JAM celebrations start
April 2013 marks the 12th year of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History's Jazz Appreciation Month initiative, which aims to draw greater public attention globally to the extraordinary heritage and history of jazz as America's original music, a global cultural treasure, the US Embassy in Yerevan wrote on its Facebook account.
Jazz is the most consequential, influential and innovative music to emerge from the United States in the 1880s. New Orleans, Louisiana, is widely known as the birthplace of jazz. No city, except perhaps for New York, has received more visiting jazz aficionados than New Orleans where the Original Dixieland Jass Band (ODJB) made the first jazz recordings in early 1917.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Kansas City, Missouri, was a hotbed of jazz - Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Mary Lou Williams and other greats performed there.
In New York, jazz from all periods can be heard in the city's many historic nightclubs, including the Village Vanguard, the Blue Note, and Birdland. Harlem's Apollo Theater has seen many great jazz artists, as has Carnegie Hall, located at 57th Street and 7th Avenue.
