Black Americans Created Jazz—The World Knows It In 1895, New Orleans cornet player Buddy Bolden assembled a band that would revolutionize music forever—creating jazz, America's greatest cultural export. But jazz wasn't born from nothing: it emerged from the African rhythms enslaved people played every Sunday in Congo Square, the only place they could legally gather (by city ordinance since 1817). Black musicians took those West African traditions—improvisation, call-and-response, polyrhythms—and