Welcome back to Music and Global Politics. Please rate, review, like and subscribe and support us on Patreon at musicandpoliticspod.com

Today we reconsider the very origins of jazz, delve into its historical context and address several questions such as Why New Orleans? What was the role of America's largest red light distinct,, how was Jazz related to the targest Union movement in the Southern United States and what was the relationship between Jazz and the failure of the politics of post-Civil War Reconstruction.

We introduce to listeners the century long debate over the role and presence of African survivalisms in this music, a question that continues to vex sociologists, anthropologists and musicologists.

Our opening musical example is a fascinating modern day experiment that pairs the West African instrument of the Kora with its long lost descendant the American banjo,, a link that forms one of the strongest musical arguments for survivals from the Mother Continent.

What we can be more certain of is that Jazz is modernist and that Jazz is hybrid. Jazz galvanises the break with tradition, from the whole formal world of the 19th Century with its boundaries and hierarchies. Jazz is carried onward by the new tempos of the 20th Century, and the fragmented, cubistic art of that era of Picasso and Stravinsky.

So contrary to the manichean fundamentalist racial dualism of the Anglo world, Jazz was catalysed by the remnants of another system entirely, that off the Creole gens de coleur the hybrid New World born people officially accepted by the New World Catholic Empires of France and Spain. These burning embers of of the Haitian Revolution came ashore in New Orlean forming a distinct Caribbean Diaspora, a colony of the dispossessed within a colony in the South. From Jelly Roll Morton, to Kid Cry, to Sydney Bechet all the way up to Winton Marsalis, it is the Creole dimension that has done so much to catalyse Jazz at its birth and to keep it alive today.

We close today with Black Bottom Stomp by Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers from 1926, that fittingly features some rip roaring banjo amidst the joyous polyphony of collective improvisation that is jazz in its earliest and archetypical form.

For reading I suggest:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/853007

· Why Jazz?: A Concise Guide, Kevin Whitehead, , p. 19-53

· A New History of Jazz, Alyn Shipton, p. 13-53; 124 -146

· Louis Armstrong & Paul Whiteman, Joshua Berett (entire book)

· The Myth of the Negro Past, Herskovitz Melville

· Black Bourgeoisie, E Franklin Frasier

· When Genres Collide, Matt Brennan

· And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, Joe Boyd