New Orleans

city · earth

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.