While a really swinging beat or rhythm will make sophisticated dancers perform quite extraordinary terpsichorean feats, we also know that the vast amount of social dancing in the Western world occurs to the dullest, stiffest unswinging ‘clomp-clomp’ rhythms.”—Gunther Schuller
On April 5, 1923, a band of Black Southern musicians gathered inside a wooden recording shack at Richmond, Indiana, about to cut their first sides. Their sound contended with that of the Whitewater River rolling outside and the “thundering steam locomotives” servicing the adjacent Starr piano factory. And Indiana, it turned out, boasted the largest KKK contingent of any state. Today, any reasonable horn player would have bolted at thought of signing on.
But these refugees had made it North. Along with thousands of other Southern Negroes, they had left a larger world of blind bigotry and violence, wanting, as the great Creole reedman Sidney Bechet has written, to be “let alone so they could be human.” The street sound of jazz would become their wormhole to humanity.
At the session, led by the resolute Joe “King” Oliver with his seven-piece Creole Jazz Band, a just-turned-21 dishwasher, grave cleaner, and junk-wagon hand let loose his first-ever recorded horn solo. For years, Oliver had urged his young acolyte to play it straight, stick to the “lead.” But the student saw a longer track.
