The Creation of Jazz in New Orleans

Chapter 1: New Orleans as a Music City: This class explores the colonial and 19th c. musical antecedents to jazz, from the street criers and serenading activities found in open-air environments to dance halls and theaters, including coverage of the musical implications of trans-Atlantic slavery driven by syncretism in Place Congo, Eurocentric bals masqués, American vernacular forms such as minstrelsy, work songs related to labor on the Mississippi river, pan-Caribbean Latin tinge derivatives of danza and danzon, and dance-oriented string bands and ragtime. This chapter will introduce students to theoretical perspectives emphasizing the cultural ramifications of the city’s geographical situation, including concepts related to the convergence of discrete systems of cultural production (trans-Atlantic Eurocentric and Afrocentric; Gulf/Caribbean creolization; and American vernacularism) in New Orleans. Students read Jerah Johnson, “New Orleans’s Congo Square: An Urban Setting for Early African-American Culture Formation,” Louisiana History, 32/2 (Spring 1991), 117-157 Lester Sullivan, “Composers of Color of Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: The History behind the Music,” Black Music Research Journal, 8/1 (1988), 51-82 (with reports due on the following week).

Congo Square was a site where African ethnic musical cultures blended into an African American variant that was specific to New Orleans and a threshold for further development.

The French Opera House (1859-1919) brought the latest Eurocentric culture to New Orleans. Ironically, its educational component was called the ‘Milano Conservatory’ by students because most of the teachers were Italian.

This chapter covers the cultural implications of ‘crazy quilt’ demographics and cultural dynamics in Tremé, the lower French Quarter, the Seventh Ward, Algiers, Central City, and the Irish Channel, as well as resort areas along Lake Pontchartrain: Bucktown, West End, Spanish Fort, Milneburg, and Little Woods. The discussion will emphasize ethnic diversity and the prevalence of outdoor musical performances evident in marching band parades, serenading traditions, spasm bands, and street criers and vocal quartets, along with coverage of saloons, dance halls, and theaters. Students read Donald M. Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz (LSU, 1978); report due next class.

This class focuses on trumpeter Buddy Bolden as a symbol of cultural change. “Great Man theory” posits the role of individuals as significant in achieving historical change, but environment can enhance or inhibit one’s choices and actions. This chapter explores the life and career of cornetist Charles “Buddy” Bolden with regard to issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and class in the context of the Uptown African American underclass. It also traces Bolden’s impact on competitors through the reconfiguration of New Orleans’ popular entertainment market driven by changing dance fashions among young people. Report on Marquis due. Read White Michael G., “The New Orleans Brass Band: A Cultural Tradition,” in The Triumph of the Soul: Cultural and Psychological Aspects of African American Music, edited by Ferdinand Jones and Arthur C. Jones (2001), 69-96. (report due next class).

Benevolent Associations, Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, and “second lines.” This class period will entail presentation and discussion of the film “Jazz Parades: Feet Don’t Fail Me Now,” an episode in Alan Lomax’s American Patchwork series (Vestapol, 1998).

This class includes discussion of various instrumentations and community-based functions prevalent in New Orleans jazz bands and brass bands, closely examining a range of festival traditions and associated performance sites situated throughout the city from the river to the lakefront. Read Charles E. Kinzer, “The Tios of New Orleans and Their Pedagogical Influence on the Early Jazz Clarinet Style,” Black Music Research Journal, 16/2 (Fall 1996), 279-303; (report due next class).

Despite mythologies about jazz as continuous spontaneous improvisation generated by critics in the 1930s, in New Orleans the music evolved from experiments that were based in ‘trial and error’ interactions, combing various degrees of musical skill and training. Jazz was therefore the result of a blending of amateur and conservatory traditions (based in new technology, such as the trap drum set, ‘head’ arrangements, musician ‘voices,’ and ‘readers,’ ‘spellers,’ and ‘fakers’). This class looks at how New Orleans jazz musicians created individual “voices” on their instruments and how bands achieved identity through combining those components into a recognizable band sound through interactive “chemistry.” Report on Kinzer due. Read Charles Hersch, Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans (Chicago, 2007) for next class.

Jazz benefited greatly from the movement of musicians into the city from the countryside and vice versa, when music “professors” such as James B. Humphrey brought instruction to rural populations. This class shows how such demographic dynamics influenced early jazz development and how the urban environment in promoted gender diversification and the social acceptance of jazz. Report on Hersch due. Read Lawrence Gushee, “A Preliminary Chronology of the Early Career of Ferd ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton,” American Music, 3/4 (Winter 1985), 389-412 and Dick Holbrook, “Mister Jazz Himself—The Story of Ray Lopez,” Storyville no. 64 (April-May 1976), 135-151; (reports due on Week 10).

This chapter concerns New Orleans jazz musicians and how they adapted to new audiences and environments as they traveled. It includes the exploits of William Manuel Johnson’s Original Creole Band, a group of Creole and African American musicians from New Orleans that toured the Pantages theater circuit from 1914-1918. By 1915-1916, white bands from New Orleans, such as Tom Brown’s Band from Dixieland and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, traveled north to Chicago and New York. In every case, a period of adaptation was required in order to effectively market the New Orleans sound and the dances styles that went with it, all of which were unfamiliar to northern audiences. Once these audiences were properly “initiated,” usually by the musicians, the bands became popular, but it was also necessary for them to make some concessions to satisfy their new customers, which meant that the style changed accordingly. Read DeVeaux, Scott, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition,” Black American Literature Forum, 25/3 (1991): 525-60 and Sherrie Tucker, “Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies,” Current Musicology, 71-73 (spring 2001/ spring 2002), 375-408 (reports due next class).

Tom Brown’s Band from Dixieland was a sensation at Lamb’s Café in Chicago in 1915 but failed on the vaudeville stage in New York City.

The Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first jazz recording in New York City in February 1917 after achieving success at Schiller’s Café in Chicago the previous year.

This chapter begins the section on jazz historiography, including defining the parameters of what has been called the “New Jazz Studies.” The class concentrates on issues and perspectives relating to gender and critiques of canon formation, stylistic boundaries, authenticity validation, presentism, and essentialism. Read Thomas Fiehrer, “From Quadrille to Stomp: The Creole Origins of Jazz,” Popular Music, 10 (January 1991), 21-38 and Lawrence Gushee, “The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Jazz,” Black Music Research Journal, 14/1 (Spring 1994), 1-24 (reports due next class).

This chapter concentrates on historiography related to New Orleans as the site of origin and includes discussion of representations of race and ethnicity in the historiographical discourse, the problem of chronology, and current work toward developing new research strategies. How did New Orleans’ Creole and African American communities differ in terms of musical practices, and what were the forces that brought them together? Should jazz be seen as an aspect of African American vernacular culture, or was it something the result of other forms of creolization? Read Bruce Boyd Raeburn, New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History (Michigan, 2009) for next class.

This chapter investigates the incipience, development, and influence of the “Hot” record collecting community in the United States and Europe during the 1920s through the 1940s. This class will consider how jazz historiography originated and its subsequent stages of development until the publication of Marshall Stearns, The Story of Jazz (1956), the first holistic jazz history textbook. This section will provide insight into the jazz schism of the 1940s (in which “traditionalists” and “modernists” battled over the rise of bebop and the New Orleans revival) and also provides a framework for evaluating the methodologies associated with the New Jazz Studies. Report on Raeburn due.

In consulting virtually any survey text on jazz history, one finds a chapter devoted to jazz origins in New Orleans, sometimes with a disclaimer stating that “jazz-like” music was also developing in other locales, although this point of view is becoming increasingly rare. Note this passage from Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux, Jazz (2009): “…in the beginning, jazz was local, even provincial—a performing tradition unique to the port city of New Orleans, which took its distinctive character from the ever-changing social conditions of that metropolis. The style known as New Orleans jazz (or Dixieland) proved irresistible enough to attract the attention of the whole country, but only in increments as it wandered north of its home base. New Orleans jazz ultimately became the foundation of jazz itself.” Alyn Shipton’s recent treatment of the subject in A New History of Jazz (2001) portrays New Orleans musicians as “Jazz Johnny Appleseeds” sowing seeds of musical revolution in Chicago and San Francisco. But the idea that jazz was “born in New Orleans” still remains a theory rather than a fact, and it is occasionally a good thing to test a theory, which is what this class is about. There are three alternate perspectives on jazz origins: first, other North American cities or regions that lay claim; second, transnational theories that eschew American “exceptionalism” and place New Orleans within a broader cultural context, such as the circum-Caribbean; and third, arguments positing early initial incubation in New Orleans but idiomatic “completion” elsewhere, notably Chicago.

This final chapter considers New Orleans jazz history as a “Jazz Continuum” and looks at the dynamics through which tradition and innovation interact in perpetuating New Orleans image as a “music city.” What are the boundaries between ragtime, jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, and rock in New Orleans? What purpose (and constituencies) do these genre boundaries serve? How does music replenish its connection to community life in New Orleans and what are the imperatives that shape successive generations of musicians who seek to build upon tradition? Term paper due.