The Birth of Jazz Artistic Movement in New Orleans

The 1910s created another type of music from African American roots: jazz. Jazz evolved into a diverse tradition encompassing many styles, genres, and social roles but seems to have begun as a mixture of ragtime and dance music with elements of the blues. New Orleans has long been considered the 'cradle of jazz,' although recent research has uncovered early jazz in other regions as well. The cultural and social environment of New Orleans nurtured the development of early jazz. The French and Spanish background of the city gave it a flavor different from other cities in the United States. New Orleans was the only place in the South where slaves were allowed to gather in public.

The music in New Orleans retained some African traditions that were lost elsewhere. Moreover, the city had close connections to the Caribbean, and rhythms from Haitian, Cuban, and Creole music also influenced early jazz. The dance bands of New Orleans interwove these strands with European styles, gradually producing a new kind of music. Typically, these hands were small ensembles with two or three melody instruments, such as trumpet, clarinet, and trombone; a bass instrument such as a tuba; and snare and bass drums.

The new style had no name at first, or was simply known as the New Orleans style of ragtime. But when bands from New Orleans began playing in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere, they used the term 'jazz.' Bands who popularized the term included a black group that toured in 1913- 18 as the New Orleans Jazz Band, and in a white band that in 1917 performed in New York and made recordings as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.

Jazz differed from ragtime particularly in the way it was performed. Instead of playing the music 'straight,' observing the rhythms and textures of a fully notated piece, players extemporized arrangements that distinguished one performer or performance from another. Listening to early jazz pianist and composer and New Orleans native Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941) play Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag in a recording from 1938. We recognize that this is unmistakably jazz and not ragtime because of the anticipations of beats: the swinging, uneven rendering of successions of equal note values so that notes on the beat are longer than those on the offbeat; the many added grace notes; the enriched harmony; and the weaving of ragtime's brief motivic units into a more continuous line.

Despite the wide appeal of ragtime and jazz, they were regarded with suspicion and condescension by many practitioners of classical music. In the United States, the reception of ragtime and jazz was entangled with the racial politics of the period, when the freedoms African Americans had won after the Civil War, like the right to vote, were being taken away all across the South through new state constitutions and Jim Crow laws, and racial discrimination in all parts of the country restricted economic opportunity and forced African Americans into segregated neighborhoods and schools.

The long tradition of blackface minstrelsy, and of black musicians performing for white audiences, meant that ragtime and jazz could be welcomed as popular entertainment, but few whites would have agreed with Joplin that his rags were on a par with the waltzes and mazurkas of Chopin. Yet there were also classical composers who admired the new styles and incorporated elements of ragtime or jazz in their own music, including Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Stravinsky, Ives, and Milhaud. For many in Europe, ragtime and jazz represented the raw energy and newness of the United States.