16 Geology and Jazz

I turned 29 the year I moved to New Orleans. I was almost a Ph.D. and about to become a new geology faculty member at a big state school, the University of New Orleans. I found a cheap house to rent within walking distance of campus. When I arrived, my landlady issued an immediate warning, “It’s not safe to go to the French Quarter.” Of course, I headed there as soon as possible. I went alone, not yet knowing anyone, and I loved New Orleans from that first day.

New Orleans is best known as the birthplace of jazz, but I grew up without a stereo. Later, I listened to Barry Manilow and Billy Joel and top-40 countdowns, guided by popular culture until college. There, choir, piano lessons, and classes emphasized mostly classical music. I found myself in New Orleans, barely able to tell jazz from elevator music.

I wish I could say that I had some great musical awakening in New Orleans, and I did indeed stir from my slumber, but I was more like a hungry teenager at a buffet who shovels down everything he can, sometimes hardly tasting it. I saw Dick Dale, the last of the surfing guitarists, the Meters, champions of New Orleans funk, and Aaron Neville singing “Amazing Grace.” Back then, the Rebirth Brass Band played on Jackson Square for tips. I went to shows, drank beer, and bobbed to the music—blues, zydeco, brass bands, and Cajun bands. I went to festivals—Jazz Fest, the Strawberry Festival, the Greek Festival, the Seafood Festival, the Hispanic Festival, and the French Quarter Festival. I ate lots of good food—beignets, po’boys, crabs, crawfish, oysters, muffalettos, Italian, Greek, Mexican, Cajun, Creole—at fine restaurants and holes in the wall. I absorbed the culture as my cholesterol spiked, but I lacked an intellectual framework to stick it onto, unlike the walls of my arteries upon which the cholesterol built up.

I left New Orleans for Dubuque, Iowa, 15 years after arriving, with a wife and two kids, departing eight months before Hurricane Katrina. In Dubuque, I met Jim Sherry, a world-class musician who had deposited himself upon the shores of the Mississippi after teaching jazz in Thailand. Family was the only explanation I discovered for his unlikely, but fortunate for me, arrival. We decided to develop a course we called “Geology and Jazz,” initially linked by alliteration and our common desire to go to New Orleans. But as the conneection of our friendship grew, so, too, did our understanding of the conneection between our two fields.

New Orleans started on the natural levee of the Mississippi River, whose ancestral rivers built Louisiana from salt and mud and sand and more mud and more sand as the super-continent Pangaea split apart and the Gulf of Mexico opened. As ocean water splashed into the rift, it evaporated, leaving its salt behind to form an unstable foundation for the future state. As the water deepened, mud and sand accumulated, their weight squeezing the salt into domes that popped toward the surface, with the oil and natural gas that accumulated around them becoming natural resource wealth. As deltas built out into the Gulf, the state grew—good soil, flat land, future plantations. And the breakup of Pangaea and the movement of the North American plate eventually brought Louisiana to the perfect latitude for growing cotton. All the pieces were in place for agricultural abundance but one—labor. And that could be imported.

The African chunk of Pangaea moved a bit further south as the Atlantic opened. The evolution of humans there under the more-intense equatorial UV radiation led to lots of protective melanin in human skin. Those humans that migrated out of Africa to northern climates gradually lost their melanin, needing to produce more vitamin D in their skin. These washed-out looking white people took Louisiana from the more heavily pigmented Native Americans, exterminated or sickened most of them, leaving few as potential la-borers. But the darker-skinned Africans could be enslaved by the light-skinned northern Europeans, enriching the Brits, the French, and the Dutch, and providing cheap labor to enrich the plantation owners. The plantation owners themselves then produced cotton and wealth without needing to dirty themselves physically, though sullying themselves morally.

The plantation owners and their white foremen treated female slaves as entertainment, and mixed-race offspring abounded. New Orleans developed a subculture around quadroon balls—a quadroon being a lady one-fourth African and three-fourths white, considered the most beautiful mixture. Rich white planters upriver from New Orleans would negotiate at the balls for a concubine, promising, for example, to send an offspring for advanced study in France. Some were trained as classical musicians.

New Orleans became one of the few places in the South where free people of color could have a somewhat decent life, owning homes, and being employed, all before the Civil War. Prior to that war, life for slaves was nothing like Disney’s Song of the South nor contemporary racists’ delusions. To help make their existence bearable, call-and-response music helped pass the long days in the field, and drum circles, like in Congo Square, helped maintain their syncopated rhythms, together birthing the blues, the root of nearly every truly American music, including rock and roll.

At the end of the Civil War, instruments from marching bands were left behind. The recently freed slaves adopted the brass instruments. But another ingredient for the musical gumbo was needed—the input of the classically trained mixed-race musicians. They lived in a world of relative wealth, freedom, and education compared to the former slaves, with little mixing. But a court case changed their status.

In 1896, the Supreme Court upheld in the case of Plessy versus Ferguson the separate but equal doctine of segregation. A mixed-race man, seven-eighths white Homer Plessy, resisted being forced to sit in the blacks-only cars in the segregated trains in Louisiana, a planned protest to challenge Louisiana’s latest segregation law that in 1890 required separate train cars for blacks and whites. Under Louisiana’s law, Plessy was classified as black. From then until well after Brown versus Board of Education, black was black, mixed was black, Negro was separated in the segregated south. Legally, the former slaves and their descendants were thrown into the same group as the educated mixed-race New Orleanians. In fact, only in 2000 did the U.S. census allow people to check more than one box under “race.”

So, in the late 1800s, the blues, brass instruments, and classically-trained musicians were all thrown together. One more thing was needed—a place for the ingredients to stew, a place for the musicians to perform. Vice often funds other entertainment—Today we have gambling in Las Vegas gambling funding musical shows, and in the late 1800s until 1917, New Orleans had Storyville, the whorehouse district. No matter how many times one samples the merchandise per day, there’s plenty of time for other entertainment. Music and alcohol filled the need. Louis Armstrong, the King of Jazz, got his start as a teenager playing trumpet in a Storyville whorehouse. Other Jazz musicians, such as Buddy Bolden, preceded him, but Louis is who we remember.

In 1917, a reformer closed Storyville, in 1920 Prohibition began, and in 1927 the worst flood in U.S. history broke the back of the sharecropper system that had perpetuated slavery under a new name. Jazz poured out of New Orleans as part of the Great Migration. Blacks headed to Chicago, New York, Kansas City, Memphis, and St. Louis. And they took Jazz with them to the speakeasies that sprang up during prohibition.

For my students at UD, studying jazz is like a history course—it’s not alive for them. Here in the Dubuque, cover bands dominate, and the summer Friday outdoor series — Jazz at the Clocktower may have an occasional local high school or college jazz band but otherwise is relatively jazz-free. But when Jim and I take them to New Orleans, the jazz heritage transforms. The horns blast, and the students dance. They mix with young, old, black, white, college students from Tulane, tourists from the world over, and locals down for a good time. Somewhat dry academic lectures are transformed by ancient rhythms. Syncopation moves down from the head, felt, not just intellectualized. Laissez les bon temps roller.

Let the good times roll.

Notes on Deltas and River Processes:

New Orleans is located on the Mississippi delta. A delta forms where a stream meets a body of standing water, such as the ocean or a reservoir. It gets its name because the Nile River delta is shaped like the Greek letter ∆.

When the water in a stream slows, it drops the sediment it carries. The faster it is moving, the larger sediment it can carry, but the larger sediment also drops out first as the water slows. When a stream floods and tops its bank, the coarsest material drops out to form the natural levee of the stream. The flat land nearby forms the floodplain of the stream. It water usually stands but trees grow, this area forms a swamp, usually fairly close to themain stream channel. Farther away and at a slightly lower elevation, no trees grow in the marsh.

The channel itself can take a variety of forms, including a meandering path, such as the Mississippi River south of St. Louis, or a braided stream with multiple channels that usually form when the stream has more sediment than it can carry, such as the outwash from a glacier or after deforestation leads to increased erosion.

A stream carries its sediment in three main ways:

bedload: large sediment bouncing along the bottom of the stream;

suspended load: mostly clay that stays in the water, not really floating but held up by the charged nature of the clay’s surfaces; and

dissolved load: salt, calcite, and other soluble minerals that rain-water dissolve and carry away.

When water slows, instead of transporting sediment, it deposits it.

As streams go downhill from its headwaters towards its delta, most change in predictable ways:

• channel size gets bigger;

• discharge, the volume of water carried per unit time, increases;

• sediment load increases;

• sediment size decreases; and

• velocity increases. The increase in velocity goes against our intuition. If we want to go whitewater rafting, we go toward the mountains, not the coast. But much of that movement of the water doesn’t result in it advancing farther downhill. Instead, it goes in eddies, hydraulics, and around boulders. Its net movement is actually less that in a place like New Orleans, where the Mississippi is very deep and wide and has little friction with its channel to slow it.