MANSFIELD — Jazz music is where America came together.
A free concert on Sunday, April 30, at the Richland Academy of the Arts will help show that off during national “Jazz Appreciation Month.”
The show starts at 3 p.m. and will feature Steve Brown and Friends.
Jazz developed in the United States in the very early part of the 20th century around New Orleans, near the mouth of the Mississippi River.
According to the National Museum of American History, the city’s population was more diverse than anywhere else in the South.
People of African, French, Caribbean, Italian, German, Mexican, and American Indian, as well as English, descent interacted with one another.
African-American musical traditions mixed with others and gradually jazz emerged from a blend of ragtime, marches, blues and other kinds of music.
Jazz, originally mostly played for dancing, spread widely after the first recordings of it were made in 1917.
“The evolution of jazz was led by a series of brilliant musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis,” according to the museum website.
With its music now around the globe, jazz has become one of the United States’s greatest exports to the world.
Brown, a former educator, and active musician from Lexington, will lead a band that includes Brown on piano; Jeffrey Boyd from Mansfield on trumpet; Eric Fairhurst from Wooster on sax and flute; Andy Cary from Wooster on guitar; Dan Conwell from Wooster on upright bass; Steve Berry from Ashland on drums; and special guest Damian Boyd from Mansfield on trombone.
All are members of the American Federation of Musicians Local 159 in Mansfield.
The concert will feature some of the greatest jazz standards which were originally on Broadway in the early to mid-20th century, including the music of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Lerner and Loewe, Richard Rodgers, and others.
“With their beautiful melodies, great harmonies and flowing lyrics, these songs have always provided a blueprint for jazz performance and improvisation,” Brown said.
The free concert is funded through a grant from the American Federation of Musicians and the Music Performance Trust Fund.
