The music Americans call jazz has many origins and many forms.
Music historians have a difficult time fixing the origins of musical styles with any precision.
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and all-white group, gave the music its name in the popular markets. But music historians have long known that the ODJB borrowed heavily from African American musical forms. Louis Armstrong and Bix Biederbecke became most famous playing in this mode of dixieland jazz. Swing music was characterized by very large bands, fixed, usually written arrangements, and solos by individual musicians in turn instead of group improvisation. Swing appears to have emerged from an adaptation of the commercially successful but bland, neo-jazz played by show and dance orchestras like Paul Whiteman's.