The popular music industry was born in the United States during the late nineteenth century, when syncopation – the displacement of beats or accents so that strong beats become weak, or weak strong – released first rhythm and then melody from the formalities placed upon it by European culture to create ragtime.
The use of syncopated rhythms wasn’t new. Classical composers had for centuries been writing pieces that surprised the listener by placing the accent on weaker beats. For the likes of Bach and Mozart, syncopation was a way of introducing some variety into their pieces.
Ragtime was different in that it was an entire style of music based on syncopation and, unlike the classically trained musicians who played those cleverly off-beat pieces, the African American artists who developed it weren’t performing someone else’s music written out for them and rehearsed in advance. Ragtime was all about improvisation, a rejection of formality in favour of feel, a change underscored by segregation. In the late nineteenth century, formal music tuition was simply not affordable for most African Americans. And even if they had the means, ‘Jim Crow’ laws designed to keep them in their place continually set obstacles in their way. With little access to formal training, the vast majority of African Americans were forced to play by ear, improvising melodies when asked to play popular tunes at dancehalls and parties within their own community.
In the years following the American Civil War, slave songs had been carefully arranged in the European classical style. Smartly dressed choirs of students from ‘negro’ colleges were highly popular with white audiences. At the same time, minstrel shows toured the rural areas, offering a parody of black racial stereotypes as a form of entertainment. While whites lapped up these bowdlerised versions of black culture, the African American community were not only busy creating a style of music that was destined to become hugely popular, they were doing so on their own terms.
The word ‘ragtime’ doesn’t appear in mainstream American culture until 1897, but as early as 1891 African American newspapers were using the word ‘rag’ to describe a grassroots social function at which string bands performed.* They were by all accounts roughhouse affairs. The Kansas City Star newspaper noted on 29 December 1893 that ‘when an Aitchison fiddler plays at a rag, he always sits by the door so he can get out when the fighting starts’.
Two years later, the Leavenworth Herald carried a report of a rag held on Christmas Eve, noting that ‘the orchestra was composed of three pieces, a fiddle, bass fiddle and a triangle … that ever favourite dance, the “possum a la” was introduced, and it seemed to carry the house by storm.’
The ‘Possum a La’, a black vernacular dance song better known as the ‘Pas Ma La’, is regarded by many as the earliest indicator of what would later be termed ‘ragtime’. Its appearance at this festive rag may be explained by the fact that African American entertainer Irving Jones published the first version of the song in 1894. The New York Clipper reported on 25 November 1893 that Jones was enjoying success with his new song, ‘The Parsamala Dance’, in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was performing with the Creole Burlesque Company. The Creole connection and the fact that the phrase ‘Pas Ma La’ sounds very much like a phonetic corruption of a colloquial French term suggest the possibility that the dance may have originated in New Orleans.
Forgive the qualifications that surround that last statement. Since the publication of Jazzmen identified New Orleans as the place where jazz was born, almost everyone who has written on the subject has felt the need to either uphold or debunk that narrative. For jazz, just like punk rock, didn’t originate in any one place in particular. There was no moment when jazz ‘began’. The musicians who we now consider to have been playing jazz in the early days actually called their music ‘ragtime’. ‘Jazz’ as a musical term was rarely heard before 1920.
It was only when Tom Brown’s Ragtime Band went north in 1915 that they found they were playing a new kind of music. Five white New Orleans musicians, performing what we would now describe as ‘Dixieland’, they were booked into Lamb’s Café in Chicago for a six-week run. As non-union out-of-towners, they faced organised opposition from the local musicians’ union. When protesters gathered outside the cafe, one of them held a placard that read: ‘Don’t Patronise This Jass [sic] Music’.
Whether it began as a derogatory term or was a slang word for the band’s vigour and pep, the term ‘jazz’ doesn’t come from New Orleans. What is undeniable is the fact that all of the early jazz stylists did.
New Orleans in the nineteenth century had a social history unlike any other city in North America, not least because of its strong cultural connections with the Caribbean. Founded by the French in 1718, the city was ceded to Spanish control under the Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1762. Following defeat by the British in the French and Indian Wars, Louis XV of France realised that, having already lost his territories in Canada to Britain under force of arms, he was likely to lose the rest of his North American empire – known as the Louisiana Territory – during the peace negotiations that followed. Preferring to do business with his Catholic Spanish allies rather than hand a vital trading link with the Caribbean to the hostile British, Louis secretly passed Louisiana to Charles III of Spain.
When peace between Britain and France was signed in Paris in 1763, provision was made to allow French colonists who didn’t want to live under British rule the freedom to move to other French colonies in the Americas. Many headed to Louisiana from the north-eastern maritime province of Acadia, becoming ‘cajuns’ in the local vernacular. Although Spain remained in control of the city until the end of the eighteenth century, this influx of French-speaking refugees ensured that New Orleans retained its French identity.
In 1800, in return for agreeing to establish the Spanish Bourbons in Tuscany, Napoleon Bonaparte secretly took control of the Louisiana Territory in the hope of re-establishing French power in North America. Before his plans could be put into action, however, a slave revolt in the French possession of Haiti was successful in overthrowing colonial rule. Having lost his most important base in the Caribbean, and with war against Britain once again looming, Napoleon decided to cash in his chips, selling the Louisiana Territory to the United States government in 1804 for $14 million.
New Orleans immediately became the biggest city in the US after those in the original thirteen colonies, and this new metropolis of the south was unlike any that America had seen before. Most of the inhabitants spoke French as a first language, the dominant religion was Catholicism and the city retained an aristocratic class of the sort that had been turfed out of the thirteen colonies by the Revolutionary War.
The white ruling class in New Orleans referred to themselves as creoles, a French adoption of the Spanish term criollo – a person of Spanish descent born in the West Indies or Spanish America. The meaning of the term creole was broadened in 1804 with the arrival and swift integration into Louisiana society of the wealthy French-speaking slave owners who fled Haiti in the wake of the victorious slave revolt. They were followed by mixed-race Haitians, who feared for their safety now that darker-skinned former slaves had taken control of the island.
In the French colonies, people of mixed race were categorised as gens de couleur libres – free people of colour – and they occupied a place in society above freed slaves. With the declaration of the Haitian slave republic, thousands of free people of colour fled to Louisiana, and in New Orleans they found that an urban coloured community was already thriving in the city.
Despite the fact that it had always been a major slave-trading port, decades of rule by France and then Spain had produced a greater degree of integration in New Orleans than in other cities in the US. When the Spanish ruling class sought to marginalise French settlers in the late eighteenth century, it reached out for support to the black population of the city, allowing many slaves to buy their freedom.
By 1840, New Orleans was booming, the third largest city in America, behind only New York and Baltimore. The commercial centre of the south, its prosperity was based on the slave trade. The American Civil War brought an end to that inhumane business in April 1862, when Union forces captured the city in the sea-bound assault that left its antebellum architecture intact.
The Union was initially committed to integrating slaves freed by the victory of 1865, but within a decade of emancipation, reformers had grown exhausted trying to ensure that everyone enjoyed the freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution. Federal troops remained in New Orleans until 1877, but once they left, as in so many places in the south the white population of the city began constructing barriers to reassert the pre-war racial hierarchy.
In most places in the southern states, the question of who was white and who was not was relatively straightforward. In New Orleans, however, the French-speaking free people of colour had become an educated artisan class, used to enjoying a social status above that of African Americans.
As English became more commonly heard in the city, free people of colour found themselves being referred to as ‘creoles of colour’, differentiating them from their fellow French speakers in the white upper class. In the difficult years following the withdrawal of Union troops, with segregation creeping into New Orleans society, ‘Creole’ became a catch-all term to describe the Francophone community in Louisiana, but one that was particularly applied to those of mixed race. Slowly, the restrictions that had previously applied only to African Americans began to eat away at the freedom of Creoles until, in 1894, those formerly regarded as free people of colour found themselves reclassified as ‘negro’ by Louisiana state law.
The Creoles were shabbily disenfranchised by segregation, but the presence in New Orleans of an educated, mixed-race community existing in its own social space between whites and blacks was unique in the United States and played an important role in bringing jazz to a wider audience.
Prominent among Creole musicians working in New Orleans around the end of the nineteenth century was John Robichaux. In a posed photograph from 1913, he and his six-piece band are shown playing their instruments while reading music from stands. Renowned scholar of early New Orleans jazz Samuel Charters observed that this was the only picture from the period that shows a local band reading music. The implication is clear: the John Robichaux Orchestra are professionally trained musicians who won’t lower the tone of your event by vulgar improvisation.
Robichaux built his reputation on musical literacy, ordering all of the latest published dance arrangements from New York, and this soon found him playing at white society functions. However, his up-to-date repertoire failed to find favour with African American audiences. As trumpeter Lee Collins recalled, Robichaux was ‘a very high-class musician. He was the most respected musician among both white and colored [Creole], and his orchestra played for the white society dances. But most negroes didn’t care for his music; it was more classical.’
For the African American community of New Orleans, the place to go to hear the latest sounds was Storyville. In the final years of the nineteenth century, in an attempt to better regulate prostitution and gambling within their bustling port city, the elders of New Orleans delegated City Councilman Sidney Story to draw up a series of guidelines legalising both practices in an area of the city referred to as the Restricted District. Officially established on 6 July 1897, and bounded by Robertson, St Louis, Basin and Iberville Streets, the area soon became known as Storyville. Adjacent to one of the main railway stations, by 1900 this red-light zone was generating more revenue than any other district of the city. Most of the bars and brothels had a resident piano player and maybe a small string band. It was these string ensembles, variously consisting of mandolin, fiddle, guitar and double bass, that had been instrumental in the spread of ragtime from the country rag breakdowns into the urban dancehalls. And in turn-of-the-century Storyville, ragtime was king.
From its inception, ragtime had been associated with loose morals. The Freeman, the nationally distributed African American newspaper, carried an editorial in 1901 that denigrated ragtime as a celebration of ‘open and notorious depravity’. One of the foremost ragtime bandleaders was Buddy Bolden. It was said of him that ‘he played nothing but the blues and all that stink music, and he played it very loud’ – a habit he’d acquired from performing in rowdy red-light district dancehalls.
Bolden was an African American cornet player, born in New Orleans in 1877. Thanks to Bunk Johnson singling him out for special praise some sixty years later, he is cited by many as being the first musician to ‘swing the beat’ of ragtime in a manner that later became recognised as jazz. Although Bolden died long after the gramophone had been invented,† he made no recordings. But one tantalising photograph of the band he led, Professor Bolden’s Orchestra, survives from around 1900. The ensemble consists of two clarinettists, a trombone player, a guitarist, a double bass player and Bolden himself on cornet. This is clearly a jazz band. The stringed instruments have been relegated to the rhythm section, while the brass and woodwind have been brought to the fore. Was this Bolden’s innovation or was he simply following fashion? We’ll never know. But what is clear from the testimony of those that heard him is that Bolden excelled in playing the blues.
When they spoke of ‘the blues’, African American musicians in turn-of-the-century New Orleans weren’t referring to the three-chord, twelve-bar form that has since become synonymous with the term. That genre didn’t emerge until later in the twentieth century. For Bolden and his contemporaries, ‘blues’ was the way they described a loosely played melody that wasn’t formally orchestrated. As Kid Ory observed, Bolden relied on improvisation: ‘He wasn’t really a [trained] musician, he didn’t study. He was gifted, playing with effect, but no tone. He played loud.’
Trombonist Edward ‘Kid’ Ory was born on the Woodland Plantation at La Place, a day’s walk from New Orleans, on Christmas Day 1886. Like many of the tenant farmers on the plantation, Ory was mixed-race, his first language French, and all his life he identified as Creole. He got his nickname from the fact that he was playing music from an early age, he and his friends constructing rudimentary musical instruments from discarded cigar boxes and fruit crates they found on the plantation.
It wasn’t uncommon in the south to see kids busking for pennies on the streets, playing home-made instruments. Known as ‘spasm bands’, the more proficient were hired by bars and vaudeville shows as novelty acts. Ory’s spasm band organised gigs in an empty house, charging admission and selling fried fish that they had caught themselves. Soon they had earned enough money to buy real instruments. When bands from New Orleans made whistle stops in La Place, Ory and his friends went along, watching the players closely, trying to pick up new tricks.
Ory made his first trip to New Orleans in 1905, to buy a trombone from Werlein’s music store. His sister Lena was living on South Robertson Street and it was there that he went with his new instrument. While he was practising, a knock came at the door. It was Buddy Bolden. The bandleader was passing by and heard Ory’s playing, promptly offering him a job in his band. But Lena was having none of it. Telling Bolden that Ory was only eighteen years old and had to go back home, she ushered the man they called King Bolden out of her house.
The encounter with Buddy Bolden only whetted Ory’s appetite for music. Lena lived near Lincoln Park, a combination skating rink, vaudeville theatre and amusement park that opened in 1902. Operated by people of colour, it featured concerts by both Creole and African American musicians. Soon Ory and his bandmates from the plantation were heading to the park on a Sunday afternoon to hear John Robichaux’s Orchestra playing in the dance pavilion. As the day turned to evening, Buddy Bolden’s band would set up in the skating rink and, once they started playing their down and dirty music, the crowds that had been dancing to Robichaux’s more formal arrangements would push their way to the ice rink to hear the King. It was Bolden’s loud playing that caught their ear – a trick that the great man himself referred to as ‘calling my children home’.
Ory and his friends became regular visitors to New Orleans, watching and learning in venues from Storyville to Perdido. They were such a familiar sight at Lincoln Park that, in 1908, the band were hired by the manager to play on the park’s advertising wagons that toured the city streets drumming up custom. Arriving for their first gig, they found that the manager had placed a painted sign on the wagon announcing ‘Kid Ory’s Brown Skinned Babies’. A photo taken around this time reveals that the band, four of whom were African Americans, consisted of trombone, clarinet, trumpet, guitar, double bass and drums.
Ory moved to New Orleans with the band in 1910 and they were soon appearing at Lala’s in Storyville, playing gut-bucket blues, all improvised as none of them could read music. Although Ory greatly admired Buddy Bolden, he also brought elements of John Robichaux’s more formal style to the band. He referred to this mixture of influences as ‘soft’ ragtime, and such was its success that within three years, just like Robichaux, Kid Ory’s Brown Skinned Babies were playing for white audiences.
In the years that followed, a series of New Orleans greats passed through the bands that Ory led: Mutt Carey, the first trumpet player to mute the sound of his horn and make it moan; Joe Oliver, a musician so sensational that he would one day be acclaimed King; and Louis Armstrong, the first superstar soloist. The reason why Ory had to keep replacing his trumpet players was simple: the rest of the US had developed an appetite for the hot music coming out of New Orleans. Chicago had been drawing musicians north since Tom Brown’s Ragtime Band had taken residency at Lamb’s Café in 1915, but jazz became a nationwide phenomenon – and entered the lexicon – in 1917 with the release of the first jazz record.
One of the most problematic issues in the early history of New Orleans jazz is the question of the role white players had in its development. However, given the Jim Crow laws that prevented African Americans from fully participating in society, it was surely inevitable that the first jazz record would be made by a band of white musicians.
At the turn of the century, when Buddy Bolden was in his prime and Kid Ory was playing a guitar made out of a cigar box, most of the white musicians playing hot music in New Orleans were working for Jack Laine. Born in 1873, Laine was a bass drum player in marching bands, parades being very popular across the city. Working by day as a blacksmith, Laine formed his own Reliance Brass Band in the late 1890s and, when he had more offers for bookings than he could fulfil, began to assemble bands for each occasion from a pool of white musicians that he knew, many drawn from the communities of European immigrants that were springing up in New Orleans.
It was one such booking in 1915 that led to a watershed moment in the history of jazz. A Chicago cafe owner, in New Orleans to see a prize fight, by chance encountered Laine’s band playing in the streets to advertise the event. Highly impressed with the way the trumpet player performed, he asked Laine if the band would be interested in coming north to Chicago. As ever, Jack Laine already had more work than he could handle in New Orleans, but he told the cafe owner that he could ask the horn player if he was interested. He was.
Nic La Rocca was the son of Italian immigrants and, like many white musicians in the city, had been playing for Jack Laine since he was a boy. The band that he would lead would go on to define the sound of jazz for a generation.
Their initial engagements in Chicago were successful, but arguments over money led to divisions. Other white musicians from New Orleans working in the city came and went from the line-up until it settled on La Rocca on trumpet, Tony Sbarbaro on drums, Eddie Edwards on trombone, Larry Shields on clarinet and Henry Ragas on piano. La Rocca and Sbarbaro were Sicilian by descent, Edwards the son of an English immigrant. Shields was an Irish American, and Ragas’s family hailed originally from Spain. Looking for a name that described their sound, and feeling that the terms ‘New Orleans’ and ‘Louisiana’ were too regional, they decided to call themselves the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.
While the music they played was gaining popularity, there was still a sense that jazz bands were a novelty. When the Original Dixieland Jazz Band played their first gig in New York in January 1917, the music was so unfamiliar to the wider public that advertising copywriters were unsure of how to spell this new buzzword. The ad for their debut appearance at the Paradise Ballroom read: ‘The First Sensational Amusement Novelty of 1917 “The JASZ Band”’. The first number that the band tore into – the old New Orleans staple ‘Tiger Rag’ – so shocked the audience that they were unsure if they were to dance to this music or laugh at it. It was only when the manager appeared at the end of the tune and announced that this was music for dancing that couples began to take to the floor.
The idea that jazz wasn’t really music, that the whole thing was a bit tongue-in-cheek, comes over in subsequent adverts for the band, one of which describes them as ‘Untuneful Harmonists Playing “Peppery” Melodies’. The novelty aspect was underlined by their first single, recorded just a month after they arrived in New York. ‘Livery Stable Blues’ featured members of the band making comedy animal noises – a rooster’s crow, a horse’s whinny and the moo of a cow. The impression given was that, rather than representing the birth of a new music, the band were playing a souped-up version of novelty ragtime, a staple of vaudeville shows of the time.
The musicians who heard that first jazz record were of a different opinion. In New Orleans, they immediately recognised the Original Dixieland Jazz Band as representing a more formalised version of the music they had been playing for two decades. However, such was the popularity of recorded jazz that soon bandleaders like Kid Ory and King Oliver, forced to meet the public’s expectations of what jazz was supposed to sound like, were having to modify their sound to match that of La Rocca’s band.
Numerous arguments and disputes rage around the true origins of jazz, and there are those who claim others were the first to put what we now call jazz on record. What is indisputable is that the 1917 Victor Records releases by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band are the earliest examples that we can hear today of a New Orleans jazz band playing the hot music of the Crescent City.
The record’s success sent a stark message to those still plying their trade in and around Storyville: if they wanted to make recordings and become famous, they had to leave New Orleans. This was doubly true for Creole and black musicians. New York had a large coloured population and Chicago was growing all the time as African American workers left the south to do war work in the city’s factories. King Oliver headed north in 1919, calling Louis Armstrong to join him three years later. Kid Ory left his band and headed west to California.
While the pull of popularity was strong, changes in New Orleans also forced jazz musicians to look elsewhere. On 6 April 1917, the United States entered the First World War, mobilising hundreds of thousands of young men. To protect their morals, a law was passed prohibiting prostitution within five miles of any military or naval base. On 2 October 1917, New Orleans City Council adopted an ordinance abolishing the Restricted District. At the sweep of a pen, Storyville was no more.
While the prostitutes simply moved into other parts of the city, the musicians who gathered to improvise gut-bucket jazz suddenly found many of their best venues had disappeared. Prohibition, introduced in 1920, further undermined their opportunities for work, to the extent that, in the 1930s, it was easier to find a band playing New Orleans-style jazz in Chicago or New York than it was in the Big Easy.
By the mid-1930s, jazz had evolved into swing – large ensembles including saxophones, grand pianos, strings and vocalists performing sophisticated arrangements of the dance tunes of the day. Hugely popular in the years leading up to the Second World War, swing’s dominance split jazz purists. Some felt that the genre was in a rut, that innovation had been sidelined in the pursuit of popularity; others felt that jazz had lost the raw edge of the early days. While both camps were dismayed at the commercialisation of the genre, their reactions couldn’t have been more different.
Those wanting greater innovation started pushing at the boundaries of musical form. In the early 1940s, young swing musicians working in New York began heading to jam sessions in Harlem after hours, where their improvisations gave rise to a new form of modern jazz called bebop. Meanwhile, those who believed that commercialism had robbed jazz of its essential spirit had set out to revive the music of the early days, seeking out musicians who still played in the traditional style. That search had led them to New Orleans and Bunk Johnson.
When Johnson’s clarinettist George Lewis was tracked down, he was working as a stevedore. The revivalists were relieved to find that, unlike almost every other clarinet player in New Orleans, he hadn’t traded in his instrument for a saxophone with the advent of swing. Lewis was in his forties, still playing the old-style jazz for middle-aged dancers in the tiny bars of the city’s rougher districts.
As word spread that there were young white jazz buffs looking for traditional players to record, more of the old-timers came forward. Johnson and Lewis recorded together as the revival built momentum, but it was their trip to New York in 1945 that brought the New Orleans sound back to prominence.
Just as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band had done decades before, Bunk Johnson and his New Orleans Band stunned Manhattan audiences with the dynamic power of their playing. Having been accustomed to the smooth sound of swing, the crowds at the Stuyvesant Casino were once again captivated by peppery melodies played by untuneful harmonists.
Throughout the late 1930s and early 40s, musicians from turn-of-the-century New Orleans were re-emerging into the spotlight: Jelly Roll Morton turned up at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, telling Alan Lomax that he, Morton, had invented jazz; Sidney Bechet was able to quit his job in a tailor shop and find fame in France; Louis Armstrong became the first jazz musician to appear on the cover of Time; Kid Ory, who had quit music in 1933 and had been raising chickens in Los Angeles, went back into the studio to record for Nesuhi Ertegun, son of the Turkish ambassador, who founded the Crescent record label especially to release Ory’s music.
Sadly this resurgence of interest came too late for one of the New Orleans greats: King Oliver was working as a janitor in Savannah, Georgia, when he died in 1938, too poor to afford medical treatment.
Soon the revival spread to Europe. In 1942, George Webb, a twenty-five-year-old pianist from London, was working as a machine-gun fitter at the Vickers-Armstrong armaments factory in Crayford, Kent. From among his fellow workers he pulled together a small band that played lunchtime concerts in the factory. After work, they got together in the cellar of a local pub to play revivalist jazz. They were the quintessential definition of an amateur jazz band: just a bunch of fans who had access to some musical instruments. They were often out of tune and their sense of rhythm was hampered by the fact that the bass parts were played on a sousaphone, but they were defiantly making music that they loved.
Dave Gelly, writing in his exploration of post-war jazz in Britain, An Unholy Row, sums up the attitude of the revivalists thus: ‘Rather like a primitive religion, it was a mechanism for explaining a phenomenon that was real to them but which they could not account for. They had found this music that moved and excited them, which they had come to value highly, amid the puerile trivialities of early twentieth century music. This was a way of extracting it, bringing it to light and according it the status of an art.’
George Webb’s Dixielanders set out to replicate the recordings that King Oliver’s Creole Band, Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers and Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven had made some twenty years before. Like Bunk Johnson did in New York, the Dixielanders played with a rough edge that enthralled young British audiences. Uncompromising in his pursuit of that 1920s sound, Webb was known to upbraid band members who strayed in the direction of swing.
Ken Colyer was just as dogged in his commitment to New Orleans jazz, but the two bandleaders ended up on opposing sides of a rancorous dispute that still echoes in the British jazz scene today. Fans of the revival were like treasure hunters, seeking out the original 78s, cataloguing their serial numbers, memorising the line-ups of bands, obsessing over particular sessions. Though they collected music from all over the US, at the heart of the revival were a handful of greats who had left New Orleans to seek fame and fortune in Chicago, New York and California: King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Kid Ory.
Ken Colyer didn’t subscribe to this belief. He felt that something had been lost in the migration north, believing style and commitment had been traded in for popularity and commercial success. The recording sessions, where technological limitations forced the musicians to play far apart, had compromised the unity of the music, depriving it of its internal rhythms.
As far as Colyer was concerned, real New Orleans jazz never left the Crescent City. In late 1951, he set out to discover if it was still there.
* In their comprehensive study of the emergence of African American popular music, Out of Sight, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff note that before the word ‘rag’ came into fashion, the most common term used to describe these informal events was a ‘breakdown’.
† Bolden was declared insane and committed to an asylum in 1907, remaining there until his death in 1931.