The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival begins Friday, and music fans from all over the world will flock to the city’s racetrack for seven days of music. A lot of things make New Orleans a one-of-a-kind music town, but one is the tuba, the monstrous brass instrument worn like a python squeezing its victim. When jazz began there after WWI, the tuba supplied the rhythmic bottom. As the music spread to Chicago, New York and beyond, the tuba spread with it, but was soon replaced by the more precise double bass. The hard-to-control (but easy to parade with) tuba soon disappeared from jazz almost everywhere, but not in the music’s birthplace.

In New Orleans, even today, having a tuba in the band remains standard operating procedure. It’s used not only in the city’s countless parades (any excuse will do), not only in the trad-jazz outfits that still flourish there, not only in the new-wave brass bands that mix funk and hip-hop into the old carnival parade music, but also in rock bands such as Bonerama and the Anders Osborne Band and in contemporary jazz bands led by John Ellisand Kermit Ruffins.

Most tuba players in New Orleans play the sousaphone, a kind of tuba designed by John Philip Sousa himself to be easier to carry, with a wider bore for warmer sound and a forward-facing bell for better projection. Music sounds different when it’s anchored by a sousaphone rather than an acoustic or electric bass. Because it’s a wind instrument rather than a string instrument, the tuba gives New Orleans music a bottom that bubbles rather than twangs. Here are five examples of how the tuba makes its mark on the city’s music.

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The Rebirth Brass Band ended its full-throttle show at Brooklyn Bowl on Thursday night more or less swarmed, yielding the stage to an eager throng. This of course was a handy bit of showmanship, timed to coincide with several of the band’s best-loved New Orleans anthems (“Feel Like Funkin’ It Up,” “Cassanova,” “Do Whatcha Wanna”) and with the climax of accumulated energies in the room. But it was also an affirmation of core principles. A stage is little more than a platform for the Rebirth Brass Band, and the distance it imposes on an audience is a passing inconvenience, even on the road.

Rebirth, as the band is often hailed at home, has barely deviated from the formula set by its leader, the sousaphone player Phil Frazier, in 1983. Commingling parade-band protocols with the more ragged aspects of jazz and funk — “junk music” is Mr. Frazier’s term for the crossbred result — the group chases down euphoria one boisterous groove at a time. In New Orleans the band plays most Tuesday nights at the Maple Leaf Bar, where the main space accommodates about as many people as the Brooklyn Bowl stage.

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Five-time Grammy winner Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, started working as a session musician and producer when he was still in his teens, performing with people like Jimmy Clanton, Frankie Ford and Huey “Piano” Smith. Musicians who epitomized the New Orleans sound, they’d promised Rebennack’s parents that they’d watch out for him in the clubs.

It wasn’t always easy to stay out of trouble. Most of the clubs were fronts for illegal activity, Rebennack told Terry Gross in 1986, and drunken brawls were frequent. But there were benefits to performing in illegal gambling halls, he said.

“What was great about it was that the owners of the clubs hired bands that played the music they liked. And there was a lot of freedom,” Rebennack said. “We weren’t under pressure to pack people in the club. These guys didn’t even care if there were any people necessarily in the club, because that’s not where the money was coming from.”

In the mid-1960s, Rebennack left for Los Angeles, where he created the Dr. John persona. As Dr. John the Night Tripper, he led a production that combined voodoo psychedelic elements with old medicine shows. Dr. John would emerge on stage dressed in sparkling robes and shoot glitter out over the audience. A troupe of dancers performed to his band’s music, which fused New Orleans rhythms with acid rock.

“The concept was to take all of the tricknology I knew from show business from over the years and [use] a lot of concepts that were easily and cheaply adaptable to make a show that would be real mystical in orientation for people,” he said. “It was a real easy-to-do show. But when we first presented it, it was a little too authentic for the labels. They weren’t quite ready for a guy biting a chicken’s head off and stuff, so we modified the show down to be a lot less authentic [and made it] more showbiz-style and took it on the road.”

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