Birth of an American Music: Jazz to the 1920s

Waves of change swept America between the Civil War and the turn of the century. Agriculture and rural life gave way to industry and urbanization. With the end of the war and slavery, many African Americans moved to American Cities.

Life was still relatively simple. Automobiles, airplanes and electricity had not yet replaced riverboats, steam trains, and gas lamps. While some American cities wrestled with ah new multicultural identity, New Orleans was more accepting ethnic diversity due to its roots as a French - ruled city. African Americans, French, Spanish, Europeans, and Native Americans mixed more freely than in most cities, and the atmosphere was conducive to new combinations of culture and fresh forms of expressions.

In this cultural gumbo of a city, the earliest jazz was born during the 1880s and 1890s, played primarily by African Americans who brought their blues, spirituals, and worksongs together with European music and instruments (especially brass). Improvisation, the spontaneous innovation of rhythm and melodies that is part of authentic African music, was a vital element in jazz from the beginning.

Basic Ingredients

New Orleans, with its rich multicultural history and rainbow populations, was the obvious - maybe the only - place for jazz to be born. Consider the ingredients present during the last years of the 19th century:

• A mixed population with French, Spanish, African, and West Indies roots - and a cosmopolitan atmosphere. African music came forcibly to New Orleans via the slave trade, and indirectly via immigrant West Indians who had earlier incorporated African traditions into their culture.



• A great concentration of African Americans and other people of color. in 1880, 55,000 of 210,000 New Orleans residents were non - white. The city was the major population center in the South, and the foremost southern U.S. destination for both imports and exports, boasting of a major transient or "circulating population." This helped to give the city a somewhat more relaxed atmosphere, when it came to race relations, than other U.S. cities.



• Brass marching bands, a popular tradition since Louisiana was under French rule. Before jazz's earliest innovators hit the scene, during the decades after the U.S. Civil War musicians in marching bands brought brass instruments such as cornets, trumpets, saxophones, and trombones into New Orleans, and into the hands of African American players.



• Relaxed attitudes toward people of color. Despite segregation, people of various races were afforded better than average treatment in New Orleans. Elected officials and police officers - more in New Orleans than in other American cities - let the ethnically diverse population mix freely, which meant that they also shared musical influences.
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