She wrote a great Congo Square story for 64 Parishes in 2018.ĭuring the 19th century, enslaved people would gather in New Orleans’s Congo Square on Sundays to buy, sell, and dance to music. She’s not only an author and historian, she’s an activist in the battle to preserve New Orleans’ unique cultural heritage. The foremost authority on Congo Square today is Freddi Williams Evans. What makes New Orleans unique to this day is that the music that grew up there and took root was never contained inside of clubs, brothels and concert halls it is still intimately entwined with street performance and outdoor celebratory rituals of birth, death and sheer enjoyment. New Orleans provided the perfect incubator for African and Caribbean music, drumming, and dance to produce multiple musical offshoots on new soil. I also promised our next stop would be New Orleans, often referred to as “the birthplace of jazz.”īut before we can herald the onset of jazz, we need to first explore its earlier roots.
In several previous installments of Black Music Sunday,we’ve explored the jazz clubs of New York City: The Cotton Club, Smalls’ Paradise, the Vanguard, Birdland, The Village Gate, and Slugs’ Saloon, as well as the incredible music recorded live in those venues.
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