Early jazz sprung from the synthesis of culture, race and class in the melting pot known as New Orleans. Louisiana benefited from huge profits and growth as trade blossomed through the emergence of America's new port city. New Orleans “creat[ed] a prosperous, cosmopolitan environment that few cities in the New World could match.” (Gioia, 27) This new found fusion of Latin, African, and Anglo-Saxon cultures meshed together to create new traditions and new sound. With the popularization of the steam engine train, New Orleans' economy collapsed. As a result, New Orleans housed both the remarkably rich and the dirt poor, this dichotomy presented a unique basis for the growth of jazz. Each culture brought a different flare to the new forms of emerging music. Africa brought rhythm to the table, syncopation and the marriage of conflicting beats contribute to the formation of blues, and later jazz. (Austerlitz, 37) Spanish influences pervade the sounds of jazz in the upbeat melodic flair. And classical training became increasingly important under the tutelage of the Mexican masters who came to Louisiana in the Mexican 8th Regimental band to play in the World Fair (Johnson, 226). Mexican influence was vital to the development of a refined iteration of jazz. The musical form was formerly reserved for “The District”, the seedy part of New Orleans, it is there, in the brothels and bars that historians claim jazz was born.(Gioia, 29) However, the infusion of classical training brought by the Mexicans heightened the expression thanks to the Tio brothers, among others, who brought formal training to the musicians who populated the scene. (Johnson, 226) This movement towards formalization and philosophy of jazz, pioneered by Jelly Roll Morton, allowed a jazz to be defined as the musical expression universally recognized today.
It is unreasonable to assume that any one factor was the chief contribution to the development of jazz in New Orleans, it is rather the synthesis of all the multicultural aspect of the port city that fostered the materialization of jazz. Jazz can be traced to a variety of roots, and it is this pluralism that defines jazz as the new form of music. In abstraction, jazz is a representation of the diversity available for study in the urban centers from which it arose. It is a reflection of emotion and a reactionary art form relating to events of the time. The form deals with hardship and hope alike but each song reflects the individual’s life experience. Even the emergence of solos caters to individuality and personalization. This focus on the individual plays directly to highlighting the vast differences in cultural background among performers. There is additionally a dual of collaboration and competition which is difficult to reconcile. The conflicting cultural backgrounds of the performers seem to reflect in the dissonance of jazz performance. This collision of cultural heritage is the primary motivation for the development of jazz.
(commented on Neel Sabnis's blog post)
(commented on Neel Sabnis's blog post)
