Born on the Bayou

A new and totally made-in-the-U.S.A. artistic expression emerges.

Introduce Yourself

Be sure to log in on the message board and meet your instructor and fellow students. As we move through this course together, we’ll have a chance to share our observations and even our favorite artists and their recordings. We’ll also discuss the assignments from our textbook, Jazz: An Illustrated History.

Crescent City Cradle

It took a special time and, above all, a special place for jazz to spontaneously spring to life. And although it might have been more by accident than design, it’s an irrefutable fact that New Orleans, the wide-open Big Easy itself, was the birthplace of jazz.

New Orleans, which supported two symphony orchestras by 1850, had gained a rightful reputation as an uninhibited international city decades before the dawning of the jazz age. It was also a thriving music center, complete with the unique, arguably infamous, sensibilities of the Crescent City, long before the birth of jazz. Its musical activities were extensive and eclectic, as everything from sophisticated classical recitals in stately mansions to drum and chant sessions by slaves in Congo Square could be heard on a regular basis.

The most frequent source of music was brass bands, which had emerged from the Civil War as America’s favorite form of music. They continued to dominate the scene with martial music and patriotic parade tunes, but in New Orleans their sound detoured down some exotic side streets as Caribbean rhythms, especially those from Haiti and Cuba, were added to create a decidedly different bounce to the beat.

The melting pot of New Orleans music might have contained sonic spices from all manner of sources, but the main ingredient was a creative sweet-and sour-combination of the sacred and the secular. The new music that was emerging as jazz addressed both the body and soul, seamlessly blending the Saturday night party music of ragtime with Sunday morning spirituals. The blues served as a bridge and a bonding agent.

The musical collision of these elements produced a sound so dense and different that it seemed to defy description. In his book Jazz: A History of America’s Music, Ken Burns quotes a musician of the era who nailed it perfectly when he described the new music as sounding “like everything all at once.” And that sound was the cry of jazz being born.

Figure 1-1: The Imperial Orchestra (pictured here in 1905) was one of the New Orleans bands beginning to play the new music known as jazz.

The Father of the Blues

Unlike jazz, the birthplace and parentage of the blues involves many musicians and locales. But W. C. Handy earned the honorary title “Father of the Blues” through his pioneering efforts to formalize and popularize the music. Handy assimilated the local “primitive” music he heard in his musical travels, effectively taking the blues out of the cotton fields and onto the bandstand. His 1912 recording of “Memphis Blues” was the beginning of the blues we know today.

Not for Polite Society

It has always bothered the more prim and proper proponents of jazz that the origin of the music is so closely associated with sex. Too bad, because jazz might not have been born in the brothels of New Orleans’ red-light Storyville district, but that’s definitely where it called home. Jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton was only one of many who made their living playing background music while the ladies of the night entertained their customers.

A Music for Every Occasion

A century or so ago, live music wasn’t something you heard just in a club or at a concert, especially in the tuneful streets of New Orleans. Live music was an essential part of daily life, literally from birth to death, and no music fit more moods and more occasions than jazz.

Jazz was played in houses of prostitution and in cemeteries. It was heard on front porches and in city parks, at cotillion balls and in funeral parades. It was the music of choice in a city of many choices, and the democratic manner in which the sound was put in the service of different classes and cultures in the Crescent City made it a major unifying factor.

The pervasive presence of live music meant steady work for the large number of musicians that the city attracted. And in a classic case of cause and effect, the quantity of work increased the quality of the musicians, giving physical credence to the old “practice makes perfect” saying.

The nature of the practice that the musicians perfected their art with further expanded both their abilities and the definition of the still-evolving jazz sound. The expansion was a natural product of the multicultural New Orleans music scene; one where musicians played in a wide variety of situations for an equally diverse audience. To be a success, it was mandatory for musicians to master at least the basic elements of many different styles of music. To do so, they had to become more technically proficient than musicians elsewhere, as well as more adaptable and adventurous. And, not so coincidentally, these attributes are among the core characteristics of jazz.

From Bourbon Street to Broadway

Will Marion Cook, who later played a part in taking jazz overseas, first took the music’s precursor to Broadway. Cook, a classically trained violinist who gave up his “serious” career because of racial barriers, staged a series of African-American productions on Broadway, beginning in 1898 with Clorindy, or the Origin of the Cakewalk. The shows, just a cut above normal minstrel fare, were historic because they featured all-black casts and the syncopated sounds of ragtime.

The Founding Fathers

No single individual invented jazz, despite Jelly Roll Morton’s claim to be its creator. The music was significantly shaped by the efforts of its original innovators, a colorful cast of creative musicians whose strong personalities and unusual lifestyles helped to establish the mystique of jazz.

The holy trinity of the first wave of jazz giants consisted of Buddy Bolden, Sidney Bechet, and Jelly Roll Morton, all New Orleans natives. Each contributed a distinct and essential element to the early development of the music.

Buddy Bolden

The almost mythical Bolden, an early cornet superstar whose 1895 band might have been the first genuine jazz group, careened through the scene like a runaway streetcar. By 1905 he was the most popular musician in New Orleans, and by 1910 he was institutionalized in a mental hospital, never to record and never to recover. His legendary virtuosity lived on through word of mouth, but it was his idea to assemble a group that stepped outside the brass band tradition that gave jazz its starting point.

Sidney Bechet

Bechet’s brilliance on clarinet and soprano sax was so overwhelming and unprecedented that he literally redefined the use of the instrument. Until Bechet’s appearance on the scene, a clarinet had little chance of being heard above the blare of brass. But Bechet, who as a teen was jamming with local stars and giving lessons to musicians twice his age, was such a sensational soloist that his sound easily cut through the brass to create a new way of playing. Bechet was unfortunately almost as talented at getting into trouble, and his various and sundry trials and tribulations contributed to his legend. After enduring a series of early European misadventures, Bechet ultimately settled in Paris, spending his later years there as a hero.

Jelly Roll Morton

Pianist Morton, who stated he “invented jazz” as a 12-year-old, was an enthusiastic self-promoter, but he was also the music’s first great composer. The ever-dapper Morton, whose early career was in the Storyville houses of ill repute, was a flamboyant showman who toured from coast to coast, influencing scores of young jazz players in his wake. But Morton’s most enduring and important contribution to jazz was his songwriting, as he put dozens of classics into the core jazz repertoire, enriching all of American music while demonstrating jazz was much more than just a joyful noise.

Today’s Headlines; Yesterday’s, Too

Inner-city racial violence is, unfortunately, not a modern invention. In 1900 a bloody confrontation between Robert Charles, a black social activist with a violent past, and the New Orleans police force inflamed an already seething racial scene, ultimately leading to the death of seven officers. After an armed white mob avenged the killings and polarized the races, the Crescent City lost its unique color-blind attitude that had made the birth of jazz possible.

Growing Pains

By the turn of the 20th century, politics and prejudice had put an end to the equal-opportunity party that was the New Orleans music scene. But the multicultural musical gumbo that was jazz kept cooking despite the artificial racial divide.

In 1890, New Orleans joined the unfortunate trend toward sanctioned segregation, passing a series of local laws that effectively eliminated all social interaction between races. The still-developing jazz scene immediately lost its unique crossover audience, and many of its best-known and most creative musicians lost their jobs in the process, as they were replaced by less adept white musicians whose efforts were a pale echo of the genuine music.

But while the loss of high-profile musical employment meant temporary setbacks, it didn’t affect the African-American core community of jazz as deeply and destructively as the legal mandate to racially separate children in public schools.

The discriminatory “Jim Crow” legislation (named after a character in a minstrel show) disenfranchised all but 1 percent of African-Americans in New Orleans, effectively preventing the laws from being overturned by their votes. But it didn’t go totally unchallenged. In fact, a New Orleans test case involving segregated rail travel led to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1896 controversial “separate but equal” decision that legalized segregation. Any chance of the situation being reversed was lost when a bloody biracial riot in 1900 cemented the separation.

Though the return of segregation changed the scene, jazz, once out of the bottle, was here to stay. In the next lesson we’ll see how jazz spread nationwide, as its first superstar is born.

Assignment: Born on the Bayou

Reading

1. Read Chapter 1 of Jazz: A History of America’s Music, paying close attention to the description of the various cultures that made up the city of New Orleans and how each is represented in the music.
2. Jazz critic Gary Giddens’ award-winning Visions of Jazz: The First Century also offers evocative insights into the lives and careers of the early giants of jazz.