The original Dixieland Jazz Band from Tom Brown
November 16th, 2008 | by Tom |We only called the music “jazz” after someone in the audience one night in Chicago kept holdering at us to “Jazz it up”! and it seemed to fit for the music. No, I never heard the word in New Orleans. I found out later it was a fould word in Chicago, but I guess we purified it.
Nick LaRocca, interviewed by Brian A. L. Rust
There was a lively musical scene among the white population of New Orleans, and musicians like Johnny Fischer, Happy Schilling, and Jack Laine were all playing music well before the outbreak of World War I that had plenty in commom with that of their Creole and African-American counterparts. Their working lives followed a similar pattern: picnics, dances, house parties, and festivals such as Mardi Gras, plus work in the clubs or bars of the District that employed white musicians as well as catering for white patrons.
Only a small number of the emergent white musicians, playing a prototype of jazz, could sustain themselves by music alone - many had comparable jobs to those of their Creole counterparts. Among the best-known, trombonist Tom Brown and his bassist bother Steve were tinsmiths, the clarinetist Gus Mueller was plumber, and so on.
In due course, several pioneer white New Orleans musicians were to have a major role in taking jazz forward - Steve Brown for example, was a prodigiously talented double bassist, who bucked the trend to adopt the tuba and succeeded in being audible on recordings in the very early 1920’s.
But such talented instrumentalists aside, there is relatively little evidence that the white musicians of New Orleans were true innovators, participants in what was being created through the symbiosis between Creole and African-American, and, therefore directly responsible for the consolidation of the constituent parts of the music itself.
Through the medium of the phonograph, the white New Orleans musicians of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band were to make the running in disseminating the music to the world, and in enshrining for posterity the name by which it would be known, however inappropriate.
In 1917, the recording business was white-owned and white dominated. It was not until some time after Kid Ory’s West Coast debut on disc in 1921, that African-American and Creole jazz musicians began to record with any regularity, or that white-owned companies began to challenge the exclusively white ownership of the industry. This is the background agains which the first jazz recordings came to be made. A mythology and folklore grew up about why it was that white musicians came first to record what was, in essence, black music.
White jazz - or at any rate proto-jazz - in Chicago began with the arrival in the city in May 1915 of a ragtime band led by trombonist Tom Brown from New Orleans. Brown’s Band from Dixieland began to attract substancial crowds, and soon started billing itself as “Brown’s Dixieland Jass Band, Direct from New Orleans, Best Dance Music in Chicago”.
Tags: dixieland, new orleans