New Orleans and the Birth of Jazz

Blog Entry 1: New Orleans and the Birth of Jazz

When slaves were to America from Africa, they brought with them distinct African cultural traditions in music and dance.  These traditions, combined with other influences specific to New Orleans and this point in history, produced jazz at the start of the 20^th century. 

New Orleans has a long and multi-faceted historical connection to African music and cultural tendencies that distinctly encouraged and guided the development of jazz.  In this entry, I will discuss the qualities of New Orleans that created jazz music beginning with Congo Square and ending with the emergence of legends like Buddy Bolden and Jelly Roll Morton.

New Orleans’ unique conditions that would later allow the development of jazz began before Louisiana was even American territory.  The main distinction between New Orleans in the eighteenth century and other American cities, was the French and Spanish rule and their differing viewpoints on the status of slaves.  Catholic French and Spanish settlers believed that slaves had souls that could be saved which differed from the American understanding of slaves as property, and therefore not human (Stewart).  This differentiation allowed a relatively more liberal environment in New Orleans in which allowed slave culture and African musical tradition to, at times, exist openly. An example of this was Congo Square, where on Sundays slaves were allowed to play traditional African instruments, sing, and dance.  This was perhaps one of the first occurrences of “syncretism”, the merging of features from different cultures that were previously separated. Gioia claims that historical accounts of Congo Square “provide us with a real time and place, an actual transfer of the totally African ritual to the soil of the New World” (Gioia, 4).  As he asserts that these purely African traditions played a significant role in fostering jazz, Gioia is also clear that the “the Latin-Catholic culture, whose influence permeated nineteenth-century New Orleans, benignly fostered the development of jazz music…the music and dances of Congo Square would not have been allowed in the more Anglicized colonies of the Americas”(Gioia, 6).  Without the more Europeanized view of slaves that allowed for outlets like Congo Square to exist, African musical traditions would not have combined with other factors to create jazz.

Some of the principles of African music can still be noticed in jazz music.  One of these qualities is Ephebism: the power that comes from youth.  This youthful energy is apparent when African dancers “step inside rhythms which are young and strong and to this extent their bodies are generalized by vital rhythmic impulse.”(Thompson, 7).  This African youthful “swing”, is also present in jazz music which was most popular with young people when it began. Young people enjoyed jazz because of its loose and improvisational qualities.  Such characteristics, especially syncopation, can be traced back trough African roots as well, as “African style art and music forms are enlivened by off-beat phrasing of the accents”(Thompson, 10). 

The one factor that is perhaps most important in the development of jazz was the presence of black Creoles in New Orleans. Creoles were racially mixed Europeans who identified more with their white ancestors. After post-Civil War reconstruction, Creoles were viewed as black and viewed the same as other black former slaves and port workers.  These Creoles were technically trained in European classical music.  When they began taking classical melodies and syncopating them, they created Ragtime.  This music was another example of cultural syncretism as whites took Ragtime music and channeled it into minstrelsy. Gioia argues that along with work songs and the development of the blues, “Minstrel music presents a rather confoluted situation: a black imitation of a white caricature of black music exerts its influence on another hybrid form of African and European music (Gioia, 8).  Without the influence of the Creoles and their variations on the classic European melodies, jazz would not have existed.

Similarly, work songs originated during the days of slavery and later prompted The Blues.  When jobs at the New Orleans port became available after reconstruction, many blacks moved to live and work in a more liberal city.  They brought with them the sound of the blues.  The combination of the blues and ragtime birthed jazz.  This combination could only have been possible in a city such as New Orleans in which the diversity of people and tradition created a “gumbo” that, similar to jazz, was made up of many specific yet essential influences.