The History of Jazz Music: From New Orleans to the World
On February 26, 1917, a white five-piece band from New Orleans walked into a recording studio in New York City and cut two sides for the Victor Talking Machine Company. The band called itself the Original Dixieland Jass Band, and the first tune they recorded, “Livery Stable Blues,” is generally considered the first jazz record. Within a year it had sold more than a million copies. The word “jass” (soon shortened to “jazz”) was on its way into the English language, and the music it described was about to conquer the twentieth century.
The full story of jazz age music is treated in the parent section, and the musicians who made it famous are profiled in famous jazz musicians of the 1920s. This page is a focused history of how jazz was born, how it traveled, and how it became America’s first original contribution to world music.
African Roots and the New Orleans Crucible
Jazz did not spring fully formed from the New Orleans soil. It was the product of a centuries-long conversation between African and European musical traditions, conducted under the brutal conditions of slavery and its aftermath. The African musical traditions brought by enslaved people — polyrhythmic drumming, call-and-response singing, blue notes, bent pitches, communal improvisation — survived the Middle Passage and became the foundation of African American music in the South.
In the sugar and cotton parishes of Louisiana, these African traditions mingled with the French, Spanish, and Caribbean musical cultures of New Orleans. The Creole population — descendants of French and Spanish settlers and free people of color — maintained a sophisticated European art-music tradition, including brass band music, that influenced the emerging jazz style. Three other strands fed into the new music: the work songs and spirituals of the enslaved; the blues of the Mississippi Delta, with its twelve-bar progression and “blue note”; and ragtime, the syncopated piano music pioneered by Scott Joplin (1868–1917).
Storyville and the Birth of Jazz
By the 1890s, New Orleans had developed a remarkable musical ecosystem. Brass bands marched in funeral processions, played in public squares, and performed at social clubs. The most concentrated of these venues was Storyville, the city’s legalized red-light district, established by ordinance in 1897. Storyville’s saloons and dance halls employed many of the city’s best musicians.
The earliest jazz musicians worked in Storyville. Buddy Bolden (1877–1931), a cornetist, is often called the first jazz musician; he is credited with being the first to blend ragtime, blues, and brass-band traditions into a hotter, more improvised music. Other early New Orleans masters included Jelly Roll Morton (1890–1941), who later claimed to have invented jazz; Joe “King” Oliver (1881–1938), the cornetist who would become Louis Armstrong’s mentor; and Baby Dodds (1898–1959), one of the first great jazz drummers.
The story changed suddenly in 1917, when the U.S. Navy shut down Storyville on the eve of American entry into World War I. With their primary employment gone, New Orleans jazz musicians scattered, many to Chicago, the nearest major city and the terminus of the Illinois Central railroad that had brought Delta blues north.
Chicago and the Recording Boom
Chicago was the first great northern city of jazz. The Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South was already well underway, and the South Side was one of the largest Black communities in the country. Two distinct streams of musicians arrived in the late 1910s and early 1920s. The white musicians came from the city’s North Side, often from middle-class families; the most famous were the members of the Austin High Gang, a group of white teenagers from Austin High School, including the cornetist Bix Beiderbecke (1903–1931). The Black musicians came from New Orleans and the surrounding South. King Oliver moved his Creole Jazz Band to Chicago in 1918, and Louis Armstrong followed in 1922.
Chicago was also the site of a remarkable growth in the recording industry. Okeh Records, founded in 1918, established a studio in the city and in 1920 recorded “Crazy Blues” by Mamie Smith (1883–1946) — the first commercial blues recording by a Black artist. The record sold 75,000 copies in its first month and inaugurated the “race records” market that would be the financial foundation of the early jazz industry.
Louis Armstrong and the Classic Jazz Era
The single most important musician in early jazz history was Louis Armstrong (1901–1971), born in poverty in New Orleans. He joined King Oliver’s band in Chicago in 1922 and, after two formative years, formed his own small groups for recording sessions. The Hot Five (1925–1927) and the Hot Seven (1927–1928) recorded in Chicago for Okeh, and the resulting discs — “Cornet Chop Suey,” “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue,” “Heebie Jeebies,” “Potato Head Blues,” and the masterpiece “West End Blues” (1928) — are the foundation of the jazz tradition.
Armstrong’s importance was technical, musical, and cultural. He extended the improvisational vocabulary of jazz, transformed jazz from a primarily ensemble music into a soloist’s art, and made jazz into an international music heard from London to Tokyo. The other great individual voices of 1920s jazz are profiled in famous jazz musicians of the 1920s.
The Big Bands and the New York Scene
By the late 1920s, jazz was moving from small combos to large ensembles, and the center of the music business had shifted to New York. The most important big band of the early era was Fletcher Henderson’s, a Black orchestra with a residency at the Roseland Ballroom from 1924. Henderson’s arranger, Don Redman (1900–1964), invented the written arrangement that allowed big bands to function. The most consequential arrival in New York was Duke Ellington (1899–1974), whose band began its legendary residency at the Cotton Club in Harlem in December 1927. Ellington’s sophisticated arrangements, blending jazz with classical and popular elements, made his band the most acclaimed in the country. The Harlem nightclub scene that Ellington inhabited is treated in Harlem nightclubs in the 1920s.
The 1920s also saw the rise of the dance band, a large ensemble that played for ballroom dancing. The most successful was Paul Whiteman’s, a Denver-born violist who built a 26-piece “symphonic jazz” orchestra and was called the “King of Jazz.” Whiteman’s 1924 Aeolian Hall concert premiered George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and was a public coronation of jazz as high art.
Kansas City and the International Spread
Far from New York, the Kansas City jazz scene developed a relaxed, bluesy style built on a steady four-four “walking bass.” The political boss Tom Pendergast (1872–1965) ran Kansas City as a wide-open town throughout the 1920s, and the clubs of the city’s 12th Street and 18th Street corridors stayed open all night. The most important Kansas City bandleaders were Bennie Moten (1894–1935) and, after Moten’s death, Count Basie (1904–1984).
Jazz also spread overseas during the 1920s. The Original Dixieland Jass Band toured England in 1919, and by 1920 there were jazz bands in London, Paris, and Berlin. The Django Reinhardt (1910–1953) sound that would dominate European jazz in the 1930s began to develop in the late 1920s in the cabarets of Paris. Jazz also influenced Brazilian and Cuban music. By the time the stock market crashed in October 1929, jazz was already a global music — and it was only beginning. The broader cultural story of 1920s American culture shows how thoroughly the music had embedded itself in the decade.