Black Americans Created Jazz—The World Knows It In 1895, New Orleans cornet player Buddy Bolden assembled a band that would revolutionize music forever—creating jazz, America's greatest cultural export. But jazz wasn't born from nothing: it emerged from the African rhythms enslaved people played every Sunday in Congo Square, the only place they could legally gather (by city ordinance since 1817). Black musicians took those West African traditions—improvisation, call-and-response, polyrhythms—and

Today is the anniversary of musician Buddy Bolden's birth -- Charles Joseph "Buddy" Bolden was born on September 6, 1877, in New Orleans, Louisiana – he died on November 4, 1931. Bolden is regarded by contemporaries as a key figure in the development of a New Orleans style of rag-time music, which later came to be known as jazz. Many early jazz musicians credited Bolden and the members of his band with being the originators of what came to be known as "jazz", though the term was not in common mu