New Orleans and the History of Jazz

What form of music has come to be synonymous with New Orleans

• ragtime

• opera

• jazz

• blues

The article contrasts ragtime with jazz. What is one difference between these forms of music?

• Improvisation is more important to ragtime than to jazz.

• Improvisation is more important to jazz than to ragtime.

• Jazz is played mainly on the piano, while ragtime is played mainly on the trumpet.

• Ragtime is usually played by many instruments, while jazz is usually played by one instrument.

Jazz was influenced by other music.

• “Music served as a psychological shield against the floods, fires, epidemics, and riots that marked New Orleans history, for it provided an excuse to forget, or a spur to overcome, the problems brought on by both nature and society.”

• “No musical genre was more popular than opera, and the arias that could be heard throughout the city day in and day out had a profound impact on the melodic styles of the musicians who created the jazz idiom…”

• “One way to listen to classic New Orleans jazz at its best is to imagine the complexity of the melodies as a representation of its polyglot communities.”

• “Jazz continued to survive in varying degrees in New Orleans as the music spread around the world, and by the 1940s the Crescent City became a Mecca for jazz lovers.”

Reread Frederick Law Olmstead’s statement about New Orleans.“I doubt if there is a city in the world, where the resident population has been so divided in its origin, or where there is such a variety in the tastes, habits, manners, and moral codes of the citizens. Although this injures civic enterprise—which the peculiar situation of the city greatly demands to be directed to means of cleanliness, convenience, comfort, and health—it also gives a greater scope to the working of individual enterprise, taste, genius, and conscience; so that nowhere are the higher qualities of man—as displayed in generosity, hospitality, benevolence, and courage—better developed, or the lower qualities, likening him to a beast, less interfered with, by law or the action of public opinion.”

Based on this statement, how can Olmstead’s opinion of New Orleans be summarized?

• New Orleans is a city whose residents are more generous, noble, hospitable, and benevolent than people anywhere else.

• New Orleans is a city whose lack of legal regulation has harmful effects on its residents.

• New Orleans is a city where cleanliness, comfort, and health are more difficult to maintain than in most other cities.

• New Orleans is a city whose extreme diversity has both positive and negative effects.

What is the main idea of this article?

• Jazz emerged from the cultural diversity and uniqueness of New Orleans.

• New Orleans was founded because North American settlers needed a way to transport goods along the Mississippi River.

• Congo Square is a place in New Orleans where slaves were allowed to dance and express themselves.

• Lester Young, Ed Blackwell, and Wynton Marsalis are all first-rate jazz musicians who came from New Orleans.

Read these sentences from the text.

“By virtue of its location and its role in the international economy, New Orleans became home to a population that was as heterogeneous as any. Besides the French and, for a time, Spanish colonial powers, other groups included African Americans (both free and slave), people from the Caribbean and Latin America, and Scandinavians and other Europeans.”

Based on these sentences, what does the word “heterogeneous” mean?

• varied or diverse

• complicated or difficult to understand

• prosperous or wealthy

• violent or combative

Read this sentence from the text.

“The city that never should have been there gave the world a tremendous cultural gift, jazz, whose progeny, popular music, was ultimately employed in fundraisers around the world to try to save New Orleans.”

Which word does the pronoun “whose” refer to?

• city

• gift

• jazz

• music

How does the author suggest listening to classic New Orleans jazz?

• The author suggests listening to classic New Orleans jazz while imagining the complexity of the melodies as a representation of New Orleans’s polyglot communities.

• The author suggests listening to the past and current jazz musicians from New Orleans like Fats Domino, Count Basie, Wynton Marsalis, and Harry Connick Jr..

• The author suggests listening to classic New Orleans jazz as a psychological shield against the floods, fires, epidemics, and riots.

Name five different groups of people who made up the population of New Orleans

• Five of the groups of people identified by the text as inhabitants of New Orleans include the French, the Spanish, African Americans, Latin America, and other Europeans.

• Five of the groups of people identified by the text as inhabitants of New Orleans include Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Joe "King" Oliver, Buddy Bolden

• Five of the groups of people identified by the text as inhabitants of New Orleans include two trumpet players, clarinet players, trombone players, and piano players,

How does jazz reflect the city of New Orleans? Support your answer with evidence from the article.

• The diversity of New Orleans is reflected in the many influences on jazz and its often polyphonic sound. in the 5th paragraph it states that Joe "King" Oliver used different horns which all played as the same time.

• Just as New Orleans took shape as a city populated by many different groups of people, so jazz emerged from a variety of musical genres, including opera, blues, and ragtime.

• Jazz reflects the city of New Orleans because it brought music from many different cultures and communities