The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival is in full swing this weekend. Wish you could be there?  So do we.  So let's do the next best thing.  Let's travel back in time to old New Orleans and witness the birth of jazz.  In the 19th century, New Orleans was a thriving seaport and one of America's most cosmopolitan cities.  It contained a spicy stew of races and ethnicities, including Europeans, Africans, Creoles, and others.  This great variety gave New Orleans a unique culture, and all the ingredients necessary to cook up a hot new form of music.  The city of New Orleans features prominently in early development of jazz.  A port city with doors to the spicy sounds of the Caribbean and Mexico and a large, well-established black population, the Crescent City was ripe for the development of new music at the turn of the century.

Brass bands marched in numerous parades and played to comfort families during funerals. Also, numerous society dances required skilled musical ensembles. New Orleans was home to great early clarinetists Johnny Dodds, Jimmy Noone and Sidney Bechet.  One of the first great cornetist, Joe "King" Oliver and his leading student and future star, Louis Armstrong hailed from New Orleans along with other influential musicians including Jelly Roll Morton.

Slaves and Minstrels

Starting in 1817, New Orleans's black slaves were allowed to dance and sing in Congo Square, near the French Quarter, on Sunday afternoons. Hundreds would gather for the celebrations.  Some sang work songs or spirituals. Others danced to Caribbean beats.  Still others performed African dances passed down through generations.

As the century wore on, New Orleans's music was also influenced by minstrelsy, a musical form featuring purported "plantation songs" written by both black and white musicians. Usually performed by white musicians in blackface, minstrelsy dominated the pop charts for decades. Despite racist overtones, minstrelsy also produced some of the first successful African-American composers.

Ragtime and the Blues

By the 1890s, New Orleans was already a musical melting pot.  Then ragtime and the blues arrived. Ragtime (short for "ragged time") was highly syncopated, danceable music that combined elements of military marches, European music, and minstrelsy.  Young people loved it.  Their parents hated it.

The blues arrived around the same time--brought mostly by black refugees from other southern states, traveling to New Orleans to escape racial hatred and the cotton fields. It was secular music strongly influenced by church singing.

Basically, New Orleans jazz was born when black and Creole musicians added ragtime and blues styles to the already potent mix of music they played--and improvised on it all.  While the rhythm section carried a song forward, a cornet player would cut loose, displaying his ingenuity and skill.  Other players would then cut loose, too. Soon, such improvisation became the essence of jazz.

Jazz An American Art Form

A Creole pianist named Jelly Roll Morton was the first man to write down original jazz tunes, and he claimed to have "invented" jazz. But tradition says that the cornet player and sometime barber Buddy Bolden was the first man to lead a real jazz band.

Buddy Bolden was committed to an insane asylum in 1907 and stayed there until he died in 1931.  By then, successors like King Oliver and Louis Armstrong had taken jazz to new heights of popularity--and to new cities like Chicago and New York.  Many now consider the music born in New Orleans America's most important art form.

As a musical language of communication, jazz is the first indigenous American style to affect music in the rest of the World.  From the beat of ragtime syncopation and driving brass bands to soaring gospel choirs mixed with field hollers and the deep down growl of the blues, jazz's many roots are celebrated almost everywhere in the United States.  Jazz is Art ~ Art is Jazz.