The Call of Something New
In the dawning of the 20th century, a vibrant voice rose out of the humid streets of New Orleans, carrying with it the hopes, joys, worries, woes, shouts, and ruminations of a culture ascendant. The sound was jazz, the music born in the geographical, economic, and cultural crossroads of the Mississippi delta. Jazz would surmount the world stage within the following decades, and thus its origins in the Big Easy are just as rich in culture as its later successes.
New Orleans may have been of the
perfect composition for the creation of jazz. One of the basal elements that
jazz sprung from was its African heritage; the forms of work songs, spirituals,
and blues, themselves originating from the sharecropper’s life all over the
south, provided one of the essential building blocks for the later occurrence of
jazz. Situated in the heart of the south, New Orleans was able to benefit from
these traditions that permeated throughout the community.
Another major factor in the
creation of jazz in New Orleans is the city’s physical location at the efflux
of the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico. “The dictates of commerce made it inevitable that a major city would be
established near the base of the Mississippi River” (Gioia, 28). The
position made it a prime center for trade, and with trade comes new ideas in
the form of new people and new money. The rise of New Orleans as a trade
capital introduced a myriad of new peoples to the city. The black and French
ethnicities already present were now substantiated with Caribbean and Mexican
influences, which only served to enrich the cultural base jazz grew from. In
fact, a band of Mexican musicians sent to New Orleans in the 1880s served as an
important stepping stone in the development of the jazz idiom, “indeed,
the influence of Mexican musicians in early jazz both complicates and
underscores African-American histories and sensibilities fundamental in the
genre’s [jazz’s] creation” (Johnson, 5). Some
of the musicians stayed and introduced instruments indispensable to jazz today,
and instructed many of the local jazz musicians in their use, as well as in the
European styles inherent in Mexican music. The money that flowed into the city
developed many different sections within the society, one of them being its red
light district, sometimes referred to as Storyville. While it is more or less a
forced fiction that jazz was born in the brothels of Storyville, it is true
that the loose and hot dance halls of the district combined with its
entertainment-hungry inhabitants provided a conducive atmosphere for jazz
artists to experiment with and produce their music (Gioia, 29).
Perhaps the most important factor
in the creation of jazz is the fact that there was such a confluence of events
and people all together in the same place at relatively the same time;
combining the amazing contributions of so many backgrounds that engender a
nascent form of artistic expression that is so much more than the sum of its
components. The magic and inspiration of jazz music comes from the simple truth
that it is impossible to point out any individual time or person as the start,
no part of it can be without the other parts, much like the communal drumming of
the African tradition (Kente Cloth, 29). This too may be the unique signature
of the early jazz in New Orleans, it contained much of the original African heritage
that later became more influenced by European tradition and stylization. As the
Great Migration occurred at the beginning of the second decade of the 20th
century, jazz lost some of its African edge once it left New Orleans, as can be
evident in the transition from King Oliver to Louis Armstrong as archons of their
time, “The passing of the baton from
Oliver to Armstrong…marks another decisive turning point in the history of
American music. Oliver represents a more Africanized sensibility…. For Western
music to assimilate the jazz sensibility, it required an innovator like Louis
Armstrong,…a true master of licks and phrases and all the complicated
combinations of notes that appeal to the Western musical mind” (Gioia, 49).
The birth of jazz in New
Orleans marks the beginning of a wonderful time in music, the jazz era, and its
multi-cultural origins from the union of so many inputs produced a sound that would
carry the theme of taking all the old to make something alive and new with it
onward into today.
Commented on Charles Wilkens
