Louisiana Purchase: worth its weight in jazz

It was the real estate deal that transformed a continent and gave birth to an unmistakably American music. If the Louisiana Purchase had not taken place 200 years ago, the world might never have heard the glorious sound of jazz and its related forms.

As New Orleans prepares to celebrate the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase on Wednesday, Americans everywhere soon will be reminded that the biggest land deal in U.S. history in a single stroke nearly doubled the size of the country and opened an inexorable expansion west.

But although the political and geographical implications of the deal have been copiously documented, the cultural implications of the Louisiana Purchase have yet to be fully decoded. For jazz, universally deemed a distinctly American musical idiom, was born of the confluence of European, African and Caribbean cultures in parts of the Louisiana Territory, especially New Orleans. “Having spent a good deal of time studying Southern music, I’ve come to believe that jazz is the quintessential American contribution to the development of music, and the Louisiana Purchase made that possible,” says historian Light T. Cummins.

“The Louisiana Purchase essentially changed the complexion of the United States,” says Alfred E. Lemmon, curator of “A Fusion of Nations, a Fusion of Cultures,” an exhibition at the Historic New Orleans Collection.

“Before the Louisiana Purchase, everything cultural in America was pretty much focused in New England, which means it was white European musical culture,” Lemmon adds. “With the Louisiana Purchase, the complexion of life and music in America changed, abruptly.”

The making of an autobiographical American music started centuries earlier, with the Spanish and the French laying claim to the Louisiana Territory.

“What you had in New Orleans was this incredible mixing of cultures and of races, even long before the Louisiana Purchase,” says David Berger, a prominent New York jazz scholar-composer. New Orleans was both a center of slave trade from the Caribbean and a bastion of French Opera, and seemingly unrelated cultures were encountering one another, he added.

Moreover, an extraordinary cultural rite unfolded in New Orleans’ Place Congo (today known as Congo Square), where West African slaves were allowed to practice the sacred music-dance rituals of their ancestors. Visitors of various nations and ethnicities marveled to hear rhythms and see dance movement of a sort hitherto unknown in the New World.

The great North American experiment in social interaction -- with various races intermingling in the unofficial capital of the Louisiana Territory -- was fully underway in the 18th century, though its cultural breakthroughs were still in the offing.

None of these developments, however, would have had much impact on the course of the United States if not for an explicitly political situation early in the 1800s, when Spain tried to restrict U.S. use of the Mississippi River and the port of New Orleans while working out a treaty with France’s leader, Napoleon Bonaparte.

President Thomas Jefferson knew that Spain was placing a chokehold on the U.S. He assigned his protege, James Monroe, to assist Robert Livingston, the American minister to France, in a bid to buy New Orleans from the French.

Napoleon, who was trying to suppress a slave rebellion on the French colony of Saint Domingue (later known as Haiti) and gearing up for war against Britain, needed cash and offered instead the entire Louisiana Territory -- as yet uncharted -- for $22.5 million (he settled for $15 million, which turned out to be roughly 4 cents an acre).

On April 30, Livingston, Monroe and their French counterpart, Francois de Barbe-Marbois, drafted in English a treaty for the sale of the Louisiana Territory to the United States. Following U.S. Senate ratification on Oct. 20, the Louisiana Territory came under American control on Dec. 20, 1803.

Louisiana, where the musical revolution was taking place, became the fulcrum for new ideas in American sound.

“New Orleans was like an artistic caldron,” echoes David Baker, chairman of the jazz department and distinguished professor of music at Indiana University in Bloomington.

“The songs of France, the opera scores of Italy, the African influences of the people in Congo Square, the different cultures that delivered goods at the port came together, so all the ingredients were there for something incredible to happen.

“Plus, at the turn of the last century you had in New Orleans the largest black population of any city in America, so, of course, the old concept of American music had to change, and did.”

Indeed, within the first two decades of the 20th century, New Orleans had given America its first jazz geniuses, among them Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet. These visionaries built upon several centuries’ worth of foreign musical influences to create something utterly new, a music that had as its root buoyant swing rhythms, plangent blue notes and large-ensemble improvisation.

“Jefferson, who was the man of the hour, was a violinist,” Berger says. “If he knew what he had done for music, it would have made him feel good.”

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Howard Reich is an arts critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.