The history of New Orleans, located at the delta of the Mississippi River, is characterized by diverse and interconnected processes and structures, including subsidence, flooding, colonialism, racism, violence, resistance, resilience, music and cultural innovation. New Orleans has been analyzed from a broad range of perspectives, as an engineering marvel or an unstable failure, as a site of unspeakable injustices, as a center of the Blues Resistance Tradition and as ground zero for Jazz. Here, I explore some of the interconnections between those perspectives using the dynamics of complex systems.
In an agent-based model for economic development, flooding and flood protection in New Orleans, instability of the city's economy under episodic large floods increases with decreasing rate of societal dissipation. I show that societal dissipation primarily can be ascribed to flows of wages from businesses to workers, implying that instability in New Orleans increases with increasing levels of inequality.
The dynamics of improvisational Jazz has been described qualitatively as nonlinear, unstable, chaotic and high-dimensional. I quantitatively analyze notated Jazz compositions using an extension of nonlinear time series forecasting in which I derive a slowly changing musical context variable and a measure for the extent to which a composition can be described by dynamics. A comparison of Jazz piano compositions by Ferdinand ``Jelly Roll” Morton with contemporary classical piano compositions by Sergei Rachmaninoff reveals that Morton's Jazz is dynamical, but less so than Rachmaninoff's compositions, that the music of both composers is nonlinear and dissipative, and that Morton's compositions exhibit higher dissipation rates and more complicated, finely-scaled phase spaces.
Adding dynamics describing Black workers, resistance movements and repression of Black communities to the agent-based model of New Orleans, based on the environmental history of Clyde Woods, results in higher rates of disruption and dissipation, which increases economic instability at intermediate scales but manifests as a more stable relationship to the environment over long time scales. In initial results, the dynamics of resistance communities in this model shares seven of nine distinct characteristics with the dynamics of Jazz, suggesting that early New Orleans Jazz music might have taken on some of the characteristics of the social milieu in which it developed.
