sounds.

The cornet played the lead, the trombone filled out the bass harmony part

in a sliding style, and the clarinet embellished between these two brass

poles. The first real jazz improvisers were the clarinetists, among them

Sidney Bechet (1897-1959). An accomplished musician before he was 10,

Bechet moved from clarinet to playing mainly soprano saxophone. He was

to become one of the most famous early jazzmen abroad, visiting England

and France in 1919 and Moscow in 1927.

Most veteran jazz musicians state that their music had no specific name at

first, other than ragtime or syncopated sounds. The first band to use the

term Jazz was that of trombonist Tom Brown, a white New Orleanian who

introduced it in Chicago in 1915. The origin of the word is cloudy and its

initial meaning has been the subject of much debate.

The band that made the word stick was also white and also from New

Orleans, the Original Dixieland Jass Band. This group had a huge

success in New York in 1917-18 and was the first more or less authentic

Jazz band to make records. Most of its members were graduates of the

bands of Papa Jack Laine (1873-1966), a drummer who organized his

first band in 1888 and is thought to have been the first white Jazz

musician. In any case, there was much musical integration in New Orleans,

and a number of light skinned Afro-Americans "passed" in white bands.

By 1917, many key Jazz players, white and black, had left New Orleans

and other southern cities to come north. The reason was not the notorious

1917 closing of the New Orleans red light district, but simple economics.

The great war in Europe had created an industrial boom, and the musicians

merely followed in the wake of millions of workers moving north to the

promise of better jobs.

LITTLE LOUIS & THE KING

King Oliver moved to Chicago in 1918. As his replacement in the best

band in his hometown, he recommended an 18-year-old, Louis Armstrong.

Little Louis, as his elders called him, had been born on August 4, 1901, in

poverty that was extreme even for New Orleans' black population. His

earliest musical activity was singing in the streets for pennies with a boy's

quartet he had organized. Later he sold coal and worked on the levee.

Louis received his first musical instruction at reform school, where he

spent eighteen months for shooting off an old pistol loaded with blanks on

the street on New Year's Eve of 1913. He came out with enough musical

savvy to take jobs with various bands in town. The first established

musician to sense the youngster's great talent was King Oliver, who tutored

Louis and became his idol.

THE CREOLE JAZZ BAND

When Oliver sent for Louis to join him in Chicago, that city had become

the world's new Jazz center. Even though New York was where the

Original Dixieland Jass Band had scored its big success, followed by the

spawning of the first dance craze associated with the music, the New York

bands seemed to take on the vaudeville aspects of the ODJB's style

without grasping the real nature of the music. Theirs was an imitation

Dixieland (of which Ted Lewis was the first and most successful

practitioner), but there were few southern musicians in New York to lend

the music a New Orleans authenticity.

Chicago, on the other hand, was teeming with New Orleans musicmakers,

and the city's nightlife was booming in the wake of prohibition. By all

odds, the best band in town was Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, especially

after Louis joined in late 1922. The band represented the final great

flowering of classic New Orleans ensemble style and was also the

harbinger of something new. Aside from the two cornetists, its stars were

the Dodds Brothers, clarinetists Johnny (1892-1940) and drummer Baby

(1898-1959). Baby Dodds brought a new level of rhythmic subtlety and

drive to jazz drumming. Along with another New Orleans-bred musician,

Zutty Singleton (1897-1975), he introduced the concept of swinging to the

Jazz drums. But the leading missionary of swinging was, unquestionably,

Louis Armstrong.

FIRST JAZZ ON RECORDS

The Creole Jazz Band began to record in 1923 and while not the first black

New Orleans band to make records, it was the best. The records were

quite widely distributed and the band's impact on musicians was great.

Two years earlier, trombonist Kid Ory (1886-1973) and his Sunshine

Orchestra captured the honor of being the first recorded artists in this

category. However, they recorded for an obscure California company

which soon went out of business and their records were heard by very

few.

Also in 1923, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, a white group active in

Chicago, began to make records. This was a much more sophisticated

group than the old Dixieland Jass Band, and on one of its recording dates,

it used the great New Orleans pianist-composer Ferdinand (Jelly Roll)

Morton (1890-1941). The same year, Jelly Roll also made his own initial

records.

JELLY ROLL MORTON

Morton, whose fabulous series of 1938 recordings for the Library of

Congress are a goldmine of information about early Jazz, was a complex

man. Vain, ambitious, and given to exaggeration, he was a pool shark,

hustler and gambler a well as a brilliant pianist and composer. His greatest

talent,