hands or stamping feet quickly became a defining feature , but a drum kit has been a later refinement . The inescapable conclusion is that recording is the event horizon of jazz . Until the Original Dixieland Jass Band made its first ( unissued ) test recording on the last day of January 1917 , an evolving music had left no permanent trace of itself , leaving us to reconstruct an ancestry of blues , field hollers , European art music and hymns , African influences and , though we tend to forget it now , military music .
In the spring of 1917 , when the ODJB , a white group playing what was essentially a black music , made those first discs for the Victor Talking Machine Company ( see how little emphasis was placed on music as the most obvious purpose of the technology ) America was set to ignore George Washington ’ s parting advice and the later admonishments of the fifth President James Monroe , and embroil herself in a European war . A few years earlier , Marconi had travelled to America on the liner Lusitania in preference to the new Titanic . His wireless technology was to play an important and dramatic part in the rescue of survivors from the stricken White Star ship , but it was the sinking of the Lusitania three years later in May 1915 that began to tip the United States toward war . These are perhaps obscure connections , but the transport of Americans across the Atlantic in two twentieth century wars was to be an important vector in the dissemination and spread of jazz music . Wherever we look in the American literature of war , in the work of Fenimore Cooper , J . W . DeForest , Stephen Crane , Ernest Hemingway , Irwin Shaw , Norman Mailer , and in many of obscurer authors discussed by Edmund Wilson in his encyclopaedic study of Civil War literature Patriotic Gore , you ’ ll find , somewhere in the narrative , not always at its core , but always in a place of symbolic importance , a young man with a horn .
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