A style of jazz developed in New Orleans at the start of the 20th century. It was later spread to Chicago and New York City by New Orleans bands in the 1910s, and was, for a period, quite popular. It is often considered the first true type of jazz, and was the first music referred to by the term jazz. The style combined earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, ragtime and blues with collective, polyphonic improvisation.

While instrumentation and band size can be very flexible, the standard band consists of a front line of trumpet (or cornet), trombone and clarinet, with a rhythm section of at least two of the following instruments: guitar or banjo, string bass or tuba, piano and drums.

The music has been played continuously since the early part of the 20th century. Louis Armstrong's All-Stars was the band most popularly identified with Dixieland, although Armstrong's own influence runs through all of jazz.

The definitive Dixieland sound is created when one instrument (usually the trumpet) plays the melody or a recognisable paraphrase or variation on it, and the other instruments of the front line improvise around that melody. This creates a more chaotic sound than the extremely regimented big band sound or the unison melody of bebop.

The swing era of the 1930s led to a decline in Dixieland and, with the advent of bebop in the 1940s, the earlier group-improvisation style fell out of favour with the majority of younger black players who moved on to develop new forms.

There was a revival of Dixieland in the late 1940s and 1950s, which brought many semi-retired musicians a measure of fame late in their lives as well as bringing retired musicians such as Kid Ory back onto the jazz circuit.