Jazz was born in the city of New Orleans, on the Mississippi River in the far south of the USA. It too probably began with the songs and dancing of black slaves in the 1830s. the musician Jelly Roll Morton said he was the first to play ‘jazz’ in 1897, but nobody really knows when it began. Black musicians like Louis Armstrong became famous in the 1920s in chicago,and jazz music became popular across the world after it travelled to New York and Paris in the 1930s. George Gershwin, who made music for films and theatre, thought jazz was an important part of American life and he used it in music like his Rhapsody in blue. During the Second World War, American soldiers brought the ‘swing’ music of the big dance bands like Glenn Miller to Europe. This was not jazz but part of the same family of music.