1920 is avowedly associated with the beginnings of jazz. Two years after the end of World War I, its aftermath brought a yearning for escape as a pandemic, the Spanish flu, was winding down, having infected over 500 million people worldwide and causing over 25 million deaths. In America, social change started bubbling up as prohibition began, women achieved voting rights, and unions called for national strikes in favor of labor reform. The country was ready for entertainment.

Jazz would become the soundtrack of an era. Instrumental in helping to cross the color lines, while segregation was still in place. Black musicians moved north, and white audiences flocked to the dance clubs in Harlem. The world soon embraced this particular genre of music whose real birth in fact took place decades earlier, in a city where integration had happened on and off since the early 18^th century under French and Spanish rule and then been abandoned after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 – New Orleans.

New Orleans was a port city where a blend of Creole culture and African traditions, peppered with European influences infused every area of life. Early jazz – or “jass” as it was spelled then – is a blend of blues and ragtime (the latter most notably performed by Scott Joplin), its roots the music of African enslaved people who sang songs on the cotton fields to find some relief in their back-breaking work. There are elements of voodoo music, of gospel hymns and of brass bands that were and are so popular in the city.

Around 1819, Congo Square (now Louis Armstrong Park), was an outdoor space where enslaved people would congregate on Sundays when the old French law of the Code Noir that was still in place, stated that they did not have to work. They sang and danced and played Cuban-style rhythms (Havaña is New Orleans’ sister city when it comes to jazz) with simple instruments, often fashioned from pieces of wood and metal and whatever else they could find.

Jazz really began to blossom in 1897, when Storyville was developed: a 38-block red light district as a means of containing prostitution to one part of the city. Its brothels provided young jazz musicians with a space to perform. Five years ago, an exhibit titled “Madams & Music” at the New Orleans Historic Collection in the French Quarter detailed the birth and growth of jazz. Even though the law did not permit integrated performances, in Storyville all bets were off as black musicians played in white brothels catering to a white clientele.  Black men were not allowed into these brothels. Unless they were musicians. And often because they were invited by their white artist friends to sit in, resulting in their own gigs at these establishments.

Madam Lulu White’s Mahogany Hall, for example, was a staple for parlor pianist Jelly Roll Morton, who started to play there at the age of 14. His nickname has a sexual connotation which was African American slang for female genitalia. His composition “Jelly Roll Blues” in 1915, was one of the first published jazz compositions. He also claimed to have invented the genre, an assertion his colleague cornetist Buddy Bolden would take offense at. At another brothel, “Big 25”, Joe “King” Oliver and “Big Eye” Louis Nelson perfected their craft.

Which brings us to Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong (1901-1971) who was born and grew up in ‘Black Storyville’, just down the street from Storyville and nowadays known as ‘Backatown’. Armstrong ultimately became the most influential figure in jazz music. His mother worked in one of the houses of ill repute as they were called. Young Louis grew up in the midst of it and said later: “I also looked forward to every night in the Red Light District, when I was delivering stone coal to the girls working in those cribs. I could hear these wonderful jazz musicians playing music the way it should be played.” These musical influences stayed with him when he started running errands for the Karnoffskys, a family of Lithuanian Jews who had a music store on Rampart Street, which became a landmark and sadly got destroyed by Hurricane Ida in 2021. Morris Karnoffsky gave the young boy a cornet from a pawn shop. It was his starter instrument, and the rest is history.

By way of Chicago and Harlem he ended up being hired by Hollywood, became friends with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and was the first jazz musician to appear on the cover of Time Magazine. But he never forgot his roots: “Every time I close my eyes blowing that trumpet of mine—I look right in the heart of good old New Orleans … It has given me something to live for.”

To this day, New Orleans Jazz features a colorful mix of artists: in 1961 the famous Preservation Jazz Hall was taken over by Allan and Sandra Jaffe, a white Jewish couple, originally from Pennsylvania who fell in love with the city and its music. The Jaffes opened The Hall as the first integrated jazz club in the South and hired musicians whose ages ranged from the 60s to the 90s and were often struggling with discrimination, poverty and illness. Their son, Ben Jaffe, a bandleader and tuba player, keeps up the traditions, and the club is known to have any visiting musician sit in on the sets, like The Who’s Pete Townshend did famously last May. Locals like Jon Batiste, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Irma Thomas, Harry Connick Jr, Kermit Ruffins, Danny Barker, Trombone Shorty and many more often jam together.

In New Orleans as in Harlem and some other places in the US, jazz history is Black history.