Jazz was born at the beginning of the 20th century in New Orleans, a port city where cultures, languages, and rhythms from all over the world met. Around the same time, our building, Edison, was being constructed (circa 1902), in a Europe discovering electricity and an America discovering its voice.
The African American communities of the southern United States, the first free descendants of enslaved people, combined work songs, religious spirituals, and blues with instruments brought by Europeans: trumpets, clarinets, and marching band drums. Many were self-taught musicians who played in dance halls, on the streets, or in parade bands. From this mix, a new music was born: free, spontaneous, and deeply human.
The first jazz bands formed around 1910, and in 1917 the Original Dixieland Jass Band recorded the first jazz track in history, Livery Stable Blues, in New York. In the 1920s, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, and Jelly Roll Morton brought jazz from New Orleans to Chicago and New York, where it became the soundtrack of modern America: the music of bars, dance, and freedom.
Since then, jazz has spread worldwide, constantly evolving. It has influenced every musical genre that followed, been reinterpreted and adapted, yet it has retained its essence: the freedom to tell your own story through sound.
The same freedom and trust in improvisation have inspired us. Driven by a desire to create, explore, and tell stories in our own way, we built this exhibition: a form of visual jazz, born from curiosity, passion, and our own creative energy.
