And they have to play with standardized tools. Ensemble musical protocols and standardized tools come from Western Europe. And songs, in miniature, echo the structures of sonatas, concertos, and symphonies. Diatonic harmony based on tonic, dominant, and subdominant tone centers, plus chromatic variations and interpolations. True, the banjo closely resembles an African instrument, but beyond traditional Dixieland, it didn't last long in the jazz world.
Jazz is, above all, a music played through something.
Without European forms and instruments to play through, jazz would be nothing - not even a narrow ethnic curiosity. You can add more, including big-band arranging techniques developed mainly by Ferde Grofe for Paul Whiteman in the second decade of the century, but that's enough. The Real American Songbook Pay attention, I repeat, to what jazz musicians actually do. For professional use only. The Real Jazz Book contains about 450 songs.