The Sound ofNew Orleans

In a large open square at the edge of the French Quarter — today's Louis Armstrong Park in the Tremé — enslaved African people gathered on Sundays to sing, dance, and play music. Louisiana's 1724 Code Noir set Sundays and holy days aside as non-work days, and in 1817 the city restricted such Sunday gatherings to this square — by then already known as Congo Square. The practice was rare in the American South, and it allowed the preservation and transmission of African musical traditions in a way that was unusual in North America.

The music made in Congo Square — the rhythms, the call-and-response patterns, the approach to collective improvisation — became foundational to everything that would follow. In 1819, architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe described a Sunday gathering of some 500 to 600 people there: instruments, dancing, a cultural memory that slavery was designed to destroy. The exact beginnings of the tradition are not documented, but Congo Square is the deepest root of New Orleans music, and through New Orleans music, of American popular music as a whole.

New Orleans in the 19th century was unlike any other American city. Its history as a French and Spanish colony, its large population of free people of color — many of whom were educated, property-owning, and musically sophisticated — and its proximity to the Caribbean created a cultural environment of extraordinary complexity and richness.

The free Black Creole community of New Orleans had access to European classical music education, opera, and the concert hall. They also maintained deep connections to African and Caribbean musical traditions. This double musical inheritance — European harmonic sophistication combined with African rhythmic complexity — was the precise combination that would produce jazz at the turn of the century.

Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, which would later become the organizational backbone of the second-line parade tradition, were established during this period as mutual aid societies for the Black community. Their role in supporting the development of New Orleans music — by organizing events, funding musicians, and maintaining the parade tradition — cannot be overstated.

In 1897, an ordinance sponsored by Alderman Sidney Story established a legal red-light district — bounded by Basin, Robertson, Customhouse (now Iberville), and St. Louis Streets — that came to be known as Storyville. For the next twenty years, this district was one of the most concentrated entertainment zones in American history (contemporary accounts of its size vary), and its brothels, saloons, and dance halls became an important source of employment for the musicians who were developing what would become jazz.

The music played in Storyville was practical music — it had to keep people dancing, drinking, and spending money. This functional requirement shaped the music profoundly: it had to be rhythmically compelling, emotionally direct, and adaptable to the needs of a rowdy, diverse audience. The musicians who worked Storyville — among them the young Jelly Roll Morton and countless others — developed an approach to performance that was loose, improvisational, and deeply responsive to the crowd.

Storyville closed on November 12, 1917, under pressure from the U.S. Navy Department, which was concerned about the district's influence on sailors stationed in New Orleans during World War I. New Orleans musicians were already heading north for work before the district closed, and historians have questioned the older story that the closure alone caused a mass exodus — the broader Great Migration and economic forces mattered more.

Charles "Buddy" Bolden is often cited as the first jazz musician — the cornetist whose powerful, blues-inflected playing in the dance halls of uptown New Orleans in the late 1890s and early 1900s first brought together the musical elements that would define jazz. No recordings of Bolden survive, but the testimony of musicians who heard him is consistent: he played louder and with more feeling than anyone before him, and the crowds followed him everywhere.

Bolden's band played in a style that was looser and more improvisational than the ragtime ensembles of the day. He bent notes, he played the blues into everything, he improvised freely — and the dancers responded. His legend is enormous precisely because it lives entirely in memory and testimony, unmediated by recordings.

The music that would come to be called jazz emerged in New Orleans in the first decade of the 20th century from a specific set of cultural conditions: the African American musical traditions preserved and developed in Congo Square; the European harmonic language absorbed by the Creole community through classical training; the blues feeling carried up from the Mississippi Delta; the march rhythms of the brass band tradition; and the improvisational freedom demanded by the dance halls and saloons of Storyville.

What made jazz new was not any single one of these elements but their combination — and specifically, the principle of collective improvisation that New Orleans musicians developed. In early New Orleans jazz, the trumpet carried the melody while the clarinet wove elaborations above it and the trombone supplied a bass-register countermelody. All three improvised simultaneously, listening to each other and responding, creating something that was simultaneously composed and spontaneous.

In 1917, the Original Dixieland Jass Band — five white New Orleans musicians — traveled to New York and made what are generally regarded as the first commercially released jazz recordings: "Livery Stable Blues" and "Dixie Jass Band One-Step," cut for Victor in February 1917. The records were hits, and they carried the word "jazz" — and the sound — to audiences far beyond New Orleans, even as the city's Black musicians, the music's principal creators, went unrecorded for several more years.

While jazz was developing in the dance halls, a parallel tradition was flourishing in the streets. New Orleans brass bands — organized by Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs to play at funerals and parades — were developing their own distinctive musical identity, rooted in march music but increasingly influenced by the jazz and blues sounds around them.

The New Orleans funeral — with its solemn procession to the cemetery followed by the joyful second-line return — established the emotional and musical template that would define the brass band tradition for more than a century. The movement from grief to celebration, expressed musically as a shift from slow hymns to fast, swinging jazz, encapsulates something essential about New Orleans culture's relationship to life and death.

Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans in 1901 and grew up in the city's streets and institutions — including the Colored Waifs' Home, where he first learned to play cornet. He came of age in the New Orleans jazz tradition, playing in the city's dance halls and on the riverboats, before following his mentor King Oliver to Chicago in 1922.

What Armstrong did in Chicago — and later in New York — fundamentally changed jazz and, through jazz, all of American popular music. His recordings with the Hot Five and Hot Seven between 1925 and 1928 established a vocabulary of jazz soloing that generations of musicians have worked within or against. His tone, his timing, his melodic invention, his rhythmic freedom — these qualities set a standard few have matched.

Armstrong became one of the most famous musicians in the world — Ambassador Satch, the face of jazz to audiences who had never been to New Orleans. But he never forgot where he came from, and the New Orleans tradition never left his playing.

Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton was born in New Orleans — his baptismal certificate, issued in 1894, gives October 20, 1890, the date now commonly used, though no birth certificate has been found and other records give different years — and came of age playing in the Storyville district. He was one of the most complex and contradictory figures in jazz history — a self-promoter of almost comic dimensions who nonetheless possessed genuine and extraordinary gifts as a pianist, composer, and arranger.

Morton's recordings with the Red Hot Peppers in 1926 and 1927 are among the most carefully crafted documents in early jazz — proof that the music could be composed and arranged with sophistication while retaining the spontaneity and feeling that defined it. His "Black Bottom Stomp," "Dead Man Blues," and "Grandpa's Spells" remain masterpieces of the form.

The broader migration of African Americans northward during and after World War I sent New Orleans musicians to Chicago, New York, Kansas City, and Los Angeles — the closure of Storyville in 1917 was one factor among many, not the single cause. They carried with them a musical language that was unlike anything else in American culture, and everywhere they went, they changed the music of the place they arrived.

Chicago became the first great center of jazz outside New Orleans, as King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, and others established the music in the city's South Side clubs. New York followed, and the interaction between the New Orleans tradition and the sophistication of the New York scene helped produce the swing era of the 1930s, when jazz reached a mass national audience.

In the mid-1940s, a young Italian-American named Cosimo Matassa opened J&M Recording Studio at 838 North Rampart Street, on the corner of Rampart and Dumaine. Over the next two decades, many of the most important records in the history of American popular music were cut in his studios — historian Jeff Hannusch wrote that virtually every R&B record made in New Orleans between the late 1940s and the early 1970s was engineered by Matassa.

Matassa's studio had a particular sound — warm, spacious, slightly reverberant — that became the sonic signature of New Orleans R&B. The combination of his room acoustics, his engineering instincts, and the extraordinary pool of session musicians available in the city produced a body of recordings that helped define an era. Drummer Earl Palmer, bassist Frank Fields, and pianist Huey "Piano" Smith were among the regulars who gave those recordings their distinctive groove.

Antoine "Fats" Domino recorded "The Fat Man" at Cosimo Matassa's studio in December 1949 — a record often cited as a contender for the first rock-and-roll record. With his rolling, boogie-woogie-influenced piano style and warm, approachable voice, Domino went on to become one of the biggest-selling artists of the 1950s — reported to have sold more records in the decade than anyone except Elvis Presley, according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's official biography.

"Blueberry Hill," "I'm Walkin'," "Ain't That a Shame" — these records, made in New Orleans with New Orleans musicians, were among the first to cross over from the R&B charts to massive pop success, bringing the sound of the city to a national and international audience for the first time since Louis Armstrong.

New Orleans' contribution to the invention of rock and roll is one of the most important and least acknowledged stories in American music history. The rolling piano style developed by Professor Longhair and popularized by Fats Domino provided the rhythmic and harmonic template for early rock and roll. At Cosimo Matassa's studio, Earl Palmer's driving straight-eight backbeat helped establish the rhythmic model that would power rock and roll for generations.

Little Richard recorded many of his greatest sides in New Orleans, with New Orleans musicians, in a room that had the sound of New Orleans in its walls. The wildness and physical abandon of his performances drew directly on the New Orleans tradition of music as bodily experience. The debt runs through the entire history of rock music — the Rolling Stones recorded Toussaint's "Fortune Teller" and Irma Thomas's "Time Is on My Side," both New Orleans R&B songs, early in their career.

Allen Toussaint emerged as a producer, songwriter, and arranger for Minit Records in the late 1950s and quickly became one of the most important figures in New Orleans music. His productions for Ernie K-Doe, Irma Thomas, Lee Dorsey, and dozens of others defined the sound of New Orleans R&B in the 1960s — syncopated piano, conversational horn arrangements, and a rhythmic looseness that distinguished New Orleans from the more rigid soul sounds coming from Detroit or Memphis.

Toussaint's influence extended far beyond New Orleans. The songs he wrote — "Working in a Coal Mine," "Fortune Teller," "Ride Your Pony," "Yes We Can Can" — were recorded by artists from the Rolling Stones to Labelle to Glen Campbell. He was one of the great song craftsmen of the 20th century, and the sound he created at his Sea-Saint Studios in the 1970s remains distinctive in American music.

When Art Neville, Leo Nocentelli, George Porter Jr., and Joseph "Zigaboo" Modeliste began playing together as the Meters in the mid-1960s, they created a sound that would become one of the most influential in American music history. Their approach to rhythm was radical in its simplicity: strip everything back to the essentials, let each instrument lock into a specific rhythmic role, and let the spaces between the notes be as important as the notes themselves.

Their recordings — beginning with the 1969 instrumental "Cissy Strut," which reached No. 4 on the R&B chart and No. 23 on the pop chart and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2011 — are among the most sampled in music history, forming the rhythmic backbone of hundreds of hip-hop tracks and influencing funk, soul, and jam-band music worldwide. The Meters didn't invent funk — but they showed the world what funk really meant.

Henry Roeland Byrd — Professor Longhair — had been one of the central figures of New Orleans R&B piano since the late 1940s, but by the 1960s he had largely faded from view, working as a janitor and card dealer while the music world moved on. His rediscovery around 1970–71 — culminating in a triumphant appearance at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival (accounts differ on whether his comeback appearance was the 1970 or the 1971 festival) — is one of the great second-act stories in American music.

Longhair's rhumba-inflected approach to the blues piano — incorporating Cuban rhythms into a Delta-derived harmonic framework — was so original and so deeply New Orleans that it remained the foundation for virtually every piano player in the city's tradition. His influence on Fats Domino, James Booker, Dr. John, Allen Toussaint, and Jon Batiste is direct and audible. Tipitina's, the great New Orleans music club, took its name from one of his songs.

Wynton Marsalis was born in New Orleans in 1961, the son of pianist Ellis Marsalis, and grew up immersed in the city's musical culture. When he burst onto the national scene in the early 1980s with his extraordinary technique and his passionate advocacy for jazz as a serious art form, he changed the conversation about American music in ways that are still being felt.

Marsalis's insistence on jazz's legitimacy as a serious art form — comparable to European classical music in its sophistication and historical importance — brought a new seriousness and visibility to the music. His Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra became one of the most prominent jazz institutions in the country, and his oratorio "Blood on the Fields" won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Music — the first jazz composition, and the first non-classical work, to win the prize. He remains one of the most prominent advocates for jazz as a living tradition.

Tipitina's opened in 1977 as a home for Professor Longhair, whose song "Tipitina" gave the club its name. Through the 1980s and 1990s it became the anchor of the New Orleans live music scene — the room where every major local act eventually played, where national acts came to experience the energy of a New Orleans crowd, and where the community of musicians, music lovers, and industry figures that sustained the scene gathered.

The Tipitina's Foundation, established later, extended the club's mission into music education and musician support — providing instruments to students, funding for musicians in need, and an institutional commitment to the tradition that went beyond the purely commercial.

The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, formed in 1977, and the Rebirth Brass Band, formed in 1983, led a revival of the New Orleans brass band tradition that brought the music to new audiences while deepening its connection to the street-level culture that had always been its home. The Dirty Dozen incorporated bebop harmonics and R&B energy; Rebirth pushed further toward hip-hop and contemporary R&B while maintaining a strong second-line foundation.

The brass band revival was both a musical and a social phenomenon — it reconnected the music to the second-line parade tradition, which had continued throughout the lean years but had been somewhat overlooked by the music industry. Sunday second-line parades, organized by Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, became increasingly visible as community events and eventually as tourist attractions — though their primary importance remained as expressions of neighborhood identity and community solidarity.

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans and the subsequent failure of the city's levee system flooded about 80% of the city. The National Hurricane Center's revised toll stands at 1,392 deaths across the Gulf Coast, and the storm displaced hundreds of thousands. The storm scattered the community of musicians, club owners, and music lovers that had sustained New Orleans music for generations — suddenly, the people who made the city's musical culture were spread across the country, from Houston to Atlanta to Chicago.

The threat to New Orleans music was existential. The musicians who played the clubs, the owners who ran them, the audiences who filled them, the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs that organized the second lines — all were gone, or trying to survive in unfamiliar cities. For a moment, it seemed possible that the culture would not come back.

It came back. The musicians returned, the clubs reopened, the second lines resumed. The music became, if anything, more important to the community's sense of identity and resilience — a proof that New Orleans existed, that its culture was real and vital, that the city was worth rebuilding. The post-Katrina period produced some of the most emotionally powerful music in New Orleans history.

In the post-Katrina years, Frenchmen Street in the Faubourg Marigny became a major center of New Orleans' live music scene — a three-block stretch of clubs that offered something the French Quarter had largely lost: locally-oriented live music for a mixed audience of locals and visitors, without the tourist infrastructure of Bourbon Street.

Snug Harbor, d.b.a., The Spotted Cat, The Apple Barrel, The Maison — these clubs hosted the musicians who were rebuilding the scene, creating an environment where jazz, brass band, funk, and blues existed side by side, where young musicians could develop alongside veterans, and where the community could gather to affirm that New Orleans music was alive.

New Orleans music today is both deeply traditional and constantly evolving. The second-line parade tradition continues through the fall-to-spring season, organized by Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs that maintain a direct connection to the 19th-century institutions that created the tradition. The brass band scene is as vital as it has ever been, with young bands emerging constantly from the city's neighborhoods. Jazz continues in its multiple forms — from the traditional ensembles at Preservation Hall to the experimental work of musicians on Frenchmen Street.

Jon Batiste — born in New Orleans, from one of the city's great musical families — has become one of the most celebrated musicians in the world, winning multiple Grammy Awards and carrying the New Orleans tradition to audiences of millions. Bounce, the city's own hip-hop, has reached global audiences through artists like Big Freedia. The New Orleans Klezmer All Stars continue to demonstrate the city's extraordinary capacity to absorb diverse musical traditions and make them its own.

The story of New Orleans music is not finished. It is one of the oldest and most continuously generative musical traditions in America — and it shows no signs of stopping.