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| What the hottest bands of the 1920s probably looked like... |
I hadn’t planned on either doing a general post on 1920s jazz or touching on more half-forgotten names, but, when I learned that one of the first songs Bix Biederbecke learned by ear was the Original Dixieland Jass/Jazz Band’s “Tiger Rag,” the lack of context started to bug me. And so…
What is jazz, who started it and where? To tackle the first question, and contra Jelly Roll Morton claim that he invented it, no one really knows the answer. One can nail down some specific firsts - say, that Jelly Roll Morton wrote the first published jazz composition, or that the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (hereafter, “ODJB”) recorded the first 78 rpm album featuring jazz (“Livery Stable Blues,” b/w “Dixieland Jass Band One-Step,” Victor 18255) - but jazz, like the blues, had a long unwritten history that most people have the good sense not to fill in. In structure and theory, it has roots in blues and ragtime. Getting the a more useful answer, however, involves a couple twists and turns that still leave a handful of open questions.
“When Broadway picked it up, they called it 'J-A-Z-Z'. It wasn't called that. It was spelled 'J-A-S-S'. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, you wouldn't say it in front of ladies.”
- Eubie Blake (quoted from Wikipedia’s overview, the main source for a lot of this)
Something forbidden, in other words, some new thing let loose in the wild of "real America." And yet the crowd went wild; in one of the oldest tales of American history, "real America" wanted jazz. The first ODJB 78 was sold as a novelty, only to surprise everyone by becoming a hit. Before too long, jazz and the people who played it came to dominate pop culture and ultimately become a big enough part in daily life that sense of the forbidden fall away. And, as often happens (which, here, means almost always), that didn't take long.
To return to the question of what jazz is, the Wikieditor had one theory on the origins of its name: it might have come from the slang term, “jasm,” which means “pep and energy” (...but when?). To flag some other, appealing theories:
“Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions.”
What is jazz, who started it and where? To tackle the first question, and contra Jelly Roll Morton claim that he invented it, no one really knows the answer. One can nail down some specific firsts - say, that Jelly Roll Morton wrote the first published jazz composition, or that the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (hereafter, “ODJB”) recorded the first 78 rpm album featuring jazz (“Livery Stable Blues,” b/w “Dixieland Jass Band One-Step,” Victor 18255) - but jazz, like the blues, had a long unwritten history that most people have the good sense not to fill in. In structure and theory, it has roots in blues and ragtime. Getting the a more useful answer, however, involves a couple twists and turns that still leave a handful of open questions.
“When Broadway picked it up, they called it 'J-A-Z-Z'. It wasn't called that. It was spelled 'J-A-S-S'. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, you wouldn't say it in front of ladies.”
- Eubie Blake (quoted from Wikipedia’s overview, the main source for a lot of this)
Something forbidden, in other words, some new thing let loose in the wild of "real America." And yet the crowd went wild; in one of the oldest tales of American history, "real America" wanted jazz. The first ODJB 78 was sold as a novelty, only to surprise everyone by becoming a hit. Before too long, jazz and the people who played it came to dominate pop culture and ultimately become a big enough part in daily life that sense of the forbidden fall away. And, as often happens (which, here, means almost always), that didn't take long.
To return to the question of what jazz is, the Wikieditor had one theory on the origins of its name: it might have come from the slang term, “jasm,” which means “pep and energy” (...but when?). To flag some other, appealing theories:
“Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in West African cultural and musical expression, and in African-American music traditions.”
Or:
“a ‘form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of the Negro with European music.’”
- Joachim-Ernst Berendt
Or, one more:
“Jazz involves ‘a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role" and contains a "sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror the individuality of the performing jazz musician.’”
- Berendt, again
That lays the foundation for the specific, early iteration of jazz that serves as the focus of this chapter: Dixieland Jazz. The subgenre originated in New Orleans, and its environs, over the first couple decades of the 20th century. It came of age in the brothels, pool halls and gambling dens of the Big Easy’s red-light district, Storyville - where Jelly Roll Morton came up - but it would take on new forms all over the world, e.g., Chicago, The Netherlands, the West Coast.; it even revived in the 1940s after an early burial in the 1930s. For more on the Dixieland sound (Wikipedia entry on Dixieland):
“The definitive Dixieland sound is created when one instrument (usually the trumpet) plays the melody or a recognizable paraphrase or variation on it, and the other instruments of the "front line" improvise around that melody. This creates a more polyphonic sound.”
Also, pertaining thereto:
“While instrumentation and size of bands 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.”
Got it? Good. Now, let’s talk about a couple famous acts, starting with…
Original Dixieland Jass Band
Like a number of jazz artists from the era, the members of the ODJB started with a musical pioneer named Papa Jack Laine. Laine formed his first bands shortly after the Spanish-American War and was (literally) decades ahead of the push toward integration. He’d take anyone who could really play before the South’s Jim Crow Laws descended on New Orleans and, after they arrived, he tried to pass off light-skinned Black musicians as Cuban or Mexican. He was even a pioneer musically:
“Laine's Reliance Brass Band was the first to fuse European, African, and Latin music.”
The first ODJB members to graduate from Papa Jack Laine’s outfit included Alcide Nunez (clarinet), Johnny Stein (drums), Eddie Edwards (trombone), Henry Ragas (piano), and, after a guy named Frank Christian bowed out, their main player, Nick LaRocca (cornet). They started in New Orleans, but their real trajectory begins in Chicago. A promoter invited them north in 1916 to compete with another popular and, crucially, new act imported from New Orleans, Brown’s Band from Dixieland, led by trombonist, Tom Brown. The bands both competed and mingled - e.g., they traded clarinetists Nunez for Larry Shields due to personality clashes between Nunez and LaBrocca - but ODJB would set up shop in New York by the next year with a residency at Reisenweber’s Café off Columbus Circle.
Their recording career took off in New York as well, first with the Victor Talking Machine Company, then with Columbia Records. Around the same time, shifts in their membership expanded their repertoire: Emile Christian replaced Edwards when the World War I draft came calling, but the bigger addition was J. Russell Robinson, both a pianist and composer, replaced Ragas after the Spanish Flu carried him to the beyond. Apart from collaborating with and writing for some of the biggest acts of the 20s and 30s - e.g., Fletcher Henderson (“Yeah Man!”), Cab Calloway (“Reefer Man”), Bessie Smith, Sophie Tucker (“Aggravatin’ Papa,” for both), and, later, Nat King Cole (“Meet Me at No Special Place”), among many, many others - he composed “Margie” and “Palesteena (Lena from Palesteena),” the ODJB’s biggest hits of 1920.
When the competition flocked to New York - Alcide Nunez, Johnny Stein, and Tom Brown among them - LaRocca scouted the next frontier by taking the ODJB for a tour of London. They performed the London Hippodrome before playing a command performance for King George V - who personally gave a rousing response to their popular “Tiger Rag.” Big as they were in the early 1920s, the ODJB didn’t carry on much further; Wikipedia muddled the timeline, saying they broke up in 1923 in one place while calling it at “the late 1920s” further down in the post. Still, it’s worth reading a semi-full list of all the bands that covered their most famous songs - e.g., “Margie” got one hundred or more.
On the Sampler
In addition to the songs listed above, I included “Darktown Strutters Ball” (a cover in its own right), “Fidgety Feet,” “Clarinet Marmalade Blues,” “Sensation Rag,” and “At the Jazz Band Ball.” They have a massive catalog, obviously, but it takes a pretty keen ear to pick out the differences on each.
Edouard “Kid” Ory
Like the ODJB, Kid Ory started in New Orleans and later joined the Great Migration north. And, like them, he played with the his era's heavyweights - e.g., the usual, Jelly Roll Morton, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong (way back on that one) - on top of mentoring some big, future stars like Benny Goodman and Charles Mingus. It’s said that the legendary Buddy Bolden discovered him, but he staked his claim to fame with a couple innovations on his first instrument, the trombone. He was an early adopter for the “glissando technique” - which, when it comes to trombone, seems like something that would become self-evident once you figured out how it works - but his main contribution came with “tailgate.” To give a sense of (and context for) what that means:
“Ory was a banjo player during his youth, and it is said that his ability to play the banjo helped him develop ‘tailgate,’ a particular style of playing the trombone with a rhythmic line underneath the trumpets and cornets.”
His rambles followed a familiar path - e.g., LA for a time in 1919, Chicago in 1925 - and he had the chops to join one of the most innovative acts of the era, Louis Armstrong’s “Hot Five.” The Depression kicked his ass, but Ory had one hell of a second act as a bandleader during the 1940s revival of “New Orleans Jazz” noted above. He had 17 solid years in one of the “top New Orleans-style bands,” playing in Los Angeles. Ory was more of a band member than a bandleader, but he shines as an innovator.
On the Sampler
Kid Ory’s most famous numbers included “Muskrat Ramble,” “Ory’s Creole Trombone,” and “Society Blues” (which, because I can’t readily find a song by that title, I’m assuming is the same as “High Society”; shit, it's not), but I also threw on a couple more tunes that caught my ear - e.g., “Blues for Jimmy Noone,” “Under the Bamboo Tree,” “Savoy Blues,” “Royal Garden Blues,” and “Ory’s Boogie.”
King Oliver
Here, we come to another innovator, only Joseph Nathan “King” Oliver made his changes on the cornet (like Kid Ory, though, he started on the trombone). The specific technique King Oliver pioneered was the art of muting a brass instrument. From his Wikipedia entry (above):
“As a player, Oliver took great interest in altering his horn's sound. He pioneered the use of mutes, including the rubber plumber's plunger, derby hat, bottles and cups. His favorite mute was a small metal mute made by the C.G. Conn Instrument Company, with which he played his famous solo on his composition the ‘Dippermouth Blues’ (an early nickname for fellow cornetist Louis Armstrong). His recording ‘Wa Wa Wa’ with the Dixie Syncopators can be credited with giving the name wah-wah to such techniques. This ‘freak’ style of trumpet playing was also featured in his composition, ‘Eccentric.’”
Career-wise, King Oliver started where most New Orleans jazz musicians did: Storyville. He co-led one of the Big Easy’s most popular bands with Kid Ory for most of the 1910s before a fateful arrest gave him one more reason to leave town. He relocated to Chicago in 1918 with his wife and his stepdaughter, Ruby Tuesday, in tow. After scouting the West/Bay Area, King Oliver returned to Chicago in 1922 to establish a residency at Royal Gardens cabaret as King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band. His early line-ups featured a who's who of 1920s jazz talent:Baby Dodds (drums), Johnny Dodds (clarinet), Lil Harden "Armstrong" (piano), Honore Dutrey (trombone), Bill Johnson (double bass) and, of course, Louis Armstrong. (Trust me, all those names show up in any article on jazz I've reviewed for this series.)
“a ‘form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of the Negro with European music.’”
- Joachim-Ernst Berendt
Or, one more:
“Jazz involves ‘a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role" and contains a "sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror the individuality of the performing jazz musician.’”
- Berendt, again
That lays the foundation for the specific, early iteration of jazz that serves as the focus of this chapter: Dixieland Jazz. The subgenre originated in New Orleans, and its environs, over the first couple decades of the 20th century. It came of age in the brothels, pool halls and gambling dens of the Big Easy’s red-light district, Storyville - where Jelly Roll Morton came up - but it would take on new forms all over the world, e.g., Chicago, The Netherlands, the West Coast.; it even revived in the 1940s after an early burial in the 1930s. For more on the Dixieland sound (Wikipedia entry on Dixieland):
“The definitive Dixieland sound is created when one instrument (usually the trumpet) plays the melody or a recognizable paraphrase or variation on it, and the other instruments of the "front line" improvise around that melody. This creates a more polyphonic sound.”
Also, pertaining thereto:
“While instrumentation and size of bands 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.”
Got it? Good. Now, let’s talk about a couple famous acts, starting with…
Original Dixieland Jass Band
Like a number of jazz artists from the era, the members of the ODJB started with a musical pioneer named Papa Jack Laine. Laine formed his first bands shortly after the Spanish-American War and was (literally) decades ahead of the push toward integration. He’d take anyone who could really play before the South’s Jim Crow Laws descended on New Orleans and, after they arrived, he tried to pass off light-skinned Black musicians as Cuban or Mexican. He was even a pioneer musically:
“Laine's Reliance Brass Band was the first to fuse European, African, and Latin music.”
The first ODJB members to graduate from Papa Jack Laine’s outfit included Alcide Nunez (clarinet), Johnny Stein (drums), Eddie Edwards (trombone), Henry Ragas (piano), and, after a guy named Frank Christian bowed out, their main player, Nick LaRocca (cornet). They started in New Orleans, but their real trajectory begins in Chicago. A promoter invited them north in 1916 to compete with another popular and, crucially, new act imported from New Orleans, Brown’s Band from Dixieland, led by trombonist, Tom Brown. The bands both competed and mingled - e.g., they traded clarinetists Nunez for Larry Shields due to personality clashes between Nunez and LaBrocca - but ODJB would set up shop in New York by the next year with a residency at Reisenweber’s Café off Columbus Circle.
Their recording career took off in New York as well, first with the Victor Talking Machine Company, then with Columbia Records. Around the same time, shifts in their membership expanded their repertoire: Emile Christian replaced Edwards when the World War I draft came calling, but the bigger addition was J. Russell Robinson, both a pianist and composer, replaced Ragas after the Spanish Flu carried him to the beyond. Apart from collaborating with and writing for some of the biggest acts of the 20s and 30s - e.g., Fletcher Henderson (“Yeah Man!”), Cab Calloway (“Reefer Man”), Bessie Smith, Sophie Tucker (“Aggravatin’ Papa,” for both), and, later, Nat King Cole (“Meet Me at No Special Place”), among many, many others - he composed “Margie” and “Palesteena (Lena from Palesteena),” the ODJB’s biggest hits of 1920.
When the competition flocked to New York - Alcide Nunez, Johnny Stein, and Tom Brown among them - LaRocca scouted the next frontier by taking the ODJB for a tour of London. They performed the London Hippodrome before playing a command performance for King George V - who personally gave a rousing response to their popular “Tiger Rag.” Big as they were in the early 1920s, the ODJB didn’t carry on much further; Wikipedia muddled the timeline, saying they broke up in 1923 in one place while calling it at “the late 1920s” further down in the post. Still, it’s worth reading a semi-full list of all the bands that covered their most famous songs - e.g., “Margie” got one hundred or more.
On the Sampler
In addition to the songs listed above, I included “Darktown Strutters Ball” (a cover in its own right), “Fidgety Feet,” “Clarinet Marmalade Blues,” “Sensation Rag,” and “At the Jazz Band Ball.” They have a massive catalog, obviously, but it takes a pretty keen ear to pick out the differences on each.
Edouard “Kid” Ory
Like the ODJB, Kid Ory started in New Orleans and later joined the Great Migration north. And, like them, he played with the his era's heavyweights - e.g., the usual, Jelly Roll Morton, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong (way back on that one) - on top of mentoring some big, future stars like Benny Goodman and Charles Mingus. It’s said that the legendary Buddy Bolden discovered him, but he staked his claim to fame with a couple innovations on his first instrument, the trombone. He was an early adopter for the “glissando technique” - which, when it comes to trombone, seems like something that would become self-evident once you figured out how it works - but his main contribution came with “tailgate.” To give a sense of (and context for) what that means:
“Ory was a banjo player during his youth, and it is said that his ability to play the banjo helped him develop ‘tailgate,’ a particular style of playing the trombone with a rhythmic line underneath the trumpets and cornets.”
His rambles followed a familiar path - e.g., LA for a time in 1919, Chicago in 1925 - and he had the chops to join one of the most innovative acts of the era, Louis Armstrong’s “Hot Five.” The Depression kicked his ass, but Ory had one hell of a second act as a bandleader during the 1940s revival of “New Orleans Jazz” noted above. He had 17 solid years in one of the “top New Orleans-style bands,” playing in Los Angeles. Ory was more of a band member than a bandleader, but he shines as an innovator.
On the Sampler
Kid Ory’s most famous numbers included “Muskrat Ramble,” “Ory’s Creole Trombone,” and “Society Blues” (which, because I can’t readily find a song by that title, I’m assuming is the same as “High Society”; shit, it's not), but I also threw on a couple more tunes that caught my ear - e.g., “Blues for Jimmy Noone,” “Under the Bamboo Tree,” “Savoy Blues,” “Royal Garden Blues,” and “Ory’s Boogie.”
King Oliver
Here, we come to another innovator, only Joseph Nathan “King” Oliver made his changes on the cornet (like Kid Ory, though, he started on the trombone). The specific technique King Oliver pioneered was the art of muting a brass instrument. From his Wikipedia entry (above):
“As a player, Oliver took great interest in altering his horn's sound. He pioneered the use of mutes, including the rubber plumber's plunger, derby hat, bottles and cups. His favorite mute was a small metal mute made by the C.G. Conn Instrument Company, with which he played his famous solo on his composition the ‘Dippermouth Blues’ (an early nickname for fellow cornetist Louis Armstrong). His recording ‘Wa Wa Wa’ with the Dixie Syncopators can be credited with giving the name wah-wah to such techniques. This ‘freak’ style of trumpet playing was also featured in his composition, ‘Eccentric.’”
Career-wise, King Oliver started where most New Orleans jazz musicians did: Storyville. He co-led one of the Big Easy’s most popular bands with Kid Ory for most of the 1910s before a fateful arrest gave him one more reason to leave town. He relocated to Chicago in 1918 with his wife and his stepdaughter, Ruby Tuesday, in tow. After scouting the West/Bay Area, King Oliver returned to Chicago in 1922 to establish a residency at Royal Gardens cabaret as King Oliver and his Creole Jazz Band. His early line-ups featured a who's who of 1920s jazz talent:Baby Dodds (drums), Johnny Dodds (clarinet), Lil Harden "Armstrong" (piano), Honore Dutrey (trombone), Bill Johnson (double bass) and, of course, Louis Armstrong. (Trust me, all those names show up in any article on jazz I've reviewed for this series.)
In a fun twist, Louis Armstrong would form his own band on his return from New York called Louis Armstrong’s Sunset Stompers, with a base at the Sunset Café. He squared that one head to head against King Oliver’s expanded nine-piece band, King Oliver and His Dixie Syncopators, who held court at the Plantation Café. Sadly, those days didn’t have the time they could have due to King Oliver’s continuously advancing gum/mouth diseases, which, together, gradually made it impossible for him to play. His later biography, helpfully dropped into a section of its own by the relevant Wikieditors, is too depressing to go through, but the short version is that he sucked at the business side of living on music and that a succession of ailments ended his life early. Still, imagine having someone Louis (fucking) Armstrong say this about you:
“If it had not been for Joe Oliver, Jazz would not be what it is today."
On the Sampler
It’s possible I sold King Oliver short, but I did try to include all the main highlights - e.g,. “Dippermouth Blues,” “Canal Street Blues,” “Sweet Like This,” and “Doctor Jazz.” I lumped in a couple more that caught my ear - e.g., “Speakeasy Blues” and “Sugar Foot Stomp” - but I’m confident that I’m not giving King Oliver his due as an artist and an influence.
That’s all for this one.
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