West Indian slaves of African descent were the touch point of New Orleans music. On Sunday afternoons, slaves gathered in Congo Square (now part of Louis Armstrong Park on Rampart), where they performed tribal dances and chants with stirring rhythms to African percussions. Thousands gathered to watch the spectacles.

New Orleans author, Honey Naylor, suggests that Charles “Buddy” Bolden, was among the onlookers at the Square and that he mixed those tribal and Creole elements with African-American ragtime and spirituals, folk songs, the blues, and even the cries of the street vendors who once filled the Vieux Carré, interpreting them with a European brass sound.

Some time in the Gay ’90s, Buddy put his cornet to his lips and blew hot notes and cool tunes. He’d invented an American original and world favorite. As with the original African music, the key to jazz was and is improvisation. In the early days, musicians often started with a blues piece as a reference point and played their way into a new composition. Nothing much has changed there for the greats, except it doesn’t have to start with blues.

Jazz picked up momentum in Storyville, where early improvisational masters like King Oliver, his protegé, Louis Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton (the first to set jazz compositions on paper) played. Lately, a new jazz generation has emerged under the tutelage of patriarch Ellis Marsalis. His sons Marsalis and Branford and his one-time student Harry Connick, Jr., are some of the young lions who have taken jazz in new directions and rediscovered old favorites. Their students and protegés are now only the fourth generation of what has become an international classic.

Land of Dixie

After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, ten-dollar bills were printed bilingually in French and English. “Dix,’ which is French for “ten,” was engraved in large letters on the back, and the bills were known as “dixies.” It was either from the land of these dixies or from a corruption of the “Mason-Dixon line” to Dixieline that Dixieland jazz got its name.

The style is hard to define. Commonly harder-driving than other forms of jazz, instruments often include a banjo and a tuba, and vocalists are rare. The ensemble musicians take turns improvising in solos. It’s upbeat, with a 4/4 meter, but a 2-beat style, something like ragtime.

Bit of the Blues

The blues may have originated elsewhere, but a blues sensibility runs deeper here than the river currents. Starting in 1949, Fats Domino took R&B to gold on the hit charts with “The Fat Man” and “Blueberry Hill.” Bluesman Henry Roeland Byrd, a.k.a. Professor Longhair (Fess to his friends), began as a tap dancer, played piano in honky-tonks, and created a style that mixed Latin rumba, mambo, and calypso stylings with an Afro-Caribbean beat interpreted with a percussive keyboard style. His “Go to the Mardi Gras” became a local anthem.

In the ’60s Creole pianist Allen Toussaint penned hits for Queen of the Blues, Irma Thomas, Aaron Neville, and Ernie K-Doe. With the invasion of English rock bands like the Beatles and the Stones, the blues were swept aside until the ’70s, when New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival reintroduced the style to a new generation of music lovers.

Cajun & Zydeco Music

Cajuns, who were expelled from Acadia in Nova Scotia in 1755, brought with them to Louisiana music of French origins. Then it simmered in a gumbo mixing Native American, Creole, West Indian, British, Spanish, and other European influences. Now, Cajun tunes are primarily thought of as dance music and still include the old European names in the dance forms: contradanses, gigues, gallops, reels, mazurkas, polkas, cotillions, valses Juliens, valses à deux temps, Varsouviennes.

After 1925, the accordian, a German influence, added accordians to the fiddles and pumped up the volume to carry across crowded dance floors. Cajun singers pitched their voices high and cried out, both from emotion and to be heard above the din. The steel guitar and other instruments came a few years later. Mixing the same European and New World ingredients, Creoles threw in African/West Indian rhythms and soulful blues and produced a variation

of the Cajun music. Then, in the ’40s, influenced by Creole compositions, piano accordianist Clifton Chenier formed a band with his brother, Cleveland, who played percussion on the washboard. He graduated to corrugated tin played with spoons and bottle openers and finally to the trademark Zydeco instrument, the frottoir.