London Jazz Festival: Learning about jazz’s history in community and wellbeing
London Jazz Festival returns for its 30th annual edition in the city and we’re excited to have two groups taking part this autumn for our twelfth festival. Our collectives from Bromley and Bexley have just begun their taster sessions and in the coming weeks they’ll be writing and creating their own original music that will be performed at the festival in November.
As our groups will be focusing on wellbeing for their 2022 theme, we thought we’d take a look back at the history of jazz itself, and the aspects of wellbeing that the genre is connected to. To do this, we have to go all the way back to the 1700s, in New Orleans’ Congo Square.
The city of New Orleans was founded in 1718, and one year later the first slave ship from Africa would port there. By 1724, a set of laws were put in place in order to regulate the behaviour of enslaved people - it was called Code Noir. This included requiring slave-owning whites to baptise them into the Catholic faith and to give them Sundays off work in order to worship. As the blog No Depression details:
“While it granted more rights to slaves than in the American territories in some ways, French colonial slavery was still a brutal system in which to be imprisoned. And the slave-owning classes running New Orleans knew they had to keep it that way in order to continue extracting the labor necessary to build a glittering city on a swamp. Giving enslaved Africans time off was a calculated risk—one that was balanced by not allowing them to congregate outside of church. However, despite constant threats and crackdowns, informal gatherings almost immediately began to take hold. In remote and public places, the enslaved people would cook, dance, and sell goods to each other, thereby mixing and mingling with the many cultures of their fellow slaves—people from the Caribbean, Latin America, France, Spain, and tribes all over Africa.”
Afropunk goes on to explore how the square to the north of New Orleans became a place for enslaved people and free people of colour to spend their ‘day of rest’ on a Sunday:
“In 1817 the mayor of New Orleans issued a city ordinance restricting the congregation of enslaved people to the back of town. This open area just outside of the city on Rampart Street became known as Congo Square. At times as many as 600 slaves and free people of color congregated in Congo Square, something unheard of in the rest of the U.S.
Congo Square became famous with visitors to the city for the African dancing and music. As the city of New Orleans grew around it, Congo Square, once located at the back of town, became the center of the French Quarter. The Sunday dancing and music was heard throughout the French Quarter from the early 1800s until 1838, influencing generations of musicians who lived around it. Congo Square became the musical heart of New Orleans.”
While people were heading to Congo Square to spend their Sundays connecting with their community, jazz’s distinctive characteristics were being formed through a unique mix of genres present in Louisiana at the time. Writing for the BBC Suemedha Sood describes how jazz came into being against the backdrop of the American Civil War:
“[In Congo Square] Caribbean music from the West Indies mixed with beats from Africa and church melodies from the United States’ south… [Meanwhile], the sound of the brass marching band provided a soundtrack to the ongoing American Civil War.
When the war ended in 1865, all of these musical styles blended to form a new genre called ragtime, which syncopated the rhythms of previous genres and made songs that everyone wanted to dance to. Around the same time, former slaves from other parts of the American south brought the blues to Louisiana, combining spiritual music from the Baptist church with secular lyrics that told the painful stories of slaves’ lives.
Blues musicians used the trumpets and trombones left over from wartime music to mimic the sound of their voices, literally singing out their pain through their instruments. It made the blues even more mournful, even more poignant and even more cathartic for anyone listening.
When ragtime and the blues came together, it created a completely novel style of music – a truly American art form. In the late 1890s, syncopation joined with soulful melodies, upbeat dance tunes united with the sultry sound of brass instruments, and jazz began to emerge.”
It wasn’t until the 1900s that the genre came into its own, gaining popularity across the world with the Jazz Age of the 1920s. Here’s a three minute run-down to how this genre became “America’s genuine classical music”.
In 1970 the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival began hosting annual events at Congo Square. As attendance grew, the festival moved to a larger space at New Orleans Fairgrounds, but Congo Square, now a part of Louis Armstrong Park, remains as an important gathering place for brass band parades, marches and drum circles.
The aspects of community and communal appreciation for jazz are alive and well today - and one you can spot in London’s blossoming jazz scenes. Lewisham writer Emma Warren has published two pamphlets on how the communities at Total Refreshment Centre and Steam Down have offered a new generation the opportunity to explore how live jazz can bring people together and promote wellbeing.
“I think we underestimate [nightclubs and music venues] as places of personal transformation or even as a coping mechanism to deal with the struggles of life…Our species has been staying out late and moving to music for as long as we’ve been able to stay out late and move to music, which suggests it’s essentially human: that it sustains us… Dancing, I’d say, is medicine.”
– Emma Warren, Make Some Space, Tuning into Total Refreshment Centre
Our own community here at ArtsTrain of young people, music leaders, workshop facilitators and charitable organisations are connected by music as a thread that brings us together, whether it’s on a weekly basis for our rehearsals, or the original music we perform at London Jazz Festival.
Each year, our festival collectives create music around a chosen theme, and in the sessions leading up to the festival, young people and music leaders respond and discuss what that theme means to them: how it resonates, how they may hold different feelings from others. The young people are encouraged to explore jazz’s characteristics and how they might incorporate this in their original tracks, and they in turn share influences from genres they feel a connection to, such as K-pop, drill and emo. Guided by music leaders, they may be encouraged to expand their skillset from vocals to keyboard, or from percussion to taking the mic.
Numerous studies have found that making and performing music in a group not only creates endorphins for each individual, but also bonds the group together, increasing a sense of community in that group.
And a few quotes from ArtsTrain participants (current and from previous years) reflect this:
“I think it’s also kind of an escape, you have somewhere else to go where you can just allow your frustrations, play some music, make some new friends, have a laugh.”
“This space is really nice like it helps you improve your teamwork and social life and helps you interact with others you don’t really interact with. I am really grateful for that.”
“I feel like music creates a chemistry that not really much else can, like, create a deep relationship with people because it’s just so easy going, and it’s not like you’ve been forced to do it’s just that it just comes together.”
We’re so excited to hear the original music our young people will create and perform this year, and to experience this journey once again, bringing us back together for our twelfth London Jazz Festival.
See our London Jazz Festival Collectives performing live this November:
Thursday 17 November at The Fellowship, Lewisham, SE6 3BT
Saturday 19 November at The London Lineup, London Jazz Festival, Royal Festival Hall’s Clore Ballroom, Southbank, SE1 8XX