Jazz Talk: Shrieks, Dances, and Revels: Early Jazz Venues in Storyville

In recent years, scholars have debunked the long-held misconception that Storyville, New Orleans’ red light district, was the center of early jazz performance, and the point from which the music spread across the country.

However, Storyville was still an important site in the music’s formative years, and we still have much to learn about how it functioned. This talk will offer a fresh look at a single block of Franklin Street in the heart of the district, which was a hotbed of music before, during, and after the Storyville era, which lasted from 1898 until 1917.

We’ll get to know the European immigrants who built music venues here, and presented African American musicians including Buddy Bolden and Tony Jackson, key figures in the emergence of jazz. We’ll also examine the origins of the Original Tuxedo Jazz Band, the world’s oldest continuously performing jazz group.

Jordan Hirsch is a writer, editor, and researcher with a specialty in the music and cultural history of his native New Orleans. He is the editor of ACloserWalkNola.com, the award-winning interactive map of New Orleans music history. His writing has appeared in Slate, Bitter Southerner, The Lens, and ANTIGRAVITY, among other outlets, and he was a staff writer for the HBO series Treme.

Register by 5:00p.m. the day of the talk to receive the Zoom link. Although all of our Jazz Talks are FREE, we appreciate donations to offset the cost of the program.