Stars of David and Sons of Sicily: Constellations Beyond the Canon in Early New Orleans Jazz

Abstract

This essay explores the interaction of Jews, Italian Americans, Latinos, Creoles, and African Americans in the early development of New Orleans jazz, and argues that a paradigm emphasizing the confluence of traditional ethnic influences is insufficient to explain the origins of jazz in this city. Rather, trans‐ethnic cultural exchange deriving from the “crazy quilt” demographic configurations of some New Orleans neighborhoods, furthered by a common attraction to new forms of musical expression among young people, enabled the creation of new vernacular—and specifically American—identities for musicians through the communal act of performing jazz. The attraction to and assimilation of black vernacular performance practices by Sicilian Americans especially fueled this process. In challenging the Eurocentric musical canon that prevailed in early twentieth‐century New Orleans, jazz musicians formed associations based on mutual interest in developing and sharing new practices, and by sometimes subverting the ethnic and racial social boundaries prescribed by segregation and other ethnocentric conventions in the process.