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JAZZ |
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factor. In 1917 the U.S. Navy closed the red light district known as Storeyville, and armies of coloured musicians and entertainers began a migration northwards which was to change the face not only of jazz itself but of the popular music of a whole world. Both white and coloured jazz bands left the desolate sporting quarter of New Orleans for richer fields— the cities of Chicago and New York where gangster-dom ruled an empire in which jazz could once again thrive and grow.
The great "kings" of New Orleans took jazz groups there, and the Dixieland white bands also followed, finding in a colour-conscious civilisation a better chance to earn big money than the musically superior negro outfits.
Negro trumpeter Freddy Keppard, fresh out of New Orleans in 1917 and fearing the inevitable theft of his repertoire by unscrupulous white songwriters and bandleaders, refused to record—and the honour of making the first jazz recordings on the new invention, the Phonograph, went to the Original Dixieland Jass Band in the same year—1917 (Brunswick 02500). But a better example of the two-beat and typically "white" music of the South can be found with the Original Dixieland Jass Band on HMVDLP1065.
Greatest of all the negro units from New Orleans was, of course, Joseph 'King' Oliver who brought men like Bad Ory, Johnny Dodds and Baby Dodds to Chicago and provided white Windy City musicians |
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