Beginning in the fall of 1994, The University Libraries and the Jazz Studies Program of the School of Music have cooperated in presenting an ongoing series of concerts by various of the jazz ensembles in the Libraries' North Exhibition Hall. Jazz is a uniquely American phenomenon, part and parcel of the twentieth century. A lthough attempts to define jazz have been made to varying degrees of success, there are three distinctive characteristics which contribute to its appeal.
Little documentation exists of the earliest jazz bands.
New Orleans was a focal point in the early development, partly due to having a musical tradition that reached back well into the 18th century, and also because the city provided many outlets for jazz at parades, funerals, on advertising wagons, at picnics, and in dance halls and cabarets. By the early 1920s, in the music of bands such as King Oliver's Creole Band, New Orleans Rhythm Kings, and Ladd's Black Aces, the music of jazz began to show an organic expansion, leading to more individual and thus more private attitudes. The differences among these underline a diversity of outlook which has remained characteristic of jazz ever since. Jazz, perhaps more than any other music, does not lend itself to a neat sequence of styles. There has been an evolutionary succession of styles, which have maintained the continuity, logic, and inner necessity that characterize real art.