1. Original Jelly Roll Blues

      NEW ORLEANS HAS A JUSTIFIABLE CLAIM to being the birthplace of the music known as jazz. The African roots of Black New Orleans reach deeply into Senegal and Guinea, regions with rich and extensive musical traditions,¹ particularly with regard to stringed instruments and percussion, the heart of rhythm sections that distinguished the new music. However, this music was often played with instruments of European origin, for example, the horn devised by Belgium’s Adolphe Sax in the early 1840s, and the European influence was strong at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

      Nevertheless, the wider point is that these European instruments (and those of African derivation, too, for example the banjo and drums) were infused with the unique culture that arose in New Orleans’ Congo Square, one that reflected a potpourri of West African and North American influences.² Interviewed by the pacesetting Jazz Studies initiative of Tulane University in 1958, Alice Zeno—the mother of clarinetist George Lewis and born in 1864—spoke of her grandmother, born in 1810 and passing away in 1910. This elder spoke to her granddaughter in Wolof; the younger also spoke French, the language she spoke more than English in the first years of her life—before learning German and Spanish. Zeno in some ways resembles the new music that arose in the late nineteenth century, a mélange of African, European, and North American influences.³

      Still, Africa was at the root: U.S. Negro missionaries in the Congo in the late nineteenth century were stunned to hear melodies reminiscent of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” then a musical staple back home.⁴ The bassist Gene Ramey, born in Austin, Texas, in 1913, said that his grandmother “remembers coming from Madagascar, yeah, at the age of four or five….”⁵ Yet another bassist, George “Red” Callender, has spoken of his “Ashanti,” a West African ethnic group, ancestry.⁶

      New Orleans may have been the opera capital of the United States during the antebellum era.⁷ Reportedly, New Orleans was the only U.S. city to maintain an opera company continuously in the nineteenth century, the Civil War years (1861–1865) excepted. It also has a rich history of Free Negro culture, which included a militia with drum companies. Some Free Negro musicians were educated abroad, circumventing the U.S. preoccupation: depriving Negroes of education of all sorts.⁸ After the Civil War, a number of musicians in bands with the vanquished so-called Confederate States of America dumped their instruments in pawnshops in New Orleans, and Negroes happily bought some of these battered instruments, tools that jump-started the creation of a new musical art form.⁹ Moreover, the banjoist known as Creole George Guesnon, born in New Orleans in 1907, argued passionately that “I don’t believe there is any other city on the face of the earth as rich in Negro folklore and unwritten legends as New Orleans,” a phenomenon that fed imagination and creativity, contributing to the blossoming of a new music.¹⁰

      There were other peculiar tendencies shaping the emerging new music. John Wiggs, a bandleader born in 1899 in New Orleans, spoke movingly of those he called “bottlemen,” who collected glass vessels and accompanied their task by blowing on horns—often three feet long—rendering beautiful blues songs that could be heard blocks away. Later he noticed the same trills and flourishes of these men replicated by trumpeters, particularly the “bending of notes.” They also used cowbells. Children were drawn to these men as they exchanged dolls for bottles.¹¹ Some of the earliest performances of the new music that took place were heard along Franklin Street inside such places as the Twenty-Eight Club and the Pig Ankle Cabaret; these “spasm bands” used homemade instruments and often honed their art on street corners. Some white and “Creole-of-color” residents dismissed it as “bawdyhouse music.”¹²

      Invention and innovation were the watchwords of this new music and were represented by the father of Joseph Thomas. The younger was a clarinetist and vocalist born in 1902; the elder played a broom, drawn across the thumb, that sounded like a violin.¹³ Mary Lucy Hamill O’Kelly, born in Vicksburg in 1876, recalled in 1958, “I can’t remember when I first knew jazz as being jazz. I just thought it was sort of embroidery that the Negroes put on tunes that they played.” She observed, “They’d add little extra notes and quivers and trills and runs and syncopation and make the thing sound entirely different,” a fair estimate of the new music.¹⁴ There were other influences on the music. The talented trumpeter Clark Terry, born in St. Louis in 1920, attributed his distinctive style to emulating “mariachi [Mexican] players who are forced to master their mouthpieces before they’re given the horns.”¹⁵

      The opera brought by European migrants also delivered a panoply of musical influences surrounding Negroes. By 1910, New Orleans also happened to have more Italian Americans than any other U.S. city, which further contributed to the rich stew of musical influences.¹⁶

      THE MUSICIAN PAUL BARBARIN SAYS that growing up he could hear bands playing even if they were almost two miles away. Fewer buildings, he says, meant sound traveled with more facility, allowing exposure to diverse forms of music. Singers with booming voices could also be heard, even if they were speaking in a language other than English. He grew up with the sound of French since his mother spoke the language—she “speaks good French … she always talk in French … we understood it..”¹⁷ One witness claims that the scintillating cornet playing of the legendary Buddy Bolden “was so powerful they could dance to his music 10 miles away.”¹⁸

      Charles Elgar, born in 1879 in New Orleans, studied violin with a French teacher, who was an assistant conductor with the French Opera.¹⁹ The first trumpet teacher of Johnny De Droit, born in 1892, was from the Republican Guard in France and was also first trumpet in their band.²⁰ His parents