Red Nichols was one of the finest cornet players to emerge during the 1920s—yet, for various reasons, he was underrated throughout much of his career and in the half-century since. Because his personality could be a bit prickly, because he sometimes worked out solos and routines in advance, and because he was influenced a bit by Bix Beiderbecke’s tone (though less by his ideas), some of the musicians from the world of Eddie Condon (many of whom he had hired in the late 1920s) were not kind in their assessment of his playing.
It also did not help that, in the early 1930s, his recordings were much better known in Europe than those of his African-American counterparts, and that the 1959 movie The Five Pennies, which was very loosely based on his life, was a hit. Some of the Condon-associated musicians seemed to resent his success and that Nichols (who took care of himself) survived the era while Bix Beiderbecke did not. However, if one looks at the music that he left behind in his many recordings, it is clear that Red Nichols was a very significant force with a musical legacy of his own.
Ernest Loring “Red” Nichols was born May 8, 1905 in Ogden, Utah. He began playing cornet when he was five, studying with his father who was a college music teacher. He played with his father’s brass band when he was 12 and worked at other local jobs as a teenager in Utah. For part of 1920
