The unique ethnic, legal and cultural mix that was New Orleans around the turn of the last century was the melting pot that created what came to be known as jazz.

A huge African population of second generation free slaves and the existence of a strange mix of both racial segregation and cultural tolerance fueled the hybridisation of African rhythms and harmonic counterpoints with European instrumentation and melody that created New Orleans jazz.

Congo Square, an area of land now forming part of Armstrong Park close to the French Quarter, was the only place in the entire United States where African Americans could openly practice native drumming. This tolerance and the huge demand for musicians in New Orleans thanks both to the desire from wealthy ‘Americans’ in the Garden District for European classical music and the preponderance of Italian, Spanish and French-influenced marching bands, provided the elements that led first to the ‘ragging’ (syncopation) of European and newer popular tunes and later to the application of new musical ideas to a whole range of material.

Add in complex African multi-rhythmic techniques—applied to melodic instruments—and the call and response influence of African American spirituals and work songs and the seeds of jazz music were sown.

But if jazz was conceived in Congo Square, then it was nurtured and matured a few blocks away in the brothels of Storyville. Many of the jazz greats mentioned above served an apprenticeship playing for prostitutes and their clients in the parlors of Storyville Mansions and the nearby saloons. The twenty block area of legalised brothels behind the French Quarter was named after social reformer John Story. The district operated from 1897 to 1917 when its increasing notoriety led to officials bowing to demands of the US Navy to close down the entire area.

All of the Storyville mansions were demolished. The only remaining Storyville structure is Lulu White's Saloon, which stood next to the infamous Mahogany Hall. Only the ground floor of the building remains, the top floors having been torn off by a hurricane. The building is now a faceless corner shop.

Because New Orleans jazz emerged at a time when recording technology was still in its very infancy, the early days of the music are, unfortunately, not documented aurally. No recordings exist of Buddy Bolden, for example, who is credited as one of the first creators of the music and was a huge influence on the young Louis Armstrong.

The first recordings on New Orleans jazz were made in the 1920’s, but even then, recording activity was centered primarily on all-white groups like The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the group which recorded the first record to use the word ‘jazz’ in its title. Although one should not denigrate the contribution of white musicians to the development of the music, it is clear that black musicians were hugely under-represented in the early recordings made in the South. During the entire decade, only 23 sides of jazz performed by black musicians were captured in New Orleans.

Our best record of early jazz comes in fact not from New Orleans, but from Chicago, where a more developed racial attitude and demand from a local black record-buying public fueled development of a strong music business in the city.

The musicians, though, were immigrants from New Orleans, attracted by the work prospects and better pay. King Oliver, Johnny Dodds, Louis Armstrong and many others had all left New Orleans by the early 20s for the wealthy shores of Chicago. But the music was already starting to diverge from its roots.

New Orleans jazz had been characterised by an ensemble style of playing. New Orleans musicians in Chicago, however, began developing a related style in which solos by the front-line musicians formed a key part of the performance. The few recordings made in New Orleans in the 1920s, suggest that the ensemble style still persisted there. By the late 1920s New Orleans was almost forgotten. The lack of local recording activity and the huge growth of the music business in Chicago and New York led to a shift of focus to the East coast. Other centres of jazz development like Kansas City (one of the last outposts of Ragtime) were also starting to assert their position.

Fortunately for jazz fans, New Orleans jazz was rediscovered in the late 1930s and 1940s and a resurgence of interest in the music led East Coast music companies to fund ‘field trips’ to the south to record the roots of the music that had become so huge across America.

Authenticity was what the music companies sought and the original giants of New Orleans jazz were hunted down and plucked from obscurity to be launched on new musical careers. One of the first of these field trips plucked trumpet player Bunk Johnson from the Louisiana chicken farm on which he worked. Bunk was sent back to New Orleans for the recording, given a new Trumpet and a set of false teeth and charged with assembling a band for the recording session. Bunk surrounded himself with jobbing local musicians George Lewis (clarinet), Jim Robinson (trombone), and a rhythm section featuring Walter Decou, Lawrence Marrero, Austin Young and Ernest Rogers.

The session launched Bunk, Lewis and Robinson on the path to international stardom and the catalogue of recorded New Orleans jazz finally began to fill with a plethora of new material from the men who first played the music.

Traditional New Orleans jazz bands consist of a three-man front line and a rhythm section. The front-line instruments are the trumpet, clarinet and trombone, with the trombone providing the bass harmonic line and the trumpet and clarinet trading melodic and harmonic lines in the treble clef.

The Rhythm section at its minimum consists of a percussive instrument (generally drums but sometimes washboards or similar) a string (double) bass and a banjo. The origins of this combination of instruments almost certainly lie in the marching bands of New Orleans and give the music its characteristic sound. As jazz developed, the clarinet was usurped by the saxophone. Amplification led to the substitution of the banjo with the guitar and the trombone was moved from the front to the back-line, a situation which persists to this day.