An Introduction to New Orleans Jazz

Bruce Boyd Raeburn, Ph.D.
Curator, Hogan Jazz Archive

The best way to account for the early development of jazz in New Orleans is to familiarize yourself with the cultural and social history of this marvelously distinctive regional culture. If you are near a university library which has a Music Library, I would suggest consulting the entry under "jazz" in

• The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2 vols (Macmillan, 1988), which has a very useful thumbnail sketch of jazz history.

• Also, Donald M. Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden (LSU, 1978) is currently in print and provides many insights into the New Orleans music scene at the turn of the century.

One of the ethnic groups which gives New Orleans culture its distinctive characteristics is the Creoles of Color, who come from an Afro-French heritage.

• Joseph Logsdon and Arnold Hirsch, Creole New Orleans (LSU, 1992) has a variety of articles which examine the social and cultural history of this group.

One might say that jazz is the Americanization of the New Orleans music developed by the Creoles, occuring at a time when ragtime, blues, spirituals, marches, and popular "tin pan alley" music were converging. Jazz was a style of playing which drew from all of the above and presented an idiommatic model based on a concept of collective, rather than solo, improvisation.

Ultimately, New Orleans players such as Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet developed a new approach which emphasized solos, but they both began their careers working in the collective format, evident in the early recordings by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (1917 ff.), Kid Ory's Sunshine Orchestra (1921), the New Orleans Rhythm Kings (1922, 1923) and King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band (1923).

Armstrong's impact became apparent with the popularity of his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings (1925-28), redirecting everyone's imagination toward inspired solos. Meanwhile, in New Orleans, community connections such as "jazz funerals" in which brass bands performed at funerals held by benevolent associations continued to underline the role of jazz as a part of everyday life. Jazz may have been a luxury (entertainment) in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, but in New Orleans it was a necessity--a part of the fabric of life in the neighborhoods. And it still is.