Jazz music seems to have evolved as a musical expression of the black communities of the southern United States, weaving together the traditions of West Africa and Europe.  'The style's West African pedigree is evident in its use of blue notes, call and response, improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation, and the swung note of ragtime.'

The first of what can be called jazz musicians probably existed in New Orleans.  These men plied their trade on their wind and percussion instruments playing music in the highly festive funerary occasions of the black community in New Orleans.  They served as proponents of this emergent form and began to spread its sounds throughout the Deep South.  About the time of the First World War, black musicians began performing in vaudeville productions and so started spreading jazz to other places in the country.

On specific performer was 'Afro-Creole pianist Jelly Roll Morton [who] began his career in Storyville. From 1904, he toured with vaudeville shows around southern cities, also playing in Chicago and New York.  His “Jelly Roll Blues,” which he composed around 1905, was published in 1915 as the first jazz arrangement in print, introducing more musicians to the New Orleans style.'

Indeed, New Orleans is so synonymous with jazz that a professional basketball team that was briefly sited there was called the New Orleans Jazz.  The team eventually moved to Salt Lake City, Utah.  In a twist of amusing irony, the franchise, situated now in a predominantly white, Mormon enclave in the Rocky Mountains, kept the name and has gone on to enjoy relative success in the NBA as the Utah Jazz.