{"id":2239798,"date":"2026-01-18T16:39:39","date_gmt":"2026-01-18T16:39:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2239798"},"modified":"2026-01-18T16:39:39","modified_gmt":"2026-01-18T16:39:39","slug":"new-orleans-jazz-wasnt-just-in-storyville-exhibit-shows-entertainment-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/new-orleans-jazz-wasnt-just-in-storyville-exhibit-shows-entertainment-life\/","title":{"rendered":"New Orleans jazz wasn’t just in Storyville, exhibit shows | Entertainment\/Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Romance isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

In the New Orleans Jazz Museum exhibit \u201cThe District: Music and Musicians in Storyville,\u201d that narrative is corrected.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was happening in Storyville as we know it, but there was also jazz that was flowering everywhere in New Orleans,\u201d said David Kunian, music curator for the museum. \u201cIt was Uptown, downtown, back of town, in the Quarter, in the Treme. This was happening everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

That the new genre was proliferating beyond Basin Street, and the rugged blocks behind it, also elevates its evolution.<\/p>\n

\u201cThough jazz and vice have been associated together for a long time, that cheapens the music and makes people think, \u2018Oh, you know, jazz is just whorehouse music, and of course it’s much more,\u2019\u201d Kunian said. \u201cSo, the way I wanted to approach it, especially because we’re a music museum, is to focus less on the vice and the prostitution\u00a0\u2014 though you have to have a little bit of that\u00a0\u2014 and more on the music and where the music was played.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The District\u2019s ‘professors’\u00a0<\/h3>\n

Jazz bands rarely entertained brothel customers. Rather, madams mostly employed solo pianists for their parlors, to better focus the commerce in other rooms of the sporting houses. Jelly Roll Morton, Tony Jackson, Kid Ross and Manuel Manetta were some of those players, often referred to as \u201cprofessors.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of that was because these guys had to play whatever anyone wanted to hear,\u201d Kunian said. \u201cIt wasn’t just kind of early jazz, ragtime, blues, but there were operas, opera themes, arias, mazurkas \u2026 all sorts of different kinds of music depending on what the patrons of these places wanted to hear.\u201d<\/p>\n

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A map of the Storyville neighborhood in the exhibit \u201cThe District: Music and Musicians in Storyville\u201d at the New Orleans Jazz Museum.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\n BY DAVE WALKER | Contributing writer<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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Venues in segregated Black Storyville, located a few blocks toward Uptown, featured spaces where larger bands would perform. The saloons, cabarets and dance halls located behind Basin\u2019s bordello mansions were also hotbeds of ensemble playing. Enduring compositions with ties to Storyville or Black Storyville include \u201cMahogany Hall Stomp,\u201d \u201cBasin Street Blues,\u201d \u201cFunky Butt Blues\u201d and Louis Jordan\u2019s \u201cSaturday Night Fish Fry.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The District, as it was known to the musicians, was nicknamed Storyville by its patrons for Sidney Story, the politician whose 1897 ordinance established the District\u2019s boundaries in an attempt to consolidate the city\u2019s vice into one neighborhood. Like the New Orleans Storyville Museum on Conti Street, the exhibit doesn\u2019t back down from the dark side of the lives of the sector\u2019s sex workers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn reality, the District was squalid, with dirty cribs and open gutters,\u201d says descriptive wall text. \u201cBeyond the environmental conditions, drug addiction was common; it was easy to get heroin, morphine and cocaine, often at the neighborhood pharmacy. \u2026 Sexually transmitted disease was prevalent, with people turning to ineffective patent medicines. In summary, Storyville was nothing like the elegant depictions of popular culture.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Key objects in the exhibit include patent-medicine bottles and a pair of dice excavated from the Storyville site, furniture and fashions seen in the houses, and a video display demonstrating some of the steps that would\u2019ve been danced to the music performed there.<\/p>\n

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Detail of the Josie Arlington costume<\/span><\/p>\n

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\n BY DAVE WALKER | Contributing writer<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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\u201cI don’t think there was a whole lot of dancing (in) the brothels, but there was some and certainly at the saloons and cabarets and music establishments of the District,\u201d Kunian said. \u201cThese are the kind of dances that they were doing to the period music.\u201d<\/p>\n

Along with music, oral histories and interviews with musicians who were firsthand witnesses to the District\u2019s establishments play in the exhibit.<\/p>\n

One of the marquee objects on view is the carriage stone from the entrance of Lulu White\u2019s Mahogany Hall. An early find by a member of the New Orleans Jazz Club (whose collection makes up much of the museum\u2019s holdings), the stone has been in storage basically since Hurricane Katrina.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI’ve been wanting to bring this out ever since I started at the museum almost 10 years ago,\u201d Kunian said. \u201cIt was the carriage stone outside Lulu White\u2019s, where people would get out of their carriages and step on this to avoid stepping in the gutter or the grass or whatever and then step onto the sidewalk and then into Lulu\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou never know who might have stepped on this while walking into one of the fanciest brothels in the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

New Orleans museum exhibits calendar\u00a0<\/h3>\n