Centennial: King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band

Jazz, the unique and defining music of the United States, evolved throughout the 19th century, with New Orleans its epicenter, but couldn’t gain general-public attention until its earliest recordings were released, in 1917. Not surprisingly, these featured white musicians, but the recordings proved popular enough to open studio doors to the Black pioneers. Among them was Louis Armstrong.

In 1922 he was a young man, fresh out of New Orleans, newly installed in Joe “King” Oliver’s ensemble in Chicago. Oliver, also from New Orleans, was his mentor and hero. He had summoned his protegé to join the band, and Louis couldn’t have been more grateful. The two cornets, playing side-by-side in this seven-piece group, gained attention for their exciting duet work—and that’s generally all the space that Armstrong got. Oliver kept him leashed.

But listen to “Chimes Blues,” recorded by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band on April 5, 1923. Louis has his first solo on record, what would turn out to be his only solo on these King Oliver sessions, and you can hear why Oliver felt threatened. That assertive Satchmo tone is all there, fully inhabiting the acoustic horn through which it was recorded. And this was part of the first of the six sessions that year that gave us the 37 sides enshrined as among the most important and influential records of that decade. Sure, Louis’s Hot Fives and Sevens were soon to come, but this is where they were born.

The Oliver ensemble initially included clarinetist Johnny Dodds, his brother Warren “Baby” Dodds on drums (but using only with woodblock, tom-tom, and cymbal, so as not to overwhelm the recording), trombonist Honoré Dutrey, Bill Johnson on banjo, and Lil Hardin at the piano (soon to become Louis’s second wife). Later sessions subbed out Johnny St. Cyr on banjo and added Stump Evans and Charlie Jackson on saxophones.

Those 37 sides, all recorded in 1923, form the core of a recent release from Archeophone Records, a label that specializes in the careful restoration of music from the acoustic-recording era, an era that ended in 1925 with the invention of the electrical microphone. It’s a four-CD, two-LP set designed to look as attractive as the recordings sound. And that’s saying something: These sessions have been reissued many times, most recently on a two-CD set in 2006 by a label called “Off the Record,” which offered restoration work far better than any that had come before.

So: If you have that set, do you need this (rather more expensive) one? I’m saying Yes, and for three reasons. The restoration work on this set is better—sometimes subtly, sometimes demonstrably. It’s the best these seminal recordings have ever sounded. Listen attentively and you will hear the individual instruments, especially Hardin’s piano, which was much obscured in earlier releases. Second, the accompanying LP-sized book contains excellent, detailed noted by Armstrong scholar Ricky Riccardi. If you’re already a fan of Louis, you know that name. And third, the collection boasts two extra CDs that provide a fascinating context to the King Oliver recordings.

The restorations in the new release were done by Archeophone co-founder Richard Martin, which may seem confusing at first, because it was Archeophone who distributed that earlier Off the Record release. But, explains Martin, “The Off the Record people are buddies of ours, and we’d worked on stuff together. They came to us one day and said they wanted to start their own label. We said, let us help you. This was 20 years ago, when distribution was still a thing, and you couldn’t get into distribution with just one title.

“So now people are asking us, why should we buy your release again? Well, the earlier one really wasn’t ours. That was David (Sager) and Doug (Benson). And for our release we got a number of the transfers that Doug did. He’s an excellent transfer engineer.” The two major ingredients of reissues of vintage recordings are transfers and audio restoration. Transfers are the bulwark, requiring the best possible original sides. Restoration requires good software and ears that know how to employ it.

What’s evident about the new Archeophone release is that there’s a more compelling presence to each of the Oliver sides, which I determined by comparing them to the Off the Record versions via a superior set of headphones. “That’s what I’m going for these days,” says Martin. “I’ve been working on this sound that I’ve arrived at for a number of years, and my ears have evolved.”

He began with Benson’s transfers, but sought better copies for some of the songs. “For instance, I was dissatisfied with ‘Tears.’ I found (writer and record dealer) Mark Berresford’s copy to be more workable. Mark’s copy of “Mandy Lee Blues” similarly was better than two others to which I had access.”

And sometimes the puzzle is pieced together from more than one record. “Except for the first three or so revolutions, Mark’s “Krooked Blues” must be the absolutely best copy out there. That was a big breakthrough. And for the bad start, I used the grooves from one of his lesser copies that had a good start! The flip, ‘Alligator Hop,’ was also an improvement over previous issues.

“For the Off-the-Record release, they went back to originals. They got rare copies. They were able to work with Marty Alexander, who was the person who had ‘Zulu’ and they did these revelatory transfers. But this is where we differ, because they decided not to turn the knobs, but present them (with) flat (equalization), as if that’s the way you would have listened to them at home. I felt that was the wrong decision.”

As a sidenote, “Zulu’s Ball” is the rarest of the King Oliver sides, and therefore one of the rarest records of all time. As Riccardi writes in the program notes, “Only one copy … has ever miraculously surfaced, twenty-one years after it was recorded, and in Oregon of all places.” It happened in a department store in Portland, where guitarist, banjoist, and vocalist Monte Ballou regularly pored through records sent there from New Orleans, “and that’s how he found Gennett 5275 in a ‘pile of scrap discs’ in 1944.”

Martin notes that he gave each of these sides hours of detailed restoration work. “The mastering stage is where I take the initial restorations, which by and large sound great, and then try to make everything ‘fit together’ sonically. This is easiest when I have done all the transfers myself, because there’s an aural consistency, even despite the different distinct characteristics of the record labels: Gennett, Columbia, Okeh, Paramount. So, it’s a heavier lift when several different people have done the transfers, but I get it. These are rare, valuable records, and I am more than satisfied by the results achieved by my friends and colleagues.”

I can’t speak to the sound quality of the LPs; I ditched my vinyl collection years ago and never lamented the passing of that format. But I know it’s a complicated subject these days. Scratch the surface and you . . . well, you know.

As to the program notes, Riccardi is an excellent writer well steeped in Satchmo lore. He’s the Director of Research Collections at the Louis Armstrong House in Corona, Queens, the house where Armstrong lived from 1943 until his death in 1971. His widow, Lucille, willed the house to the city of New York, so a museum there was inaugurated after she died in 1983. Along with many Armstrong-related liner-notes projects, Riccardi has written a three-volume Armstrong biography, albeit in reverse order. “What a Wonderful World” (2011) covers his later years, while “Heart Full of Rhythm” (2020) looks 1929 to 1947. “Stomp Off, Let’s Go,” due in February, gives us Armstrong’s beginnings, dovetailing nicely with the Archeophone set.

Alongside a lengthy essay on the backgrounds of Oliver and Armstrong are detailed descriptions of each individual track on this set, looking at the origins of the songs, the featured players, and other insights of interest. And thorough discographies identify all of the known players and times and places.

Archeophone Records was founded in 1998 by Martin and his wife, Meagan Hennessey, to specialize in the restoration of material from the earliest days of recordings, sourcing from both cylinders and platters and issuing jazz, popular music, and spoken word (including a CD titled Actionable Offenses that comprises extremely rude recordings from the 1890s—a revelatory set). The company won a GRAMMY Best Historical Album Award in 2006 for Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1891–1922, and has been nominated for many more.

“Meagan and I actually landed in this area through parallel paths,” Martin explains. “We were kids who were interested in Billboard charts and stuff like that, and the history behind those songs. We didn’t get to know each other until we were around 30. I’ve always felt there was this artificial door put up between 1955 and anything before that, so we just knocked on the door, asking what’s behind here, what’s behind there—and then we found the acoustic era and thought, Oh my god, nobody’s ever heard of this stuff. It’s this entirely different world.” And they decided to make a business of exploring it.

While Richard takes care of the restoration part, he and Meagan both work on packaging. “Centennial” includes two LPs in addition to the four CDs, with the entirety of the Oliver sides on the vinyl. The size of the box offered a larger canvas for design, and they created what I see as its own work of art. Not everyone agrees.

“The day we announced the set,” recalls Martin, “we had one cranky guy bitching about the cover on an online forum, asking how could we take a rare, important photo and treat it with such disrespect!”

The cover art reproduces a classic portrait of the Creole Jazz Band, but divides it into eleven vertical strips. “But, you know, there’s a 22 by 33-inch poster of it, intact, inside. For a hundred years, people have complained about how imperfect these recordings are, and wouldn’t it be nice if we could have had them live or electric, or this copy is not good enough, and so on. So it’s a broken narrative, these bits and pieces. That’s what’s visualized on the front, and then it’s restored on the CDs and on the poster, where it all gets put together.”

There was a last-minute change to the playing order. Where earlier sets put the tracks in the order in which they were recorded, he and Meagan decided to present them in release order, which differs, and which offers the experience a fan would have had when eagerly acquiring these 78s.

“It gives a fresh way of hearing them. And the liner notes talk about that. But then I asked Ricky what else we could do to make this a little different, a little special? He pointed out that with two CDs, there’s still some playing time left, so why don’t we add some of the Oliver tracks that other people were playing? I thought about it, but decided instead to add the flip sides, because those are part of the story of the records.”

Although common releasing practice was to place the same recording artists on both sides of a 78, there were exceptions. Three of the original Oliver sides were backed with other material: specifically, “Choo Choo Blues” by Art Landry’s Syncopatin’ Six, “New Orleans Hop Scop Blues” by Clarence Williams’s Blue Five (featuring the near-debut of Sidney Bechet), and “Dearborn Street Blues” by Young’s Creole Jazz Band, all of which have been restored and placed at the end of CD 2.

“So now we’re going to have 40 tracks, two CDs, a lovely package and great notes. And Meagan and I looked at each other said, this isn’t enough. We wanted to go bigger. Now, Ricky’s got a book coming out in February about Louis’s early days, and an important part of that was his phonograph obsession.”

Thus was born the idea for discs 3 and 4, superb historical markers that allow us to contextualize King Oliver’s music. Jazz didn’t emerge in a vacuum, and even though its recorded legacy is over a hundred years old, we’re missing its earlier development. So it’s helpful—and, to my ears, exciting—to enter the world of recordings that documents what the musicians then were listening to.

Especially Louis, who moved from Victrola to LPs to tape over the years (and who made his own fabulous mixtapes). The recordings featured on CD 3, “Louis’s Record Collection,” weren’t all in his collection, but those that weren’t at least had a proven influence.

We start with “Thompson’s Old Gray Mule” by Louis Vasnier, an 1891 cylinder recording included to give a feeling of New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century. And what a mix that follows! There’s a march from Sousa’s Band, a hymn by Henry Burr, and a Yiddish lullaby that he may have heard from the Karnofsky family, for whom he worked when he was ten, and that he certainly heard from one of his doctors when he was nearly 70.

The New Orleans funeral ritual is embodied in “Flee as a Bird” and “O Didn’t He Ramble,” while Louis’s boyhood singing as part of a street quartet is reflected in the Haydn Quartet’s 1908 recording of “Darling Nellie Gray”—which Armstrong himself would record in 1936 with the Mills Brothers.

Trumpeter Herbert L. Clarke, immensely famous in that century’s early years, shows his chops on “Carnival of Venice,” and Louis owned this record and idolized the performer. He loved opera, too, so the inclusion of recordings by Luisa Tetrazzini, Enrico Caruso, and John McCormack sit alongside songs sung by Al Jolson and Bert Williams. Chronologically, the playlist ends in 1921 with a Shelton Brooks and others in a sketch titled “Darktown Court Room,” and you would do well to make peace with its outdated, racially insensitive material. Louis owned three copies of this disc.

Disc 4 is a little different. Recorded between 1920 and 1923, the 26 sides on this disc are presented chronologically, offering a before-and-after trip through that brief era of jazz. The “before” sides were chosen as likely influences on Oliver and Armstrong, and the “afters” pay their debts to their band. The selections also prove that even in its nascent stages, jazz came at us in a variety of configurations.

Both Paul Whiteman and His Ambassador Orchestra and the Isham Jones Orchestra were offering fairly straightforward stuff (not forgetting that there were those in 1920 who considered all jazz to be the work of the devil), while the feeling was looser with Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds and Jelly Roll Morton’s Jazz Band, each of which is featured on this disc. But the Whiteman number, “Wang Wang Blues,” features Henry Busse on cornet and Isham Jones’s “Wabash Blues” sports Louis Panico on “laughing cornet,” and both of those players were tremendously influential.

Then there’s “Avalon,” in a 1920 recording by Art Hickman’s Orchestra. This is among the platters that found their way onto the Mississippi River steamboat where Fate Marable’s Jaz-e-Sax orchestra was playing, young Louis among them. “Avalon” was among the new records obtained by Joseph Streckfus, the ship’s captain, who was so impressed by the different kind of sound that he insisted that his band learn it. As he recalled in 1958, “it wasn’t long before we were in a rehearsal of these pieces by ear. … That evening we had approximately 1200 dancers, and when the band played ‘Avalon,’ they stopped the show. Folks crowded around the orchestra stand and applauded and applauded. They never had heard music like that.”

Other famous names appear as well. Fletcher Henderson is the pianist in “Frisco Jazz Band Blues” by Ethel Waters Jazz Masters (a 1921 instrumental recording), and he returns later on the disc in “Old Black Joe’s Blues,” leading Henderson’s “Club Alabam’” Orchestra in 1923 —before Louis’s brief stint with the band, but featuring a teenaged Coleman Hawkins.

“Buddy’s Habits,” by Charley Straight and His Orchestra, got its first recording in June 1923; Oliver recorded it four months later, somewhat slower but using the same instrumental breaks, which means he either knew the record or the published stock arrangement (or both). But “Sobbin’ Blues,” recorded in October 1923 by Art Kahn’s Orchestra, shows the Oliver influence on that outfit’s unnamed cornet player—perhaps inspired by Oliver’s own recording of the song that was made four months before.

And so it goes throughout this fascinating playlist. As Riccardi writes, “From Verdi and Caruso to Jones and Panico to Oliver and Armstrong, all of this music seemed to be in a state of constant conversation with each other and with anyone who was listening.”

Centennial
King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band (and Various Artists)
Archeophone ARCH 6014
www.archeophone.com