New Orleans is a musical paradise, home to a variety of genres such as jazz, soul, and zydeco, and to legendary artists like Louis Armstrong. The city's music scene is much more than a museum piece; it's where the history of jazz continues to be told, and in the present tense. Born of hope and despair, the soundtrack of New Orleans is as disparate as the history of its population, driven by the influx of enslaved Africans to the waves of immigrants from places such as Sicily, Ireland, Germany and, more recently, Mexico and Central America. New Orleans music takes on several styles of music that have often been borrowed from previous traditions. It is universally regarded as the cradle of jazz music, and its vision of rhythm and blues, exemplified by Fats Domino, was interwoven with the rhythms of Cuban immigrants.
His hip-hop style bounces back on the call and response of Mardi Gras Indians. There's even a “Louisiana sound” in heavy metal. Many journalists use the term New Orleans style to refer to black musicians who performed in Chicago between 1915 and the early 1930s after leaving their native New Orleans. Developed in the early 20th century, it was not first recorded in New Orleans but in Chicago, Los Angeles and Richmond, Indiana. The New Orleans Jazz Museum tells the story of jazz. The revivals of the style before the 1920s included one with the trumpet player Bunk Johnson, a native of New Orleans who was rediscovered by two jazz historians in 1939 and who reactivated his career in the 1940s; and another at Preservation Hall, an organization in New Orleans that continues to present improvised combined music by musicians who had lived in New Orleans during the period of music formation and from those who learned from them. Divided by many experts into whites (the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, who recorded for the first time in 1917 and 1922, respectively) and blacks (the cornetist King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band and the Spike's Seven Pods of Pepper Orchestra, who recorded for the first time in 1923 and 1922, respectively), it is traditionally said that it placed great emphasis on collective improvisation since all the musicians played mutual ornaments simultaneously.
