New Orleans Jazz

In early twentieth-century New Orleans, horns improvised together over a two-beat pulse from parades and dance halls.

Related

ModernTrumpetClarinetSyncopation

New Orleans jazz took shape in the Louisiana port city around 1900. Parade, funeral, dance hall and saloon bands shared the same players, who placed cornet, clarinet and trombone at the front and let three horns speak at once.

Origins and era

Congo Square drums, military marches, ragtime and blues met here. In the 1890s and 1900s cornetists such as Buddy Bolden carried blues phrases into the dance halls. In 1917 the Original Dixieland Jass Band made one of the first jazz records in New York; Storyville closed the same year and musicians moved up the Mississippi to Chicago.

What you hear

The front line divides into layers. Cornet or trumpet states the tune and decorates it, clarinet circles above, trombone answers with slides and low notes. The rhythm section of banjo, piano, bass or tuba and drums stresses two beats, with the second and fourth pushed. Tunes are usually twelve-bar blues or thirty-two-bar popular songs, with breaks and a closing ensemble.

Key figures

Buddy Bolden left no recordings but is often named as the first great cornet lead. Joe King Oliver took his band to Chicago, and Louis Armstrong made the solo the centre of the Hot Five records. Sidney Bechet's clarinet and Jelly Roll Morton's piano and compositions matter just as much.

Lineage

Brass bands, ragtime and blues feed in; Chicago jazz, Dixieland and the swing big bands come out. Its collective improvisation was later written into tighter arrangements.

Common misunderstandings

Jazz did not begin in 1917; black bands had played for years without entering a studio. New Orleans jazz is not always collective, since solos and ensembles alternate. Equating it with Dixieland misses earlier neighbourhood roots.

Sources

• Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz（Oxford University Press, 3rd ed., 2021），用于核对新奥尔良年代与人物
• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry New Orleans，用于交叉核对乐队与录音

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.