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.
