Enslaved people's opportunities to perform music varied among jurisdictions. For example, English Protestant Jamaica banned the enslaved community from participating in activities that could have assimilated them into European music traditions. Dancing and drumming were suppressed and gatherings were banned, because the minority European population lived in fear of revolution. Bans drove music underground and encouraged its association with suppressed cultural traditions, such as voodoo. In contrast, in Cuba, enslaved people participated in Spanish Catholic holidays. Priests encouraged enslaved parishioners to celebrate with their traditional music and dances.
When the U.S. acquired New Orleans in 1803, the population was 8,000. Ten thousand French Creoles from Saint-Domingue (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) arrived in New Orleans in two refugee phases before 1810. The second phase had first fled to Cuba for six years. The refugees included 3,000 Creole free people of color, who brought a strong voodoo tradition and African music heritage to New Orleans. By 1822, the Sunday music and dance in Congo Square was already decried as a disgrace to the city, according to Charles Hersch's "Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans."
Enslaved people in the Caribbean played music on drums, pebbles in boxes, sticks, animal bones, whittled flutes and stringed lutes made of gourd drums (banjos). Jazz developed in New Orleans after 1900 as an instrumental music and was performed on European band instruments. In the uptown/downtown jazz legend, the two traditions were fused by 1894 segregation laws, when "uptown" (French Quarter) Creoles of Color with formal music education and "downtown" blacks with no formal training (Canal Street) were marginalized into the same community.
Jazz was not founded on the 4/4 or 3/4 time signature (meter or beat) pattern typical of European music. Instead, by European standards, some notes of the beats were syncopated, meaning displaced or omitted or inappropriately strong or weak. Early jazz reflected the "clave" patterns on which Afro-Cuban music was constructed. A clave (Spanish: key) was a type of wooden peg used on ships and adapted as a percussive instrument in the Caribbean. The meters beaten on claves were three-two like the Bo Diddley beat, or the opposite, two-three.
Early New Orleans jazz bands originated performance styles in which harmonies ("changes") functioned as a foundation on which to improvise. The first prominent jazz performer and bandleader was Buddy Bolden (1877-1931), a formally trained black musician whose band members all improvised. The informal collaboration among band members was culturally African, and the improvisation in harmony was a legacy of African drumming that reached New Orleans from the Caribbean.