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Anyone who has had the privilege of hearing New Orleans jazzmen playing "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" instantly recognizes that the spirituals of the African-American Christian Churches are integral to the jazz idiom -- just as the Mississippi Delta Blues chords and harmonies are important in the development of contemporary rock-and-roll. And in New Orleans, where African-Americans and Whites have lived in relative harmony for decades, the fusion of the musical forms that became jazz represented the fusion of many cultures.
The first true jazz group is said to have been formed in New Orleans around 1895. It was known as either the Spasm Band or the Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band and was composed of seven boys aged 12 to 15. At about 1900, another band in New Orleans adopted this same name for an engagement at the Haymarket Dance Hall, the original Spasms showed up with rocks in their pockets. Their appearance persuaded the owner of this New Orleans dance hall to repaint his advertising cards to read "Razzy Dazzy Jazzy Band (Rawson, 2004)."
A key location in the development of jazz in New Orleans is the 400 block of South Rampart Street, which was once home to saloons, a ballroom, a jazz record store, and a theater. Louis Armstrong bought his first cornet on this block, which is credited by some music industry analysts as one of the places in New Orleans where jazz was born (Laborde, 1995). While there is no one single place that can truly be identified as definitively the birthplace of jazz, the bordellos of the famous Storyville red light district in New Orleans were certainly important venues in which the music was played. Overall, however, Errol Laborde (1995) believes that it was in the blocks surrounding Storyville in the country's first African-American "suburb" known as the Treme where jazz groups such as those fronted by Bunk Johnson and Buddy Bolden played. Though whit
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