The Birth and Spread of New Orleans Jazz

The City of Contradictions: The Rise and Fall of New Orleans

When I examined New Orleans as the cradle of jazz, the first thing I encountered was a striking contradiction. Following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the lifting of trade restrictions on the Mississippi River ushered New Orleans into an unprecedented period of prosperity that would last more than half a century. Within ten years of the launch of the "New Orleans" — the first steamboat to operate on the Mississippi — the city's population had doubled.

However, by the late 1800s, this glorious era of economic growth began to come to an end. In the post-Civil War period, the city found itself on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line. More importantly, an inevitable shift was underway in America's infrastructure: throughout the final decades of the century, the railroad gradually replaced the steamboat. Centers of trade developed elsewhere, and the importance of New Orleans — sitting at the gateway of America's most important inland waterway — began to diminish.

Economic hardships worsened due to chronic political corruption. By 1874, the state of Louisiana could no longer pay either the principal or the accrued interest on its $53 million debt. This situation reveals a fundamental fact often overlooked in jazz history: By the time jazz was being born, New Orleans was already a city in decline.

The city's population had more than quadrupled in the half-century between 1825 and 1875, yet in 1878 a devastating yellow fever epidemic killed 2 percent of its residents. The threat of epidemic was a constant presence in nineteenth-century New Orleans, particularly during the long, hot summer months. The city sat below sea level, and its humid, hot climate combined with poor local sanitation (the city had no sewer system until 1892) made it an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes and pests.

In a city where living conditions were so harsh, New Orleans's excessive devotion to celebrations, parades, and parties — and especially the extraordinary New Orleans funeral procession, a singular mixture of funeral rite and festival held for the dead — evokes the revelers in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death." Viewed from one angle this exuberance looks like extreme decadence; from another, it appears as a necessary defense mechanism for a society living on the edge.

New Orleans and the Storyville Myth

When I investigated the birth of jazz, I found that many sources tied it to Storyville — the red-light district of New Orleans created by city authorities on October 1, 1897, and shut down by the U.S. Navy on November 12, 1917. Yet a closer look at this colorful lineage raises many doubts.

Donald Marquis, who painstakingly researched the life of Buddy Bolden — generally regarded as the first musician of New Orleans jazz — was forced to conclude: "Bolden did not play in brothels. None of the musicians interviewed remembered playing in a brothel with a group, nor did they know of anyone who had had such an experience."

Even the name Storyville, now firmly lodged in the jazz lexicon, was largely unknown to the jazz musicians of the time. As jazz bassist Pops Foster recalled: "Long after I left New Orleans, the guys started asking questions about Storyville back there. I figured it was some little town we used to play around that I couldn't remember. When I found out they were talking about the Red Light District, I was really surprised. We always called it the District."

Other sources suggest that piano music tended to dominate in the brothels (in many cases provided by player pianos), and only a handful of venues featured larger ensembles. Prostitution in Storyville was certainly a major industry — at its peak roughly 2,000 women and more than 200 brothels were involved in the trade. But the jazz bands themselves were found not inside the brothels, but rather in the cabarets and dance halls of the District.

The Jazz and Church Connection

Jazz, often criticized as the devil's music, may in fact have far deeper ties to the house of God. Paul Barbarin, one of the earliest jazz drummers of New Orleans, explained: "You should have heard the preachers in the Baptist churches — they were singing rhythms. More even than a jazz band." Crescent City banjo player Johnny St. Cyr agreed: "Those Baptist rhythms were similar to jazz rhythms, and the singing was very close to the blues side."

New Orleans's most famous trombonist, Kid Ory, insisted that Bolden drew his inspiration not from the nightlife of Storyville but from the church: "Bolden got most of his tunes from the Holy Roller Church, the Baptist church on Jackson Avenue and Franklin. I know he went to that church, but not for religion. He went there to get ideas for his music."

Beyond the red-light establishments and entertainment venues, the broad musical panorama of late-nineteenth-century New Orleans contained many other elements. A trio of mandolin, guitar, and bass — sometimes joined by banjo and violin — would play at Saturday-night fish-fry parties. On Sundays, city residents migrated to Milneburg and the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, where bands of as many as thirty-five or forty different instruments provided entertainment. On Mondays and Wednesdays, garden parties — often private fundraisers, like the fish fries — were held all over New Orleans. Dairy barns, run by their owners or rented out for the night and swept clean, were another common setting for parties that lasted from sundown to before dawn.

The Importance of the Brass Bands

When I studied the development of jazz in New Orleans, what struck me most was the city's extraordinary passion for brass bands. This fervor lay at the very heart of New Orleans's relationship with the musical arts.

In the years following the Civil War, similar ensembles were organized in many cities and towns across the United States; some towns hired a professional bandleader to organize the group and run rehearsals, while in other cases — especially among Black bands — units were sponsored by fraternal organizations, social clubs, or by the musicians themselves. But the role of these groups was especially important in New Orleans; there, brass bands played not just at Sunday-afternoon concerts (as in many communities) but at virtually every kind of social occasion.

The Excelsior Brass Band and the Onward Brass Band, both founded in the 1880s, were the most renowned of these groups, but there were many others of varying degrees of fame and ability — probably dozens in all. Drummer Baby Dodds recalled the instrumentation of the marching brass bands this way:

"There was a traditional lineup for New Orleans parades. The trombones were always in the first row. Behind the trombones were the heavy instruments — bass, tuba, and baritone. Then behind them came the alto horns, two or three altos, and behind them the clarinets. It was very nice when there were two; usually there was only one, an E-flat clarinet. Behind the clarinets came the trumpets, always two or three, and they came in the next row. The drums were at the very back, just two — a bass drum and a snare. That was for balance. For funeral processions, the snare drum is muffled — its snares are pulled tight to mute it. With the snares off, it sounds like a tom-tom. But for parades or returning from the cemetery, you don't muffle the drums. At most there would be eleven or twelve men in the whole brass band."

Sometimes the same instrumentation was used for dances, but in many cases a smaller subset of these musicians played, usually augmented by string players. The repertoire of these bands was remarkably varied. In addition to concert and march music, the groups also knew a range of quadrilles, polkas, schottisches, mazurkas, two-steps, and other popular dance styles. When the ragtime craze swept the country at the turn of the century, these bands began playing more syncopated numbers, a shift accompanied by a growing interest in "ragging" traditional compositions. This blurring of musical genres, as we will see, played a central role in the creation of jazz.

Buddy Bolden: The Mysterious Father of Jazz

Generally remembered as the first jazz musician, Buddy Bolden is perhaps the most mysterious figure in the history of New Orleans music. No recordings of this important figure survive — despite the rumored existence of a cylinder recording from the turn of the century — and the first written source to mention his role in the roots of jazz appeared only in 1933, two years after his death and roughly thirty years after Bolden helped usher in the revolutionary birth of a new style of American music.

Bolden's greatest contribution to jazz may have been his focus on the blues. "On those old, slow, lowdown blues, his cornet had a moan in it that went right through you," trombonist Bill Matthews recalled, "like being in church." Trumpeter Peter Bocage agreed: "A lot of blues, slow drags, not many fast numbers... the blues was their foundation, slow blues."

It is important to remember that the blues form was not widely known at that time. Although W. C. Handy was hailed by his admirers as "the Father of the Blues," he only discovered the style around 1903, when Bolden was twenty-five. Yet Jelly Roll Morton describes a blues played at the turn of the century by Mamie Desdoume, a New Orleans resident. Bolden was likely incorporating blues sensibility and structure into his music around the same time.

Even if Bolden did not invent jazz, he certainly grasped the recipe that produced it: the rhythms of ragtime, the bent notes and chord patterns of the blues, and instrumentation drawn from the brass bands and string ensembles of New Orleans. As we have seen, the syncopated rhythms of ragtime had already worked their way into mainstream American culture before the blues was widely known, and Bolden cannot really be credited for that aspect of African American music. Even so, his insistence on marrying the blues to these syncopations — at a time when the blues existed only at the margins of the music world — was a bold move, and surely one of the main reasons he caught the attention of his contemporaries and of later New Orleans jazz chroniclers.

Bolden's loud, brash music stood in sharp contrast to the more traditional quadrilles, waltzes, and marches of the New Orleans Creoles. While most of the leading Creole musicians at first tried to ignore the new style, its vitality appealed to the local Black audience — especially to the younger, more independent African Americans born after the Civil War. This was not merely a matter of musical technique. The bold lyrics of Bolden's signature song, containing pointed references to a local judge and other contemporary figures, can be seen as a symbol of this new generation's more outspoken attitude.

Bolden's career lasted only a few years. By 1906, the cornetist's playing was already in decline, weighed down by his heavy drinking and growing mental instability. In March of that year, after attacking his mother-in-law with a water pitcher, he was arrested — a rare occasion on which this jazz icon made the newspapers during his lifetime, not for his art but for a brush with the law. A second arrest in September and a third the following March led to Bolden being declared legally insane and committed to an asylum in Jackson. He remained institutionalized for the next twenty-four years, his condition deteriorating into pronounced schizophrenia. On November 4, 1931, Bolden died at the age of fifty-four — according to his death certificate, of cerebral arteriosclerosis — only a few years before growing interest in the early history of jazz would lead researchers back to this important figure.

King Oliver and Louis Armstrong: Early Masters of Jazz

One of the greatest ironies in the history of New Orleans jazz is that much of it actually unfolded in Chicago. By the early 1920s, the center of the jazz world had clearly shifted north. New Orleans musicians continued to dominate the idiom, but they were now working far from the land of their birth. Well before the mid-1920s, many of the first generation of New Orleans jazz stars were making their names elsewhere — Jelly Roll Morton left New Orleans around 1908, Freddie Keppard in 1914 (if not earlier), Sidney Bechet in 1916, Jimmie Noone in 1917, King Oliver in 1918, Kid Ory in 1919, Johnny Dodds around the same time, his brother Warren "Baby" Dodds in 1921, and Louis Armstrong in 1922. These moves may have begun as short tours, but they eventually became all but permanent. The vast majority of the New Orleans diaspora never returned to their home state except for brief visits.

This migration was not a purely musical phenomenon. Between 1916 and 1919, half a million African Americans moved from the South to the more tolerant societies of the North, and another million followed during the 1920s. This great population shift — known as the Great Migration — encompassed the full range of Black society: doctors and lawyers, musicians and clergy, teachers and merchants, carpenters and laborers. Musicians moved north for the same reasons that motivated other groups: a better life, more opportunities for work, the chance to support a family, and the pursuit of a measure of personal freedom — options that were far harder to sustain for an African American in the segregated South.

Was Joe "King" Oliver the greatest of the New Orleans cornetists? On this question, the historical record is ambiguous. In fact, the deeper you dig, the more contradictions and unanswered questions you encounter. "Everyone has heard of Joe Oliver and Louis Armstrong," said Preston Jackson, "but at the time when he was at his peak, very few people had heard of Mutt Carey. Mutt Carey was the equal of Joe Oliver in his day." Carey himself had a different story to tell: "Freddie Keppard had New Orleans completely sewn up. He was the King — yes, he wore the crown." Edmond Hall, another of the first-generation players, made a case for Buddy Petit: "Buddy is a man who has hardly been written about. He was the kind of guy who set the pace in New Orleans... If Buddy had gone from New Orleans to Chicago when the other men left, I'm sure he would have had a reputation equal to those the others achieved."

Oliver's band may lack the masterful arrangements of the Red Hot Peppers or the understated elegance of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. But its hot, dirty, swinging sound is the closest thing to the essence of the jazz experience. Its appeal comes from its rawness, its earthiness, its insistence. If Jelly Roll's music aged like fine wine, Oliver's still feels like the immediate sharpness of bootleg liquor.

An important element of King Oliver's jazz was his decision to fill a hypothetical second-cornet chair. Already accompanied to California, and then to Chicago, by trombonist Honoré Dutrey and clarinetist Johnny Dodds, Oliver decided to add a second cornet player to the front line. Doubling roles in this way was unusual at the time, particularly because of the risk of diminishing the lead soloist's role within the group. Even so, Oliver chose Louis Armstrong, a rising star out of New Orleans who at that point was little known outside the city. Armstrong would go on to overshadow not only Oliver but the entire first generation of jazz musicians.

It was a transitional moment from the New Orleans style to the Chicago style. Oliver viewed jazz as collective music-making, in which the musicians were interdependent and no single horn dominated. Armstrong, by contrast, would emerge as the first great soloist in the history of jazz — yet he developed his abilities within an ensemble that featured very few solos. Therein lies the paradox.

Armstrong's ear and his ability to fit himself into the musical flow around him, combined with a paradoxically rhythmic sensibility that was at once relaxed and propulsive, marked him as an effective player even at this early stage. On the other hand, Armstrong would never quite possess Oliver's mastery of the mute, or the wide range of moans and growls Oliver could coax from his cornet.

Armstrong's musicianship was far ahead of his colleagues' — and that was exciting. His wife (and a pianist in Oliver's band) Lil Hardin would later recall that Armstrong spent days trying to imitate his boss's famous solo on "Dipper Mouth Blues" — a solo that, despite its melodic simplicity, he never quite managed to recreate. "I think this discouraged him a little," she noted, "because Joe was his idol, and he wanted to play like Joe."

Listening to these performances is both thrilling and unsettling. Armstrong's musicianship was far ahead of his colleagues' — hence the thrill. It stood in sharp contrast to Hardin's sometimes blurry chord changes, trombonist Honoré Dutrey's often uninspired melodic lines, and Dodds's tentative approach to his parts. Armstrong's mastery could only stand out impressively in such a setting. And yet, at the same time, his individualistic approach also comes across as disturbingly disruptive. Is it not a deliberate weakening of a collective aesthetic? In the context of his later recordings, where solo playing is emphasized, his charismatic and heroic stance is an asset; but within the texture of the Creole Jazz Band, it disrupts the seamless blend of instrumental voices that was the crowning glory of the early New Orleans style. Here we encounter one of the great ironies of jazz history — and a striking reminder of how quickly the music was changing — namely, that because of Armstrong's presence, King Oliver's early-1920s recordings stand both as a key example of the New Orleans collective style and as a foreshadowing of its obsolescence, already implying the more individualistic ethos that would replace it.

Jelly Roll Morton: The World's Greatest Hot Tune Writer

The greatest of the New Orleans jazz composers, Jelly Roll Morton, sparked controversy with his claims to have invented the music. Morton was indeed known for exaggerating on many topics, so much so that he has acquired a braggart persona in most historical accounts. Even so, a careful reading of Morton's firsthand recollections — preserved in a series of interviews and performances recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress — reveals that this often maligned figure could, when the occasion demanded it, be one of the most thoughtful and accurate sources on early jazz.

The Chicago years of the 1920s made up the most productive musical period of Morton's career. He cut roughly a hundred recordings or piano rolls of his compositions, kept publishing pieces, and founded his most famous group, the Red Hot Peppers. Recording in both Chicago and New York during the remainder of the decade, this band reached a level of collective artistry matched by very few traditional New Orleans groups, and surpassed by none. Morton's leading position as a jazz composer — captured by the business card on which he modestly described himself as "the world's greatest hot tune writer" — would not be seriously challenged until Duke Ellington pushed the boundaries of creativity even further in the following decade.

Morton's 1926 recording of "Sidewalk Blues" shows the results of this determination. The piece begins with a roll call, a ten-bar introduction in which each major instrument is summoned in turn: piano, trombone, cornet, and clarinet. This leads into a twelve-bar cornet melody statement, supported by a stop-time vamp over a straight blues progression. Stop-time techniques of this kind — in which the band provides the soloist with propulsive sharp accents on beats two and four — were a signature of Morton's music and were used briefly to add variety. A second twelve-bar melody follows, this time employing the interlocking trombone-cornet-clarinet counterpoint that is the hallmark of classic New Orleans jazz. The piece then returns to the opening twelve-bar melody, but with the clarinet now in the lead. A four-bar break leads into a new thirty-two-bar melody played by cornet, trombone, and clarinet (briefly interrupted in the sixteenth bar by a car horn — a typical Morton novelty touch); this melody abandons the blues form and sensibility in favor of a plaintive parlor-song style. This thirty-two-bar melody is repeated, but now in an arrangement for three clarinets. In a New Orleans–style context, this was a striking device. Morton had brought two extra clarinetists to the session and let them sit around idly all day, asking them only to be ready for certain key moments of the performance, such as this interlude. Such mid-tune changes of instrumentation, rare in other jazz recordings of the era, exemplify Morton's tendency to spring some startling sound on the listener in unexpected places in his music. This subdued clarinet section then shifts direction dramatically with the return of an energetic New Orleans–style counterpoint in the final eight bars. A five-bar tag closes out this three-and-a-half-minute whirlwind performance. In compact form, Morton has compassed a world of sound.

When I lecture on Morton's music, I am always struck by how long it takes to describe in words what happens in any one of his pieces. For a three-minute recording, providing a clear verbal road map of the changes of instrumentation, harmonic structure, and rhythmic support that characterize these performances can take ten times as long. This structural complexity is not arbitrary; it is essential to Morton's maximalist aesthetic. In the September 1926 version of "Black Bottom Stomp," another striking example of this approach, the band drops out in the middle of the piece, leaving the leader to keep the music going with a two-fisted stomp; Jelly attacks it with all the fire of a star soloist's cadenza in a classical concerto. But in an instant the Red Hot Peppers are back, this time backing cornetist George Mitchell in a fiery stop-time chorus. This leads directly to Johnny St. Cyr's conversation with the ensemble, in which the banjo player uses syncopations reminiscent of both ragtime and bluegrass. But before long the New Orleans counterpoint of trombone, clarinet, and cornet returns at twice the energy — the signature sound that signals, as inevitable as the "happily ever after" at the end of a fairy tale, that the Red Hot Peppers have arrived at the intended payoff of the performance. Here again, three minutes of disc time must accommodate symphonic ambitions.

Morton was not without his limitations. His harmonies, as in "Finger Buster" or "Froggie Moore," sometimes offer awkward combinations of chromatic and diatonic tendencies, suggesting that the composer was reaching beyond his grasp of theory; his piano playing, for all his claims, was often less than virtuosic; and his claim to have invented jazz does not deserve serious debate. Even so, in terms of overall artistry, Morton's achievements were considerable. The 1926 Victor recordings find Morton at the peak of his creative powers. In performances such as "Sidewalk Blues," "Black Bottom Stomp," "Dead Man Blues," "Grandpa's Spells," "Smokehouse Blues," and "The Chant," he had found a fertile middle ground between the strict compositional structures of ragtime and the improvisational vitality of jazz. This style would soon become anachronistic — indeed, it may already have been so by the time these recordings were made — as jazz began to forget its origins in multi-themed ragtime form. In that context, Morton's work represents both the high-water mark and the final flowering of this approach.

Social Context and the Great Migration

The diaspora of New Orleans jazz underscored the music's influence beyond its own roots. Between 1916 and 1919, half a million African Americans migrated from the South to northern communities, and another million followed during the 1920s. This vast population shift, known as the "Great Migration," encompassed the full range of Black society — from doctors and lawyers to musicians and clergy, from teachers and merchants to carpenters and laborers.

In the great northern cities — Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, and others — the Black population more than tripled between 1910 and 1930. This influx allowed New Orleans musicians to reach new audiences via tours and travel and created encounters between new musical ideas. White New Orleans jazz musicians also moved to Chicago during this period, but in their case the motivation was not to escape racial intolerance but rather to take advantage of the northern city's larger economic base.

This diaspora not only spread jazz beyond New Orleans but also drove the evolution of the music itself. As musicians from different backgrounds came together, musical encounters and innovative fusions took place.

Jazz's Transformation from Individual Voices to Collective Narrative

When I study New Orleans jazz, what strikes me most is the complex balance between ensemble and individuality. The early New Orleans style was music in which each instrument played a specific role and was expected to express interdependence rather than independence. The most characteristic moment in these recordings often occurs when cornet, clarinet, and trombone enter into spontaneous counterpoint.

The trombone dominates the low register, providing a deep, deliberate bass line; the clarinet, usually in the higher register, plays more elaborate figures consisting of arpeggios or other rapid finger patterns; the cornet moves mainly in the middle register, playing melodies less elaborate than the clarinet's while pushing the ensemble forward with driving, swinging lines. No early jazz band did this ensemble-style playing better than Oliver's Creole Jazz Band.

Armstrong's musicianship was far ahead of his colleagues' — hence the thrill. It stood in sharp contrast to Hardin's sometimes blurry chord changes, trombonist Honoré Dutrey's often uninspired melodic lines, and Dodds's tentative approach to his parts. It was impossible for Armstrong's mastery not to stand out in such a setting. And yet, at the same time, his individualistic approach also came across as disturbingly disruptive. Was it not a deliberate weakening of a collective aesthetic? In the context of his later recordings, his emphasis on solo playing — and his charismatic, heroic stance — is an asset, but within the texture of the Creole Jazz Band it disrupts the seamless blend of instrumental voices that was the crowning glory of the early New Orleans style.

The transition from King Oliver to Armstrong marks another defining turning point in the history of American music. Oliver represents a more Africanized sensibility, one that works on the textures of sound. The idea of codified musical structures based on notes and scales is a distinctly Western notion — our inheritance from Pythagoras and the Greeks, a blessing perhaps as much as a curse — and very different from the African tradition. For Western music to absorb the jazz sensibility, an innovator like Louis Armstrong was needed: not just a colorist of sound but a visionary, a true master of all those complex combinations of notes and phrasing that would come to represent the voice of jazz.

Conclusion: The Legacy New Orleans Created

As jazz continued to evolve, the legacy of New Orleans's contribution endured. The essential elements of this music — musical democracy, the importance of improvisation, the idea of using instruments like the human voice, and, above all, the synthesis of African and European musical traditions — all came from the very heart of New Orleans's musical world.

King Oliver's final days are a reminder of the tragedy of this legacy. After his fame had passed, Oliver worked long hours at menial jobs during the Great Depression — pool-hall attendant, roadside vendor, and the like — struggling in vain to save enough money to buy a train ticket to New York to join his sister. At the time of his death in April 1938, he was living in near-poverty in Savannah, Georgia. His return to New York was posthumous: Oliver's sister used her rent money to bring the cornetist's body to New York, where he was buried in an unmarked grave at Woodlawn Cemetery, since there was no money left for a headstone. Louis Armstrong, Clarence Williams, and a few other musicians attended.

By the late 1930s, Oliver's music may have been all but forgotten by the general public, but through his protégé Louis Armstrong it would leave a lasting mark both on the jazz idiom and on the broader currents of popular culture. By this period, Armstrong's influence in the jazz world was pervasive. Even more remarkable, however, was Armstrong's ability to transcend the boundaries of jazz, to attain international fame and stature, and to make his face and his manner instantly recognizable even to people who paid little attention to jazz music.

New Orleans, with its diseases, poverty, and economic hardships, showed that great art can emerge even amid the collapse of a city. Perhaps it was precisely these existential pressures that created the social conditions that helped give birth to one of the greatest art forms. The musicians who left New Orleans and the other southern cities became the carriers of this African American art form as they moved north, and served as the ambassadors of jazz.

Studying this experience, I learned that jazz is not just a musical genre, but also a meeting point between the old world and the new, Black and white, Africa and America, joy and sorrow. The city from which, over the years, New Orleans's great musicians — King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton — departed, paradoxically created its greatest legacy: a music that offers a profound lesson about human creativity under especially difficult conditions. Indeed, the "celebration of decline" may be one of New Orleans's most enduring gifts to us — the idea that making music attuned to the rhythm and melody of human experience, even in our darkest moments, is a precious tradition worth preserving and celebrating.