Jazz Music History
by on 06.06.2015

Jazz Music History

New Orleans French Quarter

2/9/22 Update: New Orleans Blues phenom Chris Thomas King has deftly set the record straight in his 2021 book: The Blues: The Authentic Narrative of My Music and Culture. We finally have the gaps filled in – at least in America from the turn of the century onward! King has also provided the thread which reaches back much further all the way to Egypt. The Blues – which was both what Anglos co-opted and called “jazz” and “Dixieland jazz,” and which is the basis for what became Gospel, Rhythm & Blues, Rock, Soul, Hip Hop & Rap – all originated in at least the mid-1880s if not before in New Orleans with educated, highly trained, free Creole musicians playing what they called The Blues, inspired by the French exclamation “sacre bleu,” as a rebellious response to attempted Protestant Anglo constrictions after the U.S. bought Louisiana from Napoleon in 1803. Free Creoles of African descent had actually settled in the territory first named La Florida by the Spanish who claimed it as early as 1513 – 100 years before the 1619 landing of enslaved Africans in Jamestown. The first noted wafts of the bold, fierce, joyful, freeing Blues infecting the air of downtown were heard from Mamie Desdunes’ piano playing her 2:19 Blues (Mamie’s Blues)- the first known Blues composition – in the late 1880s, while trumpeter “The Black Rose” Buddy Bolden blasted The Blues from 1894-1907 so far forward – there was no going back. Pianist Jelly Roll Morton, who heard Mamie playing as a child, carried The Blues from there, along with trumpeters King Oliver (Louis Armstrong’s mentor), trombonist Kid Ory, guitarist Lonnie Johnson – and a free-spirited, cosmopolitan city and international port chock full of free Creole highly-trained musicians creating high art. It was Lonnie Johnson who carried The Blues on guitar to the Mississippi Delta, through touring and phonograph records. He was the inspiration for what came later out of Robert Johnson, (no relation – but whom Robert Johnson tried to claim to be, or at least related to, and definitely tried to imitate) and all of the other Mississippi Delta blues guitarists. As the New Orleans Blues musicians began to tour and record, The Blues (erroneously called “jazz”) infectiously became the 1920s soundtrack in a craze spread around America and the world. The Blues party that is still New Orleans was spread by speakeasies, flappers, and phonographs like fire around the globe. In fact, it is now known that W.C. Handy actually saw New Orleans musician Prince McCoy performing Jelly Roll Morton’s “Winin’ Boy Blues” in Mississippi, and appropriated this song calling it his and publishing it as “Memphis Blues.” He wasn’t the first one to co-opt New Orleans Blues – and he certainly wasn’t the last. Imitation may be the highest form of flattery – but I’m sure these New Orleans original Blues musicians would have rather gotten paid for their art and gotten credit where credit is due. It is never too late to give credit where credit belongs.

Source: Thomas King, C. (2021) The Blues: The Authentic Narrative of My Music and My Culture. Chicago Review Press Inc.

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Jazz music history: The creation of Jazz is actually quite a bit more rambunctious than the Jazz History you’ve been told.  The story that Jazz was conceived in the brothels of Bourbon Street, well, just isn’t true.  When I read this story in an Introduction to Jazz textbook back in college, something just didn’t seem to fit and I imagined the “establishment” of the day making it up to disparage this new wild music just as they had ragtime.  But I wondered why the story had lasted through time.   As a musician, I longed to know the real story, my gut — and my ear — telling me there had to be way more to it.

That stuck with me  — until I moved to New Orleans and dug up a book by a local professor/musician on a corner shelf of the Old Mandeville library I’d never heard of that wasn’t even listed in the library catalog.  Sure enough!  The bordello piano players’ ears were already filled with “Jass” before they started filling Bourbon street with this infectious new music.

I had to leave New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina due to health.   I only got to live there for a little over three years and never got to do my music in the Big Easy.  But if discovering the truth about Jazz was all I was meant to get out of living in New Orleans — then it was worth it.

It was one of the most liberating, exhilarating, ah-ha experiences of my life, as I devoured the details of Louis Armstronghow Jazz was really born.  This was a fit!  The creation of Jazz came to life for me as if I could hear it, taste it, feel it, as if I was there taking part in the moment of conception.  Piecing everything I now knew together, I realized that the courtship dance that led to the birth of Jazz was of course found in non-stop music all around New Orleans.  But where it really seemed to click for me as a musician, getting down to the nitty gritty of actually inventing Jazz, was reading Louis Armstrong talk about upwards of 60 parties happening all at once on Lake Pontchartrain every weekend…(look for Sherese Timeless’ book on the conception of Jazz coming soon! 2/9/22 Update: Instead, read Chris Thomas King’s book! Now there is no need!)

by Sherese Timeless-Composer, Producer-Eliyora Entertainment

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Eliyora Entertainment LLC.  Ever Entertainment.®  © Paradunai LLC.  All international rights reserved.  All trademarks property of Paradunai LLC.  All personas, concepts and original songs created and performed by Sherese Chrétien.

 
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