Gumbo is the first episode in Ken Burns’ Jazz series. Gumbo explores the beginnings of Jazz in New Orleans. The film shows how African-American musicians in the 1890’s combined the legacies of Congo Square with Caribbean rhythms, opera, minstrel shows, and marching bands to create “jass,” later to be called jazz.
The new music sprang, in part, from the city’s brass bands, which played funerals, weddings, picnics, and many other kinds of ritualized communal events with a syncopated beat. Flee as a Bird, an early jazz standard, is traditionally played at funeral processions.
Flee as a Bird - Jazz for Young People Curriculum, courtesy Jazz at Lincoln Center
