But as to who actually invented jazz, if such an achievement could be attributed to one person, that’s a tricky matter.
But as to who actually invented jazz, if such an achievement could be attributed to one person, that’s a tricky matter. Some say Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry invented rock n’ roll, others would argue DJ Kool Herc or Grandmaster Flash created hip hop. Nick La Rocca, the Original Dixieland Jass Band’s cornet player and composer, claimed that he personally invented jazz – though the cornetist Buddy Bolden had a much better claim, or even the Creole artist Morton, who certainly was the first to write jazz out as sheet music and always said he’d invented it. As jazz historian Gary Giddins puts it, “LaRocca turned racist, and proceeded to make horrible statements about how whites invented jazz, and how they were there before the black guys, and so forth, scurrilous stuff — a cartoon cliché of the Southern bigot.” Louis Armstrong was more charitable in his 1936 book Swing That Music, calling the Original Dixieland Jass Band “the first great jazz orchestra” and that LaRocca “had an instrumentation different from anything before, an instrumentation that made the old songs sound new.” But LaRocca’s later statements follow a long tradition in the US of white artists dependent on African-American culture publicly degrading it in order to justify their exploitation of it.