How did jazz influence mainstream music in Europe and America? [How to approach and introduce this question]

Conceptions of jazz culture and music that began to develop at the very beginning of the twentieth century both in the US and in Europe have had significant repercussions for directions taken not just in popular music, but in art music too. In Europe, it is easy to detect this influence in France in the early part of the century, particularly through examination of Parisian culture and music. During the 1920s, Parisian jazzomania reached its peak – a cultural obsession that leaked its way in to all kinds of musics. One kind of ‘mainstream’ in musical culture in which this influence can be detected is the art music of those Parisian composers generally accepted by society as bastions of ‘serious’ and ‘important’ culture. One of the most significant of these figures is Maurice Ravel, whose Piano Concerto in G major (composed between 1929 and 2931) displays the influence of the sounds of jazz he encountered in a previous trip to the United States. In the US, jazz styles can be seen being worked into the fabric of ‘mainstream’ music in the work of George Gershwin. In the case of Ravel, allusions to jazz flavour his music with exotic sounds, without detracting from the ‘serious’ nature of his music – he was after all still composing in a traditional concerto idiom, meant to be heard by an attentive audience in a well-to-do concert hall. In contrast to Ravel, Gershwin spent the 1920s writing popular music in the jazz idiom in Tin Pan Alley in New York, and then went on to apply this musical style to a more traditional symphonic idiom in his piece Rhapsody in Blue (1924). Coming from more of a ‘popular music’ background, his piece is more like an application of jazz to symphonic ideas whilst retaining popular appeal and jazz flavour at its heart – this could be termed ‘symphonic jazz’. These different ways in which jazz music influenced the art music mainstream in both Europe and the US can be demonstrated through examination of these two different compositions.