Of all music in the 20th century, few styles were as influential on American popular music as jazz.

Based largely on an improvisational playing style and syncopated rhythms, jazz was born in the Mississippi River Delta out of ragtime and blues in the early 1900s, say ISU professors James Bovinette and David Stuart.

In the history of jazz, “there are different styles and periods you have to look at,” says Stuart, who teaches a class about the history of rock `n’ roll. “There was always somebody else around doing something different.”

Over time, jazz followed black migration to northern cities like Kansas City, Chicago and New York, and the jazz coming out of these cities had a distinct flavor that made it different from New Orleans jazz, says Bovinette, director of the ISU’s Jazz Ensemble program.

“Jazz is influenced by the social situations of urban areas,” he says. “It takes the issues of the people around it and turns them into musical expression,” much like today’s rap and rock do, he says.

By the 1920s and ’30s, an era now commonly referred to as the Jazz Age, jazz was the popular music.

Great soloists like Louis Armstrong and Lester Young emerged at this time, as did several new jazz forms.

The big band and swing movements led by such greats as Duke Ellington and Count Basie took jazz to a whole new level with the onset of swing dancing, and in the ’40s, bebop, yet another division of the jazz idiom, hit big.

The success of bebop performers like Charlie “Bird” Parker brought scat singing into the limelight, and with it, great singers like Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn, Stuart says.

“I can’t stress enough how important the great blues and jazz singers were to the art form,” he says. “Even later singers such as Cleo Laine and Harry Connick Jr. have contributed immensely to jazz.”

It may be interesting to note jazz and blues were the first contact most of the world had with American popular culture. In fact, many blues and jazz performers did not achieve success in America until they established themselves by relentlessly touring Europe, Stuart says.

Surprising as it may seem that America wouldn’t always show overwhelming support for its only truly original art form, that’s the way it went.

“We tend not to like our own stuff right away,” Stuart says.

Stuart cites the case of influential Chicago bluesman Big Bill Broonzy as an example.

Broonzy toured Europe for many years before gaining acceptance in the United States, returning only when necessary, and during his time back he worked as a janitor at Iowa State to save money for his next overseas tour.

“If you play jazz, you tour. That’s all you can do,” Stuart says.

And that tradition continues today. Even the successful Branford and Wynton Marsalis regularly tour Europe to keep money in their pockets.

Even Jimi Hendrix had to tour Europe first to eventually be successful in America, Stuart says.

The influence of jazz and blues performers touring Europe was evidenced in the early days of such British rock bands as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Cream whose first hits were covers of songs by blues innovators Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and others, Stuart says.

On American soil, the rhythm and blues of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and company showed yet another facet of the genre in the ’50s, much as funk and fusion (Tower of Power, Earth, Wind, and Fire) did in the ’70s. Even ’80s “hair metal” shows some signs of jazz influence in its tendencies toward guitar solos.

Soloing is improvisation, Bovinette says. While improv is not unique to jazz, the connection between soloing in jazz and soloing in rock is undeniable, he says.

“What improv really is, is relaying a kind of sensual element in the human spirit through an instrument,” he says. The feel of an improvisation or solo is “much more intimate” as a result, he says.

When asked about the future of jazz, Stuart and Bovinette seemed split on the issue.

“I’m not sure,” says Stuart. “The popular media has so much [more] power than before, it’s hard to get jazz out to new listeners unless they’re bound and determined to go out and search for it.”

Bovinette seems more interested in the medium itself.

“Jazz is a serious art,” he says. “When you’re talking about jazz, it’s like talking about painting.”

So maybe “Where is art going?” is a better question.

“You have to look at people, because they reflect that,” Bovinette says. “The future of jazz, much like the future of art, depends on the future of society and culture.”