Music in New Orleans is a blend of people, stories, celebrations, and struggles that have shaped a sound found nowhere else in the world. This is the birthplace of jazz, but the city’s musical identity reaches far beyond that one word. Here, African drumming traditions survived through enslavement. European classical forms intertwined with Caribbean rhythms. Brass bands evolved from military ensembles, then spilled into the streets for parades, funerals, and Sunday revelry. Gospel blended with blues, R&B pulsed from corner clubs, and funk grew from neighborhood jam sessions. New Orleans offers landscapes of sound where music and history converge.
Begin where the city’s musical story begins: Congo Square, in today’s Louis Armstrong Park. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, this was the gathering place where enslaved Africans were allowed to meet on Sundays, creating one of the only public places in North America where African-descended communities could openly assemble, socialize, trade, dance, and make music. Here, they danced, drummed, traded goods, remembered ancestral rhythms, and forged new ones in the face of unimaginable hardship. Drumming, singing, and dancing preserved rhythms and movements carried from West and Central Africa, while new influences from the Caribbean and Europe were gradually absorbed. In a society built on racial control and surveillance, Congo Square functioned as a rare zone of relative autonomy, where cultural continuity could be maintained in public view. You can still hear street musicians today attempt to recreate those rhythms forged long ago.
At the same time, New Orleans cultivated a serious appetite for European music, specifically opera. The city’s deep French and Creole roots made European opera feel like a continuation of local culture, especially among French-speaking residents who expected to hear the latest works from Paris almost as a matter of course. Touring companies regularly brought operas by composers such as Meyerbeer, Auber, Rossini, Donizetti, and later, Verdi, often soon after their European premieres. For many New Orleanians, opera was a place to see and be seen, to affirm cultural sophistication, and to participate in a shared Atlantic-world identity that linked the Mississippi Delta to France and Italy. The symbolic heart of this operatic enthusiasm was the French Opera House, which opened in 1859 and quickly became one of the most important opera venues in the United States. Performances were typically sung in French, even when the works were Italian in origin, underscoring how strongly language and identity shaped musical life in the city. Audiences were famously passionate and discerning, capable of turning performers into local idols or freezing them out with equal intensity.
Louis Moreau Gottschalk, one of the nineteenth century’s most cosmopolitan composers, epitomized the blend of musical traditions in the city. Born in 1829 to a Creole mother and a Jewish-English father, Gottschalk grew up immersed in a sound world that blended French opera, Caribbean rhythms, African-derived percussion, and local folk traditions. Long before he left for Paris as a teenage piano prodigy, he was absorbing melodies and rhythms he heard in salons, streets, and public gatherings—music that did not fit neatly into European categories but would later become central to his compositional voice. Even when he became an international star, celebrated across Europe and the Americas, New Orleans remained the cultural soil from which his musical imagination sprang. That influence is especially clear in Gottschalk’s pioneering use of Afro-Caribbean and Creole elements in classical piano music. Gottschalk acts as a musical bridge: between New Orleans and the wider world, between European Romanticism and the Americas.
From Congo Square and the opera house, the story unfolds through late-19th-century neighborhoods like Tremé and into the now-vanished Storyville district. This short-lived red-light district became an early incubator for the musicians who would define a new genre. Cornetist Buddy Bolden (1877-1931), often credited as the first great jazz soloist, electrified audiences with improvisations that bent the rules of ragtime. Bolden was famous for having an unusually powerful cornet tone. People said you could hear him five to ten miles away, and bands would sometimes stop playing when they realized Bolden’s band was approaching because “the King” was coming through. Sadly, in 1907, he suffered a bout of either schizophrenia or alcohol-induced psychosis and was institutionalized for the rest of his life. Unfortunately, he never made a recording, so his music is known only through oral history and the musicians he inspired.
But it is Louis Armstrong, the pioneer of jazz and one of America's most influential musicians worldwide, who is most closely associated with New Orleans. Born in 1901 into poverty in the city’s Back o’ Town neighborhood, his earliest musical education came from the everyday soundscape of New Orleans itself—brass bands parading through the streets, blues and ragtime drifting from doorways, church music, work songs, and the call-and-response patterns of Black communal life. A pivotal turning point came when he was sent to the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys, where formal music instruction introduced him to the cornet and gave structure to instincts already sharpened by the city’s musical ferment. As Armstrong’s career took him far beyond Louisiana—to Chicago, New York, and eventually the world—New Orleans remained the emotional and musical compass of his identity. He carried the city’s polyphonic spirit into jazz’s next evolutionary leap, transforming ensemble-based improvisation into a spotlight for individual expression without losing its communal roots. The parade rhythms, blues inflections, and vocal phrasing that shaped his trumpet playing all echo traditions associated with places like Congo Square, where African-derived musical practices survived and evolved in public view. Armstrong often spoke of New Orleans with reverence and nostalgia, seeing it as the wellspring of his art rather than a chapter he outgrew. In giving jazz a new global language, he also gave New Orleans something lasting in return: proof that its local traditions could reshape modern music everywhere, without ever losing their accent.
Later, Jelly Roll Morton would follow in Armstrong's footsteps by blending blues, Latin syncopations, and ballroom refinement into what he called “the first real jazz.” Morton grew up moving between the city’s sharply divided worlds: the refined musical expectations of Creole society, the rougher energy of Storyville’s brothels and saloons, and the omnipresent rhythms of parades and street bands. He absorbed ragtime, blues, Caribbean rhythms, and European harmony, then fused them into a highly structured style that emphasized arrangement, orchestration, and what he famously called the “Spanish tinge.” Morton’s recordings and compositions demonstrate that early jazz was not only improvised brilliance but also careful design, shaped by musicians who thought deeply about form, balance, and color.
Morton was far from alone in this creative ferment. King Oliver, whose Creole Jazz Band set early standards for ensemble interplay, helped define the collective sound of New Orleans jazz and mentored younger musicians with a strong sense of discipline and tradition. Sidney Bechet brought a fiercely expressive voice to the music, his wide vibrato and emotional intensity pushing jazz toward a more overtly personal style. Figures such as Johnny Dodds and Kid Ory shaped the clarinet and trombone roles that gave early New Orleans bands their dense, polyphonic texture. Together, these musicians show that New Orleans jazz was never the product of a single genius but of a crowded, competitive, and collaborative scene, where ideas circulated quickly and innovation emerged from constant conversation.
The early 20th century witnessed the rise of spirituals and gospel traditions in Black churches, where call-and-response singing filled sanctuaries and shaped the evolving sound of the city. That emotional power flowed into secular music too, shaping the blues. New Orleans blues has its own unmistakable flavor—less dusty and lonely than Mississippi Delta blues, more upbeat and often infused with syncopated rhythms. Later, rhythm and blues surged out of local studios and clubs in the 1940s and ’50s. Fats Domino’s warm baritone and rolling piano lines defined an era, while Professor Longhair’s Afro-Caribbean–inflected style laid the groundwork for rock ’n’ roll as surely as any guitarist on the national charts. Step into a neighborhood bar on Frenchmen Street or in the Marigny, where musicians might still play with the same loose brilliance that shaped mid-century R&B.
By the 1960s and ’70s, the New Orleans sound morphed again. Enter the era of funk—the syncopated, hypnotic rhythms of The Meters, whose influence can still be felt in bands across the globe. Meanwhile, soul artists like Irma Thomas gave voice to the city’s tenderness and heartbreak. At the same time, gospel choirs continued to thrive, brass bands adapted to new influences, and Mardi Gras Indians—African American krewes with Afro-Caribbean traditions—unveiled their call-and-response chants and hand-sewn suits during Carnival.
New Orleans has produced generations of musicians who translate the city’s character directly into sound, each in a different dialect. Pete Fountain carried the lyricism and easy swing of traditional jazz into the modern era, becoming a public face of the city’s festive, communal spirit. Dr. John drew on blues, R&B, funk, and Afro-Caribbean mysticism to create a swampy, theatrical style that felt both ancient and contemporary. The Dirty Dozen Brass Band electrified the brass band tradition by folding funk, bebop, and hip-hop rhythms into parade music, pushing it from the street into global consciousness. Pianist and composer Tom McDermott channels early jazz, ragtime, and Creole influences with scholarly affection and playful invention, often acting as a musical historian at the keyboard. The New Orleans Nightcrawlers, meanwhile, helped redefine the modern second-line sound, emphasizing deep grooves and modern funk sensibilities while remaining inseparable from the city’s ritual life. Together, they show how New Orleans music constantly renews itself without ever severing its roots. For today’s visitor, this musical diversity is everywhere. Wander from club to club without an agenda. Follow your ears. Let the music dictate your path.
No discussion of New Orleans music is complete without Jazz Fest—a celebration that is part concert, part culinary showcase, and part cultural memory. Here, zydeco rubs shoulders with gospel, jazz sits beside bounce, and musicians of every generation take the stage. You’ll hear local musicians playing for local crowds, which often reveals the city’s cultural heartbeat more clearly than any headline performance. New Orleans is also perhaps the only city in the world where a parade might materialize before your eyes on an otherwise ordinary afternoon. The second line—a joyful procession following a brass band—is a uniquely New Orleanian expression of community celebration. Born from African American benevolent societies and the musical traditions of funerals, second lines blur boundaries between performers and observers. Even if you don’t dance, simply walking with the procession—feeling the drumline shake the pavement beneath your feet—connects you to generations of revelers who used music to celebrate life, mourn loss, strengthen community, and reclaim public space.
Some of the best spots to experience New Orleans' musical heritage:
🎷 Congo Square
If jazz has a spiritual birthplace, it is Congo Square in Louis Armstrong Park.
As early as the 18th century, enslaved Africans gathered here on Sundays—one of the few places in North America where such gatherings were permitted—to drum, dance, trade, and keep ancestral traditions alive. Their rhythms, call-and-response patterns, and improvisatory spirit laid key foundations for jazz. Visit in the morning when the square is quiet, and imagine what it sounded like two centuries ago. Then follow your visit with a stroll through nearby Tremé, one of the oldest African American neighborhoods in the United States and a wellspring of musical talent.
🎼 Preservation Hall
No place better embodies the purity of early New Orleans jazz than Preservation Hall, tucked off Bourbon Street. Established in the 1960s to preserve the traditions of the city’s aging jazz musicians, it remains a soulful, intimate space where the music speaks without amplification or distraction. When the band plays here—whether a dirge, a stomp, or a jubilant standard—time collapses. Stand in line, embrace the wait, and savor the cell-phone-free performance. It’s part of the ritual.
🎺 Louis Armstrong Park & Trombone Shorty Alley
This park is a testament to generations of musicians who shaped jazz, from early cornetists like Buddy Bolden to contemporary stars like Trombone Shorty. A walk through the park takes you past sculptures, murals, and plaques that celebrate the music’s evolution. Don’t miss the statue of Louis Armstrong, trumpet in hand, the legacy markers commemorating early jazz pioneers, or the archway leading toward Tremé, a gateway into living musical culture
🎶 The Backstreets of Tremé
To understand New Orleans jazz, you must understand brass bands—and there is no better neighborhood for this than Tremé. St. Augustine Church, the Backstreet Cultural Museum (currently undergoing reconstruction after a fire), and the streets where second lines pulse on Sunday afternoons offer a deep dive into the continuities between African, Creole, and Black American musical traditions. Attend a second line parade if you can. It’s a community celebration, and you are welcome to respectfully join.
🎤 The New Orleans Jazz Museum at the Old U.S. Mint
Located at the edge of the French Quarter, the Jazz Museum houses invaluable instruments, recordings, and archives, including vintage horns from Armstrong and Sidney Bechet. Exhibits explore the evolution of jazz from its earliest ensembles to today’s global influence. Don’t miss Louis Armstrong’s first cornet, the Interactive listening stations, or the live performances on the museum lawn
🎻 Frenchmen Street
Think of Frenchmen Street as jazz’s open-air conservatory—where traditional, modern, fusion, and experimental jazz thrive side by side. Venues like Snug Harbor, The Spotted Cat, d.b.a., and The Maison each offer a different flavor of improvisation. Walk down the street after dark, and music spills from every doorway, mixing into the humid night air. Go early, pick one venue to settle into, and let the night unfold.
🎹 The Rampart Street Landmarks
North Rampart Street was once the boundary between the French Quarter and the musical neighborhoods of Tremé—fertile ground for the early careers of jazz giants: Buddy Bolden played in saloons and dance halls along this corridor. Sidney Bechet performed in early clubs nearby. Storyville, the red-light district where “professor pianists” honed ragtime and blues, sat only blocks away. Today, the street offers a blend of music clubs, historic markers, and architectural reminders of jazz’s earliest decades.
🥁 The Second Line Tradition
If there’s one experience that captures the essence of New Orleans jazz, it’s the second line—part parade, part procession, part joyful improvisation. Accompanied by brass bands, second lines move through neighborhoods in celebration of weddings, holidays, funerals, or social aid & pleasure clubs. Check local listings for weekly second lines. They usually occur on Sundays and are open to the public.