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Kitchen Table Kibitzing 2/26/25: All That Jazz [1]
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Date: 2025-02-26
I’m a big jazz fan and listening to jazz helps me cope with the flood of bad news we’re living through. I never get bored of it because I have 108 years worth of recordings to choose from.
On February 26, 1917, the Original Dixieland Jass Band released the world’s first jazz record. The record’s two songs, “Livery Stable Blues” and “Dixie Jass Band One Step,” became instant hits and introduced millions of people to the new genre of music. Like jazz itself, the Original Dixieland Jass Band (they later changed the spelling) got its start in New Orleans, Louisiana. Dixieland jazz combined traditional African rhythms, as well as earlier musical styles like ragtime, blues, and marches. It also included new aspects like improvisation, which remains a standard in jazz music today. Unlike other early jazz pioneers, most members of the Original Dixieland Jass Band were white. Jazz quickly became associated with the African American experience, however, and legends such as W.C. Handy and Louis Armstrong led its early expression.
Jazz is widely understood to have originated in the Black community but, like most other forms of American popular music, white musicians got a head start in making money on it.
Victor released “Dixie Jass Band One Step” and “Livery Stable Blues” in May 1917, which to our ears may not sound like jazz as we know it. During 1917 and 1918, the band, led by cornetist Nick LeRocca, recorded frequently and had changed their name to The Original Dixieland Jazz Band – partly through their success and partly because they passed it off as truth, the group became accepted as the first band to make a jazz record. The truth is that a number of other artists could make that claim. There was Arthur Collins and Byron G Harlan, who released “That Funny Jas Band From Dixieland” in April 1917; it’s just as jazzy as the ODJB. Borbee’s “Jass” Orchestra recorded two songs nearly two weeks before the ODJB entered the studio, but they did not get released until July 1917. Like the ODJB, both these artists were white. Among the contenders for the first Black musicians to make a jazz record are pianist Charles Prince’s Band, who recorded “Memphis Blues” in 1914, and then in 1915 he became the first to record a version of WC Handy’s “St Louis Blues.” In April 1917, Charles Prince’s Band recorded “Hong Kong,” a “Jazz One-Step.” Not to be outdone, WC Handy’s band were making recordings in September 1917. There was also Wilbur Sweatman’s Original Jass Band, and the Six Brown Brothers in the summer of 1917, though there is a debate as to whether some of these records are jazz or its close cousin, ragtime.
Recording jazz presented challenges to a young industry.
Making phonograph records by the mechanical or acoustical process was a tricky proposition; louder was not necessarily better, and certain instruments, such as a bass drum, could easily ruin a recording. In an interview with H. O. Brunn, Nick LaRocca, the band’s cornetist, recalled that Victor’s head recordist (recording engineer), Charles Sooy, took special care at placing the musicians around the recording horn. For their first selection, “Livery Stable Blues,” Sooy painstakingly adjusted the band’s placement in order to successfully capture Sbarbaro’s wildly resonant bass drum.
Take a trip back in time.
Jazz is still growing and evolving.
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