How Jazz Was Born — From Congo Square to Kind of Blue

Introduction — The First Legend Whose Sound Never Survived

Buddy Bolden, a cornet player born in New Orleans in 1877, is called the first star of jazz. Around 1900 his band owned the parks and dance halls of the city, and several witnesses left accounts of a sound that carried blocks away. And yet we have never once heard it. Not one recording of Bolden survives. He was committed to the state hospital in Jackson in 1907 with a mental illness, and he died there in 1931. Twenty-four years.

This is the shape of the starting point of jazz history. Most of what we know is memory transcribed decades later — the recollections of contemporaries such as Bunk Johnson and Jelly Roll Morton, and those recollections contradict one another. In his 1938 Library of Congress recordings Morton said that he had invented jazz in 1902. Nobody believes him, and nobody can quite throw the testimony away either. The Bolden biography Donald Marquis wrote in 1978 out of civil registers and newspapers showed that a good deal of the legend was untrue. The story that he was a barber and the story that he published a scandal sheet both turned out to rest on nothing.

So this piece will try not to ask who was first. Fixing a first is probably impossible forever. It asks a more answerable question instead. Why New Orleans, and why around 1900. And where did this music move over the sixty years that followed.

The Conditions Called New Orleans — Congo Square, the Creoles, and 1894

That jazz was born in New Orleans was not an accident but a matter of conditions. The city was founded by France in 1718, passed to Spain in 1763, and became American with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. That the rule of a Catholic culture lasted nearly ninety years proved decisive.

First, Sunday survived. The French Code Noir and Spanish practice let enslaved people rest on Sundays, and the enslaved of New Orleans gathered in a square on the north side of the city to beat drums and dance. This is Congo Square. The eyewitness account the architect Benjamin Latrobe left in his journal in 1819 is still quoted constantly. Hundreds of people in circles, drums of different sizes ringing over one another. Why this is special is that in the Protestant English colonies the drum was banned. South Carolina outlawing the drum in 1740, after the Stono Rebellion of 1739, is the standard example. A drum could be a signal. New Orleans was one of the rare places on the American mainland where the African tradition of layered rhythm survived across generations.

Second, there was a class of people of color formally trained in European music. Free people of color who spoke French and practiced Catholicism, the so-called Creoles. Among them were no small number of musicians who played in opera house orchestras, read scores and studied orthodox harmony. Nineteenth-century New Orleans was one of the most active opera cities in America.

Third, these two worlds were forced together. After the Civil War, as racial segregation tightened, the in-between standing of the Creoles collapsed. The Separate Car Act of 1890, the test case of 1892 in which the Creole Homer Plessy deliberately boarded a whites-only car, and the Plessy decision of 1896. The 1894 statute of the Louisiana legislature that jazz literature so often cites classified as Black anyone with any African ancestry at all. Downtown Creole players who read music and uptown Black players who played by ear ended up standing in the same band.

This passage has to be read carefully, though. The summary that says one law passed in 1894 and jazz was born is far too tidy. Segregation tightened over more than a decade, Creole and Black musicians had gone back and forth before that, and several researchers point out that the divide between downtown and uptown was in reality far blurrier. Still, the direction is clear. Because racism bound to one stage the two groups it meant to keep apart, orthodox harmony and an African sense of rhythm met inside a single band. Jazz is the name of that chemical reaction.

Two Roots — Blues and Ragtime

Jazz has two parents. What matters is that their characters are opposites.

The blues came from the voice. Descended from field hollers, work songs and spirituals, this music brought a simple twelve-bar frame, a call-and-response structure, and notes that do not sit exactly on the grid of the Western scale, the blue notes. Move it onto paper and something always drops out. W. C. Handy left in his memoir the story of meeting a man at a country station in Mississippi in 1903 who sang while sliding the back of a knife along his guitar strings, and he published "Memphis Blues" in 1912. When Mamie Smith and her "Crazy Blues" sold explosively in 1920, the record industry belatedly discovered that a Black audience existed.

Ragtime, by contrast, came from paper. Represented by Scott Joplin and his "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899), this music is precisely notated piano writing. While the left hand marks a regular beat, the right hand strikes off the beat, and that syncopated misalignment was the whole of its charm. Ragtime was composition, not improvisation, and so it sold across the country as sheet music.

Jazz combined the two. From ragtime it took syncopation and a sense of form; from the blues, timbre, expression and freedom. Added to that was the peculiar set of uses that a city like New Orleans had. Funeral processions, weddings, picnics, political rallies, dance halls. When a brass band walked a coffin to the cemetery it played a dirge, and on the way back a rousing march. Jazz was not born as music for listening; it was practical music with a great many places to be used.

1917, and the Uncomfortable Name on the First Jazz Record

On February 26, 1917, a band of five recorded two sides for Victor in New York. "Livery Stable Blues" and "Dixie Jass Band One-Step". Released in March, the record is said to have sold in the millions and stands as the first jazz record in the world. The name of the band was the Original Dixieland Jass Band. They were indeed from New Orleans, and they could play. And all five of them were white.

Their leader, Nick LaRocca, later claimed that white people had invented jazz. Nobody accepts that claim today. But the fact that the first record belongs to a white band does not erase itself, and what matters is rather what it means. It means the record industry did not think to record Black players. Music that had been played in New Orleans for more than a decade went out to the world for the first time with the voices of the people who made it missing.

There is one more anecdote often quoted alongside this. The story that the Creole cornetist Freddie Keppard turned down an offer from Victor to record in 1916. The explanation usually attached is that he worried others would copy his playing once a record existed. But the basis for this anecdote too is a single later testimony, and researchers note that the details may well have been dramatized. Most of the early history of jazz stands on recollections like this that cannot be verified.

The sound of a Black New Orleans band was properly captured on record in 1923. The sides King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band left at the Gennett studio in Richmond, near Chicago. Two cornets, clarinet and trombone weaving their own lines all at once, the summit of collective improvisation. In the second cornet chair sat a twenty-one-year-old Louis Armstrong.

Incidentally, there is another myth to sort out here. The story that when the Storyville red-light district closed in 1917 the musicians thrown out of work went up the Mississippi to Chicago. It is true that Storyville was shut that November by order of the Navy Department, but the movement north was already under way within the current of the Great Migration. The closing was less a trigger than background noise.

Louis Armstrong and Swing — The Solo Becomes the Protagonist

Let me begin by correcting the birth date of Louis Armstrong. All his life he said he had been born on July 4, 1900, American Independence Day. Then in the 1980s the researcher Tad Jones found a church baptismal record, and the actual birthday was August 4, 1901. A good story beats a fact this often.

What Armstrong did can be summed up in one sentence. He turned jazz from an ensemble music into a music of the soloist. The Hot Five sessions he recorded in Chicago from 1925 and the Hot Seven sessions of 1927 are the scene of it. Until then the virtue of a band had been the balance of several lines tangling at once; Armstrong pulled one thread out of that fabric and stood it in front. The opening of "West End Blues" in 1928, a twelve-second cadenza bursting out alone with no accompaniment, still sounds today like something breaking down the door of the tune.

What he changed was three things. That one person can carry an entire piece, the elasticity made by pushing and pulling the beat forward and back (the sensation that would come to be called swing), and a horn that sings like a voice. The scat singing on "Heebie Jeebies" in 1926, where he sang meaningless syllables instead of lyrics, is credited to him as well. The story that he dropped the lyric sheet during the take and made it up on the spot is famous, but this too is very likely an anecdote polished for publicity.

Once the solo took the center, jazz became an expandable music. The big bands of the 1930s were the result. Arranged horn sections laying down a background, over which a designated soloist blows a few choruses. The frenzy the Benny Goodman orchestra set off at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles on August 21, 1935, is commonly taken as the start of the swing era. There is a shadow here too. Much of the arranging that made Goodman the King of Swing belonged to the Black bandleader Fletcher Henderson, and the orchestra of Duke Ellington built its fame at the Cotton Club, where only Black people stood on the stage and only white people sat in the seats. The popular music of 1930s America was jazz, but the shares of that success were handed out differently by race.

From Bebop to Modal — Two Revolts That Stopped the Dancing

In the early 1940s, in the dawn jam sessions at clubs like Minton's Playhouse in Harlem, the next music was made. Charlie Parker (1920–1955) on alto saxophone, Dizzy Gillespie (1917–1993) on trumpet, Thelonious Monk on piano, Kenny Clarke on drums. The bebop they made differed from earlier jazz on almost every measure. The tempos were far faster, the chords were substituted densely, and the melodies sprang rather than sang.

The form was clever too. They took only the chord progressions of widely known tunes and laid entirely new melodies over them. The 1945 "Ko-Ko" by Parker stands on the changes of the standard "Cherokee", and "Ornithology" uses the changes of "How High the Moon". It was a way of avoiding copyright while giving players familiar terrain.

What bebop aimed at was clear. To get out of accompanying a ballroom. Bands shrank to four or five, the stage moved to small clubs where people sat and listened, and the tunes became too fast or too irregular to dance to. People often say that bebop killed the popular appeal of jazz, but that causation is overstated. Wartime conscription and travel restrictions, the cost of keeping a big band, the recording ban by the musicians union that ran from 1942, the cabaret tax levied on dance floors, and the rise of rhythm and blues all worked together. Bebop was less the cause that pushed jazz out of its place in popular music than the direction chosen by a music that was already being pushed out.

The second revolt came from the opposite direction. After bebop, jazz kept adding chords, and the 1959 "Giant Steps" by John Coltrane shows the end of that density. Improvising over a tune whose key changes every two beats was close to acrobatics. That same year, Miles Davis went in exactly the opposite direction.

Kind of Blue was recorded on March 2 and April 22, 1959, at the Columbia 30th Street Studio in New York, and came out that August. Miles, Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb. The opening track "So What" uses effectively only two scales across thirty-two bars. The first sixteen bars on one mode, the next eight on the same mode raised a half step, then eight again. Once the chords were taken away, a player could stay in one place and build a line instead of chasing the next chord. This album is counted as the best-selling jazz record of all time.

There is a myth to sort out here as well. The liner note Bill Evans wrote said that the players saw the sketches for the first time in the studio and finished almost everything on the first take. In fact other takes survive, and Miles had already tested the same idea on "Milestones" in 1958. On top of that, the three tracks on side A of the first pressing ran nearly a half step sharp because the tape machine turned slowly, and it was corrected only with the reissue in 1992. For more than thirty years the whole world heard this masterpiece in a slightly higher key.

A Listening Order for the First Time — Where to Put Your Ear

The reason jazz feels difficult is usually not a matter of taste but that you do not know where to put your ear. There are no lyrics, no chorus that repeats, and five minutes go by with no way of telling when they will end. Fortunately this music has a very stable skeleton. Grasp that alone and most tunes acquire a map.

1. Count the form. The basic shape of a jazz performance is theme (head) to solos to theme. The melody that appears somewhere between thirty seconds and a minute in is the head. When that melody disappears and one instrument steps forward, the solos have begun; when the first melody comes back at the end, the tune is over. The one thing to do on a first listen is to catch the moment the head returns. Manage that and five minutes divide into three blocks.
2. Follow the bass. If the solo is too dazzling to keep up with, drop your eyes to the floor and listen only to the double bass. Four to the bar, walking steadily on, the walking bass is both the map and the clock of the tune. Follow the bass and you feel how many laps the solo has gone; at that moment you learn that improvisation is not free at random but the work of going around a course of fixed length again and again.
3. Put two performances of the same tune side by side. In jazz a tune is not a finished product but material. So the real pleasure comes from comparison. Pick one standard and listen to two versions back to back. The "Body and Soul" Coleman Hawkins left in 1939, for instance, barely plays the theme at all and starts telling its own story from the very beginning. Set it next to another version of the same tune and what is the tune and what is the player separate sharply.
4. Order it like this. Do not listen chronologically. Early recordings are rough in sound and unhelpful as an entry point. It is far easier to start with an album that is slow and full of space, like Kind of Blue, and then go back up to the 1928 "West End Blues" by Armstrong to see the solo being born, hear the colors of arrangement in Ellington, and meet the speed of Parker last.

Listening to one tune three times is better than listening to three tunes once. It is the same reason the way of lasting three minutes in front of a painting works in a museum. What sounded like a lump of noise the first time divides into instruments the second, and on the third you hear where the player hesitates and where he pushes.

Closing — Improvisation Is Not Freedom but Conversation

The part of the birth of jazz that I end up thinking about longest is that this music mixed because of the forces that meant to keep it apart. The segregation statutes set out to strip the Creole musicians of their standing, and the result was that hands that read music and hands that played by ear gathered in the same band. What was meant and what was made were opposites.

Improvisation is often used as a metaphor for freedom, but what actually happens on the stage is closer to conversation than to freedom. Inside a set number of bars, agreed chords, and the rule of listening to one another and stepping aside, each person says something different. Pick one tune tonight and try to catch the moment the head returns. In that moment you hear that the five minutes that sounded like blowing at random were in fact a very tightly woven set of promises.