Louis Armstrong & Joe Oliver

“We called it ragtime”

“We called it ragtime,” Armstrong said of Oliver’s band. The word “jazz” didn’t come into its modern meaning and spelling until about 1920. The music was still being created - and Oliver was one of the most influential new talents, combining the ensemble feel with passionate solos and new sounds.

After World War I, when African Americans from New Orleans and the rest of the South migrated to Chicago, Oliver and his band got on the train. They entered an explosive music and cultural scene, a new world that was being created by their fellow former Southern cohorts. And they did their part.

The best musicians passed through King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, which specialized in spirited ensemble jazz with solos. Oliver was renowned for long, creative solos that made his cornet sound "like a holy roller meeting." He used mutes and other devices to give his cornet different voices, and many horn players followed him in this. Oliver is most likely responsible for the muted-trumpet jazz sound we take for granted today.

There’s plenty of speculation over why Oliver invited Armstrong into his band. Some, including Lil Hardin Armstrong, think it was because he knew he was losing his powers. Rather than having Armstrong pass him by, he could keep him under control, playing second cornet.

On the other hand, Oliver was in the habit of bringing new blood into his band from New Orleans, where the best jazz players were. He had known Armstrong there and given him some lessons. Armstrong, hungry to learn, didn’t receive that attention from other musicians. And he was in awe of Oliver’s playing. Oliver was making music that was new, fresh, and exciting.

In Chicago, Armstrong ate at his house, looked to him for guidance, and stuck with him until Hardin pried him away.

One of the reasons Armstrong was loyal to Oliver was his seriousness about music. Many jazz musicians drank heavily on the job. (Stuff Smith is notorious for having fined band members $10 every time they turned up to work not drunk.) Oliver, like Armstrong, believed in having good coordination so that music was tight, not sloppy. While there was some improvisation, it was within a structure, especially on recordings.

As important as the recordings are, they couldn't recreate the sound or energy of how the band sounded to the thousand patrons of the Lincoln Gardens - doctors, lawyers, students, musicians, white and black - who crammed in from dance floor to balcony.

“I haven’t heard a single [recording] that comes close to sounding like Joe’s playing in person. I don’t know what it was but I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t believe that it is Joe playing on the records sometimes. It never has sounded to me much like Joe,” said Mutt Carey, a well-known New Orleans trumpeter.

There are a lot of possible reasons for this. The most obvious is the length of 78 recordings: with a strict time limit, it was impossible to sail off into the kind of solo that made him renowned.

Armstrong’s clear and powerful tone created another problem. When he and Oliver stood next to each other at the megaphone-like recording horn, Oliver couldn’t be heard on the recording. The solution was for Armstrong to back to the other end of the studio—which meant he was no longer physically part of the band. Armstrong felt bad about breaking up the group and making it harder for them to work together—especially since studio acoustics were so dead they were already having difficulty hearing each other. He wasn’t comfortable about showing up his idol Oliver, either. “I always played ‘pretty’ under him,” said Armstrong. “I never blew my horn over Joe Oliver at no time unless he said, ‘Take it!’ “

Playing with one of their members across the room made a nerve-fraught situation even worse. By the drummer’s account, everyone in the band (including the leader) was nervous at those first studio recordings—everyone but Lil Hardin. Studio conditions didn’t help. Baby Dodds had to play blocks, not drums: drums wouldn’t record properly with acoustic technology. The band was sweating under the sauna-like heat that kept wax recording discs soft enough to take an impression. Recording stopped abruptly whenever trains ran on the tracks next to the studio. And it can’t have helped to know that the Klu Klux Klan, a power in the town where they were recording, made white supremacy records in the same studio. All of this may have meant that Oliver made a “safe” decision to use strictly scripted arrangements with no improvisations. There was no splicing when you recorded 78s. They had to be recorded in one take, warts and all.

Other problems might have come from the sludgy quality of acoustic recordings: entire spectrums of sound were lost. And by the time he made it to the recording studio, King Oliver was already having health troubles that made his playing problematic.

Oliver was a notorious eater. A sugar sandwich was one of his favorite snacks, and a long line of them created painful infections in his his teeth and mouth. It hurt every time he played. Dental pain is relentless, throbbing, all-consuming. He made accommodations in his embouchure, and this changed his sound. He also had back pain, which could not have been helped by being on his feet for hours every night. When he recorded with Armstrong at thirty-eight, Oliver was already considered past his prime.

While Armstrong rose, Oliver fell, gradually losing his band leadership and then his musical leadership, as his kind of jazz went out of style. Armstrong wrote that he visited Oliver in Georgia, where he wound up, but he never said that Oliver was working as a janitor in a poolroom. Oliver died at 51, unable to play a note.

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