Or to move north, like so many others.īut the Ory-Oliver band had been making gigs all around town, playing the new celebratory music with a solid kick and a “low down, slow” blues, recalled their clarinet man, Johnny Dodds. One more reason to go down in the mouth, to give up hope. As Armstrong recalled years later, the musicians he knew from New Orleans were “plagued by feelings of inferiority so crippling that they could not succeed professionally.” For Oliver, the police raid amounted to one more loss in a world loaded with them. Second, more than anything, he wanted to be a “band man.” He needed camaraderie. First, like any Crescent City musician, he needed to cover all styles and repertoires, especially to follow new trends and suit an international audience. (One observer wrote that when the Onward “played a march, dirge, or hymn it was played to perfection-no blunders.”) Yet even in that rarefied company, Oliver began playing “monkeyshines,” improvised figures around the score. Later, after playing the district with his Magnolia Band, he joined the top-line Onward Brass Band under the Creole Manuel Perez. Oliver himself had come up in traditional brass bands but then leaned toward the new “hot” music, beginning with his matriculation into the gutbucket Eagle Band, probably around 1908. This is when, Ory recalled, Pythian Temple management “called the cops.” On this June night, the Ory-Oliver band, which Louis Armstrong called “one of the hottest jazz bands that ever hit New Orleans,” apparently made a noise-and customers began abandoning the Temple roof for the Winter Garden. They were the gutbucket bands like Ory’s band and for a while Dusen’s Eagle Band. It had to be right, and it was, because it came from the right place.”Īs Oliver’s friend Pops Foster recalled, “The bands that couldn't read made the most money and were the biggest talk of the town. half a dozen men pounding it out all together, each in his own way and yet somehow fitting in all right with the others. “No music, you understand, we didn’t know what a sheet of music was,” recalled the bassist Nat Towles. Out there on the street, anyone could make a noise and get people dancing. As the old-timers had it, almost anybody could “jump” on a tune. They wanted to join a new century.īut that bluesy, bootstrap music had brought freedom and community. They may even have begun to reject the new, blues-inflected “ratty” music, which recalled too much of the “old country,” the plantation. In any case, half a century after Emancipation, black folks wanted position, especially following the Jack Johnson heavyweight victory five years earlier and the racism shown in the recently released Birth of a Nation. Yet it was ultimately that musical mélange of Downtown versus Uptown-pedigreed versus self-taught-that cooked up the Crescent City jazz gumbo. Patrons included mixed-blood Creole “Downtowners” raised with some privilege, not used to associating with what one Creole called “cut up in the face” Uptown blacks or their bootstrap music. Tulane UniversityĪccording to the National Park Service, Pythian Temple clients represented “a cross-section of New Orleans black middle and upper classes.” The seven-story building-brainchild of a former slave-brought in black entertainment to perform on its well-known roof garden. Hogan Jazz Archive, Special Collections, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library. dedicated to the living and built by Negro brains and Negro capital.” Up a block from the Winter Garden, at Saratoga and Gravier, stood the Pythian Temple office building, called at the time the “Eighth Wonder of the world . Oliver’s arrest said a lot about evolving black status in New Orleans, as tensions rose and fell from one neighborhood to the next. New Orleans musicians, Joe Oliver included, were taking note. “At one point,” notes the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson, “ten thousand were arriving every month in Chicago alone.” Chicago’s South Side, with its increasingly self-reliant African-American culture, became a shining port of call. By 1930, in what became known as the Great Black Migration, hundreds of thousands of African Americans had moved north and begun enjoying a new sense of freedom. Since World War I, a great stream of black Americans had already begun leaving beaten-down lives in “this cursed south land a negro man is not good as a white man’s dog,” as a black man from Mississippi put it. Photo by George Fletcher, courtesy Hogan Jazz Archive, Special Collections, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University
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