Blog 1: New Orleans and Jazz

     In the late 19th century the music called jazz emerged from New Orleans as a fusion of disparate sounds, the elements usually acknowledged being ragtime, the African American blues, and Latin music.  However, The New Orleans contribution to jazz, essentially originating it, can be described in more specific terms.  A picture of the first music considered to be jazz is revealed through the accusation leveled against the Original Dixieland Jazz band that their “playing was stiff and unconvincing, some going so far as to claim that [they] did not play jazz at all, just a raucous variant of ragtime.” (Gioia pg. 37) So in one sense the first jazz music sounded considerably like a wilder and more expressive ragtime with “syncopated and blues-inflected sounds” (35), but its foundation was still ragtime.  This dynamic, which is preserved in what is historically considered the New Orleans sound, was the specific contribution of New Orleans’ musicians like Buddy Bolden and Jellyroll Morton that began jazz.

     Gioia and some other sources provide a multitude of reasons why this was innovation was likely to take place in New Orleans.  He starts with the fact that New Orleans is a melting pot of contrasting ideas, beginning with the French-Moor interaction in the 700s, and prodded further along by the city’s frequent change of ownership in the 18th century.  Beyond this, he claims that New Orleans was by nature a very musical city, describing the extent to which music, particularly that performed by an ensemble, was integrated into many commonplace events in New Orleans and  the city’s unique “fascination with celebrations, parties, and parades” (30).  The New Orleans negro also experienced an unusual leniency at the hands of the governing whites which has been attributed to the predominance of Spanish and French Catholicism in the area.  A particular manifestation of this is in the Congo Square dances which persisted for many years.  Another contributing factor is the gradual social lumping together of the creoles with negroes by the passage of various discriminatory laws, culminating with “the passage of the Louisiana Legislative Code in 1894.”(34) Creole musicians had a rich background of training in European music and greater familiarity with the ragtime form that was now operating closely with the black musician’s pursuit of a “hotter” sound.

     Keeping in mind the nature of the first jazz that emerged from New Orleans, the distinguishing feature from ragtime being the addition of feeling and rhythm from the blues, the decisive factors that led to the creation of jazz were those that allowed African American culture, of which the blues are a part, to flourish, seeing as how ragtime was already very popular at that time.  Atypical of its time, New Orleans had a majority black population of 60%, many of whom were blue collar workers who brought with them the spirituals and with that the blues tonality from their original homes.   To these people the blues corresponded to actual experiences and real emotions and hence these were the people who most naturally would integrate the blues into their music.  At the same time, the spirit of experimentation and yearning for expression that characterize early jazz were wholly representative of the concurrent New Negro phenomenon that was a reaction to the Jim Crow laws and intensifying segregation in general.  This phenomenon was certainly more pronounced in the southern states and even more so in states like Louisiana densely populated by blacks.  These conditions preeminently, but also the ones which Gioia discuss, are what led to the creation of jazz at that particular time and and place.