What I'm also finding out in very basic terms of course, is Jass was born out of a part of the Creole community that felt their lighter melanated skin tone made them better than persons of the negro community that was of darker melanated hues and all that entailed.
Per Collier's book, the Creoles (of Spanish/French descent) mixed freely with whites (pre-Civil War) and shunned Black society & music (developing the foundations of the Blues) up until the post Civil War period and the adoption of Jim Crow laws. At that point the Creoles were "lumped in" with Black society and treated as such. It was the ("forced") mix of Creoles (playing European music) and Blacks(playing early Blues) than fomented early jass in the bordelos of the Storyville area of New Orleans. Where people exist, music comes out..particularly in a music oriented city like New Orleans. At the time all this was happening..the Spanish American War ended and a significant portion of the service men were decommissioned in New Orleans. The military at that time was BIG on maintaining marching bands for all occasions. A large number of those service men-band members dumped their instruments on the secondary market in New Orleans and New Orleans was awash in used brass instruments. Poor folks, like Creoles and Blacks, couldn't afford new brass instruments, but could afford used brass instruments being sold at depressed prices. Enter the flood of brass instruments into the stew of Creole/Black/EU influenced Blues and "jazz" takes a quantum step forward..into early ragtime..
It's interesting how it all comes together..right place-right time over and over and over...with post-war industrialization in the north there's a wave of poor people headed north for jobs and freedom of another sort and they take their music with them to cities like St, Louis, Detroit and Chicago...and the story continues..

