.… A legend says that Dixieland music, the beginnings of jazz, was born in New Orleans from where it was carried by river steamboats up the Mississippi river towards Memphis, Saint Louis and finally Chicago…
… There are even more reasons that will prove the truthfulness of this story. The first were testimonies of old musicians who were unanimous in their statement that the musicians from New Orleans played a different, special kind of music, which others started to copy and adopt. The second unquestionable reason is the gramophone recording: all recordings which were made by 1925 were, without exception, recorded by musicians from New Orleans or by those who openly copied this new way of music called “Dixieland”…
… Although the exact date of jazz beginnings cannot be defined, there was something going on in New Orleans , which showed that this music was born sometime between 1900-1905. The important fact that relates to this was the end of the Spanish-American war in 1898, after which a huge flood of second hand-instruments was sold by the Army after its demobilization. New Orleans was one of the closest ports to Cuba and many units were demobilized there. Therefore, around 1900, the shops of New Orleans were swamped by clarinets, trombones, drums and cornets, which even poor black people could afford…
… At the end of the 19th century, New Orleans was a city of a rich and diversified music culture. It had operas, symphonies, good instrumentalists and chamber orchestras. There were numerous half-organized and informal bands, which consisted of many Black and Creole musicians; these bands performed marches at parades, funeral music, popular songs and ragtime during picnics and parties. Music was played in cabarets, honky-tonk bars and brothels. Music was literally everywhere…
… Music merged: marches, ragtime, labor songs, blues, opera overtures- African music with European influence and European music with African influence– all these merged into one stream and one day “Dixieland” was born, a music which did not exist before, a music which during the next thirty years moaved out of honky-tonk bars, left picnic sites, sneaked out of brothels, and took off the streets of New Orleans to fly all over the world…….
