Romance isn’t quite the right word, but the romantic narrative is that jazz was born in Storyville, the French Quarter-adjacent designated sector for sin from 1897 to 1917. In the New Orleans Jazz Museum exhibit “The District: Music and Musicians in Storyville,” that narrative is corrected.
“It was happening in Storyville as we know it, but there was also jazz that was flowering everywhere in New Orleans,” said David Kunian, music curator for the museum. “It was Uptown, downtown, back of town, in the Quarter, in the Treme. This was happening everywhere.”
That the new genre was proliferating beyond Basin St. and the rugged blocks behind it also elevates its evolution.
“Though jazz and vice have been associated together for a long time, that cheapens the music and makes people think, ‘Oh, you know, jazz is just whorehouse music, and of course it’s much more,’” Kunian said. “So, the way I wanted to approach it, especially because we’re a music museum, is to focus less on the vice and the prostitution — though you have to have a little bit of that — and more on the music and where the music was played.”
Print and podcast coverage here and here. A few images are below.
