New
Orleans in the late 1800’s provided the perfect conditions for different
cultures to collide, intermingle, and ultimately create something completely
new. New Orleans is located at the mouth
of the Mississippi River, and trade (including cotton) that flowed from the
Caribbean, up the river, and vice versa had to travel through New Orleans,
making it an important center of commercial activity in America. As a consequence, a myriad of peoples from
the Caribbean, South America, and beyond arrived along with the trade, and they
mixed with the already diverse New Orleans population (including the
descendants of slaves brought over from West Africa and French and Spanish influences
left over from the time during which New Orleans was owned by France and Spain). This amalgamation of peoples is crucial to
the advent of jazz, because jazz would not exist if not for the influence of an
overwhelmingly cosmopolitan environment.
Gioia
mentions several musical developments as contributors to New Orleans Jazz. When Africans were taken to America, they
brought their musical traditions with them, which included a focus on rhythmic
complexity, call-and-response forms, and improvisation. These musical traditions not only reappear
later in jazz, but occur in some of jazz’s musical predecessors. The work song, for example, a musical form
employed by slaves in the fields, relies heavily on the call and response model. Spirituals involved the blending together of
voices in a harmonious way that figured later in jazz’s focus on the balanced
interaction of an ensemble. Blues was
also an important precursor to jazz. The
female leads that performed classic blues mirror somewhat the colorful stage
personas that many jazz musicians, including Jelly Roll Morton, later took on,
and the blues scale, which differs from the typical scale played by classical
musicians, also resurfaces in jazz. Finally,
ragtime had some influence on jazz, especially in the syncopated melodies that
is was famous for.
Mexican
immigrants, although probably not the principle players in the creation of
jazz, were still quite important. Classically
trained musicians came to New Orleans in 1884 to play at the Cotton Exposition,
and several of them stayed, offering black musicians a chance at a formal
musical education (this had been denied them by American musical institutions
on the basis of race). This probably
helped along the development of the complex melodies that jazz is known for. Besides teaching others, Mexican musicians
also introduced new instruments to the New Orleans music scene, including the
saxophone and twelve-string guitar, which have become crucial to jazz.
Although
different cultural influences were very significant, I think that the single
most important factor in the creation of jazz was the people’s attitude towards
music in New Orleans. Gioia states that because
of its extremely low elevation, New Orleans was somewhat of a terrible place to
live, ravaged by disease, mosquitoes, and short life expectancy. Thus, inhabitants of New Orleans used revelry
and celebration to escape from all of their suffering. One example of this is the tradition of
having a parade for the dead instead of the typical solemn funeral. Music was intimately intertwined with this
celebratory atmosphere. Brass bands
especially were quite popular and played at a huge variety of social
events. As Gioia states, “the birth of
this music would have been unthinkable without the extraordinary local passion
for brass bands” (page 31). Thus, it was
probably the unique combination of cultural influences along with the importance
of music in a culture arguably centered on revelry that led to the birth of
jazz in New Orleans.
Commented on Markell Stine's blog
