The Penguin Jazz Guide by Brian Morton, Richard Cook Read Free Book Online Page B

Pennsylvania under the leadership of drummer Tom Morton, who remained a constant through various changes of personnel for the remainder of the jazz decade. This, the succeeding volume and a couple of other OI5 reissues were pioneering, as hardly anything of the group had been revived in recent times; this despite an evident popularity, for they made more than 100 titles during the ’20s. The music is a closely argued example of the small-group jazz which several New York groups of the day pursued: perhaps not quite the equal of the Original Memphis Five, given that there were no soloists in the band the equal of Phil Napoleon and Miff Mole, but this is really ensemble music which picks up from the cues of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band.
    A Frog reissue offers a decent sampler of some of their sessions, but it was trumped by the comprehensive three-disc Jazz Oracle edition, of which this fine first volume will suffice for all but specialist listeners. Not only are the transfers excellent, but the documentation is superb, offering formidable research into the lives of all the leading players in the group, and there are a few ancillary sessions which are not strictly the work of the OI5 but whichare closely related. Even though little of this has a pressing claim on the general listener, enthusiasts will be impressed by the standard of these issues, and may be surprised at the heat which some sides generate.
    JOE ‘KING’ OLIVER
    Born 11 May 1885, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 8 April 1938, Savannah, Georgia
    Trumpet, cornet, voice
    King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band: The Complete Set
    Retrieval RTR 79007 2CD
    Oliver; Louis Armstrong (c); Honoré Dutrey, Ed Atkins (tb); Johnny Dodds, Jimmie Noone (cl); Stump Evans (ss, as); Charlie Jackson (bsx); Lil Hardin, Clarence Williams (p); Johnny St Cyr (bj, v); Bud Scott, Bill Johnson (bj); Baby Dodds (d); Jodie Edwards, Susie Edwards (v). April 1923–December 1924.
    Poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin said (1976): ‘If Armstrong was jazz’s Gabriel, then I suppose Oliver was its Lucifer, a proud man who risked everything and owned to no one and nothing superior to himself.’
    The third King of New Orleans, after Buddy Bolden and Freddie Keppard, remains among the most stately and distinguished of jazz musicians, although newer listeners may wonder whether Oliver’s records aren’t entirely eclipsed by those of his protégé Louis Armstrong. Joe Oliver was in at the inception of jazz and it’s our misfortune that his group wasn’t recorded until 1923, when its greatest years may have been behind it: accounts of the band in live performance paint spectacular images of creativity which the constricted records barely sustain. Yet they remain magnificent examples of black music at an early peak: the interplay between Oliver and Armstrong, the beautifully balanced ensembles, the development of polyphony. Oliver’s tight-knit sound, fluid yet rigorously controlled, projects the feel of his New Orleans origins, vivified by the electricity of his Chicagoan success. There is the brightness of the young Armstrong, content to follow his master but already bursting with talent, and the magisterial work of both of the Dodds brothers (only the recording stops us from hearing Baby’s work in its full intensity). Ragtime and brass band music still guide much of what Oliver did, but the unsettled ambitions of jazz keep poking through too. If the music is caught somewhere between eras, its absolute assurance is riveting and presents a leader who knew exactly what he wanted.
    There are 37 surviving sides by the Oliver (Creole) Jazz Band, including a handful of alternative takes. This two-disc set is the first to include all of them in one place (one disc, the Gennett coupling of ‘Zulu’s Ball’ and ‘Working Man Blues’, is so rare that only a single copy of the original 78 is known to exist) and, while Robert Parker’s stunning remastering in his first Jazz Classics volume, now deleted,