One thing you wouldn’t find in Storyville is The House Of The Rising Sun, the New Orleans brothel celebrated in a folk song that The Animals turned into an R&B standard. Glenn Miller and collaborator Jack Teagarden would later add lyrics that made the street sound far more wholesome than it was. One enduring artifact of Storyville is the song “Basin Street Blues,” popularized by Armstrong in 1929, a decade after Storyville was shut down. Another of the district’s musical giants, Jelly Roll Morton, wrote a few of the swing era’s cornerstone pieces, “King Porter Stomp” and “Winin’ Boy Blues” among them. In fact, the denizens of Storyville were some of the only people who heard jazz in its original incarnation, since Buddy Bolden – the cornetist who gets as much credit as anyone for originating jazz – never made it to the recording studio (one teenage fan of his who eventually did was Louis Armstrong). There’s no getting around the fact that New Orleans owes some of its musical history to a thriving red-light district. In this case because the composer, then just 15 years old, was delirious with typhoid fever when he wrote it. Also characteristic of New Orleans music is the piece’s otherworldly quality. One of the first popular composers to borrow these rhythms was New Orleans native Louis Moreau Gottschalk, whose 1844 piece “Bamboula” incorporated African syncopations and bits of a Creole tune recalled from his youth. This was where slaves gathered on Sunday and, according to legend, first laid down the African-derived rhythms that have permeated New Orleans music ever since. The most hallowed is Congo Square, just above the French Quarter and now part of Louis Armstrong Park. Music permeates the city, yet certain spots are more sacred than others. From Congo Square to The House Of The Rising Sun With his dazzling wordplay and deft rhythms, Wayne started out making bounce-inspired hip-hop – a variety of rap that’s still rooted, however distantly, in the parade chants of the Mardi Gras Indians. The Revivalists can switch from a tight rocker to a free-flowing jam at will, and Shorty regularly serves up vintage funk grooves, brass workouts, and hip-hop in the same set. Hot alternative band The Revivalists, soulful jazz dynamo Trombone Shorty, and hip-hop ruler Lil Wayne have all absorbed the city’s musical history as well. Even before he became the toast of Vegas, Prima combined solid jazz, Italian roots, and good old showmanship into the stuff of enduring hipsterism. Louis Armstrong is rightly established as the city’s (and possibly the country’s) flagship artist, laying down invaluable groundwork with his seminal Hot Fives and Sevens recordings. In later decades the city’s two great Louises, Armstrong and Prima, would take jazz to the world. Jazz was largely spawned in the brothels of Storyville, where Jelly Roll Morton and the unrecorded Buddy Bolden casually dispensed genius to the customers. From the start, New Orleans music was about absorbing a world of influences and creating something uniquely funky and tasty out of it. Credit that partly to New Orleans being a seaport city, or the “northernmost point of the Caribbean” as it’s sometimes called. And, to large extent, they’ve got a point. There are locals who swear that everything great about American music came from New Orleans. If it’s lunchtime you might even find a jazz combo playing in the piano bar. It could be The Meters’ “Hey Pocky Way,” Armstrong’s ubiquitous “What A Wonderful World,” or Allen Toussaint’s “Shoo Ra” guiding you toward baggage claim. Instead of standard Muzak, you’ll hear local classics through the sound system. Fly into Louis Armstrong International Airport – the world’s only major metropolitan airport named after a jazz musician – and you’ll be greeted by a life-sized statue of the man himself. From the moment you first hit New Orleans, the city’s musical history is impossible to avoid.
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