Artie Shaw in studio. AP Photo

Artie Shaw was the only serious rival Benny Goodman had to his title as “The King” of the Swing Era. By the time he was 30 years old, Shaw’s effortless clarinet solos, his innovative musical arrangements, and his unusual band concepts earned him a place in the pantheon of 20th century jazz greats.

To his dismay, his handsome good looks made Artie Shaw a matinee idol. Bobby-soxers screamed and begged for his autograph. But Shaw was an unwilling superstar. He was so ill-suited to fame that success drove him into early retirement. Before he finally left the music business for good in 1954, he’d turned his back on it several times, only to return and challenge his fans with yet more creative re-inventions of his music.

Portrait of Artie Shaw. Photo © William P. Gottlieb

There are glimpses of his perfectionism in rare interviews he’s given over time. Speaking with writer Gary Giddins in the early ‘90s, Artie Shaw talked about meeting classical violinist Jascha Heifetz backstage after a concert. Shaw thought that Heifetz gave an astounding performance and congratulated him. The violinist said, “Really? ‘I thought I was a little off.’”

Shaw remarked to Giddins: “I realized that Heifetz was aiming at 100. He probably hit 94 regularly, so that night he only hit  93 and it bothered him. There’s not much difference but he can hear it. It’s the same with the clarinet. If you really play honestly, if you’re cursed with that, and you take even one day off, then you can’t hit 94. That’s why I quit.”

Artie Shaw lived for fifty years after leaving the music business.  He took up writing and published a well-regarded memoir, The Trouble with Cinderella, and the novel I Love You, I Hate You, Drop Dead. Though he was a man with a variety of strong interests, from writing and painting to figure skating and sharpshooting, there is no doubt that Artie Shaw will be remembered for the music he created at the height of his powers, between the late 1930s and early ’50s.

Photo credit for Home Page and Recent Radio Broadcast Page: Artie Shaw publicity photo from wikipedia

“My Blue Heaven” sheet music, 1928. Image courtesy jazzage1920s.com

The historic Filoli Estate and Gardens south of San Francisco is the setting  for this week’s Riverwalk Jazz broadcast, Sweet Ballads and Red Hot Pianos.  Piano legend Dick Hyman and jazz vocalist Stephanie Nakasian join The Jim Cullum Jazz Band for an outdoor concert including a set of songs by composer Walter Donaldson.

From ”My Blue Heaven” to ”You’re Driving Me Crazy” and “Love Me or Leave Me,” Walter Donaldson composed a string of hits that have held enduring appeal for jazz musicians. And his songs have been favorites with the lyricists who collaborated with him, including the great Johnny Mercer. During a career that spanned three decades, Donaldson wrote hundreds of tunes for stage and screen, and for singing stars Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and Ruth Etting. He composed the pop hits “My Buddy,” “Makin’ Whoopee,” “My Blue Heaven” and “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm?”  

“At Sundown,” Edison Record Label believed to be in public domain

Broadway’s ‘Sweetheart of Song,’ Ruth Etting, had the initial hit record on “Love Me Or Leave Me” in 1928. With a lyric by Donaldson’s frequent collaborator Gus Kahn, it was later recorded by Count Basie, Bob Crosby, Miles Davis, Lester Young and Mel Tormé. Fats Waller recorded a masterful solo piano version on the Bluebird label, also from 1928. Composed in 1927, Walter Donaldson’s “At Sundown” has been recorded by cornetist Muggsy Spanier, The World’s Greatest Jazz Band, and Artie Shaw.

Donaldson wrote “You’re Driving Me Crazy” in 1930, and later that year Louis Armstrong recorded a highly creative and entertaining version of it. Other notable recordings are by Josephine Baker and Django Reinhardt. Like many Walter Donaldson compositions, ”Crazy” remains a jam session favorite among jazz musicians.

“Sheik of Araby” sheet music, believed to be in public domain

Broadcast highlights on Riverwalk Jazz this week include pianist Dick Hyman’s recreation of the piano roll version of “‘Taint No Sin (to Take Off Your Skin and Dance Around in your Bones)” which he remembers hearing as boy at home. Stephanie Nakasian performs a song made famous by blues singer Helen Humes, “Million Dollar Secret,” and The Jim Cullum Jazz Band clarinetist Ron Hockett is featured soloist on “The Sheik of Araby.”

Photo credit for Home Page and Recent Radio Broadcast Page: “My Blue Heaven” sheet music, 1928. Image courtesy jazzage1920s.com.

Earl Hines and his Orchestra at The Grand Terrace, from the Earl Hines and Stanley Dance Collection

Tony Jackson arrived in Chicago from New Orleans around 1912, and Jelly Roll showed up soon after. By 1918, New Orleans jazzmen Sidney Bechet, Freddie Keppard and Joe Oliver were playing South Side cabarets— the DeLuxe, Dreamland and the Royal Gardens.

Bandleader Eddie Condon claimed that in the height of the Jazz Age, if you “held up a trumpet in the night air of The Stroll, it would play itself!” The Stroll was the ‘bright light’ district on South State Street in the years before World War I when the black population in Chicago began to surge. It was a ‘black Bohemia’ of crowded streets where cabarets and pool halls, vaudeville theaters, dance palaces, and chop suey parlors provided the backdrop for fast-paced nightlife.

Click here to view extended photo gallery of the
South Side of Chicago in the early days of jazz

The most elaborate hotspot on The Stroll around 1913 was Teenan Jones’ Elite Club offering fine wines and cigars, and a cabaret where New Orleans’ top ragtime piano player Tony Jackson, performed. But big changes were about to happen to the Chicago music scene. A sensational new sound hit the city in 1915. The Original Creole Band, a seven-piece ensemble from New Orleans stole the show at the Grand Theater on South State where they appeared on the vaudeville circuit with bicyclists, comedy acts—and a female impersonator.

The Original Creole Band had talented New Orleans jazz musicians in cornetist Freddie Keppard, clarinetist Jimmie Noone and bassist Bill Johnson. Later, Johnson would play with King Oliver at the Lincoln Gardens. And both Keppard and Noone would lead their own bands in Chicago, jumpstarting the electrifying jazz scene on the South Side in the ’20s.

As the black population in Chicago grew, the epicenter of nightlife, known as The Stroll, moved south to the Royal Gardens ballroom on 31st and Cottage Grove, then on down to 35th Street—home of the top ‘black and tan’ cabarets—the Dreamland, the Sunset, and the De Luxe Cafe. Amenities at the De Luxe included a billiard room, a bar, a dance floor and a consistently high quality of jazz. The house band, Sugar Johnny’s Creole Orchestra, presented star soloists from New Orleans like Sidney Bechet.

Vasser’s Scale Steppers at the Lincoln Gardens, cir. 1920. John Steiner Papers, Chicago Jazz Archive, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library

Prohibition raids and gangland violence eventually put an end to The Stroll and the ‘black and tan’ nightclub scene of the roaring twenties. The grand opening of the Savoy Ballroom and Regal Theater at 47th and South Parkway also took a toll. Operated by a franchise out of New York, it was the most elegant entertainment complex in the city. On South Parkway, six blocks away from the Savoy, the Grand Terrace Café was a showplace for Earl Hines and his Orchestra. Backed by a floor show with two dozen chorus girls in tiger skin costumes, the tap-dancing Nicholas Brothers, and a twelve-piece jazz band, Earl Hines was on the brink of success when he opened there in the late ’20s.

This week on Riverwalk Jazz, vocalist Topsy Chapman, singer Vernel Bagneris, trumpeter Duke Heitger and pianist Dick Hyman join The Jim Cullum Jazz Band—club-hopping on the South Side of Chicago from the ‘black and tans’ of the ’20s to the grand ballrooms of the ’30s.

Photo credit for Home Page and Recent Radio Broadcast Page: Earl Hines by the Grand Terrace marquee. Photo courtesy Earl Hines and Stanley Dance Collection, from World of Earl Hines by Stanley Dance.

Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers, 1926. Photo courtesy Hogan Jazz Archive

Jelly Roll Morton had a tendency to exaggerate. On his business card he gave himself the title, ‘Inventor of Jazz.’ There was, at least a kernel of truth behind his claim. Not only was he among the first important composers and recording stars in jazz, he appears to have been the first jazz musician to write down his compositions in musical notation.  Morton’s body of work remains at the core of many classic jazz bands’ play lists.

“Milenberg Joys” sheet music. Image courtesy inglesm.com

It doesn’t take long to recognize the distinctive voice of a Jelly Roll Morton composition. His genius was to combine a playful, improvised spirit, with the formal musical elements of ragtime, that surrounded him as a young piano ‘professor’ employed in New Orleans bordellos in the early 1900s.

By the time he made his landmark Red Hot Peppers recordings in the 20s, Jelly Roll’s compositions embodied both high and low music America. Brass marching bands and ragtime, Italian opera, country blues and spirituals, tangos, New Orleans jazz and Caribbean rhythms—all rolled around in his brain, and influenced the music he wrote. Morton was a “walking treasury of the nation’s musical byways,” as jazz writer Gary Giddins put it. The result was a distillation and summation of traditional New Orleans jazz—and also, in many ways, a band sound that foreshadowed the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

Vernel Bagneris. Photo courtesy Riverwalk Jazz

By the 1930s, except for a few of his tunes like “King Porter Stomp,” that was adapted for swing bands, Jelly Roll and his music were largely forgotten. He spent the rest of his life struggling to get by, writing letters to publishers, ASCAP and periodicals to recover his lost royalties and reputation. In 1938 he wrote an article which appeared in Down Beat magazine, “I Created Jazz In 1902, Not W.C. Handy.”

Shortly after he died in poverty in Los Angeles in 1941, the worldwide Classic Jazz Revival got under way, and Morton’s status as a key pioneer of jazz was restored.

Jelly Roll Morton Band, 1928, Morton on left. Believed to be in public domain

This week on Riverwalk Jazz, The Jim Cullum Jazz Band welcomes singer Vernel Bagneris and the piano duo of Dick Hyman and John Sheridan, in a concert of Jelly Morton’s music, and a discussion of key elements in his compositions.

Photo credit for Home Page and Recent Radio Broadcast Page: Jelly Roll Morton.  Photo courtesy Institute for Studies in American Music, Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.

Harlem Dancers Leon James and Willa Mae Riker, from The Swing Era, Time-Life.

Nothing gets in the groove like a catchy ‘riff.’ The hot rhythm of a good riff lifts us out of our seats and onto the dance floor. Riffs are one of the building blocks of jazz. They are everywhere—as background figures, parts of jazz solos, and even entire riff tunes.

A riff is a short melody—just a few notes—repeated over and over in a rhythmic manner. The origin of the riff can be traced to early African-American gospel and blues forms where short, repeated, chant-like melodic fragments were typically sung or played as a background figure to support a soloist. The jazz riff evolved out of this call-and-response practice.

With their New York debut at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom in the late 1930s, the great Count Basie Orchestra and their riffing style breathed new life into the Swing Era. It is said that in rehearsal Basie would send each section of the band into a separate room, charged with the task of coming up with their own new riff. These sectional riffs would later be combined to create a shouting call-and-response effect. The result—riff tunes like “One O’clock Jump” with its famous final ‘shout’ chorus.

The Count Basie Orchestra at the Famous Door in New York, late 1940s. Courtesy Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie, Albert Murray.

Louis Armstrong, whose pioneering genius inspired generations of jazz musicians from the 1920s to the present day, often used riffs in his solos to build tension. A good example of Louis’ solo riffing can be heard on his 1929 Okeh recording of  “St. Louis Blues.” As an added attraction to his big-band dance concerts, Benny Goodman often featured small combinations—or combos—of three to six pieces. The later Goodman small combos featuring guitarist Charlie Christian developed many riff-based tunes like the one Goodman named after his daughter, called “Gilly.”

This week on Riverwalk Jazz, The Jim Cullum Jazz Band uses simple, familiar riffs to build entire arrangements and tunes—from originals like “Keep Off the Grass” to standards like “Dinah.” Special guest Bob Barnard joins the band on trumpet.

Louis Armstrong. Courtesy Frank Driggs Collection

Riffs are really very simple, infectious melodic ideas. There’s a ‘chant-like’ background figure in the Band’s interpretation of “Perdido Street Blues” that’s a good example of how the ‘riff’ began to evolve in early jazz. Sitting in on cornet, special guest Bob Barnard helps brings back the hot, riff-based sounds of New York’s 1930s jazz mecca—52nd Street—on “Undecided,” a tune star trumpeter Charlie Shavers wrote for small combos of the day.

Jim Cullum talks about what it was like for a new player joining the Count Basie Band when there were no written musical arrangements of the Band’s repertoire. Trumpeter Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison described the process years ago on one of our Riverwalk radio shows. Shortly after Edison started working for Basie, Sweets complained to him that he wanted to quit because he felt lost on the bandstand. Sweets couldn’t find his place in the Band, meaning he couldn’t find harmony notes on the riffs that weren’t already being played by another player. Basie told Sweets Edison, “If you find a note tonight that works play the same damn note every night.”

Photo credit for Home Page and Recent Radio Broadcast Page: Harlem Dancers Leon James and Willa Mae Riker. Photo courtesy The Swing Era by Time-Life

Irving Berlin. Photo courtesy Encyclopedia Britannica.com

Irving Berlin made a huge contribution to the great canon of interwar American popular song which is widely recognized as a core building block of jazz. He couldn’t read or write music, yet he composed words and melodies to thousands of novelty tunes, dance numbers, love songs and ballads—and almost 300 became Top Ten hits. In addition to individual songs, Berlin composed scores for 17 Hollywood films and 21 Broadway stage productions.

Tin Pan Alley. Photo believed to be in the public domain

Berlin’s pieces like “Easter Parade,” “God Bless America” and “White Christmas” have found a place in the pantheon of American anthems of popular song. His songs “Blue Skies,” “Cheek To Cheek” and “Puttin’ On the Ritz” continue to be performed and recorded today by artists of all flavors, from Willie Nelson to Diana Krall, and The Jim Cullum Jazz Band.

Irving Berlin compositions have endured so well, for so long, they seem destined to withstand the test of time forever. In the 1930s, trumpeter Bunny Berigan and the Crosby Band’s Bob Cats had hits when they updated and transformed tunes Berlin had composed as sedate waltzes in ’3/4 time’ some twenty years earlier.  Among others, they took his popular ballads “Always” and “Marie,” and reinvented them in up-tempo, ’4/4 swing time’ for a new generation.

Rebecca Kilgore. Photo courtesy the artist

Berlin’s knack for keeping his finger squarely on the pulse of mainstream American musical taste surfaced as early as 1911, when he composed his first mega-hit song, ”Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” Over the next fifty years, the song was recorded in a dozen hit versions by Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Connee Boswell and Ray Charles among many others.

Nina Ferro. Photo courtesy the artist

Berlin left the world hundreds of catchy tunes to whistle and hum—and memorable lyrics to sing—for just about any occasion. But Irving Berlin was as much a natural businessman as he was a natural showman and songwriter. Dedicated to protecting the rights of artists, Berlin was co-founder of ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. And he built the Music Box Theater on 45th Street in Manhattan between Broadway and 8th Avenue. It opened in 1921 with his Music Box Revue and continues to be in use today as a venue for Broadway stage plays.

Throughout his life, there seemed to be an endless outpouring of music streaming from Irving Berlin to his appreciative public. The lyrics he penned to “What Can a Songwriter Say?” sum up his attitude toward songwriting:

 

What can a songwriter do?
I wish I could make an appropriate speech
But speech-making is simply out of my reach.
So what can a songwriter do,
What can a songwriter say,
A fiddler can speak with his fiddle,
A singer can sing with his voice.
An actor can speak with his tongue in his cheek
But a songwriter has no choice
Whatever his rights or wrongs
He only can speak with his songs.

 

Photo credit for Home Page and Recent Radio Broadcast Page: The Music Box Theater Program, 1921. Image courtesy American Classics.org

Gerry Mulligan. Photo courtesy allaboutjazz.com.

Jazz musicians, far better known as performers than composers, have turned their talents to writing jazz ballads—guitarist Django Reinhardt, baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, and trumpeter Louis Armstrong, to name only a few.

In jazz, the “ballad” style is intimate, lyrical and melodic. It usually takes the standard 32-bar song form, and is performed at a relaxed tempo. In the best jazz ballad instrumental playing, you can hear a story unfolding even without lyrics being sung. Tenor saxophonist legend Lester Young said that knowing the words to a song helped him “create the right mood” in playing instrumental ballads. And Frank Sinatra said he learned his vocal phrasing by listening to Tommy Dorsey play trombone.

Thelonious Monk. Photo courtesy Duncan Schiedt

Australian cornetist Bob Barnard, a master of the jazz ballad, is our guest. According to Bob—whose style recalls the soaring lyricism of Bobby Hackett—the ballad is “especially challenging because the player is completely exposed, both technically and emotionally.”

Bob Barnard on Cornet. Photo courtesy riverwalkjazz.org

Trombonist Kenny Rupp takes center stage performing Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight.”  Django Reinhart’s “Nuages” is given a reed treatment by clarinetist Ron Hockett. Jim Cullum and Bob Barnard offer their cornet duet on Sidney Bechet’s “Si Tu Vois Ma Mere,” and they perform “Michelle,” a tune cornetist Bobby Hackett composed in honor of his granddaughter.

“If We Never Meet Again” sheet music. Image Courtesy Smithsonian Institution.

Gentle Giants: The Beauty of The Jazz Ballad, on Riverwalk Jazz.

Photo credit for Home Page and Recent Radio Broadcast Page: Gerry Mulligan. Photo courtesy allaboutjazz.com.

Cab Calloway and Doc Cheatham on the road

All-night trips over bumpy roads and hassles with broken-down buses were just part of the job for musicians touring the country in the Swing Era. Jim Crow laws made it tough for black jazz artists traveling the South to find a meal or a place to sleep for the night. But it wasn’t always grim. Doc Cheatham recalls the days when Cab Calloway’s orchestra drew huge crowds playing tobacco barns in Alabama and Georgia. There was so much cash on hand they crammed fistfuls of dollar bills in the band’s empty instrument cases for safekeeping.

This week on Riverwalk Jazz, jazz legends Clark Terry, Milt Hinton, Doc Cheatham and others tell stories of life on the road. And these jazz greats take to the stage with The Jim Cullum Jazz Band in performances recorded live at The Landing.

Swing was big business in the late 1930s and early 40s. At its peak there were hundreds of bands traveling the highways and back roads of America, playing in small town dance halls and big city ballrooms. Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, the Dorsey Brothers and Duke Ellington were a handful of the big names in jazz with orchestras on the road almost year-round.

Even the best-paid bands in the Swing Era had to keep up a grueling schedule. They often worked six nights a week and many of them were “one-niters,” which meant traveling hundreds of miles by bus in order to get to the next job after playing until one or two o’clock in the morning.

Don Albert’s tour bus, 1939

Tour buses were rarely heated and none had air conditioning. Max Kaminsky called the one he rode while traveling with the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra “a frigid torture chamber.” But it had to be better than no bus at all. Some bands toured with all the musicians piled into one car and a trailer pulled behind to carry instruments and baggage.

Cab on the road

Milt Hinton played bass with the Cab Calloway Orchestra for fifteen years from 1936 to ’51. When Milt first joined Cab’s band, strict segregation was enforced almost everywhere. Black musicians who made their living on the road developed a network of black families with spare bedrooms, or black rooming houses, where they could stay as they traveled cross-country. Milt tells the story of what happened to him his first night on the road with Cab’s band before he learned the ropes.

In an interview with Dick Cavett, jazz fiddler Joe Venuti tells the story of a practical joke he pulled on Bix Beiderbecke on a train trip through the Southwest. And Clark Terry talks about what it was like to share a room with Count Basie.

Our show this week features recordings from the Riverwalk Jazz archive and audiotape courtesy of National Public Radio.

Photo credit for Home Page and Recent Radio Broadcast Page: Don Albert’s tour bus, 1939.

Songwriters Fred E. Ahlert (L) and Roy Turk  Photo courtesy Fred Ahlert Music

We know about the Gershwins, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin—but who were the hardworking, yet little-known craftsmen of song responsible for penning the vast body of work known as “jazz standards” of the golden age. The lyrics of these songs may be rich with romance, a silly Marx Brothers ditty, or even a “torchy” lament of lost love. But the melodies capture the rhythmic bounce of America in love with its own happy-go-lucky optimism. Most were written in the era of daredevil aviators, English Channel swimmers and the “boop-boop-a-doop” girl. Somewhere along the way, jazz musicians gave these songs new life and they became standards—favorites through the decades.

Inspired by The Unsung Songwriters: America’s Masters of Melody, a book written by the late Warren W. Vaché, Sr., father of cornetist Warren Jr. and former Jim Cullum Jazz Band clarinetist Allan Vaché, Riverwalk Jazz offers a concert tribute to the unsung heroes of popular song.

“After You’ve Gone” sheet music. Image courtesy The Louisiana State Museum Jazz Collection.

Fred E. Ahlert (above photo, on left) scored hits that stayed fresh for years—standards like “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home” and “I Don’t Know Why (I Just Do).” With his lyricist partner, Roy Turk (above right), he wrote “I’ll Get By (As Long As I Have You)” and “Mean To Me.” In 1935 Ahlert and lyricist Joe Young wrote a tune most often remembered in the version recorded by Fats Waller and His Rhythm, “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.”

The black vaudeville song-and-dance team of Creamer and Layton produced a string of hits in the pre-jazz era that continue to be recorded well into the 21st century. The Benny Goodman Trio recorded a celebrated up-tempo version of Creamer and Layton’s “After You’ve Gone” in the 1930s, and “Strut Miss Lizzie,” from their 1922 Broadway vaudeville show of the same name, was one of the last recordings ever made by Bix Beiderbecke in 1930.

Charles N. Daniels, active from 1901 to the late 1930s, composed and published music under several pseudonyms; the best-known is “Neil Moret.”  Several of his songs found their way into the traditional New Orleans jazz repertoire. His “You Tell Me Your Dream” from 1908 is still a favorite at Preservation Hall. And his 1901 “Hiawatha,” a big hit for John Phillip Sousa, started a national craze for Native American themed tunes. Daniels biggest hit is still often recorded today—“He’s Funny That Way.”

Shelton Brooks. Photo courtesy The African American Registry.

Shelton Brooks, another black vaudevillian, placed a song with mega-star Sophie Tucker that eventually became her theme song—“Some of These Days.” His “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” first gained widespread fame through a 1917 recording by the Original Dixieland Jass Band and was a standard in Sophie Tucker’s repertoire.

The team of Harry Ruby and Bert Kalmar wrote songs for the Marx Brothers movies, as well as many well-played and recorded standards. “A Kiss to Build a Dream On” is most closely associated with Louis Armstrong, who recorded it several times. The Jim Cullum Jazz Band is inspired by extra-hot recordings of “Who’s Sorry Now?,” waxed by the Bob Crosby Bob Cats and the Rhythmakers, but today’s audiences remember a 1950s’ version by Connie Francis.

“Who’s Sorry Now,” 1923. Image courtesy Waterson Berlin & Snyder Co.

All of the “Unsung Songwriters” featured on Riverwalk Jazz this week were well-established, professional composers with multiple hits to their credit. Tin Pan Alley legend Harry Woods is right up there with huge commercial successes like “I’m Looking Over a Four Leaf Clover.” And he wrote Billie Holiday’s “What a Little Moonlight Can Do” and Armstrong’s “Hustlin’ and Bustlin’ for Baby.”

One of his songs, “Try a Little Tenderness,” has had an especially vibrant life in the movies and on the charts, with recordings by Ella Fitzgerald, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Perry Como, Otis Redding and Frank Sinatra. Woods’ “She’s a Great, Great Girl” is remembered today by jazz fans as the debut recording appearance of Jack Teagarden in 1928.

Photo credit for Home Page and Recent Radio Broadcast Page: 1921 Sheet Music, ‘Strut Miss Lizzie,’ introduced by Ziegfeld Follies.   Image courtesy Detroit Public Library, E. Azalia Hackley Collection.

King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band Dodds second from right. Photo courtesy Frank Driggs Collection

Louis Armstrong called him ‘Papa Joe’ and said that no other trumpet player in New Orleans had the fire of Joe Oliver. By the early 1900s, Oliver was “the King” of New Orleans trumpet men. And in 1920s Chicago, he proved himself to be a bandleader of extraordinary vision—and a highly capable composer.

Born upriver from New Orleans in 1885, Joseph Oliver belonged to a first generation of jazzmen that included Kid Ory, Sidney Bechet and Jelly Roll Morton. Even before World War I, these innovators brought the spirited, soulful sound of New Orleans jazz to national audiences in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.

Joe Oliver

If Sidney Bechet was the first great soloist in jazz, and Jelly Roll Morton its first great composer, then the genius of King Oliver lay in his skill at building and inspiring a band that reached the zenith of the art of the improvised jazz ensemble. With outstanding sidemen like clarinetist Johnny Dodds, pianist/arranger Lil Hardin, and later the young prodigy Louis Armstrong, King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band played almost entirely in the classic New Orleans ensemble style. The entire group improvised together on tune after tune as a well-coordinated team. In Oliver’s band, solos were limited to brief two-bar breaks—some of them spectacular Oliver-Armstrong cornet duets.

Oliver arrived at his own highly individual cornet style while he was making a name for himself in New Orleans dance halls and nightclubs. He is believed to be the first in jazz to make extensive use of mutes in order to achieve a vocal-like effect in his playing, at times taking on a “sobbing” quality.

Duke Heitger

This week on Riverwalk Jazz, trumpeter and bandleader  Duke Heitger joins The Jim Cullum Jazz Band for Sobbin Blues: Joe Oliver, “The King” of New Orleans Trumpet. Together they perform classic tunes King Oliver first recorded in the early 1920s, including W.C. Handy’s “Aunt Hagar’s Blues” and Oliver’s own compositions “Camp Meeting Blues” and “Working Man Blues.”

Photo credit for Home Page and Recent Radio Broadcast Page: Joe Oliver.