Jazz

node · earth · United States, from New Orleans outward

The ensemble practice that took shape among Black and Creole musicians in New Orleans in the years around 1900 and spread outward along the rivers, railways and record catalogues of the next two decades. Its materials are a summary of everything else in this Journey: blues vocal inflection applied to wind instruments; the brass-band instrumentation left over from military and civic bands; ragtime's syncopated piano; church and funeral procession; and the Caribbean rhythmic cells that reached the city through its Gulf traffic — what Jelly Roll Morton, in his 1938 Library of Congress recordings, called the "Spanish tinge", meaning the habanera and tresillo patterns without which he said the music lacked seasoning. The recorded history begins with a distortion that is itself part of the story: the first jazz record, made on 26 February 1917, was by the Original Dixieland Jass Band, five white New Orleans musicians, in a New York studio, and Black New Orleans players were not recorded in the idiom until several years later. The music the record documents was not theirs to begin with, and the record industry's ordering of who got captured first shaped what the world subsequently believed jazz was.