In the classic New Orleans style, the trumpet's duty is to state and embellish the melodic line of the theme. The trombone stresses the harmonic root notes, providing also a solidity of resonance on which the other performers may build. Above the trumpet soars the clarinet voice, weaving further variations on the same harmonies. Thus, the three voices, linked yet independent, are able to compile between them the simple triads (chords consisting of a root and the third and fifth tone above it) that were the basis of all jazz harmony at this period of its development. And, as all three were playing together throughout the performance, the band, though small, was able to maintain a surprising degree of volume.
There was a vital reason why the ensemble convention was adhered to so faithfully. In New Orleans or, indeed, anywhere else at that time, there were few musicians capable of playing an extended solo, even had the rules of their game permitted them to do so. Apart from a handful of virtuosos, the idea that a jazz performance should consist of a succession of solos would have been unthinkable for the simple reason that there was no such thing as a succession of soloists. But the musicians were developing at an astonishing rate, and, in retrospect, it can be seen that the classic New Orleans style, rigid as it had to be, was doomed by its very nature: there was no question that, in time, a player or group of players would emerge for whom the constriction of the ensemble was intolerable. When this player arrived, then the whole New Orleans conception of tightly integrated ensemble improvisation would become obsolete. Another reason why the frailty of the New Orleans tradition is more apparent now than in the heyday of that style is the fact that jazz as a musical lubricant to oil the social machine was restricted largely to the New Orleans lowlife. Although the myth-making process has drawn a picture of jazz limited strictly to the brothels and sporting houses of Storyville, the town's bordello district, there were, of course, many instances of the music splashing over into the life of the city at large. Nonetheless, jazz, linked to the black performer and the social events of black life in the city, retained a connotation of sin and dissipation for many years after the New Orleans pioneers were forgotten. The saxophonist Sidney Bechet, one of the most gifted of all the New Orleans musicians, insisted in his autobiography that the word jazz in its original form of jass was local slang for sexual intercourse, and the evidence in favour of Bechet's assertion seems overwhelming.
These brothels were thus a link in the jazz musician's economic chain, for many employed bands or, at the very least, a house pianist whose job was to thump out ragtime rhythms against a background of red plush and gilt. The collapse of the Storyville economy was naturally disastrous for the working musician. In 1917 the United States secretary of the Navy decreed that, in view of the repeated fighting and violence involving seamen on leave in the city, the New Orleans red-light district must be closed down. The sense of outrage and the disarming worldliness of the city are reflected in the official statement by the then mayor, Martin Behrman:
Preterpermitting the pros and cons of legislative recognition of prostitution as a necessary evil in a seaport the size of New Orleans, our city government has believed that the situation could be administered more easily and satisfactorily by confining it within a prescribed area. Our experience has taught us that the reasons for this are unanswerable, but the Navy Department of the Federal Government has decided otherwise.The theory that the closing of Storyville brought the heyday of New Orleans jazz to an abrupt end is one of those critical platitudes excused by the fact that it is largely true. Jazz did not, however, immediately stop in New Orleans, nor was the migration north of the musicians sudden or absolute, nor had jazz until then been unknown in the North. As early as 1917, the year of the Storyville edict, the Original Dixieland Jass Band, a group of white Southerners with a comically inflated sense of their own importance as musical innovators, had introduced jazz to the patrons of Reisenweber's restaurant in New York and recorded two compositions.
One potent evangelizing factor was the riverboat, which would ply up and down the Mississippi, often with a jazz band aboard. More than one white middle-class jazz pioneer has testified that the first jazz he ever heard came floating across the water from one of these boats as they approached the levee of some Southern port of call. The accessibility of Europe was also a factor at a surprisingly early point in the music's history. In 1919 the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, with Sidney Bechet as its star performer, played in London, there attracting the notice of a Swiss conductor, Ernest Ansermet, who was the first distinguished figure of formal music to react favourably to jazz and to discern in it uniquely vital qualities.
The main force pushing the New Orleans musician north was his need to find employment, and perhaps the most significant sequence of events after the closing of Storyville was that involving Joe "King" Oliver. Early in 1918 Oliver, acknowledged trumpet champion of New Orleans, migrated north to Chicago. By 1920 he had become a popular bandleader there, and two years later, wanting to increase the size of his band, he sent to New Orleans for the most brilliant of his disciples and, indeed, of all the jazz musicians who came out of the city, Louis Daniel Armstrong. From this point on, jazz evolved from a local musical dialect into an international language, proliferating in geographical range and in stylistic variation to a degree that astonished those of the New Orleans founding fathers who lived long enough to watch the process for themselves.
