s (this takes more talent than one would think). Since Armstrong's time, jazz has changed over the years. Nicknamed "Bird", Charlie Parker forever changed the way performers would solo by ignoring what's written and using other scales. Using more "laid-back" tones and melodies, Miles Davis helped usher in the age of "cool" jazz. According to Davis, " 'Bird (Parker) and Diz (Gillespie) were great, but if you weren't a fast listener you couldn't catch the humor or feeling of their music. Their music wasn't sweet and it didn't have harmonic lines that you could easily hum with your girlfriend trying to get over with a kiss.' He would be among the first musicians to begin looking for ways to broaden the music's appeal and restore some balance between the soloist and the ensemble." (Ward 372) Since the beginning of jazz, much of the music that followed was deeply rooted in jazz. During World War II, swing and boogie music became very popular with the younger generation and even had its own lingo, kind of like hip-hop music today. Benny Goodman recalls playing his first show for teenagers rather than adults and remembers them rushing the stage in a frenzy and even climbing on stage to dance. "It seemed like Times Square on New Year's Eve," he said. "Exciting, but also a little scary – frightening." (Ward 253) Jazz truly paved the way for the rest of American music through the 20th century.
             The blues are almost as old as jazz and just as significant. "As it developed and first appears in notated form, the blues was a strophic song built of three short musical phrases. The classic form of the blues is the well-known three-line verse, in twelve measures of 4/4 rhythm, with an A-A-B rhyme pattern and a line length usually measured by five stressed syllables." (Cohn 17) Almost all blues songs are writt...