New Orleans

Assembled from 15 blocks · 2 evidence · 13 related

1. Story
2. The Mississippi delta port whose unusual layering of colonial regimes made it the densest musical crossroads in North America. Founded by France, held by Spain from 1763, returned to France and sold to the United States in 1803, it retained Catholic institutions, a Francophone and Creole-speaking population, a large community of free people of colour, and a legal and social culture in which African practice was policed rather than erased — the Congo Square gatherings being the clearest instance. To that it added successive arrivals: refugees from the Haitian Revolution, many via Cuba, in the first years of the nineteenth century; Sicilian and German immigration later; and continuous traffic with Havana and the Gulf ports, which is how Cuban danzón and habanera rhythm reached the city's dance bands. The result was a place where brass-band instrumentation, church and funeral procession, blues vocal practice, ragtime piano and Caribbean rhythm were all available to the same musicians in the same decade. Jazz is what those musicians made of the combination in the years around 1900, and the city's port function is the reason all of it was there to combine.
3. Knowledge
4. New Orleans
5. Connections
6. The Middle Passage
7. Congo Square, New Orleans
8. Jazz
9. Havana
10. New Orleans confines Sunday gatherings to Congo Square
11. The first jazz record is made
12. Alan Lomax records Jelly Roll Morton at the Library of Congress
13. Evidence
14. Morton drew Afro-Cuban rhythms including the tresillo and habanera into early jazz and called them collectively the "Spanish tinge", stating in his 1938 Library of Congress sessions that jazz required it; Cuban dance bands toured New Orleans and the danzón was a significant influence there. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary attributed to this Tulane resource together with related scholarship; no page was opened and no recording or transcript was consulted.
15. Enslaved and free people of African descent gathered on Sundays at the ground beyond Rampart Street to drum, dance, sing and trade; an 1817 municipal measure confined such gatherings to that plot; observers describe the bamboula and a pattern counted as three plus three plus two, and crowds of several hundred by 1819. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary across several public-history accounts; none was opened, and the 1817 measure is described in them variously as an ordinance and as a mayoral decree.