Jazz

Jazz, in the words of The American Yawp, is “a uniquely American musical style” popularized by the African American community in New Orleans. Early New Orleans bands built it from collective improvisation: a front line of cornet, clarinet, and trombone “faking” ragtime together produced the music’s characteristic many-voiced sound. Later, players such as Louis Armstrong made the improvising soloist its center.

New Orleans had a culture unlike the rest of the young United States: Catholic and French-speaking, fond of festivals and dancing, and shaped by Africans and people of African descent, who made up more than half the city’s population by the end of the 1700s. Enslaved people gathered on Sundays at what became known as Congo Square for African dances and drumming. After the Civil War, brass bands, ragtime, and blues filled the city’s parades, dances, and funerals.

Between 1895 and 1900 cornetist Buddy Bolden began mixing improvised blues into faster dance tunes. Segregation laws passed in the 1890s erased the special status of the city’s Creoles of color, which pushed Black and Creole musicians together and combined uptown improvisation with Creole training.

New Orleans musicians carried jazz north on riverboats and touring shows. In 1917 the Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first commercial jazz recording, an unexpected hit, and jazz became a national craze; King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band moved to Chicago, where Louis Armstrong joined it in 1922.

In the 1920s radio and records spread jazz everywhere. The New York Times ridiculed it as “savage” because of its racial heritage, but to others it represented cultural independence. In Harlem, white audiences flocked to the Cotton Club to hear stars like Duke Ellington — while the surrounding Black community was usually kept out.