The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Jazz

An essay discusses the 19th century origins of jazz in New Orleans. While much mainstream research points to a recording by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band as the beginning of jazz, research in the 1930s by African-American musicologists points to other players, such as bandleaders Basile Barés Buddy Bolden and guitarist Johnny St. Cyr. While it is obvious that what the country came to know as jazz in 1917 came out of ragtime dance music as it was played in New Orleans in the first years of the century, it was the abandonment of the nexus of social dances first imported from Paris in the 1840s in the course of the 1890s that was the sine qua non for later developments.