Dixieland

in music, a style of jazz, often ascribed especially to the New Orleans pioneers of that movement, although many critics of popular music believe the term better describes the music of a later wave of white Chicago musicians including Jimmy McPartland, Bud Freeman, and Frank Teschemacher. Though a number of critics, especially Europeans, dismiss them, the white New Orleans musicians associated in the early 1920s with Nick LaRocca in the Original Dixieland Jass (later Jazz) Band and with Paul Mares in the New Orleans Rhythm Kings (originally the Friar's Society Orchestra) represent a style that closely parallels the black New Orleans style and had at least as much influence on jazz of the 1920s and '30s. Conspicuous differences are few, but the white New Orleans bands seem to have drawn more from ragtime and European music and less from 19th-century black ethnic music than did the black New Orleans bands. It also should be noted that New Orleans musicians including cornetist Freddie Keppard and bassist Bill Johnson performed in Los Angeles as early as 1912, thus casting doubt on the simplistic myth that jazz evolution ran smoothly “up the river” from New Orleans to Chicago. (See also Chicago style, New Orleans style.)