a knowledgeable Scott Joplin fan, but this particular piece had completely eluded me.  Anyway, I'm hearing it for the first time, under my fingers. It's totally wonderful.  Yeah, to put it gently, the music is a bit above my station in terms of difficulty, but on a good day I can almost pull off maybe eighty percent of it.  BTW, the music the book actually contains is uniformly awful.

As for my piano, it's an early 20th Century Mason-Hamlin studio upright.  It can no longer be tuned to standard pitch, and it will never be fully in tune with itself but it's got tone, tone, tone!  My audio-fool ears bathe in luxury.