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New Orleans and the History of Jazz,
by Loren Schoenberg
Executive Director, Jazz Museum in
Harlem
Faculty, The Juilliard School |
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| Jazz Funeral, New Orleans (Courtesy of Library of Congress) |
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New Orleans is a city built in a location that was by
any measure a mistake.
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A map of Louisiana and of
the river Mississippi, ca. 1719-1721 (GLC 06090). |
North American settlers needed a way to import and
export goods via the Mississippi River, so a city was
created atop swamps. By virtue of its location and its
role in the international economy, New Orleans became
home to a population that was as heterogeneous as any.
Besides the French and, for a time, Spanish colonial
powers, other groups included African Americans (both
free and slave), other Europeans, people from the Caribbean,
Latin Americans and Scandinavians. The United States
purchased Louisiana from France in 1803 (for $15M),
and this more than doubled the size of the young country.
The Louisiana Territory included parts of Alberta and
Saskatchewan, as well as almost a quarter of the modern-day
United States. Naturally, New Orleans became one of
the country’s major cities. Its variegated racial
realities played a major role in the spiritual and moral
lives of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, both of whom
first witnessed the true cruelties of slavery there.
In his series of essays that eventually comprised the
classic The Cotton Kingdom, Frederick Law Olmstead
stated the following about New Orleans in the mid 1850s:
I doubt if there is a city in the world, where the
resident population has been so divided in its origin,
or where there is such a variety in the tastes, habits,
manners, and moral codes of the citizens. Although
this injures civic enterprise--which the peculiar
situation of the city demands to be directed to means
of cleanliness, convenience, comfort and health--it
also gives a greater scope to the working of individual
enterprise, taste, genius and conscience; so that
nowhere are the higher qualities of man--as displayed
in generosity, hospitality, benevolence, and courage--better
developed or the lower qualities, likening him to
a beast, less interfered with, by law or the action
of public opinion.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Crescent
City, as it was known (due to the curvature of the Mississippi
river as it surrounds the city), was alive with music.
Music served as a psychological shield against the floods,
fires, epidemics and riots that marked New Orleans history,
for it provided an excuse to forget, or a spur to overcome,
the problems brought on by both nature and society.
The most original form of that music, jazz, has come
to be synonymous with New Orleans.
In the nineteenth century, balls or public dances were
held in many American cities, and those in New Orleans
were legendary—both for their popularity and their
inter-racial audiences. To attract the maximum number
of people to the dance floor, the bands of nineteenth
century New Orleans gradually mixed and matched musical
styles, sowing the seeds of jazz. No musical genre was
more popular than opera, and the arias that could be
heard throughout the city day in and day out had a profound
impact on the melodic styles of the musicians who created
the jazz idiom, most notably the pianist/composer Jelly
Roll Morton, reedman Sidney Bechet and trumpeter/vocalist
Louis Armstrong. Their precursors included the Creole
composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk who, as far back as
the mid-nineteenth century, wrote such works as The
Banjo and Bamboula, which combined African
and European idioms in a fresh and daring manner.
But if there is one specific place where the roots of
jazz can be traced, it would be in Congo Square, where
slaves were allowed to dance and generally express themselves.
This is where the cultural mix that remains at the root
of American (and subsequently, much of the world’s)
popular music began. The slaves’ various forms
of expression, rooted in Africa, intermingled with the
New World. This outlet for the myriad emotions engendered
by racism and slavery (as well as the hard-to-find and
hard-won joys of life in such situations) started a
stream of music that led to Buddy Bolden.
By all accounts, this barber/cornetist was the first
musician whose music could be called jazz. It was the
early twentieth century, and Bolden took ragtime, the
music of day, and played it in a rough-and-ready style
with the vocal and improvisatory feeling of the blues.
Ragtime was conceived as a delicate, non-improvisatory
style of piano music. Bolden’s transmogrification
of it into a harder-edged improvisatory, horn-based
form laid the groundwork for jazz bands of the future.
His pioneering efforts inspired the next generation
of musicians, including cornetist Joe “King”
Oliver, who refined the approach into something far
more sophisticated. At the root of the mature New Orleans
style that Oliver and his band championed was a polyphonic
approach to ensemble playing. This means that the horn
players (two trumpets, clarinet and trombone) all played
concurrently. To do this without sounding jumbled called
for each musician to both listen intently to the others
while simultaneously creating their own responses. One
way to listen to classic New Orleans jazz at its best
is to imagine the complexity of the melodies as a representation
of its polyglot communities. It’s worth noting
that at the very time that Bolden’s band was at
its peak, the injustices of Plessy vs. Fergsuson were
making themselves manifest in the Crescent City and
across the country.
Much has been made of the synergy between New Orleans’s
fabled red-light district, Storyville, and the evolution
of jazz. And while it’s true that the tremendous
amount of vice that flourished there created around-the-clock
work for musicians, the fact is that the majority of
them worked elsewhere, and certainly not in the houses
of ill-repute, which were mostly the exclusive province
of pianists. Where Storyville does enter significantly
into the picture is when it was closed in 1917 (purportedly
too many servicemen on their way to fight World War
I never returned after finding their way there on leave)
and its population of entertainment-related workers
had to look to other cities for employment. This coincided
with the general migration northward of southern Blacks,
and within a few years many of the major players were
relocating in Chicago (and more than few in California).
This left the gap that the young Louis Armstrong filled
(he was born in 1901, just a year too early to be drafted)
and within a few years he rose to the top, eventually
joining his mentor Oliver in Chicago in late 1922.
Armstrong’s travels north and eventually west
took him to Chicago and then to New York. Jazz continued
to survive in varying degrees in New Orleans as the
music spread around the world, and by the 1940s the
Crescent City became a Mecca for jazz lovers. There
also continued to be a steady stream of first-rate jazz
musicians who came from New Orleans and participated
in all the current streams of music that were developing
in Kansas, City, Los Angeles and New York. A short list
would include tenor saxophonist Lester Young, who came
to fame with Count Basie’s band, Ornette Coleman’s
drummer Ed Blackwell, and in more recent years, the
trumpeter/composer Wynton Marsalis. Of course, in terms
of R&B and its offshoots, we only have to mention
the names Fats Domino, Harry Connick, Dr. John, Professor
Longhair and Aaron Neville to be reminded of how New
Orleans has stayed close to the core of popular music
to this day.
It was a tragedy that brought New Orleans back to the
world’s attention in the summer of 2005 when Hurricane
Katrina not only ripped the city and its environs apart,
but also exposed the racial and cultural dysfunctions
that still exist in the United States. The city that
never should have been there gave the world a tremendous
cultural gift, jazz, whose progeny, popular music, was
ultimately employed in fundraisers around the world
to try to save New Orleans. Students and teachers alike
will gain a new understanding of our nation’s
past by looking into the untold strands of world history
that are inextricably bound to the Crescent City.
| For a list
of books and websites covering the history
of New Orleans and the history of jazz, visit
our Additional
Resources Page. |
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