xieland Jazz Band (ODJB), took their versions on tour and recordings began to capture the sound of New Orleans' black music--although only six of the early black brass bands were recorded in the 1920s (Pfeffer).
The African slaves brought their music with them and took in much from European music--more or less, depending on the genre--in order to produce the music that the twentieth century would recognize under various labels such as blues and ragtime. There is some documentation of the imported music because, unusually, slaves in New Orleans were allowed to hold weekend musical meetings in the Place Congo (now the approximate site of Louis Armstrong Park). These mass dances featured drummers, groups of stomping dancers, chanting women's voices, and, as contemporary drawings show, "percussion and string instruments virtually identical to those characteristic of African music" (Gioia 4). The dances continued at least until the 1860s and they had great importance as part of the collective musical memory of the people. The great New Orleans reed player Sidney Bechet remembered the reports of his grandfather who would "beat out rhythms on the drums at the square [on] Sundays when the slaves would meet" (quoted in Gioia 5).
But the specific origins of ragtime and jazz are obscure. Both undoubtedly began on the plantations among the slaves and it was not until after the Civil War, when the musicians acquired freedom of movement, that the early strains began to coalesce into the form of ragtime that became famous in the 1890s and the New Orleans jazz that came together around the turn of the century. Thus "it is quite possible that music which the modern ear would recognize as having jazz characteristics" had been played by plantation slaves "many generations before its emergence as a common musical property" (Gammond 280). And, at the same time, the first signs of ragtime can be heard in the songs that were played in minstrel ...