Jazz: Music and Background

Abstract

It is unusual to find a work on popular music with an argument, let alone one that makes claims on the scale of Peter Van der Merwe's Origins of the Popular Style. This book will have repercussions not only on the study of popular music, but on those debates about cultural identity which are centred on blues and jazz. The extent of its effect will depend on the willingness of those involved in identity politics arguments to take on board its potentially unpalatable lessons. The book demonstrates in a terse but convincing argument what common sense might already have told us : that, as far as it is possible to determine, the blues (and by extension, jazz) are not simply African forms transmuted into European idiom, but represent a complex fusion of African and European elements resulting in the new, twelve bar form which became so diffuse.1 Van der Merwe, an African, is