One of the so-called Creole Romantic musical dynasties of New Orleans, the Dédé family including father Edmond and son Edouard – were among the most noted of the city’s nineteenth-century free black community. Along with another father/son pair named Lambert, these pioneering African-American composers helped to develop the cross-cultural musical language that served as a link between European concert music, ragtime and jazz.

The alternately Gallic and Italianate Mon pauvre cœur (1852) was Edmond Dédé’s first local success and the earliest piece by a black person to be published in New Orleans. The zany Françoise et Tortillard (1877), dating from his Bordeaux years, is a lightning-fast comedy, while the orchestral Chicago Välse (1891) dates from Edmond’s later years in Paris and is by turns brassy and stentorian, dreamy and sentimental. The composer often maintains a certain dignity even in the midst of frivolity, an example being Méphisto masqué, a polka with a buzzing ensemble of mirlitons, or French kazoos.