The Love Child of Ragtime and Blues

The humidity was almost suffocating, as breeding grounds for vectors of disease pooled in the swamps and marshes.  In the underbelly of a fading metropolitan city, known as New Orleans, emotions poured out of back alleys and through city streets in the sounds of music.  As cultures from around the world whisked together with their respective genres of music, a thickening agent was created.  That binding would define and express the oppressive living conditions of the time in the music of jazz.

New Orleans was the vessel, a simmering Dutch oven, with all the ingredients needed for a shift that would change the face of American musical expression.  It was a city where bustling commerce forced together unlikely mixtures of European, African, Native American, and Asian cultures.  They would offload their goods, drink, eat, and fulfill their carnal desires, forced together in close proximity.  This mixture of cultures, combined with a local passion for brass bands, a deep religious background, and the necessity for an oppressed group of people to have a cathartic musical outlet, were precursors that would contribute to the emergence of jazz in the twentieth century.

Shortly after the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803, New Orleans became a trading hub as the United States lifted trade restrictions.  The steamboat made New Orleans a prosperous, metropolitan city, with global influences.  Economic prosperity would not last long, as the introduction of the railroad made the steamboat irrelevant, the Civil War put its geographical location on the losing side, and a Yellow Fever epidemic in 1878 wiped out two percent of the population (Gioia, 28).  Before the decline of the city, the progressive treatment of slaves would allow African traditions of performance to survive.  While the rest of the United States enforced strict Puritanical control over the behavior of the human currency of West Africa, New Orleans, with its European Catholic ideology, provided a more liberal atmosphere.  Slaves were allowed to gather in a place called Congo Square, on Sundays, beginning around 1817.  They used this opportunity to keep the spirit of their homeland alive.  The importance of a seamless blending between audience and performer, and the requirement of music to only exist in congruence with movement of the body and art, persisted in stark contrast to the stiffness of European performance(Thompson, pp 5-28).  While other cities, like New York and San Francisco had similar elements of cultural blending, and a population under harsh conditions(Jones, pp 95-97), several suggested sources of jazz were unique to New Orleans.  One of those sources were the Creoles of Color.  The offspring of Spanish and French masters and their African wives and mistresses, Creoles prided themselves on their ability to assimilate to European culture.  Many Creoles were classically trained European musicians, but after the Louisiana Legislative Code of 1894 classified them as African, they were forced to confront the ethnicity they had distanced themselves from.  This began a blending of European and African music that would be attributed to the emergence of jazz.  Storyville, a one time red light district of New Orleans, is suggested as one of the environs where this blending took place.  A more likely stage would have been the fish fries, lawn parties, and many social engagements where brass bands ruled the stage from sun up to sun down.  These brass bands seemed to express emotion in much the same way that the spiritual songs of the church, the work songs of the fields, and the blues music of the rural south.  There was an attempt to deal with the harsh living conditions of the times by forcing out raw emotions, giving a human voice to the instruments they played.  

It is hard to imagine jazz coming together without all the historical elements coming together.  The brass bands of the social gatherings, though, seem to be one of the most important factors that caused New Orleans to be the birthplace of jazz.  It was something that was uniquely local to the area and it permeated every aspect of life.  Whether a celebration, a somber funeral, or a gathering to raise money these brass bands were there to entertain, but also to provide a release and speak to the inner soul that longed for freedom and equality.