Summer trip to New Orleans

Hello everyone.

Today I will tell you about my summer trip to New Orleans.                       More precisely, I would like to tell you about an exhibition at the museum of Art of New Orleans that I attended. It was about jazz creation and dissemination.                            

Let’s get to the heart of the matter. I learnt that in New Orleans, jazz was born from drums and voodoo rituals that took place on the Congo Square site in New Orleans before the Civil War.                            

Furthermore I discovered this painting that I find interesting. We can see three exhausted soldiers playing jazz.

In 1914, the First World War broke out and New Orleans became a war port. So in 1917, the Navy closed Storyville, which was the neighbourhood of jazz creation, that’s why a lot of musicians went looking for work in other cities : Chicago of course, but also New York and Kansas City. Thus, Chicago and New York became new capitals of jazz.

Furthermore, some American soldiers who crossed the Atlantic to help French and English soldiers knew playing jazz.                

So, to bring soldiers together, the American soldiers who knew how to play music would start jazz pieces.                                                                                                    

Moreover when the French were mixed with the Americans, they listened. Thus, that’s how jazz was spread in Europe.

Additionaly, I discovered an artist named Louis Amstrong. He was born on August 1901 and died on July 1971. Louis was an African-American jazz musician and singer. Coming from an Afro-American folk music, Amstrong is one of those who have made it a national and popular musical current with a universal vocation, jazz. His talent as a trumpeter, his charisma, his qualities as a director and his generous personality have forged over time his international fame. He became one of the first renowned jazz musicians.

After visiting this part of the exhibition, I went to the objects part of the exhibition.

In 1922, after the closure of Storyville in 1917, Amstrong accompained the general exodus movement to Chicago, where he was hired as second trumpeter by Joe "King" Oliver in his Creole Jazz Band. In this bubbling context, he recorded his first disk.

So I'm going to present you one of the many disks of Amstrong. It’s called « what a wonderful world ». It was published in 1967. He sings of his happiness describing the different things of his daily life that delight him : the blue sky, white clouds, the colors of the rainbow, babies who grow up and represent the future, before concluding with optimism,  in a chorus that gives the song its title: "and I think to myself, what a wonderful world".

I also discovered an object, more precisely a horn, it’s a wind musical instrument of the brass family. The Claude Thornhill Orchestra is the first group to integrate the horn into a jazz ensemble. In the early 1940s, the orchestra moved to Southern California. Julius Watkins was one of the only jazz horn players in the Midwest. He played not only with Buckner's band during the recording sessions, but also with Milt Jackson's small band. After the appearance of the horn in larger formations, many horn players feel frustrated to be confined to a support role. Many renowned horn players then performed in smaller bands, giving the horn a headlining role in jazz orchestras.

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