Blog Post #1: New Orleans Emergence of Jazz

The New Orleans economy exploded in the 1800s following the Louisiana Purchase, as trade routes along the Mississippi River poured into New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.  New Orleans, being the largest trade mecca in the United States at this time, was comprised of many different ethnic backgrounds, and became a melting pot of culture.  Often cited as the “cosmopolitan center of the South,” New Orleans featured a sophisticated, urban and stylish mecca of French, African-American, Creole, and Mexican people, which was unique to anywhere else in the world (Gioia 27).  Because New Orleans was more liberal than the rest of the South, many ex-slaves congregated here as a place of refuge and rebirth. This notion of a rebirth was a common theme reflected in the voices of Jazz musicians such as R.L. Burnside, or Lead Belly.  Jazz emerged as a way for these musicians to express their struggles and as a way to help get them through another day of slave labor, hence “work songs.”  New Orleans was an impoverished area in the late 1800s following the railroad boom.  Gioia states that “by the time of the birth of jazz, New Orleans was already a city in decline” (28).  These living conditions highlighted by the looming slave struggle as well as cosmopolitan influences shaped the beginning of Jazz music.  In the early 1900s New Orleans was split by Canal Street with the wealthier, often white people living uptown, and the creoles and blacks living downtown.   This divide created the Red Light District , also known as StoryVille, where many famous Jazz musicians got their start.  “Historians of New Orleans jazz have preferred to focus on the city’s moral dangers, linking the rise of hot music to sin and licentiousness” (29).  Some of the musicians that emerged from New Orleans’ Red Light District include the likes of Buddy Bolten, Jelly Roll Morton, and Louis Armstrong.  Three prominent jazz figures who, without question, were influenced by the nature of their surroundings.  I think the main reason jazz emerged from the United States is due to the history of the living conditions and the emergence of the area as a cosmopolitan region.  The roots of jazz music were a reflection of the struggles and hardship that the slaves experienced while living in the South.  Following the civil war, African-Americans were still at the bottom of the social hierarchy, and jazz, for many was the only means for making it out of the cyclical pattern of poverty.  A crop of talent beginning with R.L. Burnside, and highlighted by Louis Armstrong’s presence as the “first soloist” pushed jazz to the forefront of American culture (Gioia 53).   Jazz from New Orleans was different than anything else due to the influences of multiple different cultures.  New Orleans was unique to all other cities because it was comprised of a mixture of French, African-American, Mexican, and Creole people.  These different cultures each added to the jazz music of New Orleans in its own way.  Musicians such as King Oliver spent years refining their sound.  “This obsession with sound gets to the heart of the New Orleans revolution in music, and to the essence of Oliver’s contribution to it.  Instead of aspiring to classical purity of tone, emulation an otherworldly perfection, the early jazz players strived to make their instruments sound like human voices” (Gioia 48).  It was the attention to detail and the unique ethnic flair that separates New Orleans from anywhere else at that time.