400 Esplanade Avenue, New Orleans LA 70116
Website, tickets, social feeds here
- The New Orleans Jazz Museum offers an overview of the city’s place in music history with an emphasis on the development of early jazz. Changing exhibitions explore other music genres, including blues, rhythm and blues, zydeco, and more.
- Located in a former US mint, the museum also includes a museum store with a broad selection of CDs of New Orleans music, a fantastic performance space, and an extensive public programming schedule of performances, presentations, and K-through-graduate-student educational opportunities. There is also a reading room/research center on-site offering access (by appointment) to the museum’s 50,000 archival holdings.
The history
Now affiliated with the art, history, and culture assemblage of institutions called the Louisiana State Museum, the objects and artifacts that formed the foundation of the current New Orleans Jazz Museum started in the mid-20th century with a group of collectors, scholars, and buffs who established the museum’s original location in 1961 (a plaque at the Hotel St. Pierre marks the spot) and bounced around a little until the early 1980s. Then, the museum settled in its current location on the upper levels of the Old U.S. Mint. The mint’s history is told on the structure’s ground floor, see below. Attribution on artifact labels throughout the museum to the New Orleans Jazz Club indicates that those items are likely from the original collection that started on 1017 Dumaine Street. Read more about the New Orleans Jazz Club and the State Museum’s jazz collection here.
Overview
Whether you have a few minutes or a few hours, start your visit in front of the title wall of “Congo Square to the World: Early Jazz in New Orleans.” These galleries explain why the people around you in the museum know of, and travel to witness and listen to, New Orleans. Pause for a second to observe the brief reference to the Boswell Sisters, which you can later explore further at the Historic New Orleans Collection’s website. Then, backtrack to “It All Started in Jane Alley: Louis Armstrong in New Orleans” and learn about Armstrong’s early life in his hometown and the few returns he made after departing to change the world.
As time permits and if you’ve got a thing for the gift to that world that is New Orleans drumming (having already learned about Congo Square, you’ll have the important background), spend some time with “Drumsville: Evolution of the New Orleans Beat” exhibit Look carefully for the photo of cultural pilgrim (and Rolling Stones drummer) Charlie Watts touring the exhibit, which he did when his band had a concert delayed by a hurricane. A Google Arts and Culture virtual exhibit on the museum’s website covers the reasons why this exhibit had to be. Listening posts throughout all of the museum’s galleries allow visitors to hear why the museum itself had to be.
Must-see objects
Louis Armstrong’s cornet – A young troublemaker, arrested for celebratory gunplay on New Year’s 1912 and sentenced to a residency at the Colored Waif’s Home, encounters one horn and two music educators. The world changes. “This is not his first cornet; this is the cornet he really learned how to play on,” said David Kunian, the museum’s music curator, in this story about the Armstrong exhibit. “This is the beginning of really all of what you know Louis Armstrong was, and all that jazz became. That is, in my humble opinion, the most important thing that we have.” Find it in the “It All Started in Jane Alley” exhibit. Find more about the exhibit here.
Kid Ory’s trombone and Johnny St. Cyr’s banjo – Ory and St. Cyr were early titans of their instruments, contemporaries of King Oliver, Armstrong, and Jelly Roll Morton.
Fats Domino’s piano – Lately displayed in the second-level lobby of the museum, this piano was one of two pianos in Domino’s 9th Ward home, which flooded during Hurricane Katrina. The other is on view at the Presbytere off Jackson Square, also a Louisiana State Museum. The white one is more fully restored (but not playable); the other is stabilized from further deterioration but otherwise left in the ruined state it was found after the storm.
Public Programs
A huge roster of public performances, taking place throughout the year, animates the lessons on the museum’s walls. Those and other educational and informational programs are listed on the website’s events calendar. Coordinating your visit to the museum with one of the performances is highly recommended.
Museum store
The selection of books and CDs is stellar if you intend to continue your journey into the past and present of New Orleans music. Coffee mugs (some featuring musicians from beyond the New Orleans sphere, though they’ve all felt the influence) and only the hippest jazzwear are available as well.
Parking
Try your best to find street parking (not really an option during French Quarter events, festivals, or parades) on Esplanade Avenue, and spots are often available within a block or two of the museum. There are a few Premium pay lots a half-block away on either side of Elysian Fields Avenue.
Lunch
Coop’s Place (“Where the not-so-elite meet to eat.”) and Central Grocery are a few upriver steps away.
Drinks
Any number of places on nearby Frenchmen Street will pour you a drink or draw you a draft, but the Apple Barrel (609 Frenchmen) should be the choice if you’re interested in riding the sublime musical mood established by a visit to the museum. There, live music is provided by a rotating array of funky combos. The bar at the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen is just across Barracks from the backside of the museum and the restaurant’s curbside seating is within eye- and ear-shot of the balcony where some performances are staged.
Website
There are two, actually. One is a standalone site at nolajazzmuseum.org and features the detailed events calendar you’ll want to refer to when planning a visit. The other, a subsite of the flagship Louisiana State Museum digital home, is prettier.
Extra thing
The first level of the building is where to learn the building’s history as a US Mint. Completed in 1838, the branch mint operated until 1909 (with a closure from 1861 to 1879, spanning the Civil War and Reconstruction) and was the only mint to produce both American and Confederate coinage. During Prohibition, it operated as a federal prison, and that phase is what you feel when you enter the building’s main Esplanade entrance. The feeling deepens when you learn that the building was designated a nuclear fallout shelter in the 1960s and then deepens further when you learn about the event that took place on the balcony above the entrance. In the galleries, exhibits document the gold and silver coins minted there and some of the administrators who oversaw the work.