Download - New Orleans and Early jazz
The Birthplace of Jass
New Orleans
A Unique Colonial history.
Coastal city in the
Southern state of
Louisiana.
Was controlled by
Spanish and French
before being sold to
Americans by French
in 1801.
Different Cultural Makeup
Congo square – an area where on Sundays African
and patois songs, French quadrilles and African
styled drumming were performed.
A brass and military band culture.
A large Creole or mulatto class who were granted
privileges of free men and had access to general
society and IMPORTANTLY musical training.
Fraternities, secret societies, and clubs. (White and
Black) - music groups that performed at all public
functions. Picnics, funerals, dances, boating trips.
Creole liberties are ended
1894 post-civil war legislation withdrew all or
most civil rights from the Creoles.
Creoles lost their property and were forced to
live alongside the darker Negroes.
In these ‘mixed’ areas the finely trained bands
of the Creoles and the untutored, raw bands
of the Uptown, darker New Orleans Negroes
played together.
Common instrumentation
Trumpet
Trombone
Clarinet
Tuba/Acoustic Bass
Banjo
Piano
Jass is Born - Musical coming
together The formal technical training of the Mulatto
was combined with the oral blues expression of the darker Negroes.
Mulattoes gave blacks training.
Mulattoes had to play the ‘rougher’ blusiertype of music to keep work.
By the time the first non-marching, instrumental, blues-oriented groups started to appear in numbers, i.e., the "jass" or "dirty" bands, the instrumentation was a pastiche of the brass bands and the lighter quadrille groups.
Jass Equation
Blues of Darker Skin Negroes + Ragtime by
Brass Bands + Technical Instrumental Expertise
of Mulattoes = Jass
Largely Instrumental
Unique musical characteristic of New
Orleans
Collective Improvisation
‘Tail-gating’ sound of the trombone.
Artists
Artists: Buddy Bolden, King Oliver, Louis
Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton.
Works
Baraka, Amiri. Blues People: Negro Music in
White America. New York: W. Morrow, 1963.
Print.
Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans:
A History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1971. Print.
Social Change
These groups will eventually move to the Urban
North initiating the Jazz age.