Bandleader Dan Levinson Celebrates a Century of Jazz on Record

Reedman and jazz scholar Dan Levinson is poised to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of recorded jazz this year with a series of concerts featuring his Roof Garden Jass Band. He sees February 26, 1917, when the Original Dixieland Jass Band entered the Victor studio in New York to record “Dixie Jass Band One-Step” and “Livery Stable Blues,” as the day popular music changed forever. Some claim as the first jazz record can be made for “My Hawaiian Sunshine” recorded by Wilbur Sweatman for Emerson in December 1916, as well as “Too Much Mustard” (Victor 35359) by Europe’s Society Orchestra from December 29, 1913. There was also a popular song by Gus Kahn and Henry I. Marshall, “That Funny Jas Band from Dixieland,” recorded by Arthur Collins and Byron G. Harlan (Edison Diamond Disc 50423) on December 21, 1916. But the Original Dixieland Jass Band represented something entirely new. “They had a sound unlike any other band on record at that time,” says Levinson. “You could say Wilbur Sweatman is jazz, you could say Jim Europe is jazz—but whatever the ODJB was, it was different. It had something that took the country by storm.” That first record, he says, “is what made jazz popular.” The band (whose perso