Narrator: In New Orleans, always and everywhere, there was music. And like the people who lived there at the turn of the century, it came from all over the world -- French waltzes and Spanish habaneras, German polkas, Irish ballads and Italian arias, rhythms at once African and Cuban and Caribbean.
Tom Piazza, Writer: Every different strain in this city maintained its color and each of them brought with them a very vibrant musical culture. Also, New Orleans had a big tradition of street music. There were all these little groups of serenaders, who would go around, and they ... little string bands just like a mandolin and maybe a fiddle and a guitar.
And they'd just kind of rove the streets in the evening, and they might stop underneath your window and play you a little tune, and maybe you'd throw some money down for them. You'd also have something called spasm bands, which were just little groups, of usually of very young kids who might have like a kazoo and a washboard And this was constant.
George Schmidt, Painter: I can remember, everything was vended off the street. And so a lot of the vendors would have a chant, "I got bananas. I got watermelons. I got bananas. I have a watermelon." You know, they would come down the street. In a cart. In a big wagon pulled by a mule, you know, and that was all over the place.
Narrator: There were dozens of brass bands in town, and they played wherever New Orleanians gathered -- at picnics and political rallies, backyard birthday parties, dance halls and saloons. And in a city where, as a visitor once observed, "no hour of the day was immune from a parade," they often brought the music right into the streets -- providing accompaniment for everything from Mardi Gras and lodge celebrations to funeral processions.
The sound seemed to ricochet all over town. "It was like a phenomenon, like the Aurora Borealis," one New Orleanian recalled, "... that music could come on any time."
Kalamu ya Salaam, Writer: New Orleans is an outside culture. New Orleans, unlike most of the rest of the United States, has the procession as part and parcel of cultural daily life so that things move through the community rather than the community going to one spot.
Tom Piazza, Writer: If you are sitting in your living room or parlor and a parade comes down the street, you're likely to hear it and to want to come out and check it out the way all your neighbors are doing. It encourages a kind of communal celebration to, to occur almost continually, in the neighborhoods.
John Scott, Artist: There is a kind of intimacy of living in New Orleans that's a little bit different than other places. Even under segregation, neighborhoods were basically mixed. I mean people had to experience each other.
Ari Kelman, Historian: Rich, poor, white, non-white, people all live on top of each other. It's not a matter of choice, you know the city's not so utopian as all that, it's just necessity. There's nowhere else to go. The city's confined to this narrow swath of land that, that, that shadows the river so that leads to a kind of, really, unusual cultural mixing in New Orleans.
Narrator: As one Afro-Creole remembered it: "We always swapped platters of our best cooking with the French and Italians next door. ... Whenever we had dinner ... it was just over the fence."
George Schmidt, Painter: I like to use the word "various, variety." We have a, a variety of customs here. And they are not "diverse" in the sense you draw a line between you and me. What it means is, is that the culture is transmittable. It transmits. It transfers. It doesn't depend upon your race.
Narrator: So it was that in the mid-1890's, all of New Orleans heard what some would later call "the big noise." It came from way uptown, from a neighborhood of Irish, German and African-American laborers, many of the blacks recent migrants from the Mississippi Delta. It had echoes of the improvised music those new arrivals brought with them -- the spirituals of the Baptist church and the blues. But it was set to the syncopated rhythms of ragtime, which was fast becoming the most popular dance music in America.
The sound -- which someone dubbed the "hot blues" -- was unlike anything New Orleanians had ever heard, and they were mad for it. Wherever the hot bands played, the crowds followed. They jammed the honky-tonks and the dance halls, cheering and stomping and slow dancing -- sometimes until sunrise. "We had to change," one local player recalled, "we couldn't make a living otherwise."
Soon, musicians all over town, black and white, were riffing on the style -- and playing fresh, off-the-cuff variations on the standards. Even classically trained Afro-Creoles had to admit the black musicians uptown were on to something. "I don't know how they do it," one Creole violinist marveled. "But goddamn, they'll do it. Can't tell you what's on the paper, but just play the hell out of it."
John Scott, Artist: We have never separated so-called folk art, fine art. The umbilical of our culture, folk and fine has never been cut. So one respects the other. That's not true, in European culture. I think once the folk rises to the certain level, there is a cutoff, and it becomes something different. Ownership changes. With us, there is no change in ownership. So things that develop in the street, are absorbed, and constantly refined, even by the so-called fine artists.
Narrator: By the dawn of the 20th century, the unique, hybrid culture of New Orleans had spawned a distinctive new style of music: a swinging fusion of African rhythm and European harmony, of bold improvisation and technical virtuosity -- "Not spirituals or the blues or ragtime," said one musician, "but everything all at once, each one putting something over on the other."
Tom Piazza: What New Orleans really offered at that extraordinary time in its history was a working model of democracy at its most ideal. You had a real melding of all the different kinds of musical forms you couldn't really take out the French element or the African element or the Caribbean element, without unraveling the entire fabric. It wouldn't be the same thing.
Narrator: As yet, few outside of New Orleans had heard the new sound. But in the years to come, scores of musicians would pack up their instruments and hop aboard steamboats and railcars headed north -- among them Nick LaRocca and Sidney Bechet, Kid Ory, Joe Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton, and a one-time hustler turned trumpeting sensation named Louis Armstrong. Within a generation or two, their music would be heard all around the world.
By then, no one is sure just how, the New Orleans sound had come to be known as jazz.
John Scott, Artist: I think jazz is probably the only original American cultural contribution to the world that didn't come from somewhere else. You know Jazz was born in the streets of New Orleans. And it's amazing that that little bitty place exported this product that literally changed world culture.
Irvin Mayfield, Jazz Musician: The jazz story is not only a musical story, it's an American story of a way of life. You have to have people wanting to participate with one another. You know we can think of cities all around this country that have had many years of having all kind of cultures living with one another, but if they don't participate in a certain way, if they don't celebrate together, if they don't come and marry these traditions, you're not going to birth anything significant like jazz. And I think the city of New Orleans did it because of that participation.
Lawrence N. Powell, Historian: Well, New Orleans seems to have the strongest local attachment of any place I've ever lived in. I think almost eighty percent of the people who live there were born there.
George Schmidt, Painter: In New Orleans you didn't feel as if you had to leave it. There was no, you didn't say, "Oh, I, I could find something better elsewhere." People here were convinced [LAUGHS] that this was place was the center of, of the, of the universe.
Rick Bragg, Writer: When you walk down the streets and you hear a 12 year old kid blowing his heart out on a battered trumpet, yeah you can get trumpets anywhere, but there's something about the sound of it here, in the air, you know, the land shifts under your feet here. It makes no sense at all to want to own a piece of it. Yet, you know a lot of us do.