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If you want to discover the origins of jazz read one of the best books ever compiled about the music: Nat Shapiro's and Nat Hentof's, 'Hear me talkin' to ya', which is subtitled 'The story of jazz by the men who made it', ( it should of course be subtitled 'The story of jazz by the men and women who made it', as there are contributions from many well known female musicians and singers) which was first published in 1955 and is made up of extensive interviews with musicians who, fifty-four years after its publication, are probably now all dead.

The book is a treasure chest of information, and required reading for anyone remotely interested in the history and development of jazz.

Early on in the book we get this splendid contribution from New Orleans clarinet player, Alphonse Picou, who started his first band in 1897 - that's 1897!

"Those were happy days, man, happy days. Buy a keg of beer for one dollar and a bag full of food for another and have a cowein. Those boys don't have fun nowadays. Talking about wild and woolly! There were two thousand registered girls and must have been ten thousand unregistered. And all crazy about clarinet blowers!"

As banjo and guitar player, Danny Barker, points out: "New Orleans, until the twenties, was the safest haven in the Americas for the world's most vicious characters", with most of them hanging out in the big gambling and prostitution joints where the police would only go by request and after a hefty financial hand-out. And as the self-confessed inventor of jass, the pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton ( he wrote King Porter Stomp for instance) describes it, the 'City of Dreams' was, when he started playing piano in 1902, "considered second to France, meaning the second greatest in the world, with extensions for blocks on the north side of Canal Street[and] I'm telling you this Tenderloin District was like something that nobody has ever seen before or since. The doors were taken off the saloons there from one year to the next. Hundreds of men were passing through the streets day and night. The chippies in their little-girl dresses were standing in the crib doors singing the blues".

This is the New Orleans that had, after the Civil War, prospered as an international port, where sailors, construction workers, and garrison soldiers wanted booze, sex, and entertainment, and part of that entertainment was music; and the music that Morton and Picou were playing was a derivation of rag-time but with a harder beat that made you want to get up and dance, and drink, and whatever those 'chippies' got up to.

In the late1860s, after the Civil War, the departing armies left behind a multitude of bent and broken musical instruments, instruments that were soon put to good use by talented black field hands, mechanics, dock and quay workers, who quickly learned the rudimentary elements of playing the clarinet, trumpet and trombone, or at least enough of those elements (disguised by a heavy syncopated three or four beats to the bar time signature slammed out on a bass drum that probably still had the regimental crest on its blue and gold rim) to earn a few extra dollars to feed a family or just have a good time. What those guys also had was a tradition of singing in a repeated twelve bar pattern that could, with the right musical touch, break your heart.

Jazz, out of the blues, out of pain, had been born.

Learn more about this author, Steve Newman.
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