Jazz and the Italian Connection.
During a recent academic conference held in
New Orleans there occurred an exchange which might best be described as droll
but which was intrinsically didactic. The setting was a panel discussion on
jazz, and the panelists were all historians who were actively researching and
publishing on the subject. Following the various presentations which were
devoted to the life-stories of musicians such as Sidney Bechet, Buddy Bolden,
Jelly Roll Morton, and Lester Young, a gentleman from the back of the audience
asked: "What about the ODJB, the first band to record jazz?" A hush
fell over the room, attended by looks of horror and pity emanating from the
podium. For a moment the panelists seemed startled, until one launched into the
by now almost perfunctory response to the question, stressing that the
circumstances which had permitted the Original Dixieland Jazz Band to make the
first jazz recording were another indication of the racist bias of the recording
industry and suggesting that, beyond that, the question should not be dignified
with further elucidation. Somewhat nonplussed, and duly ambushed, the gentleman
returned to his seat no closer to an answer (or serious consideration) than he
had been at the outset. Yet one can only wonder how historians who are trained
to ask hard questions could have contented themselves with such a brusque and
simplistic response to an apparently sincere request to hear their views on the
matter of the ODJB and its influence. Had the gentleman been better prepared to
make a case for the importance of the ODJB, he could clearly have done so, for
the evidence on their behalf is quite impressive, if presently obscure. Why,
then, should a question on the ODJB be dismissed as "politically
incorrect"? The answer can be traced back to the earliest jazz studies in
the late 1930s and to the aesthetic predilections of the men who wrote them.
Jazz history has often been written from the
perspective of the "great man," emphasizing the influence of musicians
who enjoy widespread critical acceptance, especially in retrospect, and ignoring
the role of "lesser" artists whose activities are ipso facto less
important In the case of the ODJB, however, personalities also became a factor.
When Marshall Stearns’ "The History of Swing Music" appeared in Down
Beat in twenty parts between 1936 and 1938, objections from the leader of the
ODJB that Stearns had denigrated the band's significance in the original
development of jazz began to circulate within the jazz press. LaRocca's letters
to Down Beat, Metronome, and Tempo in the fall of 1936 all argued that the ODJB
had invented jazz and disputed Stearns' claim (based on conversations with
members of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings) that the Original Creole Orchestra had
been first. In a personal reply to LaRocca dated January 11, 1937, Stearns
complained that "you failed to give colored musicians a break and that is
why I exaggerated the other extreme, since the public is inclined to believe you
and musicians of your opinion." While considerable attention was given to
the ODJB by Charles Edward Smith in Jazzmen, an early American jazz history
published in 1939, his interest in the ODJB was not typical of the general
trends among "hot" jazz collectors. Most of them preferred the
recordings of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bix Beiderbecke, Joe Oliver, or
Jelly Roll Morton, considering the earlier records by the ODJB to be
rhythmically "stiff" and a little too cacophonous. Since all the early
histories were written by "hot" jazz collectors, such aesthetic
predilections had a bearing on historical perceptions, relegating the ODJB to
"second-class" status aesthetically and therefore historically. Some
fifty years after the fact, it is apparent that a reappraisal of the ODJB and
its influence is long overdue.
Indeed, the reaction of American jazz scholars
to the ODJB has been remarkably similar to that of the Columbia Phonograph
Company which made the first aborted attempt to record the band in January 1917.
Consider the account given by H.O. Brunn in The Story of the Original Dixieland
Jazz Band (1960):
The interweaving strains of jazz bounced from wall to wall until the
resultant reverberations became one continuous din. The recording director
closed the door to his office from the inside. A gang of carpenters, who were
building shelves in the studio, laughed and threw their tools about to
contribute to the bedlam. After two numbers the musicians were paid their $250
and ordered from the studio. Columbia had washed its hands of jazz. (pp.
64-65)
But Columbia's attitude changed dramatically
when the band's "Livery Stable Blues," recorded soon after by Victor,
surpassed the million-and-a-half sales mark for that company within months of
its release. By August 1917 Columbia's ODJB version of "Darktown Strutter's
Ball" was vying for the attention of record buyers on the shelves, and
newspaper advertisements for both Victor and Columbia products by Maison Blanche
in New Orleans show how important they were as harbingers of a revolution which
was only just beginning. Maison Blanche left little doubt as to why "Livery
Stable" was so popular: "Here is positively the greatest dance record
ever issued. Made by New Orleans musicians for New Orleans people, it has all
the "swing" and "pep" and "spirit" that is so
characteristic of the bands whose names are now a by-word at New Orleans dances.
It is more proof that New Orleans sets the pace for 'Wonderful' dance music—a
fact that is recognized and commented upon the country over." The "Darktown"
copy was comparable: "It’s played by New Orleans boys, too, for here is
where 'Jazz' music originated and it has been the craze the country over."
Mercantile hyperbole notwithstanding, the overriding theme of these
advertisements is that the ODJB was representative of New Orleans music
and a model for further development. As it happened, the influence of the ODJB
on New Orleans musicians, both white and black, can be extensively documented
and serves as a useful counterpoise to the usual historical accounts.
The context for any discussion of an ethnic "connection" to New
Orleans musical culture, be it Italian, Irish, Creole, German, Latin American,
or African-American, is the process of transculturation which fused diverse
traditions into a distinctively regional blend. Demographic patterns witch
created a "crazy quilt" of mixed neighborhoods also yielded an
extremely eclectic musical amalgam, and in a town renowned for its festival
traditions, all citizens had access to the music which was performed on the
streets, at the camps at West End, and in the cabarets and dance halls which fed
the neighborhoods. Consequently, one of the essential features of an Italian
connection to New Orleans jazz was that it was not intended for the sole
enjoyment of Italians but contributed instead to the development of a New
Orleans style of playing improvised music, duly enriching it. Within the ODJB
there were Italians (LaRocca, Sbarbaro), Irish (Shields), and English (Ragas,
Edwards), but what they played was a New Orleans sound which exceeded the sum of
its parts. Local reactions to the recordings of the ODJB tended to be
enthusiastic, and far-ranging. John Wigginton Hyman (Johnny Wiggs), by his own
recollection, had first gravitated to jazz after hearing Joe Oliver at
subscription dances at Tulane in 1916 and was applying what he could pick up
with the Invincibles, a string band made up of middle-class youths from the
uptown area. Yet it was hearing the ODJB that revolutionized his conception of
the music: "In 1917 the Original Dixieland Jazz Band released their first
record on Victor. This was too much for the Invincibles and we began to yearn to
play 'real Jazz.'" Throughout his long career Wiggs rubbed shoulders with
various Italian musicians who shared his dedication to "real jazz,"
including Tony Parenti, Charlie Scaglioni, Leon Roppolo, Santo Pecora, and
Sherwood Mangiapane, and as a child he had played streetcomers with young Joseph
Manone for small change. For him, the ODJB was a model for nascent jazzmen to
follow, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that he was not alone in this
opinion.
The impact of the ODJB on black New Orleanians
was no less telling. When Dink Johnson, a drummer and clarinetist who worked
with the Original Creole Orchestra, Jelly Roll Morton, and Kid Ory, was
interviewed by Floyd Levin in 1950, he had some interesting observations
concerning his reaction to the ODJB: "I was actually a drummer, you know. I
had always wanted to play the clarinet since hearing Larry Shields with the
Original Dixieland Jazz Band." The effect of the ODJB's recordings on the
most popular black dance band in New Orleans in 1917, Kid Ory's, is another case
in point. What was known as the Ory-Oliver band included future stars such as
Joe Oliver, Johnny Dodds, and occasionally Louis Armstrong and held forth at
dance halls like the Economy and Cooperators, where its popularity was
unassailable. Testimony by Manuel Manetta, the Violinist in Kid Ory's band,
illustrates what happened throughout the city in the wake of the ODJB
recordings. The two "readers" in the band were Oliver and Manetta,
with the latter serving as "straw boss" for Ory in the selection of
material and direction of the band. Yet Manetta was fired because "Joe
Oliver and Kid Ory wanted to follow the format of the Dixieland Jazz Band and
use only five pieces." Prior to 1917, many New Orleans dance bands either
carried or were led by violinists. After that year, violins all but disappeared.
Manetta ended up dropping violin, offering saxophone, trumpet, trombone, and
piano to prospective employers. The success of the ODJB through the medium of
the phonograph completed the revolution in dance-band instrumentation begun by
Buddy Bolden two decades earlier, supplanting violinists with cornetists and
standardizing the jazz-band lineup. The success of the ODJB
vindicated "faking" and fused the term "jazz" to the New
Orleans style of instrumental ragtime, collectively improvised, which had been
developing since the turn of the century. The term itself became a rallying
point for New Orleans musicians of all ethnic and racial backgrounds, creating
conditions for the formation of a community of interest in support of the new
music, which was perceived as a local product. While the roots of Jazz were
undoubtedly nourished largely within the African-American community (which was
itself extremely diversified), its subsequent development before 1917 was a more
broadly communitarian phenomenon, drawing on a variety of musical cultures
extant in New Orleans. Music, in other words, brought people of all affiliations
together, in spite of the social conditions which were often designed to keep
them apart.
In addition to the success of their records,
the ODJB were the first link between jazz and the youth culture that emerged in
the wake of the First World War. Indeed, the band had caught the doughboys going
and coming, first as the hottest ticket in New York City 1917-18 when the city
served as a major port of embarkation, and later in London in 1919 at the
Hippodrome and the Armistice Ball, where they played for the returning
servicemen and their generals. The same celebration of the joys of
self-expression that was present in jazz was also found in the interpretation of
Freud as a means to health through the unrestrained libido or in the fashions of
the flapper, mutually reinforcing the reaction against the formalism of the
Victorian Era. Comparison of the early musical experiences of Italians such as
Nick LaRocca or Leon Roppolo with those of Creoles of color like Sidney Bechet
or Freddie Keppard reveals the operation of a generation gap which presaged the
general rebellion of youth in the 1920s. LaRocca's father forbade him to
practice cornet and destroyed several, even though he himself was a player.
Roppolo came from a long line of Italian clarinet virtuosi, who urged him to
take up the violin because there was no money to be made playing clarinet in
America. Keppard rejected violin in order to take up comet in the manner of
Bolden. Bechet started with clarinet but eventually gravitated to soprano
saxophone, largely because it enhanced his ability to predominate in ensemble
situations. In each case, young players opted for faking over the more
traditional formal pedagogy which was prescribed by their parents, creating
similar situations in the households of Italians and Creoles of color. Jazz was,
after all, a musical vehicle for the expression of personality, and the
tribulations of the Roppolo and Keppard families were later experienced by the
Beiderbeckes and the Toughs in Iowa and Illinois. But there was one major
difference. New Orleanians such as Bechet, Keppard, LaRocca, and Roppolo were
reacting to the music they heard all around them; Beiderbecke and Tough got
their first exposure by listening to ODJB records, which led them to seek out
other New Orleans bands such as King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band and the New
Orleans Rhythm Kings in Chicago.
There is still much to be learned about jazz
history and its early development from the story of the Original Dixieland Jazz
Band, and fortunately a reassessment of its contributions is already underway
(see Jack Stewart's piece elsewhere in this Issue). If we are serious about
understanding the culture which produced jazz in New Orleans, then it is
incumbent upon us to broaden our horizons to include each and every thread in
this complex tapestry. The Italian connection was but one strand of many, yet
the presence of Italian musicians in so many of the early New Orleans jazz bands
tells us that it was a significant factor in the development of the music and
deserves recognition. LaRocca and Sbarbaro with the ODJB, Roppolo with NORK
Curly Lizana with the New Orleans Jazz Babies, Charlie Cordilla with the Halfway
House Orchestra or the subsequent activities of Joseph "Wingy" Manone,
Sharkey Bonano, Tony Parenti, Louis Prima, Irving Fazola (an honorary Italian)
and others all attest to an Italian jazz connection which was deep and abiding.
To dismiss any of this body of work as imitative or derivative is to appease the
critic at the expense of the historian and to remove from discussion some of the
music's most colorful and charismatic personalities.
- Dr. Bruce Boyd Raeburn
Sources:
or call ODJB agent at 504-283-3786 (1-800-668-7429 toll free)
