New Orleans Unique

Known to rival New York, New Orleans was the “cosmopolitan center of the South” (Stewart) with great cultural diversity as well as influence.  With the mixture of French, Spanish, English and African cultures, a myriad of musical styles that had never been brought together, were kneaded into a style of its own.  This new style would eventually be molded and shaped into jazz, but only after going through many transitions. Gioia states that it is this “dynamic interaction, the clash and fusion” (27) that brings together jazz.

Through the Atlantic Slave Trade, African culture coalesced with the already mixed European society of New Orleans to produce a hybrid of the African pentatonic scale with the European diatonic scale.  This mixture, along with components such as call and response and beat focus, arose from slave work songs and spirituals to create one of the predecessors of jazz, the blues.  Many artists like Bessie Smith took this musical style and excelled with it, taking it to places such as St. Louis and Chicago.  Shortly following the blues, the musical style of ragtime came on the scene.  According to Gioia, there are scholars that will argue that the jazz is merely ragtime that is swung.  Although both styles share musical qualities such as syncopation, jazz is more than just swung ragtime.  Jazz also includes improvisation and blues tonality.  One artist who popularized ragtime is Scott Joplin.  He did so to such an extent, that piano sales in America rose a great deal as well as the number of ragtime pieces published (Gioia 22).  Like the blues, ragtime spread to major cities all over.  This raises the question then, if blues and ragtime where the predecessors of jazz, and they had both spread over the country why didn’t jazz emerge in another major city?  I pose that there was something within the city of New Orleans that promoted the emergence of jazz and not the musical roots of the genre.

There were many unique aspects of New Orleans that could have promoted the emergence of jazz, such as the city’s bordellos within the red light district, its passion for brass bands or even its churches.  It is important to note that ragtime and jazz flourished in metropolitan areas such as the bordellos of New Orleans, but “most early jazz musicians did not play in the District” (Gioia 31).  Also, there were many places in other metropolitan cities that had areas similar to the bordellos of New Orleans.  It then comes to reason that the District was most likely not the main reason why jazz started in New Orleans.  It is well noted that Buddy Bolden, the “elusive father of jazz”, often went to church “not for religion, [but] he went there to get music ideas” (Gioia 31), so it seems that New Orleans churches may have been a major contribution to the emergence of jazz.  This again though can be refuted by the fact that the music performed there was just a small bit of the music of New Orleans.  I would argue that the main reason jazz emerged from New Orleans is based in the city’s intimate relation with brass instruments.  As Gioia puts it “but the birth of jazz would have been unthinkable without the extraordinary local passion for brass bands, an enthusiasm that lay at the core of that city’s relation to the musical arts” (32).  No other city had this, although many others had all the other ingredients.  This is what set New Orleans apart, and this is why jazz emerged there.