That is stupid. Show us european Jazz, rock 'n' roll before the 20 century. What is Jazz may I ask. Or Rock 'n' roll?  Of course there wasn't any European Jazz or Rock n' Roll before the 20th century. They are American forms of music created in the 20th century, we all know that. But they weren't created by Blacks...:D   And even if they were...it certainly wasn't without a ton of White influences so it isn't correct to call Jazz, Blues or any other style of American music Black music, and actually, to do so ... is completely incorrect and really quite racist and blatantly anti-White, IMO;)    Of course there was no Rock n' Roll or Jazz in Europe prior to the 20th century, rock n' roll and Jazz didn't even exist at all prior to the 20th century. Although there were plenty of antecedents to rock n' roll and jazz in Europe prior to the 20th century, but...none in Africa:D    Now...I have a challenge for you...you show me some hundreds of years old traditional sub-saharan, Black African styles of music that sound more similar to rock n' roll or blues than hundreds of years old, traditional Irish and British Folk songs and Pub songs, do you think you can do it? Can you meet the challenge? ;)    If that isn't a big enough challenge for you...here is another... You show me some traditional, sub-saharan, Black African styles of music that sound more similar to Jazz than European Marching Band music, Classical music and traditional French, Spanish and Italian Latin styles like for instance the French Quadrilles, Minuets or the Spanish and French Contrandanza.....Can you do it?? ;)    What is Jazz you ask? Well, here I have for you the original recording of the first Dixieland/Jazz song ever recorded in history. It's called Livery Stable Blues by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. The sound quality sucks I know, you can't even hear the piano, but you must remember this is the original recording from 1917, the first Jazz/Dixieland song ever recorded, this recording is  91  years old!:eek: It's a wonder it has survived at all.     YouTube - Original Dixieland Jass Band - Livery Stable Blues (1917)               Jazz and the Italian Connection.      During a recent academic conference held in New Orleans there occurred an exchange which might best be described as droll but which was intrinsically didactic. The setting was a panel discussion on jazz, and the panelists were all historians who were actively researching and publishing on the subject. Following the various presentations which were devoted to the life-stories of musicians such as Sidney Bechet, Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, and Lester Young,  a gentleman from the back of the audience asked: What about the ODJB, the first band to record jazz? A hush fell over the room, attended by looks of horror and pity emanating from the podium. For a moment the panelists seemed startled,  :D until one launched into the by now almost perfunctory response to the question, stressing that the circumstances which had permitted the Original Dixieland Jazz Band to make the first jazz recording were another indication of the racist bias of the recording industry and suggesting that, beyond that, the question should not be dignified with further elucidation. Somewhat nonplussed, and duly ambushed, the gentleman returned to his seat no closer to an answer (or serious consideration) than he had been at the outset. Yet one can only wonder how historians who are trained to ask hard questions could have contented themselves with such a brusque and simplistic response to an apparently sincere request to hear their views on the matter of the ODJB and its influence. Had the gentleman been better prepared to make a case for the importance of the ODJB, he could clearly have done so, for the evidence on their behalf is quite impressive, if presently obscure.  Why, then, should a question on the ODJB be dismissed as politically incorrect?  The answer can be traced back to the earliest jazz studies in the late 1930s and to the aesthetic predilections of the men who wrote them.     Jazz history has often been written from the perspective of the great man, emphasizing the influence of musicians who enjoy widespread critical acceptance, especially in retrospect, and ignoring the role of lesser artists whose activities are ipso facto less important. In the case of the ODJB, however, personalities also became a factor. When Marshall  Stearns ’ (Jew name:D)  The History of Swing Music appeared in Down Beat in twenty parts between 1936 and 1938, objections from the leader of the ODJB that Stearns had denigrated the band's significance in the original development of jazz began to circulate within the jazz press. LaRocca's letters to Down Beat, Metronome, and Tempo in the fall of 1936  all argued that the ODJB had invented jazz  and disputed  Stearns' claim  that the Original Creole Orchestra had been first. In a personal reply to LaRocca dated January 11, 1937,  Stearns   complained that you failed to give colored musicians a break and that is why I exaggerated the other extreme, since the public is inclined to believe you and musicians of your opinion. While considerable attention was given to the ODJB by Charles Edward Smith in Jazzmen, an early American jazz history published in 1939, his interest in the ODJB was not typical of the general trends among hot jazz collectors. Most of them preferred the recordings of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bix Beiderbecke, Joe Oliver, or Jelly Roll Morton, considering the earlier records by the ODJB to be rhythmically stiff and a little too cacophonous. Since all the early histories were written by hot jazz collectors, such aesthetic predilections had a bearing on historical perceptions, relegating the ODJB to second-class status aesthetically and therefore historically. Some fifty years after the fact, it is apparent that a reappraisal of the ODJB and its influence is long overdue.     Indeed, the reaction of American jazz scholars to the ODJB has been remarkably similar to that of the Columbia Phonograph Company which made the first aborted attempt to record the band in January 1917. Consider the account given by H.O. Brunn in The Story of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (1960):     The interweaving strains of jazz bounced from wall to wall until the resultant reverberations became one continuous din. The recording director closed the door to his office from the inside. A gang of carpenters, who were building shelves in the studio, laughed and threw their tools about to contribute to the bedlam. After two numbers the musicians were paid their $250 and ordered from the studio. Columbia had washed its hands of jazz. (pp. 64-65)     But Columbia's attitude changed dramatically when the band's Livery Stable Blues, recorded soon after by Victor, surpassed the million-and-a-half sales mark for that company within months of its release. By August 1917 Columbia's ODJB version of Darktown Strutter's Ball was vying for the attention of record buyers on the shelves, and newspaper advertisements for both Victor and Columbia products by Maison Blanche in New Orleans show how important they were as harbingers of a revolution which was only just beginning. Maison Blanche left little doubt as to why Livery Stable was so popular: Here is positively the greatest dance record ever issued. Made by New Orleans musicians for New Orleans people, it has all the swing and pep and spirit that is so characteristic of the bands whose names are now a by-word at New Orleans dances. It is more proof that New Orleans sets the pace for 'Wonderful' dance music—a fact that is recognized and commented upon the country over. The Darktown copy was comparable: It’s played by New Orleans boys, too, for here is where 'Jazz' music originated and it has been the craze the country over. Mercantile hyperbole notwithstanding, the overriding theme of these advertisements is that the ODJB was representative of New Orleans music and a model for further development. As it happened,  the influence of the ODJB on New Orleans musicians, both white and black, can be extensively documented and serves as a useful counterpoise to the usual historical accounts .     The context for any discussion of an ethnic connection to New Orleans musical culture, be it Italian, Irish, Creole, German, Latin American, or African-American, is the process of transculturation which fused diverse traditions into a distinctively regional blend. Demographic patterns which created a crazy quilt of mixed neighborhoods also yielded an extremely eclectic musical amalgam, and in a town renowned for its festival traditions, all citizens had access to the music which was performed on the streets, at the camps at West End, and in the cabarets and dance halls which fed the neighborhoods. Consequently,  one of the essential features of an Italian connection to New Orleans jazz was that it was not intended for the sole enjoyment of Italians but contributed instead to the development of a New Orleans style of playing improvised music , duly enriching it. Within the ODJB there were Italians (LaRocca, Sbarbaro), Irish (Shields), and English (Ragas, Edwards), but what they played was a New Orleans sound which exceeded the sum of its parts. Local reactions to the recordings of the ODJB tended to be enthusiastic, and far-ranging. John Wigginton Hyman (Johnny Wiggs), by his own recollection, had first gravitated to jazz after hearing Joe Oliver at subscription dances at Tulane in 1916 and was applying what he could pick up with the Invincibles, a string band made up of middle-class youths from the uptown area. Yet it was hearing the ODJB that revolutionized his conception of the music: In 1917 the Original Dixieland Jazz Band released their first record on Victor. This was too much for the Invincibles and we began to yearn to play 'real Jazz.' Throughout his long career Wiggs rubbed shoulders with various Italian musicians who shared his dedication to real jazz, including Tony Parenti, Charlie Scaglioni, Leon Roppolo, Santo Pecora, and Sherwood Mangiapane, and as a child he had played streetcorners with young Joseph Manone for small change. For him, the ODJB was a model for nascent jazzmen to follow, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that he was not alone in this opinion.      The impact of the ODJB on black New Orleanians was no less telling .  When Dink Johnson, a drummer and clarinetist who worked with the Original Creole Orchestra, Jelly Roll Morton, and Kid Ory, was interviewed by Floyd  Levin :rolleyes: in 1950, he had some interesting observations concerning his reaction to the ODJB: I was actually a drummer, you know.  I had always wanted to play the clarinet since hearing Larry Shields with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band .  The effect of the ODJB's recordings on the most popular black dance band in New Orleans in 1917, Kid Ory's, is another case in point.  What was known as the Ory-Oliver band included future stars such as Joe Oliver, Johnny Dodds, and occasionally Louis Armstrong and held forth at dance halls like the Economy and Cooperators, where its popularity was unassailable. Testimony by Manuel Manetta, the Violinist in Kid Ory's band, illustrates what happened throughout the city in the wake of the ODJB recordings. The two readers in the band were Oliver and Manetta, with the latter serving as straw boss for Ory in the selection of material and direction of the band. Yet Manetta was fired because  Joe Oliver and Kid Ory wanted to follow the format of the Dixieland Jazz Band and use only five pieces.  Prior to 1917, many New Orleans dance bands either carried or were led by violinists. After that year, violins all but disappeared.  Manetta ended up dropping violin, offering saxophone, trumpet, trombone, and piano to prospective employers. The success of the ODJB through the medium of the phonograph completed the revolution in dance-band instrumentation begun by Buddy Bolden two decades earlier, supplanting violinists with cornetists and standardizing the jazz-band lineup. The success of the ODJB vindicated faking and  fused the term jazz to the New Orleans style of instrumental music, collectively improvised,  which had been developing since the turn of the century. The term itself became a rallying point for New Orleans musicians of all ethnic and racial backgrounds, creating conditions for the formation of a community of interest in support of the new music, which was perceived as a local product. While the roots of Jazz were undoubtedly influenced largely by musicians within the African-American community (which was itself extremely diversified), its subsequent development before 1917 was a more broadly communitarian phenomenon, drawing on a variety of musical cultures extant in New Orleans. Music, in other words, brought people of all affiliations together, in spite of the social conditions which were often designed to keep them apart.      In addition to the success of their records, the ODJB were the first link between jazz and the youth culture that emerged in the wake of the First World War.  Indeed, the band had caught the doughboys going and coming, first as the hottest ticket in New York City 1917-18 when the city served as a major port of embarkation, and later in London in 1919 at the Hippodrome and the Armistice Ball, where they played for the returning servicemen and their generals. The same celebration of the joys of self-expression that was present in jazz was also found in the interpretation of Freud as a means to health through the unrestrained libido or in the fashions of the flapper, mutually reinforcing the reaction against the formalism of the Victorian Era. Comparison of the early musical experiences of Italians such as Nick LaRocca or Leon Roppolo with those of Creoles of color like Sidney Bechet or Freddie Keppard reveals the operation of a generation gap which presaged the general rebellion of youth in the 1920s. LaRocca's father forbade him to practice cornet and destroyed several, even though he himself was a player. Roppolo came from a long line of Italian clarinet virtuosi, who urged him to take up the violin because there was no money to be made playing clarinet in America. Keppard rejected violin in order to take up cornet in the manner of Bolden. Bechet started with clarinet but eventually gravitated to soprano saxophone, largely because it enhanced his ability to predominate in ensemble situations. In each case, young players opted for faking over the more traditional formal pedagogy which was prescribed by their parents, creating similar situations in the households of Italians and Creoles of color. Jazz was, after all, a musical vehicle for the expression of personality, and the tribulations of the Roppolo and Keppard families were later experienced by the Beiderbeckes and the Toughs in Iowa and Illinois. But there was one major difference. New Orleanians such as Bechet, Keppard, LaRocca, and Roppolo were reacting to the music they heard all around them; Beiderbecke and Tough got their first exposure by listening to ODJB records, which led them to seek out other New Orleans bands such as King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings in Chicago.     There is still much to be learned about jazz history and its early development from the story of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and fortunately a reassessment of its contributions is already underway (see Jack Stewart's piece elsewhere in this Issue). If we are serious about understanding the culture which produced jazz in New Orleans, then it is incumbent upon us to broaden our horizons to include each and every thread in this complex tapestry.  The Italian connection was but one strand of many, yet the presence of Italian musicians in so many of the early New Orleans jazz bands tells us that it was a significant factor in the development of the music and deserves recognition.  LaRocca and Sbarbaro with the ODJB, Roppolo with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, Curly Lizana with the New Orleans Jazz Babies, Charlie Cordilla with the Halfway House Orchestra or the subsequent activities of Joseph Wingy Manone, Sharkey Bonano, Tony Parenti, Louis Prima, Irving Fazola (an honorary Italian) and others  all attest to an Italian jazz connection which was deep and abiding. To dismiss any of this body of work as imitative or derivative is to appease the critic at the expense of the historian and to remove from discussion some of the music's most colorful and charismatic personalities .   -  Dr. Bruce Boyd Raeburn      Sources: Brunn, H.O. The Story of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1960).     Jazzmen. Charles Edward Smith and Frederic Ramsey, Jr., eds. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1939).     Levin, Floyd. Mystery Shrouds Kid Ory 1920s LA. Recordings. West Coast Rag (November 1990): 17-20.     Manetta, Manuel. Taped interview, March 21, 1957, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University.   Menville, Myra Wiggs - Self-Explained, The Second Line, 29 (Spring 1977). 3-13.   New Orleans Times-Picayune, April 15,1917   New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 8, 1917.   Welburn, Ronald G. American Jazz Criticism, 1914-1940. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1983.