How New Orleans Became the Cradle
From its origins in Congo Square, jazz carries forth as the spirit of the Crescent City
You can find Spotify Playlists to accompany your reading, featuring the artists and songs included in this article, here:
When it comes to the origins of jazz, today often called BAM (Black American Music), there is one point that historians and scholars across the spectrum generally agree on: jazz would not exist were it not for Congo Square.
Like its indigenous Creole Cuisine, New Orleans’s musical genre was born a product of the different international cultures that came together in the port city at the Mississippi’s mouth. Enslaved Africans and free people of color contributed high-energy syncopation and polyrhythms; Europeans brought advanced harmony and four-note chords; blues music’s simultaneous birth nearby added “blue notes” and a new interpretation of quarter notes known as “swing”. Jazz’s older cousin, ragtime, set the stage for all of these elements to come together in New Orleans venues and morph into the high-energy, intricate, inherently improvisational musical genre beloved across the world for over a century, and according to some, set to experience a revival in 2024.
Jazz’s older cousin, ragtime, set the stage for all of these elements to come together in New Orleans venues and morph into the high-energy, intricate, inherently improvisational musical genre beloved across the world for over a century, and according to some, set to experience a revival in 2024.
Up From Congo Square
While jazz does not exist without Congo Square, Congo Square existed long before the advent of jazz. In today’s Armstrong Park, Congo Square was designated by a city ordinance in 1817 as the only area in New Orleans (and far beyond) where enslaved Africans were allowed to gather in large groups. Throughout the early 19th century, every Sunday, hundreds of enslaved individuals would convene there to buy and exchange goods, play music, and dance. Instruments included drums and marimbas, stringed instruments akin to early banjos, gourds, reed instruments similar to pan flutes, and sometimes other instruments from around the world like violins and tambourines. It is said that Louis Armstrong mused, “....if New Orleans is the cradle of jazz,” then the “Gold Coast” of West Africa “...must be the mother.”
“....if New Orleans is the cradle of jazz,” then the “Gold Coast” of West Africa “...must be the mother.” —Louis Armstrong
One of the very first to bridge the divide between the African sounds of Congo Square and the world of European classical music—before jazz or even ragtime—was New Orleans-born Creole composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk. Considered a prodigy, at age eleven he made his debut playing at the St. Charles Hotel; in 1842 at age thirteen he traveled to Europe to receive training in classical music at The Paris Conservatoire. Gottschalk was deeply inspired by the music he had heard and witnessed in Congo Square, and he incorporated those rhythmic components in his early piece, “Bamboula (Danse Des Nègres)”. His 1857 composition “Souvenir de Porto Rico” likewise incorporates African American as well as Latin American musical components, nearly half a century before ragtime and jazz would bring them into fashion.
Where Uptown and Downtown Met
It is said that in the years leading up to the turn of the twentieth century, a “symbolic line” divided musicians on opposite sides of Canal Street. Often descended from those who were enslaved, the Black musicians upriver from the French Quarter were generally perceived as poorer and less educated than their downtown counterparts. They played by ear, usually without training, and their instruments were often those that resonated in the streets—drums, trumpets, trombones, and tubas; which later became fixtures in jazz as well as brass bands. Their “venues” were usually community events, including the antecedents of second lines and jazz funerals.
The Downtown-residing Creole “gens de couleur” were generally regarded as being in better financial standing, and better educated—musically and otherwise. They could usually read sheet music, and their instruments were more likely to be fixed in place and designed for interior performances: upright bass, clarinet, piano, violin, etc. Approaching the end of the 1800s, these classically-trained Creole musicians performed in the city’s well-established venues and concert halls, frequently alongside white musicians.
In the decades following the end of the Civil War, New Orleans society was increasingly characterized by its unique racial complexities. Though Black people living Uptown and in the rural outskirts of New Orleans and Downtown Creoles both possessed African heritage, they experienced vastly different treatment and levels of privilege, depending on their situations.
This unofficial class system sustained itself, until state and federal governments started passing Jim Crow laws like The Separate Car Act of 1890 and the Plessy vs. Ferguson “separate but equal” ruling of 1896, which mandated that Creoles were categorized and thus segregated along with anyone with any degree of African, or sometimes even simply non-white, heritage (it has been documented that some early jazz musicians of Mexican or Spanish descent were flippantly labeled as “Creole” at the time).
Though most historians attribute Jim Crow laws with pushing these two cultural groups closer together ahead of 1900, some assert that the two communities were already more intertwined than is usually acknowledged, and that they organically became closer and experienced more cultural overlap during and after Reconstruction. Regardless of how the fusion occurred, historians mostly agree that it was from the space where the “Downtown” Creole musicians and “Uptown” Black musicians met that jazz emerged.
Paul Dominguez, a Creole violinist-turned-fiddler working in New Orleans during this period, explained the merging and its impact to Alan Lomax in an interview conducted in 1950:
“Us Downtown people, we didn’t think much of this rough Uptown jazz until we couldn’t make a living otherwise . . . They made a fiddler out of a violinist—me, I’m talking about. A fiddler is not a violinist, but a violinist can be a fiddler. If I wanted to make a living, I had to be rowdy like the other group. I had to jazz it or rag it or any other damn thing. . . I don’t know how [the Uptown musicians] do it. But goddamn, they’ll do it. Can’t tell you what’s there on paper, but just play the hell out of it.”
An African American music teacher named James Brown Humphrey, born just before the Civil War on Cornland Plantation in Sellers, Louisiana (which is today Norco), is credited with advancing the musical assimilation of the two groups and their distinctive methods and styles. Humphrey was known to travel with his cornet and sheet music, teaching music to students across racial lines in the city, as well as to the young descendants of the formerly-enslaved living in sharecropping cabins on the edges of nearby cotton and sugar fields.
"I don’t know how [the Uptown musicians] do it. But goddamn, they’ll do it. Can’t tell you what’s there on paper, but just play the hell out of it.” —violinist Paul Dominguez
Humphrey’s most notable project was the Eclipse brass band, made up of musicians mostly from Magnolia Plantation. This group, according to some, marked one of the earliest instances of musicians simultaneously possessing the ability to read sheet music and to improvise and play by ear; the combination of which would be seminal to jazz’s identity.
“The legit New Orleans musicians could not ‘fake,’” asserted historian Karl Koenig. “The untrained ‘faking’ musicians could not read [sheet music]. The Magnolia and other musicians taught by Professor Humphrey could do both, read and fake. Thus they made excellent band members and could, when called upon, play either type of music . . . It was from these musicians and the young city musicians that credit should be given for crystalizing the early jazz style.”
Storyville and the Fathers of Jazz
Under Jim Crow, Creole and Black musicians alike were being pushed out of white venues, so they came together in a place where most laws became irrelevant: Storyville. The Tremé’s legal red-light district was founded in 1897 by a city ordinance proposed by Alderman Sidney Story, and was intended to regulate prostitution, an increasing problem at the time for the rowdy port town. Once brothels were established, dance halls, restaurants, and saloons began to appear. Besides the gambling, drinking, and prostitution, early jazz music became a fixture of such clubs. Musicians were free to play in a more rowdy and improvisational style, and the Creole musicians who were no longer allowed in more “respectable” venues joined and assimilated.
At the same time jazz was rising in Storyville’s raucous ranks, cornetist Buddy Bolden’s band, established in 1895, was gaining significant musical influence in the city, frequently playing the saloons of the concurrent red-light district that existed Uptown at the time, called Uptown Storyville or Black Storyville. Bolden had experience as a sideman playing in parades and second lines, perhaps influencing his “wide open” approach to cornet playing. His loud, powerful style of playing and looser, more improvised interpretation of ragtime, which also incorporated elements of blues and gospel music, is thought to have been one of the earliest iterations of jazz, inspiring other musicians throughout the city (notably Freddie Keppard and “King” Oliver). There are unfortunately no records of Bolden’s sound, despite his documented influence on jazz. He was committed to a mental facility in 1907 at the age of thirty for what today might be diagnosed as schizophrenia.
Another of the earliest musicians to influence the genre was Kid Ory from LaPlace, Louisiana—who some scholars cite as the conduit between the early jazz generation led by Buddy Bolden and the younger, more famous, generation of musicians the likes of Louis Armstrong. Ory, a trombonist and bandleader, was one of the early players to implement the “glissando,” or technique of sliding from one pitch to another, which would become another regular component of jazz.
[Read Arts & Entertainment Editor Alexandra Kennon's story about the Kid Ory House Museum in LaPlace here, as well as Ruth Laney's story on John McCusker's research on the life of Kid Ory, here. ]
Still a small child when Bolden formed his band, Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, better known by his stage name “Jelly Roll Morton” (drawn from the contemporary slang for female genitalia and a desire to not “be called Frenchy” when he traveled outside of Louisiana), began playing piano in brothels when he was around fourteen, according to some records. Despite the contributions of Bolden and other musicians, Morton famously claimed in 1902 to have “invented” jazz. Though the assertion is arguably exaggerated, Morton did contribute substantially to the solidification of the genre’s place in music and on the national stage. He was the first to formally arrange jazz, demonstrating that the music’s improvisational nature could also be notated on sheet music.
“ . . . had it not been for Joe Oliver, jazz would not be what it is today. He was a creator in his own right.” —Louis Armstrong
And of course, no discussion of early jazz in and around Storyville is complete without Louis Armstrong. Born on a much-disputed date around the turn of the century in New Orleans, Armstrong (known famously as “Satchmo” or “Pops”) was raised within the rough society of Storyville, surrounded by the early sounds of ragtime and jazz. After being arrested on New Year’s Eve of 1912 for firing his stepfather’s gun into the air, Armstrong was sent to the Colored Waif's Home. There, he took up the cornet and played in the school band, sparking his initial love of music.
[Read more about the discrepancies surrounding Armstrong's birthday in Sam Irwin's story, here.]
Armstrong’s innate talent eventually attracted notice from bandleader and trombonist Kid Ory, as well as cornetist, trumpeter, and bandleader Joe “King” Oliver. Oliver served as a mentor to Armstrong in his youth, offering the young trumpeter his role in Ory’s band when he left for Chicago. Armstrong and Oliver were also regular members of the Tuxedo Brass Band, led by bandleader Oscar Philip Celestin, or “Papa” Celestin. Oliver would also become a mentor to clarinetist and saxophonist Sidney Bechet, who has come to be regarded as one of the first great soloists in jazz. Armstrong would later write of Oliver, “ . . . had it not been for Joe Oliver, jazz would not be what it is today. He was a creator in his own right.”
Instrumental Developments
Such a pioneering genre called for new developments to the design and use of several instruments, as well. Prior to the twentieth century, the drum set was an unknown concept—musicians would play a single drum; and later, as ragtime developed into jazz, New Orleans drummers would implement a “double drumming” technique of playing a bass drum with one hand, and a snare with the other. With syncopation and polyrhythms being such integral elements of jazz, a new method of playing multiple drums at once was born with the genre. Early jazz drummer Dee Dee Chandler is credited with making the earliest bass drum pedals from household materials like wood and a milk carton, while Paul Barbarin (who played drums alongside Armstrong), and Warren “Baby” Dodds utilized and improved the design. Around the same time, Dodds helped invent the “sock cymbal,” an ancestor of the hi-hat that allowed drummers to clash two cymbals together with a foot pedal.
The use of the upright or double bass was revolutionized within jazz, too. In ragtime and the earliest days of jazz, a clarinet or horn of some kind would provide the bass line. The bass was usually designated to classical performances, with musicians using a bow to play the strings. Approaching the 20th century, early ragtime and jazz bassists set aside the bow, instead plucking the strings with their fingers (pizzicato style) and eventually popularizing the “slap style” of slapping or plucking the strings in a manner that caused them to hit the fingerboard, thus better resonating and allowing the low frequencies to be heard over the rest of the band.
Another major development in how instruments were played came when Oliver began using a “mute” when playing trumpet. Besides quieting the horn, the mute allowed Oliver and others to alter the tone and timbre of the instrument; an effect that remains associated with brass instruments in jazz.
The Export of Jazz & the Birth of the Big Band Era
While it is usually thought that jazz’s early musicians first traveled outside of New Orleans with the federal government’s shutting down of Storyville in 1917 (the debaucherous port neighborhood became a problem for the Navy during World War I), many believe that musicians began bringing jazz north of New Orleans even earlier. Whatever the catalyst, it was around the late 1910s that New Orleans’s early jazz musicians—and therewith the genre itself—began to travel via train and steamboat up the Mississippi and elsewhere.
Bandleader William Manuel Johnson, who is regarded as having fathered the “slap” style of playing double bass, is also credited with starting the first jazz band to tour outside of New Orleans, The Original Creole Orchestra—which became a popular vaudeville act across the country. He was also instrumental in forming King Oliver’s Creole Brass Band in Chicago in the 1920s. After years of touring with his own band, and spending some time performing and composing in Chicago, Morton followed Johnson to California in 1917.
As jazz (still called jass or other variations in those early days) gained popularity outside of Louisiana, white musicians took interest and capitalized on the burgeoning genre. In Chicago, The Original Dixieland Jass Band (who would later change the spelling to “jazz”), was formed in 1916, led by Sicilian-American cornetist Nick LaRocca. LaRocca and five white band members would adapt and copy the New Orleans style of jazz, and because of the racially-fraught context of the early twentieth century, were able to secure a recording contract before any African American musicians from New Orleans could (though legend has it Black New Orleans-born cornetist Freddie Keppard was offered a recording opportunity in late 1915, which he turned down either out of fear of his music being “stolen” or lack of adequate compensation).
Often compared to minstrel performances, this first jazz recording has become a controversial point in history. It marked the first use of the word “jass” or “jazz,” on the national stage and on a recording, but took an artform expressive of Black experience and culture and reduced it to a simplified reproduction; lacking the improvisation and swing so crucial to defining the genre. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s early recordings are regarded as even more problematic because of LaRocca’s later blatant racism and declaration that he “invented” jazz, refusing to credit African American musicians from New Orleans.
This fraught origin story around the use of the term “jazz,” is a large reason for the modern movement led by New Orleans musician Nicholas Payton to instead use the term “BAM,” or “Black American Music,” which many believe more accurately reflects the genre’s origins.
Ory’s band would be the first New Orleans African American jazz band to record their music, releasing the original composition “Ory’s Creole Trombone” with Sunshine Records in Los Angeles in 1922. In 1925, Ory would move to Chicago, where he played with other New Orleans jazz greats like Morton, Armstrong, drumset pioneer Warren “Baby” Dodds, and others.
Armstrong left New Orleans in 1922 to join Oliver’s band in Chicago. Shortly after the move, Armstrong wrote that, “I had already made up my mind that I will never leave New Orleans unless Joe (King) Oliver send [sic] for me . . . I would not take the risk of leaving for anyone else. I say too many of my little pals leave and come back in real bad shape.” Oliver went first in 1918, and regularly wrote to Armstrong imploring him to join him and his band there. After playing with Oliver in Chicago for close to a year, in April 1923, Armstrong and Oliver’s band recorded their first album in Richmond, Indiana, on the Gennett Label—it also featured Baby Dodds, Johnny Dodds, Lillian Hardin, Honore Dutrey, and Bill Johnson.
By this point in the 1920s. The Big Band Era had taken hold. Originally called “jazz orchestras,” these larger iterations of jazz bands with ten or more players—headed by musicians such as King Oliver, Count Basie, Mamie Smith, Duke Ellington, and Coleman Hawkins—were gaining popularity across the United States. By the height of the Swing Era in the 1940s, these groups dominated jazz, and would lead the way for contemporary big bands.
The Evolutions of Jazz
Throughout the 1950s and into the ‘70s, New Orleans joined the rest of the country in embracing the rise of new vocal-focused genres including R&B, rock ‘n’ roll, funk, and soul. Many local recording studios and venues turned their attention to this more modern music, as artists outside the realm of jazz (if influenced by it) like Fats Domino, Professor Longhair, Huey “Piano” Smith, Dr. John, Allan Toussaint, and the Meters rose to fame. Live “trad” jazz performances in New Orleans steeply declined, inspiring venues like Preservation Hall to open with the goal of maintaining the tradition of the genre in the city in which it was founded.
As early as 1950, the big bands of the Swing Era had become largely obsolete. The cost of hiring so many musicians, coupled with factors like a jazz musician recording strike from 1942–1944, World War II drafting musicians and making travel expensive, and a 1944 “cabaret tax” on New York nightclubs that allowed dancing all contributed to the subgenre’s decline.
From this vacuum emerged new variations of jazz in major cities outside of New Orleans, including in the smaller, sit-down jazz clubs of New York that rose to popularity as a result of the cabaret tax, where a new, less-danceable version of jazz emerged, with traits like asymmetrical phrasing and complex harmony: bebop. Other new variations of jazz took over major cities outside of New Orleans, including the hard bop and West-Coast cool jazz of the 1950s, and the fusion and free jazz of the 1960s.
One of the first artists to bring bebop back to New Orleans and also revolutionize jazz in his own right was Ellis Marsalis, Jr., patriarch of the famously-musical Marsalis family. In the 1950s and ‘60s, Marsalis worked with an ever-rotating group of musicians featuring himself on piano alongside other local artists interested in freer improvisation and a more avant-garde style. Among them at various times were clarinetist Alvin Batiste, drummers Ed Blackwell and James Black, bassist Richard Payne, and saxophonists Harold Battiste, Earl Tubinton, and Nat Perrilliat. While venues like the Dew Drop Inn provided a home for R&B music and late-night jazz, open-minded talent bookers at more obscure spots like the Playboy Club provided outlets for Marsalis and his band to experiment.
While Marsalis and others were forwarding jazz in the city, another young New Orleans pianist named James Booker was making his name playing R&B music, garnering a reputation as “the Black Liberace”. Booker incorporated the type of improvised piano riffing of earlier jazz and ragtime music, but updated it for modern, popular audiences. His captivating, high-energy playing brought him on tours of Europe and into recording studios with pop music giants of the time, including Ringo Starr and the Doobie Brothers. He returned to New Orleans, where he was the house pianist at the Maple Leaf Bar until his death in 1983 at the age of forty-three.
In the 1980s, New Orleans jazz made a return to the national stage by way of composer and pianist Ahmad Jamal, who helped solidify the genre’s importance in the modern era. Recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts and awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Recording Academy, Jamal was one of the most respected small bandleaders in the country—always insisting that his band consisted primarily of New Orleans musicians, including drummer Herlin Riley.
Around the same time as Jamal’s rise to fame, trumpeter Wynton Marsalis (Ellis’s son) was touring Europe and recording with legendary hard bop drummer Art Blakey, then touring with funk-jazz fusion star Herbie Hancock. By the end of the 1980s, Wynton founded the concert series in New York that would become Jazz at Lincoln Center; in the mid-’90s he became the Center’s artistic director as well as the musical director of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. New Orleans clarinetist and jazz historian Dr. Michael White, who is among the esteemed players in New Orleans preserving and educating on traditional jazz today, has on several occasions served as guest director of Jazz at Lincoln Center Concerts, too.
While Wynton was in New York maintaining and continuing the tradition of straight ahead jazz, the genre continued to evolve in its birthplace. Founded by saxophonist Toni Dagradi in 1978, a quartet called Astral Project started to gain prominence in the ‘90s—The Times-Picayune calling them, “The city's premier modern jazz ensemble.” Besides Dagradi, Astral Project today consists of drummer Johnny Vidacovich, bassist James Singleton, and 7-string guitarist Steve Masakowski. Pianist David Torkanowsky was originally part of the band before leaving in 2001, though he still regularly plays live jazz in New Orleans, sometimes with Astral Project or the Stanton Moore Trio. Today, Astral Project is a staple of the lineup of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, as well as a regular on the bill at venues like Snug Harbor and the Maple Leaf.
The Brass Band Revival
Around the middle of the 19th century, America experienced a surge of big brass bands, and New Orleans didn’t hesitate to participate. Benevolent societies in the city, called social aid and pleasure clubs, had been established to help fund community events like funerals and parades, helping to give this new brass band movement a boost. Depending on the occasion, these bands generally played religious and popular music. When jazz entered the scene at the turn of the century, brass bands like the Original Tuxedo would incorporate the new style, bringing it into the streets as well as into venues. In turn, jazz would be shaped by the bold, less-polished influence of the brass bands, as well.
Over the course of the twentieth century, as jazz underwent its shifts and undulations, so did the world of New Orleans brass band music and culture. Still drawing from the African beats and syncopation the Uptown street musicians used throughout history in events like Black Masking (Mardi Gras) Indian outings and second lines, groups like the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, formed in 1977, wove funk and bebop into their interpretations of jazz. When they rose to popularity in the ‘80s, Dirty Dozen inspired a revival of brass bands throughout the city and beyond—further proving that live music audiences in New Orleans were eager to hear fresh interpretations of jazz, rather than the traditional, museum-quality version of the genre. Maintaining their relevance, in 2023, Dirty Dozen took home the Grammy for Best American Roots Performance.
One of the most influential contemporary brass bands to emerge in New Orleans was Rebirth Brass Band, which trumpeter Kermit Ruffins co-founded in 1983 while still finishing high school. Rebirth started out busking in downtown New Orleans, and their high-energy, innovative blend of brass band music, jazz, second line music, funk, and hip-hop quickly vaulted them to popularity. Ruffins left the band amicably in 1993, and has since started another band, The Barbecue Swingers, which regularly plays his venue Kermit’s Tremé Mother in Law Lounge, the Blue Nile, and others.
Rebirth has since toured North America and Europe, and took home the 2012 Grammy for Best American Roots Performance in the award’s inaugural year.
Rebirth’s success is still firmly rooted in New Orleans, however, with their long-standing Tuesday night residency at The Maple Leaf Bar widely regarded as a favorite live music experience both for locals and visitors. When President Barack Obama made his speech commemorating the ten-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, he joked that when he left office he hoped to, "...finally hear Rebirth at Maple Leaf on Tuesday night".
The band Soul Rebels would later push Rebirth’s brass band revolution even further into the realm of contemporary popular music by collaborating with superstars like Nas, Katy Perry, Robert Glasper, and fellow New Orleans local Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews. Andrews is another musician representing jazz and brass band legacies who has landed in the national spotlight, elaborating upon the jazz his musical family played to incorporate funk, hip-hop, and rock.
Jazz Lives On
Traditional jazz still holds its place in New Orleans and up the river in Baton Rouge, too. In 2023, trumpeter and vocalist Wendell Brunious (who has played with legacy musicians ranging from Wynton Marsalis to the Dirty Dozen Brass Band), was named the musical director of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Brunious, with experience playing at Preservation Hall since his youth, along with more contemporary gigs, bridges the divide between the traditional jazz born at the turn of the century and the evolutions that have emerged since. Pianist and professor Larry Seiberth is another contemporary New Orleans artist rooted in a more traditional style of jazz, but also pushing the genre forward for new generations.
Preservation Hall’s lineups today range from trad jazz to more modern iterations. Other venues in the French Quarter promoting traditional jazz in the style of early greats like Armstrong and Morton include Fritzel’s European Jazz Pub and Mahogany Jazz Hall (where drummer Gerald French’s Original Tuxedo Jazz Band maintains a residency). The New Orleans Jazz Museum frequently hosts live music as well, ranging from hyper-traditional jazz nearly venturing back to ragtime up through progressive modern artists. In Baton Rouge, which has tangentially contributed to jazz history since bandleader Fate Marable began recruiting New Orleans musicians like Armstrong to head up the river on steamboats around 1907, The Florida Street Blowhards carry forth traditional New Orleans jazz.
One of the best indicators that jazz is very much living, breathing, and growing in New Orleans today is that multiple generations of musicians can be heard playing a wide breadth of interpretations of the genre. To experience jazz in New Orleans today even somewhat comprehensively, one should seek out performances by multiple generations of musicians, in a variety of styles. For example, though the Barbecue Swingers and Astral Project are from roughly the same generation, each group performs a completely different interpretation of jazz. Many still-active musicians of the older generation, like Vidocovich and pianist Lawrence Seiberth, spend part of their time teaching music at universities like Loyola and University of New Orleans, helping to usher in the new generations. Likewise, many of the younger generation of musicians carrying jazz ahead were the latter generation's students.
Besides Wynton’s bringing jazz to the Lincoln Center, other children of Ellis Marsalis continue to play and extrapolate upon jazz in New Orleans. Saxophonist Branford Marsalis studied under Alvin Batiste at Southern University in Baton Rouge and also played with Blakey early in his career, before later forming the Branford Marsalis Quartet, which won a Grammy in 1992 for Best Instrumental Jazz Album. Trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis founded the Uptown Jazz Orchestra in 2008, which is devoted both to celebrating the tradition of jazz and educating emerging artists. Ellis Marsalis’s youngest son, Jason, has also made a name for himself as a drummer and vibraphone player after apprenticing with James Black as a small child. Besides playing with popular jazz fusion groups like Snarky Puppy, Jason has an affinity for merging Latin American music with jazz—he joined Afro-Cuban percussionist Bill Summers and since-disgraced trumpeter Irvin Mayfeild to form Los Hombres Calientes, which melded aspects of Latin and contemporary jazz in the ‘80s.
Today, several New Orleans-based musicians weave jazz together with other international sounds—notably Moroccan-born guitar/oud player Mahmoud Chouki, who melds jazz with Arabic and Spanish soundscapes; and djembefola Weedie Braimah, who combines jazz with more traditionally West African sounds and instruments.
[New Orleans has a long history of drawing artists and musicians from around the world to her streets. Read this story about djembefola Weedie Braimah in our February 2022 issue, this one about Moroccan-born, New Orleans-based guitar and oud virtuoso Mahmoud Chouki in our February 2023 issue, and this one about Japanese jazz musicians Yoshitaka "Z2" Tsuji and Haruka Kikuchi in our February 2020 issue.]
Besides the New Orleans artists working in the city itself, there are also the performers who received their musical training there, and have since continued the tradition of exporting jazz to other cultural capitals like New York and San Francisco. Trumpeter Terance Blanchard was a student of Ellis Marsalis at The New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. From there, he joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in New York, going on to compose multiple film scores for director Spike Lee, serve as the artistic director for the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz in Los Angeles, and become the first African American composer to write an opera produced by the Metropolitan Opera. He has also recorded dozens of jazz albums for respected labels like Columbia and Blue Note.
New Orleans-born drummer Adonis Rose retains his birth city as his homebase, though he also has traveled to play venues like Carnegie Hall and the Lincoln Center with respected musicians, including Blanchard and Wynton Marsalis. A longtime member of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra (NOJO), Rose was a member of the group when it claimed a 2010 Grammy for Best Large Ensemble. In 2017, he became the artistic director of the eighteen-piece orchestra, and has since been instrumental in founding The Jazz Market, a venue in the Central City neighborhood where NOJO plays.
While another drummer originally from New Orleans, Stanton Moore, is known primarily for his funk/jam band Galactic, he also leads jazz-derived projects, including the Stanton Moore Trio and Garage a Trois. His trio often features older jazz legends, including David Torkanovsky and James Singleton; while Garage a Trois is considerably more progressive, featuring saxophonist Skerik, vibraphone and percussionist Mike Dillon, and keyboardist Marco Benevento playing music that fuses jazz with rock and funk.
Trumpeter Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, formerly Christian Scott, is another musician who takes inspiration from his musical heritage in New Orleans and Africa and carries it around the globe. His uncle Donald Harrison Jr. was a jazz saxophonist in the Crescent City; and Adjuah’s family possesses a long and storied history of leadership within the Black Masking Indian tradition, as well. In his original music, Adjuah draws from jazz, West African music, the Afro-Native inspired music of the Black Masking Indians, and hip-hop. With his 2010 album Yesterday You Said Tomorrow, Adjuah coined the term “Stretch Music,” because he said he "wanted to stretch the definition of jazz beyond the prescriptivist definitions of music."
In the same spirit of pushing the boundaries of the genre is the trio Extended—made up of pianist Oscar Rossignoli, drummer Brad Webb and sometimes Peter Varnado, and bassist Matt Booth—which embraces the spirit of jazz while, as their name suggests, extending and pushing the boundaries of the elements that define it. Saxophonist Brad Walker regularly plays with Extended and other progressive jazz groups, and also leads his own modern jazz trio that plays his original compositions. Saxophonist and clarinet player Byron Asher, who self-describes his work as existing, “at the intersection of broadly experimental composition and jazz and improvised music,” leads an experimental ensemble called Skronch Music, as well as a “free jazz party band” named Basher.
A pianist like Rossignoli might, for example, play a traditional jazz gig in the style of Morton one night, followed by a more progressive set containing odd time signatures and intentionally discordant notes the very next. This is true of many musicians currently playing in New Orleans, showcasing the breadth of talent present as well as the full evolutionary spectrum of the city’s indigenous genre.
Still active in New Orleans somewhere between the jazz orchestras, brass bands, and smaller trios and quartets is progressive six-piece jazz fusion band Naughty Professor. Saxophonist/clarinetist Nick Ellman, trumpeter John Culbreth, saxophonist Ian Bowman, drummer Sam Shahin, guitarist “Wild Bill” Daniel, and bassist Noah Young (who also leads the Noah Young Band) met while studying jazz at Loyola University, and have been performing across New Orleans and internationally for over a decade. Their high-energy, horn-and-rhythm driven music combines complex compositional arrangements with improvisation, elaborating upon their city’s lineage of jazz while melding it with elements of funk, rock, brass bands, and R&B.
A remarkable point worth noting about contemporary jazz is that most musicians on the New Orleans scene today can, and do, play multiple styles of jazz, often within the span of a single week. A pianist like Rossignoli might, for example, play a traditional jazz gig in the style of Morton one night, followed by a more progressive set containing odd time signatures and intentionally discordant notes the very next. This is true of many musicians currently playing in New Orleans, showcasing the breadth of talent present as well as the full evolutionary spectrum of the city’s indigenous genre.
Where to Find Jazz Today
To hear it all for yourself, New Orleans offers a wide range of venues and festivals at which one can experience jazz in all of its iterations. The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, while including musicians well outside the boundaries of jazz, still annually slates traditional jazz acts as well as progressive modern groups like Astral Project and Naughty Professor. French Quarter Festival, with its lineup of exclusively-New Orleans-based musicians, also regularly features a wide variety of jazz-influenced groups. WWOZ 90.7, New Orleans's community "Jazz and Heritage" radio station, often airs jazz and music descended from it.
Among the best places to hear traditional jazz as it was performed near the turn of the century are Preservation Hall, Fritzel’s, and Mahogany Hall. Venues offering fairly traditional as well as more progressive sets, depending on the day and players, are Snug Harbor, The Spotted Cat, Maison, Blue Nile, the Three Keys, and Bayou Bar. Historic venues like Professor Longhair’s Tipitina’s and The Maple Leaf offer a wide variety of New Orleans music as well as touring acts, and also regularly host modern jazz and jazz-adjacent artists.
[Read our article on Galactic's purchase of Tipitina's back in December 2018.]
The thing about jazz in New Orleans that remains true today is, you never know where you might find it. It often makes its way into neighborhood bars like Carrollton Station, Hi-Ho Lounge, and Chickie Wah-Wah. Or, as the cliché goes, it “bubbles up” from the streets themselves—you’ll hear the Young Fellaz Brass Band from multiple blocks away when they regularly play at the corner of Frenchmen and Chartres, and buskers inspired by jazz to varying degrees are still heard resonating throughout downtown.
When an artform like jazz emerges organically as it did in the crescent between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, as a true child of the city and the lifeblood of its culture, it cannot be contained. Through wars, hurricanes, depressions, and counter-movements, jazz has not only remained strong in New Orleans, but evolved, outgrowing its original home and becoming the Crescent City’s most beloved and prized export. Even so, nowhere in the world is jazz more concentrated, more vibrant, or heard more loudly than in its birthplace.
Recommended Reading/Resources:
“Jazz is African Diasporic Music: Reconfiguring the Uniquely American Definition of Jazz” by Joshua Vincent and Lydia Lindsey
“Louis Moreau Gottschalk”. 64 Parishes, by Peter Collins.
The Plantation Belt Brass Bands and Musicians, Part I: Professor James B. Humphrey by Karl Koenig
Magnolia Plantation: History and Music by Karl Koenig
Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and Inventor of Jazz by Alan Lomax
“Jazz in America Timeline” from The Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz.
Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans by Louis Armstrong
Creole Trombone: Kid Ory and the Early Years of Jazz by John McCusker
Hidden History of Louisiana’s Jazz Age by Sam Irwin
“A New Orleans Jazz History,” National Park Service—New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park
Louis Armstrong: Master of Modernism by Thomas Brothers
Jazz by W.W. Norton, Gary Giddins, and Scott DeVeaux.
“Black American Music and the Jazz Tradition” by Nicholas Payton
Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans by Charles Hersch
The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight by Peter C. Zimmerman
Up From the Cradle of Jazz: New Orleans Music Since World War II by Jason Berry, Jonathan Foose and Tad Jones