New Orleans style

New Orleans style, in music, the first method of group jazz improvisation. Developed near the turn of the 20th century, it was not recorded first in New Orleans but rather in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Richmond, Indiana.

Divided by many experts into white (the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, which first recorded in 1917 and 1922, respectively) and Black (cornetist King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band and Kid Ory’s Spike’s Seven Pods of Pepper Orchestra, which first recorded in 1923 and 1922, respectively), it is traditionally said to have placed great emphasis on collective improvisation, all musicians simultaneously playing mutual embellishments. This was the case in the first recordings, but a portion was also given to solos and accompaniment in which a single instrument, such as cornet, occupied the foreground while others, such as clarinet and trombone, played obbligato with combinations of guitar and/or banjo and/or piano chording insistently on almost every beat. Many journalists use the term New Orleans style to designate those Black musicians who performed in Chicago between 1915 and the early 1930s after having left their native New Orleans. Aside from Oliver and Ory, the strongest of these players were trumpeter Louis Armstrong, clarinetist–soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, clarinetist Jimmie Noone, drummer Baby Dodds, and his brother, clarinetist Johnny Dodds. Armstrong and Bechet, in particular, helped to move the emphasis away from ensemble improvisation to a focus on solo improvisation, anticipating the later Dixieland style.

Revivals of the pre-1920s style included one with trumpeter Bunk Johnson, a New Orleans native who was rediscovered by two jazz historians in 1939 and who reactivated his career in the 1940s; and another at Preservation Hall, an organization in New Orleans that into the 21st century continued to present improvised combo music by musicians who had lived in New Orleans during the music’s formative period and those who learned from them. Samuel Charters’s Jazz: New Orleans 1885–1963 (1963) is a historical study. See also Chicago style.