New Orleans

The City on the Gulf

Jazz comes from a mixture of African,
European, and Caribbean experiences,
but it started out as a local musical
practice in New Orleans. New Orleans
jazz transformed marching band and
dance music into an improvised, playfully
voiced, cyclic, polyphonic music played
over a steady dance beat using collective
improvisation.
The City on the Gulf
Creoles of Color and Uptown Negroes
The demographics of New Orleans also
contributed to the creation of jazz because it
was a site characterized by the mingling of
newly urbanized blacks with Europeanized
Creoles. New Orleans musicians eventually
moved to other parts of the United States,
such as Chicago, New York, and California,
as part of the Great Migration.
The City on the Gulf
Creoles of Color and Uptown Negroes
At the same time, the burgeoning record
industry made New Orleans jazz available in
diverse geographical and sociocultural
contexts.
The City on the Gulf
Creoles of Color and Uptown Negroes
New Orleans is a port city. It became a
nineteenth-century commercial center
focusing on the slave trade on the one hand,
with a distinct, more relaxed Caribbean
culture on the other. A brief history:
1718: founded by France
1763: sold to Spain
1803: reclaimed by the French
1803: almost immediately sold to the United States
The City on the Gulf
Creoles of Color and Uptown Negroes
New Orleans had French, Spanish, and
English speakers and was the largest, most
sophisticated city in the South. This included
an active cultural life from the eighteenth
century, encompassing opera, Mardi Gras,
dances, parades, and fancy balls.
The City on the Gulf
Creoles of Color and Uptown Negroes
Race relations were different from those in
other parts of the United States. Unlike
Protestant North America, New Orleans was
oriented to the Caribbean, and like racial
practices there, slaves were allowed to retain
much of their culture, including music.
The City on the Gulf
Creoles of Color and Uptown Negroes
North American culture recognized two
categories: white and black. Caribbean
culture, including New Orleans, recognized a
mulatto culture as well. This benefited free
blacks with lighter skins.
The City on the Gulf
Creoles of Color and Uptown Negroes
New Orleans mulattos were known as
Creoles of Color. Because they were of mixed
race, they had privileges and opportunities
that blacks did not, including civic power,
property ownership, French language skills,
Catholic religious practice, decent education,
and skilled trades. Creoles lost this status
around 1894 with the enactment of Jim Crow
laws and U.S. Supreme Court decisions in
1896.
The City on the Gulf
Creoles of Color and Uptown Negroes
Creoles tried to remain geographically
separate from blacks by keeping to an area of
the city east of Canal Street including the
French Quarter. Blacks lived uptown, on the
other side of Canal. But Jim Crow laws forced
the two traditions to collide.
The City on the Gulf
Creoles of Color and Uptown Negroes
Uneducated Uptown Negroes played
raucous, beat-based, orally learned, bluesy,
improvised music based on rags, folk music,
and marches. Creoles saw this as
unprofessional, but they started teaching
uptown blacks as well as young Creoles.
The City on the Gulf
Creoles of Color and Uptown Negroes
At first Creoles got the better-paying jobs
playing traditional European dances, but
blacks eventually came to offer a new,
alternative way of playing that appealed to
audiences for different reasons.
The City on the Gulf
New Orleans Style
Instrumentation
First, brass bands provided the front line of cornet,
trombone, and clarinet.
Second, the rhythm section of banjo (or piano), tuba (or
string bass), and some percussive instrument.
The City on the Gulf
New Orleans Style
At first, a violin played an unadorned melody
against which the cornet ragged the melody, but
by 1917, the violin had disappeared. Now the
clarinet improvised a countermelody around the
trumpet line (originally taken from published
arrangements), using the underlying harmony. The
trombone improvised a line lower than the trumpet
and with fewer notes (and originally played cello or
baritone horn parts). It typically uses long
glissandos called tailgate trombone.
The City on the Gulf
New Orleans Style
Improvisation
By the time New Orleans jazz was first recorded, it
had attained its own distinctive style of collective
improvisation, with each wind instrument having its
own musical space and rhythm: clarinet was the
fastest and pitched higher than the cornet; the
cornet was in the middle; and trombone was the
slowest and below the cornet.
The City on the Gulf
New Orleans Style
Form
Mostly the form was the same as ragtime. At the
end, the last strain would be repeated many times.
A new structure was the 12-bar blues. This could
be repeated indefinitely.
The City on the Gulf
Storyville
The District in New Orleans, where
prostitution was legal, lasted until 1917.
Bordellos could be mansions or shacks.
The City on the Gulf
Storyville
Many jazz musicians worked in Storyville
cabarets, but they also worked in parks,
parades, excursions, advertising wagons, and
riverboats and for dances throughout the city.
The City on the Gulf
Storyville
But Storyville did play a role. It was a rough
area where white values of taste were absent.
This made it easier for musicians to develop
expressive techniques, slow tempos (for sexy,
slow dances), and timbre variation.
The City on the Gulf
The Great Migration
In the late nineteenth century, former slaves
started to move into cities like New Orleans.
With the onset of World War I, they moved
north to places like Chicago and New York.
The City on the Gulf
The Great Migration
They were socially motivated by their
powerlessness, the discriminatory practices of
sharecropping, widespread racial segregation
touching practically all areas of life in the
South, and thousands of lynchings for which
nobody was arrested.
Economically, the draft during World War I
opened up the labor market in northern cities
for blacks.
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
Original Dixieland Jazz Band
The white ODJB came to New York to play at
Riesenwebers Restaurant in 1917. They were a
sensation.
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
Victor signed them to record two pieces, Livery
Stable Blues and Dixie Jazz Band One Step,
which turned out to be blockbusters. Although
previous ragtime records had hinted at some jazz
elements, to most listeners, ODJBs music was
unprecedented. They were so popular that they
brought the word jazz into common parlance.
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
Origins
Many New Orleans neighborhoods were integrated, and
thus white players became familiar with ragtime and jazz
in New Orleans and probably influenced black players in
terms of repertory, harmony, and instrumental technique.
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
Influence
The ODJB has been labeled as mediocre. But they
played a spirited, unpretentious music that established
many Dixieland standards, broke with ragtime, and, by
visiting Europe in 1919, made jazz international. The
group dissolved in 1922.
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
Jelly Roll Morton (18901941)
Jazz history can be seen as a mutually influencing
relationship between composers and improvisers,
as is the relationship between Creoles and blacks
in the creation of jazz. Morton fits right in as a
Creole composer who learned from and worked
with black New Orleans musicians.
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
Morton had many jobs and claimed to be the
inventor of jazz. He was proud of his French
Haitian heritage.
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
He traveled widely, assimilating new musical
approaches. He settled in Chicago in 1922 and
started recording in 1923 with a white New Orleans
band called the New Orleans Rhythm Kings
(NORK) for Gennett Records in Richmond,
Indiana; this was the first important integrated
recording. He introduced some of his originals,
including future standards such as King Porter
Stomp.
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
The Red Hot Peppers
Morton became a successful songwriter. To help
increase interest in his work, Victor started recording his
studio band of seven or eight players (The Red Hot
Peppers) in 1926, when recording was switching from
acoustic to electric recording. For many they represent a
perfect balance of improvisation and composition in the
New Orleans style.
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
Dead Man Blues
A number of blues choruses in collective New Orleans
style, this is Mortons take on the New Orleans burial
ritual. This is highly organized with even the bass lines
written out. There is also an overlay of ragtime structure
with various sets of choruses as ragtime strains.
By 1930, he was considered outdated. In 1938 he
made some important recorded interviews with
Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress.
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
King Oliver (18851938)
By 1922 jazz musicians had matured, writing many
new pieces and demonstrating increased
instrumental technique. But jazz had also become
associated with gimmickry and comedy. King
Oliver resisted this last turn.
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
In 1905 Oliver started playing cornet in brass
bands and saloon groups, before joining
trombonist Kid Orys band in 1917. Oliver was
known for his use of various mutes, a practice that
was very influential.
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
King Olivers Creole Jazz Band
Oliver organized many different kinds of bands
depending on the specific job. In 1918 he moved to
Chicago and spent several years on the road until 1922
to play at a high-end, black-owned nightclub, the Lincoln
Gardens. His band was made up of New Orleans
musicians except for the pianist, Lil Hardin. Oliver had
gum disease, which meant he required a second
cornetist to back up his playing, so he sent for his old
student, Louis Armstrong.
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
They were a great success. Black and white musicians
came to hear the uptown style of this band. The bands
recordings from this period exhibit a mature New Orleans
collective style. In 1923 they recorded for Gennett in
Richmond, Indianathen a hotbed for the Ku Klux
Klanusing stop-time, breaks, and an improvised,
polyphonic first line.
Dippermouth Blues also includes solos by clarinetist
Johnny Dodds and Louis Armstrong and a widely
imitated one by King Oliver using mutes.
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
Not unlike Morton and other early jazz figures,
Oliver was soon surpassed by new styles and
younger players. By 1935 he could no longer play
and died in poverty soon thereafter.
Gennett Records
Gennett was owned by a piano-manufacturing
company. The studio was made of wood planks
with one megaphone that recorded acoustically, so
the musicians had to position themselves in the
room to create a musical balance.
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
Snake Rag
As per the title, this has a ragtime structure but
also includes bluesy breaks, chromatic melodies
(or snakes), a repeated trio section (which is
used to build excitement), and the signature
Armstrong-Oliver improvised duo breaks.
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
Sidney Bechet (18971959)
Clarinetist and soprano saxophonist Bechet may
have been the first great jazz improviser. He made
the saxophone central to jazz and also traveled
abroad during the 1920s spreading this new music.
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
Born a Creole, Bechet mostly taught himself the
clarinet. He ended up playing in many of the
important marching bands. In 1916 he started
touring, taking him to Chicago in 1919. There he
attracted the attention of composer, songwriter,
classical violinist, and bandleader Will Marion
Cook, who recruited Bechet into his band, the
Southern Syncopated Orchestra, for their
European tour. There were some important results
from this tour:
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
In 1921 Bechet teamed up with New Orleans
pianist, composer, song-publisher, and record
producer Clarence Williams and recorded with
Clarence Williamss Blue Five. In the groups 1924
recording of Cake Walking Babies (from Home),
Bechet proved himself to be the only musician of
that era who could rival the talented, up-and-
coming Armstrong.
The City on the Gulf
Jazz Moves On: First Recordings
He settled in France in 1951 and remained the
soprano saxophones chief exponent until his
death in 1959.
The New Orleans style is still alive at
Preservation Hall bands in New Orleans and
in bands all over the world devoted to
Dixieland jazz.