The Forgotten HOGAN JAZZ ARCHIVES, TULANE UNIVERSITY The period 1880 to 1900 was one of unprecedented musical activity for Negroes in New Orleans. Its most distinctive feature, however, was that persons from a different culture had begun to make their contribution. These were the Negroes from outlying country districts and plantations who had emigrated to the city in such large numbers following Emancipation. Although New Orleans had known many kinds of music for well over two centuries, this was the first time that a large audience could have supported a widespread musical activity that introduced new elements of song and dance. Frederick Ramsey, Jr., from Been Here and Gone, (Rutgers University Press, 1960) Joe King Oliver circa 1920 56 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Fall 2008
King of Jazz Before there was Wynton Marsalis, before there was Louis Armstrong, there was Joe King Oliver, the first New Orleans superstar of jazz JOSEPH NATHAN OLIVER WAS A BIG MAN, proud of bearing and domineering in his command of both jazz technique and ensemble discipline. Born in the outlying country town of Edgard, La. on December 19, 1885 and raised in Uptown New Orleans, his father and mother both died by the time he was 15. Brought up largely by his half-sister, he worked early in his life on the household staff of a well-todo, Uptown New Orleans family and never lost the upright posture of a butler. Musically, he was said to be a slow learner, but a diligent student blessed with a good ear for remembering, note-fornote, whatever music he heard. He could also be taciturn and quick to anger. His rise in music was not meteoric, but an incremental and steady climb up the ladder of professional achievement in early-20thcentury New Orleans, beginning as a teenager in a neighborhood brass band for children. One of his first professional music jobs was said to be with Buddy Bolden s former associates in the Eagle band. He later progressed to Manuel Perez Onward Brass Band and A.J. Piron s Olympia Band, where he replaced trumpeter Freddie Keppard, the first New Orleans Creole of color to be offered a national recording contract (which Keppard turned down, much to the benefit of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who took the contract and made the first jazz record in 1917). Eventually, Joe Oliver established himself at Pete Lala s prominent 25 Club with a band co-led by trombonist Edward Kid Ory at the very height of the popularity of Storyville, New Orleans notorious, legalized-prostitution district. When the district was shut down during World War I, Oliver migrated to Chicago, where his skill and reputation got him not just one, but two simultaneous jobs with New Orleans-style jazz bands. The bands had plenty of work and were playing to increasingly large audiences of Southern black migrant workers who began streaming into the industrial city in the years immediately following the war. Offered leadership of his own band, Oliver then proceeded to put together the first BY ROGER HAHN King Oliver s Creole Jazz Band, 1923, featuring Honore Dutrey, Warren Baby Dodds, Joe King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Lil Hardin-Armstrong, Bill Johnson and Johnny Dodds. HOGAN JAZZ ARCHIVES, TULANE UNIVERSITY Fall 2008/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 57
superstar ensemble of jazz King Oliver s Creole Jazz Band which both introduced Louis Armstrong to the world and made a series of 37 recordings in 1923 still regarded as prime examples of New Orleans-style ensemble improvisation. By then, it was the height of the Jazz Age, Chicago was America s most dynamic urban setting, and Joe Oliver s New Orleans ensemble was the most sought-after band in the city. The band s leader had developed a unique style of playing, with various mutes and resonators, that plasticized the bright, focused sounds of solo brass instruments. A latecareer recording with The Dixie Syncopaters, Wa Wa Wa, lent the modern name wah-wah to this musical bag of tricks, which would later play a major role on the stylistic innovations of rock guitarists. Oliver also devised a method of playing twinned leads and breaks onstage with his protégé Armstrong, a technique employed many decades later by Southern rock bands, most notably The Allman Brothers Band. ENDURING INFLUENCE IN THE HISTORY OF JAZZ Besides the budding, young Armstrong, Oliver s Creole Jazz Band included brothers Johnny and Warren Baby Dodds (both already stars in their own right on clarinet and drums respectively) and Lil Hardin (soon to become Mrs. Louis Armstrong) on piano. Chicagoans crowded the dance floor every night, and musicians came from near and far to hear them. An entire generation of young, white jazz musicians, including Bix Biederbecke and Hoagy Carmichael, came to study the band s performances. And some musicians like trumpeter James Bubber Miley, who brought Oliver s Camp Meeting Blues to the Duke Ellington Orchestra, where it was recast as Creole Love Call took away more than just music lessons. The records made by the Creole Jazz Band had a more lasting impact. During the Depression, as glossy Hollywood movies and swank big bands dominated the entertainment scene, a subculture emerged of record collectors who favored old, obscure blues and jazz. Rummaging through second-hand shops, publishing newsletters, and even reissuing recordings on their own labels, these impassioned cultural reformers created the first ARCHEOPHONE RECORDS REISSUES 1923 KING OLIVER BAND RECORDINGS The band put together by Joe King Oliver in Chicago in the early 1920s was the first supergroup of early jazz the first African-American band from New Orleans to make a huge impression on Jazz Age audiences and American record buyers. In 2006 Archeophone Records reissued 37 recordings of Oliver s band on a two-disk set where a 22-year-old Louis Armstrong makes his first appearance on records. Looking back, the King Oliver Jazz Band releases are also where the history of jazz as an expression of African-American culture really begins. Oliver s major career achievement, the 1923 Creole Jazz Band recordings, took place before the introduction of electrical recording technology, during an era (from the 1890s to the mid-1920s) that preceded the microphone. To make a record at that time, Oliver s seven-piece band would stand together in front of the mouth of a megaphone, sending their collective sound down the open siphon to a diaphram, where it moved a needle which, in turn, inscribed a master. Even at the time, they were considered a faint reproduction at best of what the band actually sounded like in live performance. Collectors David Sager and Doug Benson, both traditional jazz musicians, have produced the first new transfers in a decade of those old King Oliver disks (some so rare that only one copy exists). By working closely with a worldwide network of collectors and carefully matching a playback stylus to each disk, and by using the most advanced digital technology and making no effort to change the inherent sonic balance of the originals, they ve given us the most accurate reproductions of these pre-electric recording documents ever released. So what does the music sound like to contemporary ears? Well, there s a ricky-ticky element to the rhythmic pulse, and a hokey feel to some of the soloing on a couple of numbers, for instance, Louis Armstrong is featured not on cornet but on slide whistle. But even with all that, listening to King Oliver s Creole Jazz Band today, we can still hear the passion, the rhythmic drive, and the tight ensemble conception, with individual strands in some passages woven together so masterfully that even today they stand out as supernaturally modern. Roger Hahn 58 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Fall 2008
HOGAN JAZZ ARCHIVES, TULANE UNIVERSITY King Oliver s Creole Band at the Pergola Dance Pavilion, San Francisco, 1921. in a series of 20th-century roots movements that persist to this day. Chief among their valued treasures were King Oliver s Creole Jazz Band recordings of 1923, which contained Armstrong s debut and, more importantly, represented a pinnacle of the New Orleans style of ensemble improvisation. But despite all of these accomplishments, Joe Oliver s name is not among the first rank of New Orleans jazz icons no airports are named in his honor and no statues have been erected in his memory. The only two chapterlength accounts of his life and music, one by Frederick Ramsey, Jr., the other by Martin Williams, are currently out of print. It should be remembered, too, that the cultural establishment of his time largely ignored Oliver. Its attention was instead focused on Paul Whiteman, the society bandleader who had named himself King of Jazz and whose high-profile 1924 concert in New York s Aeolian Hall, billed as Experiments in Modern Music, represented a major effort in the campaign to absorb the innovations of jazz in forms of music already accepted as culturally legitimate. The evening s program, for example, featured both an orchestral rendering of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band s 1917 novelty hit, Livery Stable Blues, and the world premier of George Gershwin s Rhapsody in Blue, a jazz-colored composition embodying all the grandeur and sophistication of the best European AT THE HEIGHT OF THE JAZZ AGE, CHICAGO WAS AMERICA S MOST DYNAMIC URBAN SETTING, AND JOE OLIVER S NEW ORLEANS ENSEMBLE WAS THE MOST SOUGHT-AFTER BAND IN THE CITY. classical music. Remembered best by musicians and New Orleans jazz specialists, Joe King Oliver has never been accorded the kind of recognition bestowed on musical peers like Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Ferdinand Jelly Roll Morton, or even Edward Kid Ory. Even Buddy Bolden, a semimythical figure whose music is forever lost to us, looms larger in the traditional New Orleans jazz pantheon. And that roll call was swelled significantly after World War II by the New Orleans jazz revival that brought back to public life living legends such as trumpeter Willie Bunk Johnson, clarinetist George Lewis, trombonist Jim Robinson and the many musicians associated over the years with Preservation Hall. A TRAGIC FIGURE Certainly Oliver s historical reputation has not been helped, either, by the fact that the Creole Jazz Band recordings represent the pinnacle of a career that continued without much distinction for another 15 years, or that those recordings place him in Prohibition-era Chicago instead of New Orleans. But a major factor for his relative lack of fame surely must be laid at the doorstep of the writing of jazz history, which consigned Joe Oliver early to the role of tragic hero, and later reduced him to something like a footnote in the creation myth of jazz. In the first case, it was his misfortune to pass away just as Fall 2008/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 59
HOGAN JAZZ ARCHIVES, TULANE UNIVERSITY Louis Armstrong and Joe Oliver circa 1922 the first wave of the New Orleans jazz revival was building; in the second case, the years of his personal musical accomplishment and slow rise to popular success the decade preceding World War I, during the most active years the Storyville remain at the periphery of conventionally recorded history. The same community of impassioned record collectors that helped spark the first New Orleans jazz revival was also responsible for writing the first comprehensive history of jazz. Published in 1939, the volume produced collaboratively by nine authors bore the title Jazzmen: The Story of Hot Jazz Told in the Lives of the Men Who Created It and contained 15 articles divided into four sections: New Orleans, Chicago, New York, and Hot Jazz Today. As a work of history, the project represented the consensus opinions of a subculture that prized the older, hot, blues-related jazz over mainstream, sweet, big-band swing music. Based mainly on oral history and suffused with romantic inspiration, Jazzmen also became the place where the story of jazz was outlined and this assessment of its place in American culture influenced all future generations of jazz historians and critics. Jazzmen s vividly passionate account of the formative years of a new American music is animated by one set of letters from Bunk Johnson and another from Joe Oliver. Johnson s letters serve as a folkloric frame, a scriptural foundation for what cultural historian John Gennari describes as an epic full of larger-than-life heroes and unforgettable places that cohered into a new national mythology. They also helped launch Johnson s commercial resurrection, which, in turn, inspired an international New Orleans jazz revival. Oliver s letters, on the other hand, serve as a coda for his slow decline, a downward fall that jazz historian Martin Williams described as a medieval tragedy of the good man whom capricious fate had deprived of success and awarded only adversity and failure. Over the following decade, Oliver intermittently led several bands and made a handful of recordings as an accompanist, but never with the distinction of the Creole Jazz Band s accomplishments. Eventually, he was reduced to touring the Midwest and Southeast with pick-up bands on barely profitable contracts. His last tour left him stranded in Savannah, Ga., where he found cheap lodging in a rooming house, got a job sweeping out a pool hall, and tended a sidewalk vegetable stand for spare change. In a scene fit for a Shakesperean tragedy, Martin Williams reports Louis Armstrong happening upon Oliver during a tour stop in Savannah, weeping in astonishment, and handing the old man money to buy new clothes. THE COMMUNAL MUSIC OF HIS BIRTHPLACE But Joe Oliver s last letters, written to the half-sister who had raised him and was then living in New York City, also reflect his persistent, stubborn pride. Having made his mark in pre-world War I New Orleans and Jazz Age Chicago, Joe Oliver seemed either unable or unwilling in later years to adapt to a rapidly changing entertainment scene in which the 60 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Fall 2008
sweet jazz bands prevailed. Hollywood became a major factor, and hot jazz was subsumed by big-band swing. As the writing of jazz history matured in the second half of the 20th century, the struggle for cultural assimilation has remained a defining element of its evolution. If the first generation of jazz historians was fighting for the simple recognition of jazz expression as legitimate American popular culture, subsequent generations have focused more intently on academic recognition and, more recently, a kind of cultural exceptionalism that presents jazz as America s classical music. At the same time, what we think of as jazz has largely abandoned its role as popular dance music, concentrating instead on individual virtuosity and intellectual satisfactions, none of which benefit the legacy of Joe Oliver, who has remained a shadowy presence in the cavalcade of jazz greats as defined by the larger jazz narrative an early innovator who wound up a tragic and forlorn figure selling fresh produce on the sidewalks of Savannah. If the evolution of jazz history neglects Joe Oliver, however, a wider view of 20th-century American popular culture only serves to elevate his stature. As New Orleans jazz historian and Tulane jazz archivist Bruce Raeburn points this out in King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, and Sidney Bechet: Ménage a Trois, New Orleans Style, published in The Oxford Companion to Jazz, all three jazz pioneers took the communal music of their birthplace and transformed it into highly personal works of art. Today, we may hear the emphasis on highly personal works of art, but a more-thoughtful assessment of Oliver and his achievement with the Creole Jazz Band remind of us of a more important part: the communal music of their birthplace. If there s an apt analogy for the Oliver s life, then, it s probably that of McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, the Delta blues musician who brought the sounds of the cotton fields north to forge a dynamic musical ensemble that gave voice to its own moment in history with piledriver force and bravado innovation. HOGAN JAZZ ARCHIVES, TULANE UNIVERSITY... HIS RELATIVE LACK OF FAME SURELY MUST BE LAID AT THE DOORSTEP OF THE WRITING OF JAZZ HISTORY, WHICH CONSIGNED JOE OLIVER EARLY TO THE ROLE OF TRAGIC HERO... For many of his listeners in pre-world War I New Orleans, Oliver s music spoke to the experience of rural Southern blacks migrating for work to Southern cities; in Chicago, his music spoke to those who participated in the massive wave of post- World War I migration north, in much the same way Muddy Waters music reflected the experience of a similarly massive post-world War II migration. What both King Oliver and Muddy Waters share is the distinction of creating inventive ensemble popular music that reflected African-American culture in the context of American history, and especially southern African-American culture exported north. Later in the 20th century, bandleaders James Brown and Miles Davis would achieve similar successes in pioneering the late-20th century genres of funk and King Oliver s Dixie Syncopators, 1926, featuring (front row) George Field, Bud Scott, Darnell Howard, Albert Nicholas, Barney Bigard, Luis Russell, and (back row) Bert Cobb, Paul Barbarin, Joe King Oliver, and Bob Shoffner. fusion jazz, both of which wed musical innovation to popular acceptance in a manner that deserves much wider recognition as American music embodying themes of belonging and identity rooted in shared historical experience. LCV Roger Hahn is a New Orleans-based jazz writer whose work has been featured on NPR Jazz and VH-1 websites, MusicAngle.com, and in New Orleans OffBeat Magazine. He is currently working on a cultural history of the New Orleans jazz tradition, including its pair of 20th-century revivals. Fall 2008/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 61