The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia Page A

others, such as Jelly Roll Morton and Bunk Johnson, made outstanding recordings, but did so, for the most part, some years after the New Orleans style of performance was perfected, thus raising questions about how accurately these recordings represent turn-of-the-century practices. Our ability to decipher this history is further complicated by the personal mythmaking of important firsthand informants such as Johnson, Morton, and LaRocca—all players whose autobiographical narratives were tainted by a desire to enshrine themselves as major protagonists in the creation of this new music.
    As previously mentioned, some twenty years transpired between Bolden’s glory days and the release of the first jazz recordings. Nor do these first commercial discs simplify the historian’s task. If anything, the opposite is true: the history of recorded jazz was initiated with an event that remains to this day clouded in controversy. And, as with so many of the loaded issues in the story of the music, the question of race lies at the core of the dispute. In an ironic and incongruous twist of fate, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB), an ensemble consisting of white musicians, was the first to make commercial recordings of this distinctly African American music. Raised in New Orleans, these five instrumentalists—leader and cornetist Nick LaRocca, clarinetist Larry Shields, trombonist Eddie Edwards, drummer Tony Sbarbaro, and pianist Henry Ragas—joined forces and performed in Chicago in 1916, then opened in New York in January 1917. During an engagement at Reisenweber’s Restaurant, the group attracted large audiences with its novel and spirited music, and spurred the interest of East Coast recording companies. Columbia was the first to record the band, but hesitated to release the sides because of the unconventional and ostensibly vulgar nature of the music. Soon after, the Victor label overcame such scruples, and a second session produced a major commercial success in “Livery Stable Blues.”
    Partisan polemics have made it all the more difficult to assess this band’s importance and merits. LaRocca and his apologists have offered a stridently revisionist history that places the ODJB as key contributors to the creation of jazz. 16 In contrast, critics of the band have attacked its playing as stiff and unconvincing, some going so far as to claim that it did not play jazz at all, just a raucous variant of ragtime. Others have looked for earlier examples of recorded jazz in their attempt to dislodge the ODJB from their place in the jazz pantheon, often tendentiously striving to classify the 1913–14 sides by James Europe’s Society Orchestra as the true maiden voyage of the new musical style, or else hypothesizing about lost recordings by Bolden and others.
    Any fair assessment of this controversial band needs to tread cautiously through the exaggerations made on both sides. On the one hand, no evidence exists to support the claim that the ODJB initiated the jazz tradition—indeed, it is even doubtful that the band was the first white group of New Orleans musicians to play jazz (Papa Jack Laine, a turn-of-the-century bandleader, has stronger claims on that distinction). Yet smug dismissals of the ensemble are equally off the mark. LaRocca’s cornet playing stands out as especially supple and often inspired, while Larry Shields’s clarinet work, although seldom remembered nowadays, also exerted an influence on other musicians at the time. Sixty years later, Benny Goodman recalled that Shields had been a strong early influence (along with Jimmie Noone and Leon Roppolo) on his music, adding that he could still play Shields’s chorus on “St. Louis Blues” note for note. True, the group indulged in novelty effects of questionable taste, but so would a host of later jazz musicians—from Jelly Roll Morton to the Art Ensemble of Chicago—without subverting the underlying virtues of their efforts.
    Although not the best of the