300 Years of New Orleans Music: The Rhythm of the City

University of New Orleans University of New Orleans

ScholarWorks@UNO ScholarWorks@UNO

Midlo Center Publications Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies

2017

300 Years of New Orleans Music: The Rhythm of the City 300 Years of New Orleans Music: The Rhythm of the City

Connie Zeanah Atkinson

University of New Orleans

, [email protected]

Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/midlo_pub

Recommended Citation Recommended Citation

Atkinson, Connie Zeanah. "300 Years of New Orleans Music: The Rhythm of the City." in New Orleans: The

First 300 Years, Ed. Errol Laborde. Gretna, La: Pelican Publishing Company, 2017.

This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at

ScholarWorks@UNO. It has been accepted for inclusion in Midlo Center Publications by an authorized

administrator of ScholarWorks@UNO. For more information, please contact [email protected].

“300 Years of New Orleans Music: The Rhythm of the City”

By Connie Zeanah Atkinson

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First published in New Orleans the First 300 Years. Errol and Peggy Scott Laborde, editors,

2017. A joint venture of Pelican Publishing Company and public television station WYES with

the assistance of The Historic New Orleans Collection on the occasion of the Tricentennial of the

City of New Orleans. From migration to politics to music to ethnic culture and identity, this

comprehensive volume touches on all aspects of New Orleans history for the past 300 years.

“With contributions from some of the leading influencers and scholars of New Orleans cultural

history, including a foreword by Professor Emeritus Lawrence N. Powell, no stone is left

unturned. This is the quintessential book on New Orleans for every history buff, citizen of New

Orleans, or visitor wanting to know more about who we are and how we got here.”

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Almost from its beginning, the city of New Orleans has been associated with music and

dancing. Early in its colonial years, locals of all conditions could hear music in a variety of settings

– sacred and secular, classical and popular, out of doors and in concert halls. Young New

Orleanians took up music, and it became the family business for many who were denied other

opportunities. The sheer number of musicians and places to play defined and refined the city’s

reputation and relationship with the rest of the country and the world.

The city’s enthusiasm for music evolved as a practical response of a new people in the new

world. In contrast to its Protestant neighbors, Catholic New Orleans had no censure against dance,

and for an immigrant destination with people of many languages, dancing was a convenient,

inexpensive and enjoyable means of socializing. Locals had an appetite for new dances, and in

this busy port, with ships coming in daily from the Caribbean and Gulf, new sounds came ashore

with the new arrivals. Musical genealogists trace these rhythms into the city and into the repertoire

of local musicians, where styles and beats were absorbed, altered, incorporated, becoming local

signatures, recognizable signs that reaffirmed a local identity, creating community of the disparate

and polyglot population of this far-flung place. Simply put, music helped create New Orleans in

the local imagination, and the constant need for a musical accompaniment to the city’s myriad

celebrations created new opportunities for musicians to play.

Although slavery was as violent and abusive in French and Spanish New Orleans as in

other places in the South, both French and Spanish colonial governments did allow New

Orleanians of African descent some freedom to perform their music, making New Orleans one of

the few places in the US where people of European descent could hear and absorb the musical

values of the African continent and Afro-Caribbean. In addition, since enslaved New Orleanians

had opportunities to make money and thus could attend European-style musical performances,

New Orleanians of African descent could absorb European musical values as well. So from the

earliest days, New Orleans was a place where a musician had access to a range of musics and the

style of music played was not limited by the musician’s ethnicity.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in this place the musicians eventually devised

a musical style that took advantage of all these varied influences, allowing each musician a voice

for his or her own distinct message, and the confidence to jump from the written score. And that’s

what some call America’s original art form, jazz. Ah, the irony -- a music for, but certainly not of,

America’s Protestant/Puritan founders became what Albert Murray called “the national

soundtrack.”

In fact, Wynton Marsalis and others have called jazz a metaphor for democracy – the

balance of the individual with the communal. Maybe this explains why the place where this music

emerged looms so large in the American imagination – the land of dreamy dreams. Jazz reflected

its hometown – an American place with an impulse for diversity, for all to have a voice… a goal

seldom reached but a persistent dream nonetheless, revealed in its music. Within the music lay

the potential for freedom for all, and worldwide, people heard and responded to that musical

message. Jazz became the logo for an age, the sound of freedom, and New Orleans as its site of

emergence became forever associated with the music.

To spotlight a few New Orleans musicians in a survey of the city’s music is to leave out a

host of others equally worthy of mention. The names most familiar to music fans – Armstrong,

Gottschalk, Domino, Bechet, Prima, Fountain, Connick – represent but a handful of the creators

and craftsmen of New Orleans music. Innovators, masters of their instruments, protégés, mentors,

divas, entertainers and teachers abound. Branches of family trees are heavy with musicians:

Humphreys, Batistes, Barbarins, Marsalises, Nevilles. Sidemen with names familiar only to

musical insiders brought New Orleans to the likes of James Brown, Duke Ellington, Ornette

Coleman. The work, if not the names, of New Orleans studio musicians are recognized by popular

music fans everywhere, not to mention those multitude of New Orleans musicians never or seldom

captured on disc who created the thousands of magical nights in smoky clubs, moments of ecstasy

at festivals and churches, who again and again made us fall in love with our city, and sometimes

with each other.

What links these disparate musicians? Most were products of thick, overlapping networks

of families, neighborhoods, and social institutions. Most as children and before formal instruction

had heard a variety of music in a variety of places. Many benefitted from a series of mentors and

music teachers in and out of the band room willing to share experiences and bandstands with

younger musicians. For generations, the pedagogical strategies of New Orleans – long, slow

exposure without overpraising, hands-on experience and opportunities for youngsters --

successfully produced generations of excellent and versatile musicians.

Somewhere at the end of the 19

century, New Orleans musicians, a little bored with

ragtime, began collectively improvising on a mélange of current musics -- brass band marches,

quadrilles, danza and danzon. From practically the moment of release of the first jazz record by

the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1917, jazz became the nation’s hottest popular music and the

New Orleans jazz musician became the city’s big export. The most renowned of these was Louis

Armstrong, probably the musician most associated with jazz and with New Orleans. His career

mirrored that of many young local musicians -- exposure to a variety of musical styles from blues

to opera, instruction and mentorship by such as Peter Davis and Joe “King” Oliver -- but his

virtuosity and innovation, his personal charm and generosity, made “Pops” one of the most famous

people on earth.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, New Orleans music again hit big in the recording world, only this

time, the recording was done in New Orleans. Some of the best loved American popular music

came out of this period from small, locally owned recording studios. The war years brought a ban

on recordings, and now, tired of war and with money in their pockets from war production jobs,

young Americans were ready for new sounds. New Orleans R&B reflected the optimism and youth

of the era - simple, fun songs played by master musicians for teenagers to dance to. Non-

threatening, happy music, most exemplified by the artist whose brother-in-law called him a country

and western musician, Antoine “Fats” Domino. Selling over one hundred million records to fans

all over the country and across oceans, Domino reflected the idealized world-view of New Orleans

– happy, carefree, uncomplicated. Along with Domino were dozens of local recording artists

cranking out the hits for juke boxes from coast to coast. In Cosimo Matassa’s J&M studio and later

in Allen Toussaint and Marshall Sehorn’s SeaSaint studios, the hits just kept on coming, filling

the Billboard charts and rocking the car radios of the rock and roll years.

Meanwhile, in 1973, the Orleans Parish School Board, with the support of the Arts

Council, opened the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, a tuition-free instruction center for the

city’s young talent. Although the school’s goal was not to produce superstar musicians but rather

to furnish an arts education to the city’s children, produce them it did, with its first few graduating

classes including Harry Connick Jr, Branford Marsalis, Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison, and

Wynton Marsalis. By 1990, Wynton graced the cover of Time Magazine, which proclaimed “The

New Jazz Age.” He embraced, unashamedly, the New Orleans music tradition of respect for the

past along with personal expression in the present, brushed off NY critics with a distain to which

they were not accustomed, and, as winner of the Pulitzer Prize and as artistic director of New

York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center, established himself as a jazz icon. His thoughtful reflections on

New Orleans jazz history have kept the city of New Orleans in the conversation while his virtuosity

has reinforced ideas of New Orleans musicianship.

New Orleans may be primarily known outside the city for jazz, but it is also home to a

large gospel community. The birthplace of the Queen of Gospel, Mahalia Jackson, New Orleans

was one of the first places where gospel was performed within Catholic churches. Today, music

clubs, festivals, and even conventions regularly feature gospel choirs. Writings on New Orleans

music often overlook gospel, and in doing so miss a major force in the sustaining of musical

instruction and performance that support the city’s music industry. Also, the emphasis by scholars

on jazz and R&B in New Orleans often denies the participation of women, who for example are

active in gospel in all phases, including organization and administration.

Brass bands, popular in New Orleans since the early 19

century, had begun to fade in the

city by the 1970s, but an intervention by banjoist/guitarist Danny Barker led to a rebirth of the

brass band tradition. Recently returned from a successful career in New York, Barker founded a

brass band for the young people of the Fairview Baptist Church. The Fairview Band launched the

careers of many young musicians and popular brass bands such as the Dirty Dozen. Through his

mentorship and inspiration, today brass bands are synonymous with New Orleans music and

culture.

In the 1990s, New Orleans rappers developed their own up-tempo, bass heavy, call and

response version of the genre, called Bounce music. Around the new millennium, local rappers

achieved tremendous success that made many of them multimillionaires and hip hop became the

city’s most lucrative cultural export, mainly because New Orleans was home to two giants of the

hip hop industry, Master P’s No Limit Records and the Williams Brothers’ Cash Money Records.

These labels spawned an incredible number of international rap stars. Embracing New Orleans

musical traditions, New Orleans rappers incorporate brass-band street-parade

instrumentations/rhythms and Mardi Gras Indian chants into the hip-hop collage while becoming

a prime vehicle for social and political commentary and community celebration.

Two major forces serve as bookends for the story of New Orleans music in this last century

– the emergence of jazz and the series of governmental and ecological failures that became known

as the Katrina event. Neither happened as the events that they were portrayed: jazz as a cataclysmic

event vs. jazz as a practical response to myriad influences; Katrina as a cataclysmic hurricane vs.

Katrina as the culmination of geographic, infrastructural and social neglect. But those two events

shaped the perception of music in New Orleans just as the flooding shaped the topology of the

city.

New Orleans post-Katrina remains a city in recovery. Historically drawing its cultural

vitality from its non-professional cultural industries -- the local celebrations, the street parades, the

social institutions – it still suffers the loss of neighborhoods and the dispersal of performers. But

despite disruption and disaster, with little support for education and infrastructure, New Orleanians

still put their energies into music and the world continues to listen.

Jazz and gospel, R&B and hip hop, brass bands and rock & roll… the families,

neighborhoods, churches and schools have nurtured and created opportunities for young New

Orleanians to find their expression through music. Each generation has used music to express its

own distinctive voice, while often giving a nod to those who came before. The sounds coming

from the wards and neighborhoods may differ, drawn from the distinct history and experience of

the residents, but they all thrive under the second line umbrella of New Orleans music.

ATKINSON BIO

Connie Zeanah Atkinson is co-director of the Midlo Center for New Orleans Studies at the

University of New Orleans, where for 20 years she has taught the history of New Orleans music.

Dr. Atkinson received her PhD from the Institute of Popular Music, Liverpool, England. She

worked at the Courier and Figaro newspapers, New Orleans Magazine, and was editor and

publisher of Wavelength, New Orleans Music Magazine.