INTRODUCTION

In New Orleans, we love to say that things are a “gumbo,” referring to the wonderful soup that somehow manages to combine many different flavors into the perfect food. It is a cliché, but it often is an excellent metaphor. New Orleans–style jazz is also a blend of many different ingredients, but it does one thing that soup does not normally do for you: it makes you move.

New Orleans music is all about movement. In the French-Spanish Colonial period, soldiers would march in time with bugles and drums. Slaves danced in time with their drums and songs. Sailors would make port in New Orleans, bringing with them chanteys and shipboard instruments. By the middle of the 19th century, the city was a major hub for music and entertainment in North America. Music never left the city through the horrors of the Civil War and the Reconstruction that followed, but once those had passed, the city returned to its status of an entertainment destination.

Music was an important accompaniment to food, wine, and sex as New Orleans approached the 20th century. People wanted—no, they needed—music to help them through many aspects of life, from the dance halls on Saturday night to churches on Sunday morning. Orchestras enabled dancing, and brass bands picked up the tempo in the 1890s.

When Charles “Buddy” Bolden and his contemporaries picked up their horns, though, the music made people move rather than the other way around. That is when jazz was born. Military-style brass music became something else when Bolden added his “big four” syncopation. Feet stomped and hands clapped when piano players and drummers improvised along with the cornets. Suddenly, the tunes on the sheet music did not sound the same twice in a row, as musicians now had license to change things, expand the music, and make people move. Bolden made other musicians want to stop being “legitimate,” to let go and explore the sound. His bands were popular in the parks, saloons, and dance halls.

The demand for music that made one move was incredible. Bolden’s combo spawned others like Joseph “King” Oliver, John Robichaux, Freddie Keppard, and more to pick up the beat. Teens like Edward “Kid” Ory, known as “Dutt” to family and friends, came in on a train from out in the country to hear these bands at the parks and after baseball games. They took the sounds they heard back with them to the farms and rural communities up the Mississippi River, changing them and making them their own. They would then return on subsequent weekends with their instruments, hoping to get noticed by the bandleaders, joining them for gigs.

There was money to be made playing “jass” and “ragtime” in New Orleans at the turn of the century. (The change in spelling from “jass” to “jazz” is one of the genre’s big mysteries, but the word was standardized as “jazz” in print by 1918.) While the new stylings created by Bolden and his contemporaries had not reached the ears of the majority of white folks, there were enough affluent African Americans in the city to nurture musicians along. The sound moved from the bars to a wider audience, one where more white people would hear it. Musicians looking to make the most of their weekend time would parade on the backs of horse-drawn carts, advertising their gigs that evening. White musicians caught the beat, and jazz moved from blacks-only establishments into white bars and onto college campuses. Many whites-only establishments would not even permit African American bands. Segregation presented white musicians with many opportunities, as many whites-only establishments would not even permit black bands.

Life in the segregated South of the early 20th century was tough, not only for musicians but also for all African Americans. As the Great Migration of blacks from the Jim Crow states to northern, industrial cities took place, musicians followed them. Knowing they would find work playing for the black communities in cities like Chicago, bandleaders King Oliver and Kid Ory gave up on hassles of dealing with white saloon owners, police, and patrons who thought they were better than the band in every way. The cream of the crop of New Orleans jazz connected with their counterparts up north and the music spread. Life in Chicago was cold and hard for the men who played Lincoln Park and Storyville, but at least they did not have to sit at the back of the bus on their way home from work.

Improvements in recording technology also spread the gospel of jazz. Instead of the fragile wax cylinders used to record musicians in the 1900s and 1910s, bands were recorded on celluloid and, later, vinyl discs. The advent of electrical recording in the mid-1920s enabled a greater distribution of jazz, as the music industry in New York began to hear players from Chicago without having to get on a train. Jazz might not have been moving mountains, but it was certainly moving millions.

Of course, not all African American musicians abandoned New Orleans for the promises of the northern cities. Bandleaders like Fate Marable negotiated paid gigs on the riverboats, operating locally on daytime excursions, as well as the boats transporting passengers to and from St. Louis. The Creoles of New Orleans continued to demand entertainment, and a new generation of young musicians, those who had heard the fathers of jazz as teens, were now ready to provide the music. The original sounds of King Oliver, Kid Ory, and Louis Armstrong continued in New Orleans even though jazz elsewhere began to evolve into “swing” and the “big band” sound. New Orleanians still liked their “Dixieland” style, even if those playing it did not improvise and experiment as much as their predecessors. Because of that lack of innovation, however, New Orleans faded from jazz prominence as larger cities applied their influence to what had begun here. Depression and war made it difficult for the journeymen musicians to make a living, and people wanted to swing to forget their troubles.

By the late 1940s, the Dixieland players were getting older, and many were only playing at each other’s funerals. Realizing that time was short to get some of the original players recorded on vinyl, producers and jazz historians brought the old men onto the stage and into studios. They were interviewed, questioned, and encouraged, and the 1950s revival of the New Orleans sound carried the traditions forward. Local historians and aficionados organized and made commitments: to museums, to recording, and to preservation. People of influence, such as Edmond “Doc” Souchon, worked to develop collections of music, photographs, and memorabilia. Though funding was often difficult, they could always lean on the old men to do benefit concerts. Larry Borenstein’s arguably selfish desire to hear traditional jazz music while he ran his French Quarter art studio turned out to be a miracle for the movement, as it led to the opening of the 50-year tradition we know as Preservation Hall, located on St. Peter Street.

An established “base” for traditional jazz attracted musicians and audiences alike, and the various incarnations of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band renewed interest in the local sound. Motivated older musicians like Danny Barker became teachers and mentors to a younger generation of teens growing up in the 1970s. Those young men had their own views on the music; some stayed with the traditional sound, while others followed a more modern path. Either way, the local jazz scene in the 1980s experienced a major boost, and jazz combos stepped up and began to compete for listeners with the R&B and funk players. Brass bands took the basics they had learned from Daniel “Danny” Barker, Ernest “Doc” Paulin, and the men of the Onward Brass Band and put their own twist on it, bringing the music out of preserved stasis. The older generations were buried in classic style, and the “walk back” was fresh and exciting.

Those who followed paths different from the traditional passed on what they knew as well. Ellis Marsalis and other “modern” players assumed the role of teacher and mentor, encouraging talented youths to stretch the boundaries. The combination of traditional and modern is too strong, even for the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina, as New Orleans jazz continues to expand and evolve in its second century.