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    New Orleans Jazz
    New Orleans Jazz
    New Orleans Jazz
    Ebook181 pages1 hour

    New Orleans Jazz

    By Edward J. Branley

    ()

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    About this ebook

    From the days when Buddy Bolden would blow his cornet to attract an audience from one New Orleans park to another, to the brass bands in clubs and on the streets today, jazz in New Orleans has been about simple things: getting people to snap their fingers, tap their toes, get up and clap their hands, and most importantly dance! From the 1890s to World War I, from uptown to Faubourg Treme and out to the lakefront, New Orleans embraced this uniquely American form of music. Local musicians nurtured jazz, matured it, and passed it on to others. Some left the city to make their names elsewhere, while others stayed, playing the clubs, marching in the parades, and sending loved ones home with “jazz funerals.” Older musicians mentored younger ones, preserving the traditions that give New Orleans such an exciting jazz scene today.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateApr 7, 2014
    ISBN9781439642665
    New Orleans Jazz
    Author

    Edward J. Branley

    New Orleans native Edward J. Branley is a former high school history teacher. He has written five books for Arcadia Publishing, including Legendary Locals of New Orleans and Images of America books New Orleans: The Canal Streetcar Line, Maison Blanche Department Store and New Orleans Jazz. He is graduate of Brother Martin High School in New Orleans and the University of New Orleans.

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      Book preview

      New Orleans Jazz - Edward J. Branley

      (USMC)

      INTRODUCTION

      In New Orleans, we love to say that things are a gumbo, referring to the wonderful soup that somehow manages to combine many different flavors into the perfect food. It is a cliché, but it often is an excellent metaphor. New Orleans–style jazz is also a blend of many different ingredients, but it does one thing that soup does not normally do for you: it makes you move.

      New Orleans music is all about movement. In the French-Spanish Colonial period, soldiers would march in time with bugles and drums. Slaves danced in time with their drums and songs. Sailors would make port in New Orleans, bringing with them chanteys and shipboard instruments. By the middle of the 19th century, the city was a major hub for music and entertainment in North America. Music never left the city through the horrors of the Civil War and the Reconstruction that followed, but once those had passed, the city returned to its status of an entertainment destination.

      Music was an important accompaniment to food, wine, and sex as New Orleans approached the 20th century. People wanted—no, they needed—music to help them through many aspects of life, from the dance halls on Saturday night to churches on Sunday morning. Orchestras enabled dancing, and brass bands picked up the tempo in the 1890s.

      When Charles Buddy Bolden and his contemporaries picked up their horns, though, the music made people move rather than the other way around. That is when jazz was born. Military-style brass music became something else when Bolden added his big four syncopation. Feet stomped and hands clapped when piano players and drummers improvised along with the cornets. Suddenly, the tunes on the sheet music did not sound the same twice in a row, as musicians now had license to change things, expand the music, and make people move. Bolden made other musicians want to stop being legitimate, to let go and explore the sound. His bands were popular in the parks, saloons, and dance halls.

      The demand for music that made one move was incredible. Bolden’s combo spawned others like Joseph King Oliver, John Robichaux, Freddie Keppard, and more to pick up the beat. Teens like Edward Kid Ory, known as Dutt to family and friends, came in on a train from out in the country to hear these bands at the parks and after baseball games. They took the sounds they heard back with them to the farms and rural communities up the Mississippi River, changing them and making them their own. They would then return on subsequent weekends with their instruments, hoping to get noticed by the bandleaders, joining them for gigs.

      There was money to be made playing jass and ragtime in New Orleans at the turn of the century. (The change in spelling from jass to jazz is one of the genre’s big mysteries, but the word was standardized as jazz in print by 1918.) While the new stylings created by Bolden and his contemporaries had not reached the ears of the majority of white folks, there were enough affluent African Americans in the city to nurture musicians along. The sound moved from the bars to a wider audience, one where more white people would hear it. Musicians looking to make the most of their weekend time would parade on the backs of horse-drawn carts, advertising their gigs that evening. White musicians caught the beat, and jazz moved from blacks-only establishments into white bars and onto college campuses. Many whites-only establishments would not even permit African American bands. Segregation presented white musicians with many opportunities, as many whites-only establishments would not even permit black bands.

      Life in the segregated South of the early 20th century was tough, not only for musicians but also for all African Americans. As the Great Migration of blacks from the Jim Crow states to northern, industrial cities took place, musicians followed them. Knowing they would find work playing for the black communities in cities like Chicago, bandleaders King Oliver and Kid Ory gave up on hassles of dealing with white saloon owners, police, and patrons who thought they were better than the band in every way. The cream of the crop of New Orleans jazz connected with their counterparts up north and the music spread. Life in Chicago was cold and hard for the men who played Lincoln Park and Storyville, but at least they did not have to sit at the back of the bus on their way home from work.

      Improvements in recording technology also spread the gospel of jazz. Instead of the fragile wax cylinders used to record musicians in the 1900s and 1910s, bands were recorded on celluloid and, later, vinyl discs. The advent of electrical recording in the mid-1920s enabled a greater distribution of jazz, as the music industry in New York began to hear players from Chicago without having to get on a train. Jazz might not have been moving mountains, but it was certainly moving millions.

      Of course, not all African American musicians abandoned New Orleans for the promises of the northern cities. Bandleaders like Fate Marable negotiated paid gigs on the riverboats, operating locally on daytime excursions, as well as the boats transporting passengers to and from St. Louis. The Creoles of New Orleans continued to demand entertainment, and a new generation of young musicians, those

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