What makes "jazz" the revolutionary music of the 20th century, and will it be revolutionary for the 21st century?

African American Review, Summer, 1995 by Fred Wei-han Ho

4. royal hartigan has described this phenomenon as African Americans trying to get the Western seven-note scale back to the five notes common to many West African pentatonic systems (although he also recognizes that there are seven-note African scales).

5. I am interpreting LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka here.

6. Extensive syncopation (the emphasis on "off" or "weak" beats) is very prevalent in the musical cultures of the Pacific Islands, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world. But none of these musics "swing" in the African American sense, even though it can be asserted that they are their own forms of "swing."

Fred Wei-han Ho is a Chinese American baritone saxophonist, composer/arranger, leader of the Afro Asian Music Ensemble and Monkey Orchestra, and activist. His most recent CD is The Underground Railroad to My Heart (Soul Note), and his book Sounding Off!: Music as Subversion/Resistance/Revolution, co-edited with Ron Sakolsky, is forthcoming from Artonomedia/Semiotext.