1900-20
In 1917, a group of white musicians collectively called the Original Dixieland Jazz Band quite unexpectedly sold out Reisenweber's fashionable café on New York's Columbus Circle.
They also cut the world's first jazz record 'Livery Stable Blues' and 'Original Dixieland One-Step'. The sound was so unusual and unexpected, that customers had to be told that they could dance to it. A few weeks later they couldn't be stopped! What's more, the ODJB's recording sold a million copies... helping put 'jazz' into the vocabularies of street corners and elegant parlours in a single stroke.
But the Original Dixieland Jazz Band did not invent jazz. They had heard it down in New Orleans.
As the 20th century dawned, New Orleans was a simmering cauldron of peoples and races. Frenchmen and Spaniards. Englishmen and Italians. Germans and Slavs. Within the black polulation there were differences too. No less different than a white from Britain or a white from Spain.
All these people loved, first of all, their music- the sounds of their homelands which they wanted to keep alive. So in New Orleans people sang British folk songs, danced Spanish dances, played French ballet music and marched to brass bands which played music based on Prussian or French military music. In churches could be heard the hymns and chorales of Puritans and Catholics, Baptists and Methodists. And mingling with these were the 'shouts' of black street vendors and black dances and rhythms.
New Orleans must have been an astonishingly musical city in those days. Records exist of about 30 orchestras in the area at the beginning of this century. To appreciate this statistic, you must know that Delta City, which is what New Orleans was called, had no more than 200,000 inhabitants at that time.
Things like this, no doubt, created an exotic image for New Orleans as it attracted travellers from all over the world. And while it's a myth that the Mississippi delta was the sole birthplace of jazz - New Orleans is certainly where many important aspects of the music crystallized.
There are many reasons why New Orleans is perceived as the 'birthplace' of jazz. For one, there was the old French-Spanish urban culture of Delta City. Two, the tensions and challenges of two positively different black populations confronting each other. Three, the intense musical life of the city - 'serious' European music and popular music of the blacks. Four, and most importantly, all these varied elements came together in Storyville - New Orleans' red-light district - without prejudice or class consciousness.
The two black populations of New Orleans were the Creoles and the 'American Negroes' - the latter being descendents of slaves who gained freedom at the end of the Civil War.
The Creoles had made French culture their own - being 'freed' by rich French planters and merchants for reasons of distinguished service. Being a "free Negro" was an important title in old New Orleans. Many became wealthy businessmen. Their language wasn't English but 'Creole' - a French patois with admixtures of Spanish and African words. Their names were French: Alphonse Picou, Sidney Bechet, Barney Bigard, Albert Nicholas, Buddy Petit, Freddie Keppard, Papa and Louis deLisle Nelson, Kid Ory...and so on. It was an honour to be a Creole. Jelly Roll Morton went out of his way to make it clear that his real name was Ferdinand Joseph La Menthe!
Compared to the Creoles, the 'American Negroes' were more 'African'. Their ex-'masters' being Anglo-Saxon, they were not exposed to the more liberal social attitudes as the Creoles were. The consequence was that there were two very different groups of New Orleans musicians - and the difference found expression in the music. One was restrained and polished and the other more earthy and bluesier. And the mixture of the two brought the new, evolving music to an even brisker boil.
The instruments these musicians used were brass and drums which came from surplus military stock available cheap after the Civil War. Clarinets came from the musically educated, Creoles - who adopted the old French woodwind tradition. The banjo and guitar from minstrelsy and the blues. And many of the piano players from the city's legal brothels and bars.
This classic line up played in a general approximation to European conservatoire counterpoint. But the constant spontaneous reworking of lines was African in origin, where no one melody was so special that it couldn't be improved in the next performance.
And, 'Jazz' was the name sticking to this new sound. It wasn't long before the rest of the world started hearing of names like Joe 'King' Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Sydney Bechet...names associated with what was soon called New Orleans jazz.
But, New Orleans jazz did not mature in the warm South's Crescent City. It flowered in the cold and grime of Windy City, 800 miles north.
