New Orleans is a city on the Mississippi delta, founded by the French in the eighteenth century and named after the Duc d’Orleans. After changing hands to Spain, and then back again, it was sold to the United States by Napoleon as part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1805. It became a flourishing seaport in the nineteenth century.

Its population in the latter quarter of that century – the period during which jazz was developing – was as diverse as any in a great port. Immigrant communities included a large Irish population, part of the post-famine diaspora, and groups from Italy and the Caribbean. These groups merged with existing American inhabitants in areas such as the ‘French Quarter’.

It is clear that the new music - New Orleans jazz -developed out the mingling of the musical influences brought to the USA by immigrants with forms already present. By the turn of the twentieth century, black American culture had already made an impact on the world stage through the religious songs called ‘spirituals’. Ragtime was emerging as another art form and Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag, published in 1899, was to become a huge hit. Although genuine ragtime was never as popular as its bowdlerised version in the hands of Tin Pan Alley composers, including Irving Berlin, the rhythmic peculiarity of its syncopation became well known and ceased, by familiarity, to be exotic.

In many other respects ragtime can be seen to derive from European sources, such as marches, as can the twelve-bar blues (mainly folk songs). But the syncoptation and ragtime was unfamiliar, as were many of the harmonic variations (‘blue notes’) in blues. We are now familiar with all these, but in the period 1890-1910 they would have sounded very odd indeed to European and US middle class people.

Along with popular songs of the time, including Bible belt hymns, these various influences merged with folk music brought by immigrants from the poorer parts of Europe, including Italy, Ireland, England and the Iberian peninsula (the latter having already a strong tradition) together with the Caribbean. It was this mixture, together with the African tradition of drumming that started to come together in jazz. The entire structure was bound together in an improvisatory framework. Improvisation was not new, but collective improvisation where many instruments worked together without the benefit of written arrangements was more of an innovation.

It is now clear that the in its earliest days the music was not associated with a particular ethnic group, but with an economic class – the working class. It was also associated with the New Orleans underworld of prostitution and somtimes shady business through its use for entertainment. Within this proletarian context, three ethnic groups quite quickly became prominent: Creoles - the descendants of both Caribbean immigrants and the mixed race descendants of both the French and Spanish settlers, African Americans and Italians. Presumably because of their skin colour it was the Italians who first brought the music to international recognition in the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, first recording in 1917 and then coming to London in 1919. But by this time and in these hands the music had lost much of its radicalism. It was no longer genuinely improvised – even if the band could not read music they could remember their arrangements.

At around this same time, however, and associated with a large scale transmigration of African Americans and Creoles from the South to the North of the USA, African American and Creole players - retaining especially the tradition of collective improvisation - started to be employed in the night club and dance hall entertainment scenes of cities like Chicago. It was from their playing both in clubs and in riverboat bands - when they stopped at Mississippi cities like Davenport - that a new generation of white musicians first learned the music and the various groups - black, brown and white were instrumental in helping create a craze for the music – the jazz age – during the 1920s.

Although still associated partially with the underworld, the situation being made more acute by Prohibition, the music in its finest form started to become known across class and ethnic divides in the USA and beyond, particularly in the UK and in France (countries that still remain prominent in the field of New Orleans jazz). During this period, the first great African American and Creole stars emerged – Jelly Roll Morton (piano), King Oliver (cornet), Kid Ory (trombone), Johnny Dodds, Jimmie Noone, Albert Nicholas (all clarinettists), Sidney Bechet (soprano sax and clarinet) and, of course, Louis Armstrong amongst many others. Nearly all of these were from New Orleans.

Like all fads and crazes, however, the life span of the music depended upon the fickle attention of the general public. As its gaze became diverted by other musical forms (which, however, would not have existed without the prior influence of New Orleans jazz), the originators, marginalised by the very music industry they had helped to develop, were left unnoticed, sometimes in penury and sometimes to die relatively young. There were some exceptions, such as Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, but a price had to be paid for musical survival; this price was to compromise with the white establishment of the time.

During the 1930s a few young adherents to the music kept the faith and towards the end of that decade began to bring the attention of a new audience to the music. Jelly Roll Morton was rediscovered in Washington DC. Kid Ory and Bunk Johnson amongst others, were also ‘rediscovered’ at this time.

During the 1940s attention turned to New Orleans itself, rather than cities where New Orleans players had settled. Partly this was a search for what a band of dedicated but disparate enthusiasts believed was the ‘authentic’ jazz played by musicians who had never by choice left the city for the bright lights and big dollars of the North.

In 1940 Kid Rena’s band was recorded and recordings of working New Orleans bands continued for several decades followed this. Bunk Johnson’s band was prominent in the early years of this period, and people like George Lewis and Kid Thomas Valentine dominated the 1950s and 60s.

In the UK and France jazz record collectors had begun to take an interest in jazz and detailed discographies had emerged by the end of the 1930s. For some this led directly to an interest in what was called ‘contemporary’ New Orleans jazz, i.e., the jazz that was still played in the city, as opposed to the 1920s recordings of New Orleans musicians sometimes on the spot in New Orleans but more frequently in Chicago and New York.

It was in this context that many bands in the UK were influenced by the recordings starting to emerge from the USA. Bands recreating the ‘classic’ (i.e., 1920s) jazz bands had been playing since the early 1940s but by the early 50s in the UK the search for more ‘authentic’ forms was becoming a crusade.

Prominent in this search was London trumpeter Ken Colyer who, famously, illegally entered the USA to play with musicians in New Orleans. In itself, this trip, ending in deportation, has become legendary. Ken brought back the fundamentalist message to the UK and made it his life’s work to bring this almost forgotten style of exciting music the recognition he felt it deserved.

Others have since taken up the banner and New Orleans jazz, in its various sub-forms, is now seen as an important musical form in its own right. Many leading American musicologists strongly believe it to be the only truly American art form.

Despite the fact that the ‘trad boom’ of the early 1960s can be traced directly to New Orleans jazz bands, it was not a New Orleans jazz boom; New Orleans jazz has never in its own right been part of mass culture in the UK. But then, neither has Baroque music – its lack of popular status has not interfered with its artistic standing, and the same is true of New Orleans jazz.

Many of its performers and adherents are, collectively, ageing, although there are some younger players, even if audiences are not young. Part of the aim of the Ken Colyer Trust is to ensure that the standing of New Orleans jazz is, culturally, where it deserves to be – a significant part of the world’s culture, and not simply an historical oddity nor a moment in the development of the popular music of today.