NEW ORLEANS JAZZ

A FUSING IN THE HEAT

Louis Armstrong Hot Five

New Orleans jazz is the first jazz. The humid climate and the variety of people and their music in New Orleans in the nineteenth century made the city the perfect place for the creation of a new type of music. A witness to the mid-nineteenth century environment in New Orleans was American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who enthusiastically wrote of his experiences watching the drum and banjo music go down in Congo Square.

Jazz began somewhere between about 1900 and the mid 1910s, depending on how you view it. Cornetist Buddy Bolden, born in 1877 (two years after classical violinist Fritz Kreisler, by way of cross-musical comparison), was prominent in bringing the blues into the mix of the other music played by bands at the time, ragtime, quadrilles and other music. He also played by ear: in other words, he improvised. A photograph of his band, taken sometime in the first five years of the twentieth century, shows the typical New Orleans front line instruments, cornet, clarinet and trombone--the band looks like a jazz band--so it appears an open and shut case that Bolden must have been playing music that was essentially jazz as it initially came to be known, later on record. 

The key step that Bolden took was his use of the blues. Firstly, blues enables you to change the aspect of any music one hundred eighty degrees. When the slurs start, and the flattened notes, you have a new music. For example, imagine playing the blues on Beethoven's "Fur Elise"... it is possible, and to do so would convert the music into something completely different (albeit unusual). Blues, also, has to be improvised: that is, its benefit to the music is not just the coloration from flattened and bent notes. Given that blues instrinsically requires improvisation to play it, it is not surprising to find that improvisation became an automatic part of the new jazz music. Blues can be seen as the shaper of the new music, and it certainly helped the development of jazz that blues would soon became a craze (in the 1910s).

Further, at the time of Bolden, blues had not been much, it at all, written down. Memphis' W C Handy was to compose his famous blues numbers, spread widely by sheet music, only later--Handy's "St Louis Blues" was a major example: the flattened third note on the word "sun" in the first line of the melody can be clearly identified and written down, putting a major device of the blues on paper. Accordingly, the way was open for Bolden and others to use the blues as freely as possible, when adding it to the ragtime, dance and brass music also being played by the New Orleans bands and solo pianists.

At the same time, New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton was in his late teens, and he too fused the blues and what he called the "Spanish tinge"--another ingredient of New Orleans music--with ragtime and other music. Of course, he claimed to have personally invented jazz in this way. He probably was one of the inventors, but Bolden's history shows that Morton would not have been the only one. They were playing at exactly the same time.

The next decade saw great popularity for the blues. By now, the future 1920s jazz stars like Louis Armstrong, clarinetist Sidney Bechet and trombonist Kid Ory were beginning to get gigs in New Orleans and, in due course, on the riverboats that steamed up the Mississippi. Kid Ory, the most famous New Orleans trombonist, was born in 1886 and so was older than most of his future recording compatriots. He led a band in the city in the 1910s that featured Joe "King" Oliver and then Armstrong himself on cornet, and the clarinetists Johnny Dodds and Jimmy Noone. Clarinetist Sidney Bechet, about four years older than Armstrong, was playing with the Eagle Band of New Orleans (led by trumpeter Bunk Johnson) as early as 1911 and then with Oliver in a band known as the Olympia Band, just prior to World War One. In the late teens, however, Oliver and Noone all left New Orleans for Chicago, and Bechet left for New York, in what would eventually become an all-out breakout by leading jazz musicians from the Crescent City. 

These musicians would soon provide the first great body of jazz music on record, such as the brilliant recordings of Oliver's great band with Armstrong, and also of Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven groups and Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers, and so on. This would largely take place in Chicago in the mid to late '20s.

Before this, however, a group of white musicians, also from New Orleans, would actually record the first jazz, in 1917. This was the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and their records were massive sellers. The band was soon so popular (or its records were) that it performed at victory balls after the end of the First World War in London. The ODJB's records pointed up the show-piece potentialities of some of the instruments soon to be associated with jazz, such as the slurs of the clarinet, the barking of the trumpet, and the exaggerated sliding of the trombone. For example, "Livery Stable Blues" took the music into the farmyard, the instruments imitating farm animals. Another of their records was the swing era jam classic "Tiger Rag". The music was fluid, though not especially texturally vivid.

Probably, therefore, the first great jazz on record was from Kid Ory, who recorded his classic "Ory's Creole Trombone" in 1922 in Los Angeles--Ory had travelled there in 1919. He later came to full prominence with King Oliver in Chicago in the early '20s and with Louis Armstrong's Hot Five in the mid '20s.

Armstrong was still in New Orleans in 1922, until King Oliver, who was playing in Chicago, recruited him as second cornetist. It is with this band of Oliver's that the story of the popular music that we know today really began. The band, a quintet including Dodds on clarinet, made its famous records in 1923. An example is "Dippermouth Blues".

Before long, the band's characteristic twin cornet breaks, pairing Oliver and Armstrong, led to Armstrong embarking on his own path. Simply, he invented the idea of the improvised solo standing out from the ensemble backing, and soon also invented the triplet-based rhythm for swing, the future music of the 1930s. Just one example of the solo trumpet of Armstrong, standing out as a jewel in the crown of the ensemble, is the magnificent Hot Seven tune "Potato Head Blues" of 1927, where Armstrong's irresistible hooky melody (based on a major seventh interval) features the most brilliant improvised Armstrong solos.

Armstrong's invention of the swing feel evolved when, at the urging of his then wife Lillian (the pianist in Oliver's band), he left Oliver to play in NewYork with the Fletcher Henderson band (a larger group and prototype '30s big band). In this band, Armstrong had a moment to step back and assess what he could do as an individual in the music, as well as to investigate, to the displeasure of Lillian, the dancing girls in the shows. By the time Lil called back the boy to Illinois, Armstrong's playing had moved from the essentially "two beat",  or fast 12/8 music, of the Oliver band to a more relaxed swinging triplet feel. It was a bit like the switch from Baroque music  to the classical era of Haydn and Mozart, through adjusting the instrumental emphasis to the three main stringed instruments of modern classical orchestras.

The color and musical foliage of the recordings of the '20s Chicago bands is striking to this day. There are of course Armstrong's Hot Five recordings, made over 1925-28, and his Hot Seven records, from 1927. Band members included clarinetist Johnny Dodds with his distinctive low register playing (like Armstrong, a former member of King Oliver's band), and on the 1928 recordings, the first jazz piano master Earl Hines. The Hot Seven also included Dodds' brother Baby Dodds on drums, the first great drummer of jazz. The Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings are the first of the three essential collections of jazz music (the second is Duke Ellington's early '40s music, and the third... it's up to you and your preference, but most likely, from the general view of popular music as a whole, it is Charlie Parker's recordings over 1944-48, when the altoist introduced to popular music melodies typically placed higher in the chord, a style used from the 1960s to this day on most popular records).

Prominent also among the Chicago-based jazz bands of this time are, of course, Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers, and their classic recordings of 1926, and clarinetist Jimmy Noone's Apex Club Orchestra (including Hines on its recordings). This music has influenced people as apparently diverse as Eric Clapton--Clapton played the Red Hot Peppers record "Dr Jazz" on a BBC radio show where he talked about his jazz and blues influences.

A particular feature of most of these records is the broad swathe of sound from individual instruments, especially the trombone (often Kid Ory--he was also a member of the Red Hot Peppers) and the low register clarinet vibrato of players such as Dodds, Noone, and Omer Simeon (of The Red Hot Peppers). Thick vibrato was a characteristic of both New Orleans trombonists and clarinetists. This sound had, later, its most spectacular result in the extraordinary soprano saxophone playing of Sidney Bechet, who switched from clarinet to soprano sax after seeing one in the window of a music store in 1919.

Noone's Apex Club records show his rich clarinet vibrato combining with Hine's dashing piano to create exotic music. The classic riff-driven "Apex Blues" is one. Another magnificent recording by the band is "I Know That You Know", lush lines arising from the swinging melody. At one point, Noone's clarinet throws both flowing and stuttering figures behind a saxophone playing the melody. These records are faster than Armstrong's music of the time, and closer in feel to what would become swing.
 
Also of note are records of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, a white band formed in Chicago in 1922, though its main members were from New Orleans. The band made some excellent records, including some later in New Orleans itself (in 1925). The band's records are characterized by space and some forthright allocation of instrumental roles. Signature cuts were made with the New Orleans legend Jelly Roll Morton at the Gennett studios in Richmond, Indiana, where many important early to mid '20s records were recorded by Chicago-based bands including King Oliver. George Brunies, a well-known early jazz figure, was the band's trombonist.

The irrepressible Sidney Bechet was almost the equal of Armstrong as a soloist. Bechet epitomizes New Orleans jazz. He took a different geographic path out of the city to his Chicago-emigrating compatriots. After leaving for New York in 1919, he went on to Europe with Will Marion Cook's Southern Syncopated Orchestra ( a band said to have influenced Duke Ellington). His travels included time in London, Paris and even a trip to Russia. Bechet is probably one of the top three improvisors in jazz history (with Armstrong and Ellington), and this aspect was obvious to leading musicians from other types of music: the important classical conductor Ernest Ansermet said of Bechet's playing in 1919, "This is surely the highway that music will travel in the twentieth century". Ansermet should have applied for honorary status as a clairvoyant. Just one example, of both of these points, is part of a solo on Bechet's record "Blues In The Air" from the early '40s, which the sopranoist later developed into his famous 1950s hit "Petite Fleur".

The first trumpeter to follow in Armstrong's path was Louisiana-born Henry "Red" Allen. Allen was younger than Armstrong, and his father had a brass band. Allen joined King Oliver in 1927. He was a powerful and inventive player, and a world-prominent trumpeter through to the 1960s.

Another important figure from New Orleans was the pianist, composer and publisher Clarence Williams. Williams was a central figure in '20s jazz and blues, moving from New Orleans to New York in 1921, via Chicago. He recorded with many of the biggest names, including Armstrong, and also made many records using washboard percussion. Washboards were to become an "object of authenticity" in many later white New Orleans-style bands!

Other New Orleans musicians, however, did not become widely known and celebrated until the New Orleans jazz "Revivalist" movement of the 1940s. These included cornetist, trumpeter and vocalist Papa Celestin, who named his later band the Original Tuxedo Jazz Orchestra after the New Orleans Tuxedo Dance Hall venue where he had played in 1910.

The early New Orleans trumpeter Bunk Johnson was only recorded in the Revivalist era. Born somewhere between 1879 and 1889 (probably closer to the latter) Johnson was prominent as early as 1905. He was however later injured in a fight in the 1910s, and it was only after treatment to replace his teeth that he was finally able to record in 1942.

Cornetist George Mitchell was also important. He was from Kentucky, and recorded with the Armstrong's Hot Five (replacing Armstrong), and was also the cornet player with Morton's Red Hot Peppers.

Other New Orleans clarinetists included Edmond Hall and George Lewis. Hall became a major figure at the Cafe Society venues in New York, and even recorded with pre-bop guitarist Charlie Christian. Later he joined Armstrong's All Stars. Lewis eventually took over Johnson's band and toured the "original New Orleans jazz" sound to Europe and Japan in the 1960s.

From the point of view of their influence on rock music, It is interesting to note that the classic New Orleans jazz recordings were made before Charlie Patton and the much later Robert Johnson, both often cited as Rosetta Stones of rock and roll music. In truth of fact, the real origin of much of modern main stream rock music is more likely to be found in the New Orleans era jazz records.

For example, in the UK, the country of the birth of modern rock in the 1960s, the New Orleans Revivalist movement in the '40s and '50s had been very popular. In fact, outside America, the "traditional jazz" of New Orleans was usually the jazz of choice for jazz musicians, both amateur and professional. The influence of New Orleans jazz was communicated through these "trad" jazz bands to the future rock musicians. For example, Mick Jagger once described fellow Rolling Stone Brian Jones as "really a... traddy", while Clapton listened closely to early jazz too. 

Thus, New Orleans jazz had a major role to play in the evolving of rock music from Europe. This holds for French music too: due to Bechet living in France in the '50s and writers such as Boris Vian and his jazz-fanatic French predecessors, New Orleans and swing jazz were (and are) a great part of French culture. Apart perhaps from some nods from Frank Zappa, early jazz did not seem to play such a great part in American rock music. This is probably simply because, following the arrival of bebop, there was eventually less of an influence of New Orleans jazz in America generally: American jazz musicians have usually always been at the vanguard of the music's development, and so modern jazz and beyond began to assume center stage in American record collections.

Exceptions to this trend are the '60s anthem "Fixin' To Die Rag", really an early jazz tune reshaped with anti-war lyrics, by Country Joe McDonald and the Fish, music from Dr John, and singers such as Leon Redbone, who have shown the continued presence of early jazz imagery, if not music, in the day to day musical culture of the country.

Whatever the music that has come through in between, the records of the New Orleans masters such as Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet and Jimmy Noone stand supreme as some of the best music ever recorded. 

This article appeared in jazztimes.com

Copyright © 2011 Simon Jay Harper