The roots of Jazz have been traced back to African tribal rhythyms and the music sung in Black Christian churches. Of course, this is mostly speculation, since such things cannot really be proved beyond a doubt. Ahh...Blacks think they single handedly created every single genre of music in the world. I swear it won't be long before they are claiming they created classical music, and country-western. Jazz is definately a mainly Black originated genre, and all of the most famous and probably best jazz artist are/were black. But if you really really do some research back to it's very roots you will find that Whites had a little more hand in the beginning of the jazz sound than you might think. Bluegrass, country, blues, celtic, folk, jazz, even classical music, all had an effect on each other in some degree or another, they all did a bit of intermingling down in the deep south. There were some pretty jazzy sounding White pianist wayy back in the day, before anyone heard of the word jazz. I'm not trying to downplay the Blacks influence on the jazz music, but Whites had a little more influence on the development of what we call jazz than alot of people realize or would like to admit. After all, there wouldn't be jazz in the first place had it not been for White instruments like the piano and trumpet. :cool: