What do you get when you combine both jazz and blues? Jazz Blues, like most other forms of music, gained its popularity in the back rooms of clubs, honky-tonks, and even in underground cultural surroundings.

With the history of blues and jazz woven together and some similarities in the styles, to this day the two still inspire each other. With the similarities in each style of music, artist began a fusion funk of the two giving birth to Jazz Blues.

At the very core of Jazz Blues, are blues songs that vocally express life felt stories of emotions bringing each verse to life. With Most blues songs include words forming a three-line stanza like in bop songs.

In the 1920’s, Harlem became the metropolis of an unprecedented creativity for the country’s best jazz musicians. The birth to many jazz players careers and several greats, got their start in the night clubs of Kansas City.

Blues music itself and the role that it plays in jazz music needs no mentioning. To this day you don’t have to look far to find melodies that have been impacted by sweet sounds of blues. If you happen your way down to New Orleans, and through the French Quarter, you can truly appreciate how a city that was once underwater after Katrina, clanged on to the hope of its revival.

Through the sweet sounds of Jazz Blues infused a belief in their culture that spirited the community to rebuild. As jazz, blues or a combination of, continues to heal and bring hope to a battered community, new incredible sounds have come to life, new artist have risen from the debris and old ones returned to bring in an era of new hope and life to this great city.

The area known as the Mississippi Delta has produced the largest number of influential and important blues artists.  This area in west Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi was never a major center of music business but it is considered the emotional heart for many blues musicians, fans, and historians.  It was fertile ground for the roots of the blues.

The Delta was a cruel place for African Americas in the middle of the 20^th century.  Slavery, oppression, the KKK, Jim Crow laws mixed with Southern heat, illiteracy and poverty was the perfect recipe for an expression of the culture of southern blacks of this time like no other.  Blues music is an important documentation of this era.

Early Delta blues songs were simply passed down orally, then in written form.  But they were later preserved in recording made by traveling musicologists such as the father and son team of John and Alan Lomax.  In the early 40’s this duo would go on field trips to the south to make these recordings and it wasn’t until later that artists would travel around the country to record their music.  After their travels, they would return to the Delta to continue playing in the juke joints, and social dances and gatherings

In the 1920s and ‘30s Delta bluesmen Charley Patton, Son House and Robert Johnson influenced the next generation of Mississippi born blues greats like Muddy Waters.  Musician such as he took the music north as the mass exodus from the rural south of blacks happened in the ‘40s and ‘50s.  Originally the Delta blues was simply one instrument and a vocalist but in Chicago the sound was amplified and electrified to accommodate the new urban tastes of the black population.  The growth of this industry once it hit Chicago was huge and soon Chicago eclipsed the Delta as the center of the blues.