Why New Orleans? The Emergence of Jazz in America

To look at the creation of jazz is to look at the sum of many incredibly vibrant and different people and cultures. As a cosmopolitan city matched by few in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries (Stewart), New Orleans was an ideal city for jazz to emerge out of the "the rhythms of ragtime, the bent notes and chord patterns of the blues, and... brass bands and string ensembles" (Gioia, 4). Just like the how city itself had been created as a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities, jazz was a creation of the musical and cultural freedom of the city from which it came.

Starting as early as 1817, when the New Orleans City Council established an official site for slave gathering and dances (Gioia, 7), New Orleans came to represent a place where musical and artistic culture would be celebrated, often looking beyond the traditional stigmas of the day. Much of this can likely be attributed to the inhabitants of early New Orleans, who came from many different cultures and set forth much looser standards of ethnic interaction compared to other Anglicized colonies. Included in this was a class of free Blacks and Creoles, who had both European and Black ancestry (Gioia, 6). This freedom of interaction in New Orleans allowed for syncretism, or "the blending together of cultural elements that previously existed separately (Gioia, 5)." According to jazz historian Ted Gioia, this blending of different cultural arts “is perhaps the most striking and powerful evolutionary force in the history of modern music (Gioia, 8)." While this inter-cultural freedom would diminish significantly in the late 19^th Century after all people of African descent were classified as Black by Louisiana Legislative Code No. 111(Gioia, 24), Blacks and Creoles took with them many elements of traditional European music and mixed in their own style and stories. Adding elements of New Orleans’ underbelly, specifically of all the happenings in Storyville or the District (Gioia,32), to these more European elements, created a new sound that up until recently was thought to be solely a Black experience.

However, to fully examine the rise of jazz in New Orleans, one must look beyond Black culture and take into account the impact of another non-European ethnicity: Mexicans. Originally coming to New Orleans for the 1884 Cotton Exposition but choosing to remain in the city afterwards, Mexican musicians played a large role in the development of New Orleans’ musical culture that up until recently was virtually unknown (Johnson, 226). Mexican musicians, most notably the Eighth Regimental Band, brought with them from Mexico a classical training that their Black counterparts did not possess. By the early 1900s, some of the most promising jazz musicians in city were receiving classical training from these Mexican musicians (Johnson, 226). In addition to their training, the Mexicans introduced their Black counterparts to woodwind instruments (Johnson, 229).  With the inclusion of instruments such as the clarinet and the saxophone into their ensembles, along with their new found classical training, the first jazz bands now had a greater range of sounds and ideas they could explore and develop, all as a result of the Mexican influence.

After examining all of the factors leading to the emergence of jazz in New Orleans, the one that truly stands out is how the freedom of inter-cultural relationships was critical in blending all of the sounds and styles that became jazz. Music is more than sounds for the audience to listen to and be entertained by; it is also provides the artist with a way to express himself. Jazz became a way for the multicultural people of New Orleans to take parts of different types of music, and thus different pieces of artistic and cultural expression, and tie it all together into one new form of music that truly represented New Orleans. That is what was truly distinct about New Orleans jazz: music was no longer African, or Mexican, or Spanish, or French. New Orleans jazz, while it contained pieces of all of those, was new, it was abstract (Gioia, 37), and it was their own.


Comment: Michelle Kaplan