Exhibits

Visitors to the New Orleans Jazz Museum have access to a series of rotating exhibits on themes relating to jazz history and culture. Current exhibits include: ‘Congo Square to the World: Early Jazz in New Orleans’, ‘It All Started In Jane Alley: Louis Armstrong in New Orleans’, ‘ ‘Drumsville: Evolution of the New Orleans Beat,’ ‘Bourbon Street Black: The Photography of Eric Waters’, ‘Shake Your Hips: Louisiana Blues’, and ‘Face Value: The Illusions of Power and Money.’ With listening stations, instruments, photographs, artwork, and more, each exhibit is intentionally designed to personally engage each visitor. All exhibits listed are open to the public.

A WONDERFUL WORLD: Jazz and Blues Musician Portraits by RICHARD CORMAN

For the past ten years, renowned photographer Richard Corman has documented musicians affiliated with the Jazz Foundation of America (JFA), a nonprofit dedicated to providing housing assistance, pro bono medical care, and emergency financial support to musicians in crisis. He has created individual portraits, captured moments from the organization’s iconic Apollo gala, and documented scenes from multiple trips to New Orleans. Corman’s passion for music and musicians permeate each image, celebrating emerging and established jazz and blues artists.

Corman's work has long served as an artistic visual record of the JFA’s mission and community. With this exhibit, he and the New Orleans Jazz Museum bring his remarkable collection to the public. He is excited to share these stories while helping raise awareness of those musicians who have played the soundtrack to our lives.

Over the past forty years, Corman's photography has varied widely in subject matter, but it is always intensely focused on the infinitely varied expressions of the human spirit. Ken Burns, documentarian and director, describes Corman’s work as an “artistic vision dedicated to the highest aspirations of human endeavor.” The photographs, Burns continues, “record in big moments and small, among the famous and ordinary, the gifted and challenged, larger truths relevant to all of us."

IT ALL STARTED IN JANE ALLEY

Louis Armstrong in New Orleans

The New Orleans Jazz Museum unveiled a new permanent exhibition, It All Started in Jane Alley: Louis Armstrong in New Orleans, on August 1, 2024, ahead of Satchmo SummerFest. The exhibition delves into Armstrong’s early life, including key influences such as his mother Mayann, the Karnofsky family, his music teacher Peter Davis, and his mentor Joe “King” Oliver. Through photos, artifacts, and stories, the exhibit illustrates Armstrong’s upbringing in New Orleans and the pivotal role the city played in shaping his identity and career.

Armstrong grew up in a poor section of New Orleans known as Jane Alley, and despite his international fame as "Satchmo," he maintained a simple life in a working-class neighborhood. His influence as a founding figure of jazz is unparalleled, and his connection to New Orleans remained deeply personal throughout his life. The exhibition captures Armstrong’s enduring bond with his hometown, highlighting the lessons he learned there about music, people, and life, which he carried with him throughout his global journey.

Congo Square to the World

People take it for granted that Jazz, the music known and loved the world over, started in the Crescent City. But how and why? Scholars, musicologists, and musicians have wrestled with the answers to those questions for a century. In this exhibit, Congo Square to the World; Early Jazz in New Orleans, the New Orleans Jazz Museum makes its case for why and how Jazz developed here with instruments, photographs, recordings, sheet music, and other artifacts from its 50,000 piece collection. Early jazz musicians such as Charles “Buddy” Bolden, Freddie Keppard, Jelly Roll Morton, Edward “Kid” Ory, and Joe “King” Oliver came up playing this music due to the unique aspects of life in New Orleans. In the first section, “Roots of Jazz,” the exhibit considers the social and musical branches that contribute to the tree that is New Orleans Jazz. From Congo Square where enslaved people and free people of color met to dance and drum to the thriving international port of New Orleans to the widespread and varied musical culture of the city, jazz came out of that. As the music developed in hall and taverns across town including both the notorious Storyville and Black Storyville, it became the sound of the city and people in it. And as New Orleans changed at the end of the 1910s and African-Americans fled the oppressive Jim Crow segregation laws, more musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Warren “Baby” Dodds, and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings took the music they learned here and brought it north and west. By 1917 when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band recorded the first jazz record (after Freddie Keppard refused because he didn’t want people to steal his music) “Livery Stable Blues,” the music that started in the back of town bars and parades in Central City and Treme New Orleans was poised to become the soundtrack of the Jazz Age.

SHAKE YOUR HIPS! LOUISIANA BLUES

Although Louisiana is most known musically for Cajun, zydeco, and, of course, jazz, its rich blues tradition often goes unnoticed, or worse, is ignored. Shake Your Hips: Louisiana Blues is the first comprehensive museum exhibit that tells the complex story of Louisiana blues and sets it in the larger context of the American music tradition.

The many forms of Louisiana blues have been shaped by and reflect the state’s geography, history, and regional differences in culture. Blues from New Orleans has been and continues to be influenced by the city’s ultra rich jazz scene, while blues from southwest Louisiana gains influence from both zydeco and Cajun music styles. And Baton Rouge is one of the unsung American centers for blues music.

Shake Your Hips: Louisiana Blues includes never-before-seen artifacts, multi-media displays and new interviews with Louisiana blues greats, in the process finally giving due to another great Louisiana music tradition.

DRUMSVILLE: EVOLUTION OF THE NEW ORLEANS BEAT

Check out our Drumsville exhibit on Google Arts & Culture

The New Orleans Jazz Museum debuted Drumsville: Evolution of the New Orleans Beat on November 8, 2018, in celebration of both International Drum Month and the New Orleans Tricentennial, along with the development of the drum kit in New Orleans and the ongoing evolution of rich local drumming traditions. Drumsville begins with the legacy of Congo Square, including traditional African percussion instruments from the Southern University at New Orleans African Art Collection, and moves through the brass band tradition to the introduction of the bass drum pedal and development of the drum kit and the extensive legacy of drummers to emerge in New Orleans over the past century. Drawing upon the Jazz Museum’s large and unique archive of historic instruments, drum kits and equipment are featured from such New Orleans legends as Papa Jack Laine, Baby Dodds, Paul Barbarin, Louis Barbarin, Cie Frazier, Ray Bauduc, CoCoMo Joe Barthelemy, Earl Palmer, Idris Muhammad, Zigaboo Modeliste, and James Black. In addition, contemporary New Orleans drum masters Johnny Vidacovich, Herlin Riley, Shannon Powell, and Stanton Moore generously loaned equipment from their personal collections. Drumsville examines related traditions of improvised percussion instruments and the tambourine, and concludes with the next generation of drummers, testifying to the vibrancy of the city’s drumming tradition.

“…Heads you Lose” coin - a double-headed fine silver coin for the year 2020. This coin speaks to the tools of the trade for a trickster, like a gambler’s stacked deck, this is a dishonest object for a post-truth culture. This coin illustrates how Patriarchal culture has gamed the system forever.

FACE VALUE: THE ILLUSIONS AND POWER OF MONEY

A solo exhibition by Generic Art Solutions (artists Matt Vis & Tony Campbell). Housed in the coin room, the Old Mint in New Orleans was active from 1839 to 1909, and is the only US Mint to strike coins for both the United States of America, for a succeeded Louisiana, and for the Confederacy.

Displayed side by side with coins minted in this historic facility, the artists have “minted” new coins for this exhibition. The intention of the show is to explore the tropes of wealth and influence and probe the promise of an American Dream and the gambler’s persistent belief in his luck. This exhibition examines the power structures surrounding money and our trust in those institutions. Our relationship to money is complex and currently volatile. This abstracted system of trade the world over is adrift from the gold standard, often merely a digital token divorced from the soon-to-be antiquated hard currency, thus demanding ever more blind trust in the legitimacy of the said economic system.

“The Money Jukebox.”

A fully functional Jukebox loaded with 7” disks featuring Money-themed songs. With this ongoing project, we have encouraged artists to make a famous “money “ cover version or a self-penned original on a 7” vinyl record, to be housed in our custom Jukebox. The collection will examine the long and complex relationship that Southern music and culture have with money. We would feature all the local genres of music, Ragtime Jazz, Blues, Country, Hip Hop, Bounce, Rock, Punk, Zydeco, Swamp Pop. Etc.

“Louisiana Landfall”

A customized coin pusher arcade game. This interactive sculpture addresses ecological losses in Louisiana, namely the drastic coastal erosion of the state’s wetlands. The United States of America continues to gamble with global warming and the climate crisis and is experiencing a long losing streak. This artwork entices the audience to mirror this irresponsible behavior for similar financial gains.

“The Money Jukebox.” A fully functional Jukebox loaded with 7” disks featuring Money-themed songs.

“…Heads you Lose”

A double-headed fine silver coin for the year 2020. This coin speaks to the tools of the trade for a trickster, like a gambler’s stacked deck, this is a dishonest object for a post-truth culture. This coin illustrates how Patriarchal culture has gamed the system forever.