One of the best books ever compiled about jazz is 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’, 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 [a party]. 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”. Most of them hung 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 describes it:

“The ‘City of Dreams’ was 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 ( plus a mix of European music) 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.