Jazz chant is a poem that use jazz rhythms to illustrate the natural stress and intonation patterns of conversational American English. Jazz Chants provide an innovative and exciting way to improve your student's speaking and listening comprehension skills while reinforcing the language structures of everyday situation. Jazz is an original American musical art form which originated around the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States out of a confluence of African and European music traditions. The use of blue notes, call-and-response, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swung note of ragtime are characteristics traceable back to jazz's West African pedigree.[1] During its early development, jazz also incorporated music from New England's religious hymns and from 19th and 20th century American popular music based on European music traditions. The origins of the word "jazz," which was first used to refer to music in about 1915, are uncertain; for the origin and history, see Jazz (word). Jazz has, from its early 20th century inception, spawned a variety of subgenres, from New Orleans Dixieland dating from the early 1910s, big band-style swing from the 1930s and 1940s, bebop from the mid-1940s, a variety of Latin-jazz fusions such as Afro-Cuban and Brazilian jazz from the 1950s and 1960s, jazz-rock fusion from the 1970s and later developments such as acid jazz and Chant (from Old French chanter) is the rhythmic speaking or singing of words or sounds, often primarily on one or two pitches called reciting tones. Chants may range from a simple melody involving a limited set of notes to highly complex musical structures, often including a great deal of repetition of musical subphrases, such as Great Responsories and Offertories of Gregorian chant. Chant may be considered speech, music, or a heightened or stylized form of speech. In the later Middle Ages some religious chant evolved into song (forming one of the roots of later Western music).