The Trumpet That Traveled: Tracing a New Orleans Brass Line Back to a Yoruba Drum Pattern

It started with a single bar of music. Dr. Terrence Boudreaux, a musicologist at a historically Black college in New Orleans, was transcribing a 1920s brass-band recording when he noticed a rhythmic figure in the bass drum that he could not place. It wasn't European. It wasn't quite the standard second-line pattern. It was older than both, and it nagged at him. Four years later, that single bar has become the centerpiece of a collaboration that traces a thread of American music all the way back across the Atlantic — to a Yoruba drum pattern still played in Nigeria today. Congo Square and the m…