The Beginning Of Jazz In New Orleans Essay Samples

During the nineteenth century, a lot of racial and ethnic groups such as Spanish, French, African and American found a common interest in their love for good music. Influences of European folk were combined with African and Caribbean elements, which merged into a new form of music. Jazz began to develop after the beginning of the twenty century, being part of a broad new musical revolution which brought together blues, ragtime and marches. The music emerged due to the distinctive cultural climate provided by the social forces. It was represented by the tensions created between lower class black population and "creoles of color," the interaction between "white" musicians that came with different ethnic background and local musicians.
Jazz came from a mix of European, Caribbean and African experiences which started as a regional musical practice until 1917, in the city New Orleans. The performers of New Orleans transformed dance music and marching bands into a cyclic, playful vocal improvised polyphonic music. Another factor which contributed to emerge of jazz in New Orleans was the demographic position, due to the mixture of recently Europeanized creoles with urbanized. This blended of nation’s lead jazz music to be available in sociocultural and diverse geographical contexts. The city where jazz was born was a port city and in the nineteenth century had been a commercial center focused on slave trade. Due to his powerful history and the fact that was in order the propriety of France, Spain and United States, during the years, New Orleans gained population from every nation above, becoming in a short time the most exquisite city in the South. In the eighteen century, this city had an energetic cultural life including parades, dances and attractive balls. Of course, everything was organized only for people of white color because the racial slaves were permitted to retain their culture.
Black people started to express their musicality by playing improvised, bluesy music based on folk music, rags and marches, most of the time being a music which was orally learned, played raucous with beat-based. At the beginning, Creoles population rejected this music but after a while they integrated in their music. Sheet music continued to be an important for distributing music but it was been capture by the phonograph records which were capturing every little detail or nuance of the performance and recording aspect of paying style which were very difficult to write down by essential in jazz performance.
The early development of Jazz in New Orleans has been associated with the popular band leader Charles “Buddy” Bolden which was an uptown cornetist that was helped by this charisma and his musical skills and talent to become a legend. Bolden had an individual astonishing style, being at the beginning a great blues player. Combining this style with elements of his personality like competitive spirit and excessive life style, Bolden invented a new manner of playing. Bolden leaded many bands but the best popular was formed from a trombone, a cornet, two clarinets, a drummer, a guitarist and a bassist. Another cornet was attached sometimes foreshadowing the band of King Oliver with the star Louis Armstrong.
New dance bands, like the Superior, Olympia and Peerless started to learn and play the moving sounds of jazz. A lot of bands emerged in that time, but the most prominent, which remained in the history and made the transition between Bolden’s firsts experiments going to 1920’s classical bands was the Creole Band having as a leading musician Ory The Kid.
Edward Ory called “Kid” was the child of a Creole female with Native American and Afro-Spanish heritage and with French man and has classified to be a creole. He was a prodigy child and until he turned 14 years, he already was leading his own band and organizing dance parties for the neighbors and organized castings to get around the most ambitious new musicians from New Orleans. During the next ten years, he realized to update his personal with future jazz talented stars such as Louis Armstrong, Joe Oliver, Jimmie None and Warren and Johnny Dodds. Besides being extremely talented musician, Ory was a good promoter of himself and of other new artist that come along. Due to his outspoken personality he managed to play seven years with his band in Storyville at Pete Lala Salon.
Dixieland Jazz Band was a well know and fresh band that even emerged to Chicago and then to New York still had remained a powerful influential in spreading jazz throughout the whole world but especially the recordings left had a great impact in the musicians from back home in New Orleans. The band popularity was achieved by the cabaret Reisenweber had combined the dancers lining up with experience of a “jazz night.” The Original Dixieland Jazz Band achieved their greatest success with the piece “Livery Stable Blues” which transformed jazz into a commercial product that was widely distribuited.
"Here is positively the greatest dance record ever issued. Made by New Orleans musicians for New Orleans people, it has all the ‘swing’ and ‘pep’ and ‘spirit’ that is so characteristic of the bands whose names are a by-word at New Orleans dances." (Birthplace of Jazz)
The history of jazz can be regarded as an influential relationship between improvisers and composers, like a relationship between blacks and Creoles in jazz. Jelly Roll Morton, one of the most influential personalities in jazz can be seen “as a creole composer who leaned and worked with black musicians from New Orleans” (Birthplace of Jazz). Being identified as the first great composer of jazz, Morton started his role with the publication of his “Jelly Roll Blues” in 1915. Another important piece called “Red Hot Peppers” was recorded between 1926 and1930. In composing this piece, Morton combined elements of blues, marches, ragtime into a jazz gombo, polishing New Orleans style on his own vision. Being a soloist, composer and ensemble player, Morton had influenced the move of rhythms beyond the stiffness of ragtime into a more exciting feel of swing.
Many gifted players, black or creole offered jazz music a remarkable diversity due to the musical background which anyone brought to this new style emerged in New Orleans. Many names played and composed in that period but none of them become that famous as Jelly Roll Morton or Louis Armstrong but this only recall an essential truth that the New Orleans music scene has remained a fertile ground for the talented musicians with diverse backgrounds.

Works Cited

"Birthplace of Jazz." New Orleans Official Tourism Web Site - New Orleans Online. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2015.
"Chapter 4: New Orleans | Jazz: W. W. Norton StudySpace." Home | W. W. Norton & Company. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2015.
"A New Orleans Jazz History, 1895-1927 - New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)." U.S. National Park Service - Experience Your America. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2015.