Abigail Daniels, CNN
- It was the music of rebellion and youth. Artists traded witty improvisations onstage chronicling the pain and the promise of being black in America, inspiring inner-city and rural Southern audiences alike in nightclubs and on street corners.
That music was jazz.
Today, Jaspects, an Atlanta-based group of young musicians who were born in the hip-hop era, fuse rap and jazz melodies to introduce younger audiences to jazz and the broader ideas regarding African-American society.
For Jaspects, whose music has appeared in the movie “Hustle & Flow” and recently was featured in the CNN documentary series “Black in America,” the lessons of jazz go beyond its artistic merits to questions about the ownership and control of black music in general.
