Jazz began as a solo piano music in the city’s “sporting houses”; a small-combo music played for dancers in ballrooms; and a marching band music performed at funerals, parades, and other public events.
The earliest jazz was not written down but rather passed on aurally among the musicians of New Orleans. This great seaport near the mouth of the Mississippi River was a bouillabaisse of African American, Anglo American, French, German, Italian, Mexican, Caribbean, and American Indian musical influences. Unlike some other U.S. cities, New Orleans had neighborhoods in which families from different ethnic backgrounds lived cheek by jowl, a circumstance that provided exceptional opportunities for musical exchange and is reflected in the music’s vitality. It explains how African Americans such as Buddy Bolden, Creoles of color such as Ferdinand Lamothe (known professionally as Jelly Roll Morton), and Caucasians such as the Italian American Nick LaRocca would all play roles in the early development of jazz. Jazz began as a solo piano music in the city’s “sporting houses”; a small-combo music played for dancers in ballrooms; and a marching band music performed at funerals, parades, and other public events. As riverboats took New Orleans music north, and as the wanderlust of Morton and other early performers brought them to both coasts, jazz became more than a local phenomenon, a process that accelerated greatly once LaRocca’s Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded in New York in 1917. Around this same time, changing working conditions in New Orleans brought about a mass exodus of the city’s musical community, launching a creative diaspora that took jazz and many of its most talented practitioners to the rest of the United States, Europe, South America, and Asia.