While it is generally understood that New Orleans is the birthplace of jazz, not much is known about the early origins of the music in the place. But the particular economic and political situation of post-Reconstruction Black New Orleans was indeed a major contributing factor to the development of early jazz.

Reconstructing Blackness:

With the end of Reconstruction, the Creoles of color of Faubourg Tremé realized that there would be no remedying the political and economic losses they had come to experience during and after the War years. With the removal of the last federal troops from the city in 1877, those federal edicts purporting to ensure Black citizenship rights were invalidated by creative interpretations of existing law. The subsequent creation of a new state constitution patently deprived Blacks of their few and hard-won rights, safeguards, and any means of redress. Nor would it be long before Jim Crow laws were instituted and a 90-year reign of terror against the Black citizenry firmly established across the Southland.

In 1890, Legislative Code No. 111 would be adopted, making it plain that all persons of African ancestry would henceforth be considered "Negro" under law. This stripped Creoles of color of whatever political and economic protections they might have enjoyed prior to the War. In that same year, the Republican Party, whose Reconstruction tag had been "the friend of the Negro," purged Black members from its rolls. Two years later, the Democrats likewise instituted a "black-out," excluding Blacks from the Democratic gubernatorial primaries. In 1896, the infamous Plessy vs. Ferguson separate-but-equal ruling was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. And, in 1898, the already restrictive Louisiana constitution would be further modified to adopt a "Grandfather Clause," making it impossible for 90% of the state's African American citizens to vote. It would remain in effect into the summer of 1915.

The 19th century was indeed ending on a bitter note. With major political loss following major political loss, Black New Orleans turned its back on a system that had served only to hustle and defraud those in its ranks who dared to enter the game. Downtown, in the Faubourg Tremé, those who had enjoyed pre-war prosperity or financial stability now found themselves impoverished. People who had been financially independent, those who were business proprietors as well as those who had inherited wealth, found themselves penniless. Many recreational musicians, as well as students, and "professors" of music turned to performing as a second vocation.

The downtown musicians were primarily formally trained, "reading" musicians. Many had studied with members of the New Orleans French Opera House. Their preferred repertoire was the classical music of European composers – symphonies, concertos, sonatas. In the post-Reconstruction years, more and more often they were playing for weddings, church socials, society dances, parades – any playing job that paid.

"See, us Downtown people, we didn't think so much of this Uptown jazz until we couldn't make a living otherwise.... 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."

                                    Paul Dominguez, Jr. (ca.1887– ca.1965)

Storyville:

On 1 October 1897, Storyville was founded. It was the first legally established red-light district in the United States. The growing tide of gambling and prostitution could not be stemmed. Sidney Story, a city alderman, proposed to control the illegal activities by confining them to "the district."

Storyville bordered on the Faubourg Tremé and in fact linked this once prominent downtown community to the American Sector. It also accidentally opened new lines of communication between uptown and downtown Blacks.

The red-light district stretched along Basin Street from St. Louis to Perdido, extending over to Tremé Street on the downtown side, and swinging over to Robertson Street uptown. The former Creoles of color found themselves playing side by side with uptown American Negroes and competing with them for work. The oft-quoted passage from violinist Paul Dominguez, Jr., above, shows how intense was the drive to compete for the jobs available.

Storyville's many dance halls, gambling houses, cabarets and bordellos were certainly in need of entertainment. Though Black New Orleans suffered major economic setbacks, musicians found their skills very much in demand. Nor were the owners of these establishments concerned with whether the musicians they hired were reading scores or playing by ear. As long as the music was lively, the liquor flowed and the "girls" easily plied their trade. In the bordellos, the piano was the instrument of choice. Clubs and music halls could more readily employ full orchestras and small bands.

The red-light district thus afforded numerous employment opportunities for the city's many Black musicians. It is not, however, the site of the origins of jazz. For that we must look downtown, to the old colonial city of New Orleans – and the Faubourg Tremé.

"You know there's people, they got the wrong idea of Jazz. They think it's all that red-light business. But that's not so....My story goes a long way back. It goes further back than I had anything to do with....I got it from something inherited, just like the stories my father gave down to me."

                                    Sidney Bechet (1897–1959)

Congo Square:

Along the riverside boundary of the Faubourg Tremé, at the intersection of Rampart and St. Ann streets, is Congo Square. The former site of Fort St. Ferdinand and the City Commons, Congo Square had been the Sunday gathering place of free and enslaved Blacks. Here they met to sing and dance, to barter and exchange goods, and form allegiances. What impressed most observers of those Sunday gatherings, however, was the music.

Their instruments included a variety of Congo drums, gourds, triangles, six-stringed banjos, instruments made of horse and mule jawbones and teeth, and a local natural reed instrument called the "quill." On this last they improvised "quill tunes," some of which have been preserved in publications of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Such dances as the famed Bamboula, Calinda and Chacta were danced in Congo Square. It is from these dances that the New Orleans Second-line evolved.

These weekly celebrations ended abruptly with the first notes of the Civil War and the closing of the Square. With the end of the War, however, the entire Black population was free to celebrate its new victories. The weekly gatherings were resumed and continued until 1885. Luckily, the African traditions preserved and the newer ones created in Congo Square did not die there.

French colonial New Orleans had always enjoyed a marching tradition. The military bands of the War years created a surplus of brass instruments. Black musicians donned uniforms and took their celebrations out into the streets. Not content simply to march in the Napoleonic tradition, the Black players strutted, strolled and swayed, bringing to bear the Congo Square heritage as they made their way through the city streets.

"A kind of music, originally improvised but now also arranged, characterized by syncopation, rubato, heavily accented 4/4 time, dissonances, melodic variations, and unusual tonal effects on the saxophone, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, etc.; it originated among New Orleans Negro musicians."

                                    Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (1979)

Making Jazz:

The early Jazz years coincide with the time of the closing of Congo Square and continue through the close of the 19th century (1885–1899). During this early period, New Orleans boasted a host of traditional symphony orchestras as well as marching bands. From the ranks of the classically trained Tremé musicians, some of the earliest bands developed. Their repertoire consisted of marches, funeral dirges, and popular dance music. They were hired to play for Black church events, to advertise benevolent society subscriptions and enrollments, as well as for dances and benefits of all kinds. The high demand for dance bands eventually spelled the death of the larger orchestras.

The bands usually consisted of a dozen or so instruments: three cornets, two trombones, alto horn, baritone horn, two clarinets, and two drums, bass and snare. These smaller bands were far more versatile as they could play parades and funerals as well as large and small dances held at the numerous halls across the city.

One of the most popular bands of the early period was Professor Théogène Baquet's Excelsior Brass Band. The personnel included Baquet and Fice Quire on cornets, brother Lorenzo and Luis Tio on clarinet, the Hackett brothers on alto horn, Anthony Page on trombone, and a drummer named Lee.

Baquet led the Excelsior from the 1880's until his retirement in 1904, when he turned the band over to his friend, cornetist George Moret. A stern music professor, Baquet counted his son George among his many students. In the late 1890's, Baquet was conducting the Lyre Club Symphony Orchestra. George played clarinet with the Lyre, under his father's direction, at the age of 14. The younger Baquet went on to play with Onward Brass Band, the Superior Band, the Imperial Orchestra, the Magnolia Orchestra, with Buddy Bolden's band, and with Keppard's Original Creole Orchestra.

Freddie Keppard's was the first group to take New Orleans jazz on the road. He was a powerful cornet player who had begun his music studies on violin, mandolin and accordion. As children, he and his brother, Louis, went house to house playing mandolin and guitar throughout the Faubourg Tremé. In 1907, the brothers founded the Olympia Orchestra, with Louis playing guitar, Joe Petit on trombone, Jean Vigne on drums, and Alphonse Picou on clarinet.

The Olympia Orchestra was highly respected and regularly played major society events uptown and down. The Keppard brothers also played in "joints" such as Hanan's, a barroom with a dance floor at the corner of Iberville and Tremé streets, and Huntz's Cabaret, directly across the street. When Freddie's Original Creole Orchestra left for Los Angeles in 1912, the Olympia was taken over by A.J. Piron. Freddie's spot in the band was then taken by Joe "King" Oliver.

Oliver (1885–1938), was born at Saulsburg Plantation near Donaldsonville, Louisiana. He played with the Tremé-based Olympia Orchestra until 1914. The following year he was leading his own band, which included young Sidney Bechet. And it was under Oliver's tutelage, and with his help, that the young Louis Armstrong got his earliest paying jobs.

Though Armstrong Park marks the Rampart Street boundary of the Faubourg Tremé, Louis Armstrong was an uptowner. He was born on Jane Alley between Gravier and Perdido Streets. He played with the downtown brass bands and in area clubs and bars. Those who knew him in the early days said that his playing was heavily influenced by Manuel Perez. He had, in fact, been Perez's errand boy, fetching beer and sandwiches for the older musician and picking up a little spare change by playing during Perez's break.

Manuel Perez (1879–1946) was considered by all who knew him and heard him play, the best of the parade cornetists. He was famous for his solo on the funeral dirge, "Fallen Heroes." He started the Imperial Orchestra in 1900 and was later soloist with Onward Brass Band. Like Dominguez, Perez came to resent the extent to which jazz was popularized. He bristled at the attention that musicians whom he felt possessed less training and skill received with the advent of the "Jazz Age."

Dominguez and Perez were unable to see that jazz was created out of the very mix they, as a matter of principle, felt compelled to resist. It was the forced realization – under the aegis of segregationist law – that Creoles and Negroes were the same people that brought about the interaction of uptown and downtown musicians. The tradition of "cutting" contests and of musicians playing one another off the stage derive from this New Orleans uptown-downtown rivalry. What began as a kind of territorial competition in fact resulted in new ways of playing. Early jazz was thus a synthesizing of people and approaches. The unique circumstances that brought about the development of the early form could only have happened here.

Dominguez went so far as to blame Buddy Bolden for the advent of jazz. And history has borne out his claim. Buddy Bolden, an uptown American Negro, took the city by storm at the turn of the century. Though he died in obscurity, confined to the state insane asylum at Jackson, his power as musician and model would carry far and wide. The almost mystical influence he had on those who played with him, on those who knew him and heard him play, has evolved into the legend without which the history of jazz can be neither told nor grasped.

Bolden's cornet solos carried great distances. His raw, wide open playing style evoked the old Congo Square days and heralded the newer, more experimental urge that would come to be the earmark of all great jazz musicians. "He cause [sic] those younger Creole men like Bechet and Keppard to have a different playing style all together from the old heads like Tio and Perez," said Dominguez.

Bolden did not have the classical training of the downtowners. He was, therefore, not confined to a literal interpretation of any composition. He utilized series of blues effects, shifted keys and tones, combined blues, ragtime, and the sacred, made use of extended solos, and added arpeggios and unwritten embellishments of his own. Jelly Roll Morton tagged him, "the most powerful trumpet player in history....the blowingest man since Gabriel." The older musicians had never heard anything like it.

Though Bolden was a reading musician, it was his ability to improvise, his willingness to borrow from whatever was musically available to him, and to experiment with his horn, that crystallized jazz as a new American art form. Of the new music, Dominguez said simply, "Bolden cause [sic] all that."

Nearly all of the second and third generation of New Orleans jazz musicians – Armstrong, Baquet, Bechet, Keppard, – cite Bolden as the first discernible bridge between the old and the new, Creole and Negro, downtown and uptown, traditional and experimental. Freddie Keppard was said to have developed his own style through a series of variations and refinements of Bolden's approach. Bolden's was the band Kid Ory considered his own personal favorite. "Wooden" Joe Nicholas told of learning to play by listening to and copying Bolden. Jelly Roll recorded a number called "Buddy Bolden's Blues" in his honor. Bechet then did a livelier version called "Buddy Bolden's Stomp."

As the 19th century turned into the 20th, Black New Orleans tried to put the defeats of the last decades firmly behind it. And a young man with a horn promised to lead the way to a bright new future. In 1900, Buddy Bolden had the city of New Orleans in the palm of his hand.