Early jazz is the music that started it all — a collision of African American musical traditions, European harmonies, and the particular social world of New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century. It sounds loose and alive, with multiple instruments improvising at once rather than taking turns, driven by a stomping rhythm and a brass-band directness that could fill a dance hall or a street corner equally well. Before jazz became art music, it was community music, and you can hear that in every bar.
The story of early jazz begins in New Orleans, where a unique mix of African American, Creole, and immigrant communities created something that didn't sound like anything else. African American musicians brought blues feeling, call-and-response patterns, and a rhythmic sensibility rooted in African traditions. They absorbed brass band music, ragtime, and the harmonics of European classical and church music, and blended it all into something spontaneous and social. The result was a music built on collective improvisation — cornet carrying the melody, clarinet weaving around it, trombone filling in the bass lines, and a rhythm section holding the whole thing together. Nobody was the star. The band was the star.
The city's specific geography mattered too. The dance halls, brothels, and social clubs of the Storyville district gave musicians steady work and a willing audience. Funerals, parades, and picnics kept bands employed outdoors. Buddy Bolden is often credited as one of the first musicians to pull these threads together into what we'd recognize as jazz, though no recordings of him survive — we know him through the memories of people who heard him play. What we do have are the early recordings of Jelly Roll Morton, whose Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers (1926) sessions for Victor capture the New Orleans approach with remarkable clarity, even though they were recorded in Chicago. Morton was a brilliant organizer and composer who could take the looseness of the tradition and give it shape without killing its spontaneity.
When musicians began migrating north — to Chicago, New York, and beyond — early jazz went with them and started to change. Chicago became a second laboratory, where a younger generation of musicians absorbed the New Orleans style and pushed it in new directions. Louis Armstrong made the single most important leap of the era: with his Hot Five (1925) and Hot Seven recordings, he demonstrated that jazz could support a soloist of almost unbelievable invention, shifting the music's center of gravity from the collective to the individual. You could still play New Orleans style after Armstrong, but you couldn't ignore what he'd shown was possible. King Oliver, Armstrong's mentor, had already brought the New Orleans sound to Chicago with his Creole Jazz Band, and the recordings they made together in the early 1920s document the tradition right at the moment it was about to transform.
By the late 1920s and into the 1930s, early jazz was giving way to swing, but the foundational vocabulary it established — blue notes, improvisation, syncopated rhythm, call and response — never went away. Every subsequent style of jazz is in conversation with it, whether consciously or not. Revival movements in the 1940s and again later brought traditional New Orleans-style jazz back to new audiences, and today there are musicians all over the world who still play in roughly this idiom. But the original recordings carry something the revivals rarely quite recapture: the sense that this music was brand new, and that nobody knew yet where it was going.
Before jazz became art music, it was community music — and you can hear that in every bar.