Culture

Jazz by decade:

1910-1920

During the decade between 1910 and 1920, the seeds of jazz began to take root. New Orleans, the vibrant and chromatic port city in which ragtime was based, was home to a number of budding musicians and a new style.

In 1913, Louis Amstrong was sent to live in a juvenile delinquency home, and there he learned to play the cornet. Just five years later, band leader Kid Ory lost his star and hired Armstrong, and helped give rise to a talent that would change the course of music.

The first jazz recording ever was made in 1917. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, led by cornetist Nick LaRocca, recorded “Livery Stable Blues.” The music is not thought to be the most authentic or the best executed jazz of the time, but it became a hit, and helped light the fuse that led to the jazz craze.

1920-1930

The decade between 1920 and 1930 marked many crucial events in jazz. It all started with the prohibition of alcohol in 1920. Rather than quell drinking, the act simply forced it into speakeasies and private residences, and inspired a wave of jazz-accompanied and booze-fueled rent parties.

The audience for jazz was broadening, thanks to an increase in recordings cut, and to the popularity of jazz-inflected pop music such as that of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. Also, New Orleans began to lose its centrality in musical output, as musicians moved to Chicago and New York City. Chicago briefly enjoyed being the capitol of jazz, partly because it was home to Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, and Louis Amstrong.

By featuring virtuosic soloists and performing bombastic blues arrangements, big bands, such as those led by Earl Hines, Fletcher Henderson, and Duke Ellington, began to replace New Orleans jazz in popularity. 

1930-1940

By 1930, the Great Depression had befallen the nation. 25 percent of the workforce was jobless, and up to 60 percent of African American men had no work. Cities became crowded with people searching for work after farms began to wither and rot. Black musicians were not allowed to do studio or radio work.

However, jazz music was resilient. While businesses, including the record industry, were failing, dance halls were packed with people dancing the jitterbug to the music of big bands, which would come to be called swing music.

Meanwhile, the stars of earlier jazz styles were being forgotten. Bix Beiderbecke died of pneumonia in 1931 after a fierce battle with alcoholism. That same year, cornetist Buddy Bolden died at the Louisiana State Hospital for the Insane. He had never been recorded. Saxophonist Sidney Bechet was forced to open a tailor shop and abandon music. Louis Amstrong sustained a increasingly lucrative career, but at the expense of a faltering reputation for having become too commercial.

In 1933, the prohibition of alcohol was repealed, and speakeasies were legitimized. The sounds of swing were spreading, as exposure to its defiant jubilance reached audiences through radio waves.

As the 1930s drew to a close, swing was pumping through jukeboxes and radios around the country. However, after Hitler’s Germany brutally invaded Poland in 1939, the United States was soon drawn into war, whose effect extended into the evolution of jazz.

1940-1950

Early in the 1940s, young musicians such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, steeped in the sounds of swing, began experimenting with melodic and harmonic dissonances as well as rhythmic alterations, such as beginning and ending improvised phrases in uncommon places in the measure.

The Creation of Bebop

Minton’s Playhouse, a jazz club in Harlem, New York, became the laboratory for these experimental musicians. By 1941, Parker, Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Christian, and Kenny Clarke were playing regularly at jam sessions there.

During this period, there were two main musical paths forged. One was a nostalgic movement that reexamined the hot jazz of New Orleans. It became known as Dixieland. The other was the new, forward looking, experimental music that departed from swing and the music that preceded it. It was known as bebop.

The Fall of the Big Band

On August 1st, 1942, the American Federation of Musicians began a strike against all major recording companies because of a disagreement over royalty payments. No union musician could record. The effects of the strike include the shrouding of the developments of bebop in mystery. There are few documents that can provide evidence of what the early forms of the music sounded like.

American involvement in World War II, which began on December 11th, 1941, marked a decline in the importance of big bands in popular music. Many musicians were sent to fight in the war, and those who remained were restricted by high taxes on gasoline. By the time the ban on recording was lifted, big bands had practically been forgotten, or had begun to be thought of as peripheral in relation to vocal stars such as Frank Sinatra.

In the mid 1940s Charlie Parker began to deteriorate from drug use. He was admitted to Camarillo State Hospital after a breakdown in 1946. His stay there inspired the song "Relaxin' at Camarillo."

In 1947, tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon achieved fame for recordings of “duels” with saxophonist Wardell Gray. Gordon’s virtuosity and aggressive tone attracted the attention of young alto saxophonist John Coltrane, who would shortly thereafter switch to tenor saxophone.

By the end of the 1940s, bebop was the ideal among young jazz musicians. Unlike swing, bebop was untethered to popular demands. Its primary concern was musical advancement. By the early 1950s it had already spread into new streams such as hard bop, cool jazz, and afro-cuban jazz.

1950-1960

Charlie Parker, despite a severe drug problem, was at the height of his career. In 1950 he became the first jazz musician to record with a string ensemble. Charlie Parker With Strings made my list of “Ten Classic Jazz Albums.”

In 1954, 24-year-old Clifford Brown brought virtuosity and soul to his recordings with Art Blakey and Max Roach. His aversion to drugs and alcohol presented an alternative to the drug-addled bebop lifestyle.

The same year, Miles Davis hired John Coltrane over Sonny Rollins to be in his quintet. Coltrane was Davis’ second choice, but Rollins turned down the offer so he could recover from drug addiction. The next year, Davis fired Coltrane for showing up to a gig inebriated. However, that was not the end of the pair’s collaborations.

After leaving Davis, Coltrane joined Thelonious Monk’s quartet. In 1957, the group earned prestige for regular performances at the Five Spot. A recording of their 1957 concert at Carnegie was released in 2005 as Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall. Later that year, Miles Davis rehired Coltrane, who was by that time a jazz star.

Ornette Coleman moved to New York City in 1959, and began a famous stint at the Five Spot, where he introduced the provocative style that became known as free jazz.

That same year, Dave Brubeck recorded Time Out, featuring the song “Take Five” by saxophonist Paul Desmond. Also that year, Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue, featuring Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, and Charles Mingus recorded Mingus Ah Um. All three albums became are now considered seminal jazz records.

At the start of the 1960s, jazz had become elementally forward-looking and sophisticated.

Louisiana Creole cuisine

Southeastern Louisiana was more heavily influenced by Spain and Latin America than was Acadiana. The region also maintained more trade with France and incorporation of more recent French culinary traditions well into the 19th century. The major city of New Orleans, long known for its fine restaurants, allowed development of more gourmet variations of local dishes.

At the start of the 1980s Cajun chef Paul Prudomme opened a popular restaurant in New Orleans which started significant influence of Cajun food on to Creole traditions.

African-American influences

Plantations were born after the Southern settlers realized the great region's potential for agricultural profit. The wealthiest land owners began to cultivate the land in larger and larger tracts and in the process began bringing slaves.

Most Africans’ diets consisted of greens and various vegetables. Stews were common and rice was a familiar staple to them. Foods that became part of the Southern diet from African-American heritage include eggplant, koka nuts, sesame seeds, okra, sorghum and some melons. Sweet potato yams and greens are believed to be from their influence as well.

The African influence is still most easily recognized in traditional Cajun cuisine. Gumbo (a stew using chicken or seafood, sausage, rice, okra and roux) and Etouffe, (a thicker, less liquid gumbo served over a bed of rice) are all born from African cooking tradition. A spicy Cajun dish is associated with Louisiana’s Creole culture but has its roots in seventeenth-century Africa.

Louisiana African-American Heritage Trail

It is a cultural heritage trail with 26 sites designated in 2008 by the state of Louisiana, from New Orleans along the Mississippi River to Baton Rouge and Shreveport, with sites in small towns and plantations also included. In New Orleans several sites are within a walking area. Auto travel is required to reach sites outside the city.

A variety of African American museums devoted to art, history and culture are on the "trail", as is the Cane River Creole National Park, and the first two churches founded by and for free people of color. The trail includes two extensive plantation complexes with surviving quarters used by people who lived and worked at the plantations until 1930 in one case, and into the 1960s at the other. Two historically black universities are also on the trail.

The trail's chief state promoter has been Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu, who saw its designation as a way to highlight the many contributions of African Americans to the culture of Louisiana and the United States.