New Orleans, 1910

Although every city contains its contradictions, as Louis Eric Elie notes in her 2013 book Unfathomable City, New Orleans is “in many ways a segregated city, its populations form blurry, complex checkerboards, whose inhabitants also intermarry, mingle in various ways, and don’t lend themselves readily to being mapped.” 7 The city’s improvisational style has influenced every aspect of its life. To historian Lawrence Powell, for whom New Orleans is the Accidental City, the distinctive local cuisine contains the essential elements that have made New Orleans its own place.

“The kitchens may have been French,” Powell writes, “but the cooks were slaves, tossing in the same kettle culinary ingredients plucked from three continents. They received direction from the mistress of the house, but they were the ones who occupied the nexus between town and country. Not only did they cook the food but they purchased the groceries from petty tradesmen and footloose trappers, themselves slaves; and in the process, they skimmed off something extra— “lagniappe,” as later generations would describe it — in the form of income and victuals. . . . In other words, African slaves not only stirred the pot; they filled it too.” 8

What was true in the pots and pans that hung over the stoves of this swamp metropolis proved equally true when New Orleanians put down their spoons and knives and picked up musical instruments,

which similarly had been created on three continents. The results, of course, became known to the world as “jazz.” Jazz, to a considerable degree, is the music that emerged more than a century ago from the rough-and-tumble streets of the city’s Storyville neighborhood, a so-called red light district, through the powerful collision of African musical traditions, at times filtered through the Caribbean idiom, with European instrumentation.

This clash has occurred since the city’s founding. French and later Spanish colonial administrators allowed, and even encouraged, African-born slaves and their descendants to congregate on Sundays to form drum and dance circles, trade, and practice the traditions of their homelands on a barren patch of land in the “back of town” that became known as Congo Square. These gatherings persisted into the American period, until a fearful antebellum elite led by local slave owners brought them to a halt. Gatherings nonetheless continued elsewhere in the city, with Congo Square and the nearby Tremé neighborhood remaining focal points for musicians and musical forms that combined African, Caribbean, European and American traditions.

Freddi Williams Evans records the story well in her history Congo Square (2011). Evans writes, “alongside European-derived dances, some African descendants continued to dance in the ways of their tradition. Several of the eyewitness accounts of Congo Square gatherings, given during the 1840s, indicate that the dance and the music were African. Dance descriptions written in the 1940s, around one hundred years after the gatherings ceased, show that black New Orleanians continued to employ those rhythms, dances, musical instruments, or cultural practices. The use of handkerchiefs when dancing and the receiving of money for impressive, informal street performances became standards in New Orleans culture. . . . Thus, African-based rhythms that both stimulated and accompanied dance steps undergirded indigenous New Orleans styles. Indeed, the music and the dance continuously influenced each other.” 9

Such connections have remained just below the surface of “proper” New Orleanian society for most of the city’s existence. It is doubtful, for example, that more than a handful of the white shoppers making their way down busy Canal Street in 1915 trying to finish their daily errands noticed two teenage “colored boys” playing their hearts out for50 cents a day on a flatbed advertising wagon. None of these shoppers probably ever thought for a moment that they were listening to a free concert by players who would become two of the most important musicians of the century, Sidney Bechet on clarinet, and Louis Armstrong on cornet.

Music thus flowed over racial, ethic, class and gender divisions, all the more so because it often was played outside in earshot of everyone. The result was jazz, but so much more. The city’s musicians have played pivotal roles in developing at least three more of the

twentieth century’s most potent musical forms: Gospel; rock ’n’ roll; and, hiphop. Although each of these later genres has multiple claimants for parenthood, there is no doubt that the Crescent City nurtured some of the most seminal figures in each. A cappella quartets such as the Zion Harmonizers moved Gospel from the storefront to established churches during the 1920s and 1930s; and Water Street–born Mahalia Jackson helped to secure Gospel’s acceptance nationwide. Every African American performer of note during the 1940s and 1950s cut his or her musical teeth in the city, driving jazz- and blues-laced rhythm & blues into what is now known as rock ’n’ roll. More recently, hip-hop and “bounce” (the local dance party music that emerged from public housing projects in the 1990s, hence known as “Project Music”) have taken pride of place.

Underneath all the music — from the drums of Congo Square to the electrified rubber bands at the Magnolia Projects a couple of centuries later — lies the most distinctive element of all New Orleans music: a powerful bass line. Bass defines New Orleans music, whether it has been played by African or snare drums, acoustic or electrified basses, tubas or foghorns, or chanted by Mardi Gras Indians. Let the music get “dirty and lowdown” and “muddy as the Mississippi,” and whatever is happening up above doesn’t matter. It’s New Orleans.

The city’s incredibly fertile musical atmosphere — like its cuisine — is no accident. It is a result of a vibrant mixing of cultures (Native American, European, African and Caribbean) within the physical context of shared space (Congo Square, Storyville, Plymouth Rock Baptist Church, the Dew Drop Inn, the Calliope and Magnolia Housing Projects), as multigenerational musical families (e.g., the Marsalises, the Bastiles, the Nevilles, the Harrisons and the Millers) and institutions (including churches, bars, clubs, so-called social aid and pleasure clubs, radio stations, heritage music festivals and everything associated with Mardi Gras) come together to confront the demons arising from poverty and disenfranchisement.