Free The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia Page B

of the northern city. As in the case of the ODJB, these white ensembles also found it easier to interest record companies in their music, and for a while enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the jazz record market—at least until the tremendous popularity of the first race records revealed the commercial potential of African American performers. Within a few months of the initial recordings of black Chicago musicians, racially mixed bands also entered the studio— although the issue of segregation in jazz was anything but resolved by this move, and would continue to be a focal point for conflicts, personal as well as societal, for many years.
    The collaboration between Jelly Roll Morton and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, a Chicago-based unit of white Louisiana instrumentalists, was the occasion for this signal event, the first interracial session in the history of Chicago jazz. The Rhythm Kings had already undertaken recording sessions in August 1922 and March 1923 when, in July 1923, they engaged Morton to serve as pianist and composer for a follow-up date. “We did our best to copy the colored music we’d heard at home,” group organizer Paul Mares later recalled. “We did the best we could, but naturally we couldn’t play real colored style.” 20 In Mares’s case, his pungent middle-range cornet solos reflect the influence of his contemporary Joe “King” Oliver, whose band made its first sides in Chicago a few months after the initial Rhythm Kings recordings. Although less rhythmically exciting than King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings featured strong ensemble work, a sure sense of swing, especially at medium tempos, and the impressive clarinet stylings of Leon Roppolo. Roppolo’s work, as demonstrated in his solos on “Wolverine Blues” and “Panama,” avoids the arpeggio-based approach that imparted a mechanical quality to so many other first-generation New Orleans clarinetists. Instead, he offers a more linear, melodic style that would come to exert a marked influence on numerous later Chicago school reed players.
    Yet those seeking the hottest jazz in Chicago, circa 1923, inevitably found their way to Lincoln Gardens, the largest dance hall on the South Side, where King Oliver led a band built primarily on the skills of transplanted New Orleans players. Was Oliver the greatest of the early New Orleans cornetists? On this matter, historical accounts are inconclusive. If anything, the deeper one probes, the more one encounters contradictions and unanswered questions. “Most everybody has heard of Joe Oliver and Louis Armstrong,” Preston Jackson has asserted, “but few ever heard of Mutt Carey in his prime. Mutt Carey, in his day, was equal to Joe Oliver.” Carey himself had a different story to tell, remarking that “Freddie Keppard had New Orleans all sewed up. He was the King—yes, he wore the crown.” Edmund Hall, another of the first-generation players, cast his vote for Buddy Petit: “Buddy is a man they’ve never written much about. He kind of what you call set a pace around New Orleans. … If Buddy had left New Orleans to go to Chicago when a lot of the other men left, I’m positive he would have had a reputation equal to what the others got.” 21 Or what about Emmett Hardy, the white New Orleans cornetist who never recorded and died of tuberculosis in 1925 at the age of twenty-two? “Emmett was the greatest musician I ever heard,” later wrote Bix Beiderbecke, who had encountered the New Orleans player when Hardy traveled to Iowa to perform in the early 1920s. 22
    Whatever the virtues of these and other neglected figures, Oliver stands out as the New Orleans cornetist who left behind the most impressive body of recordings— recordings that, in many ways, help us understand what the other early figures of New Orleans jazz might have sounded like in their prime. Oliver’s band may have lacked the ingenious arrangements of the Red Hot Peppers, or the understated